We have too many words and we lack silence. If the billions of words and screams spread across the networks had a price, global poverty would end. Silence is a strange spirit that frightens more than it reconciles. Our civilization has been fed by the poison of physical and moral noise since its birth. And yet creativity usually germinates and sustains in the levels of meditation and solitude.
I'm not talking about physical loneliness, but mental loneliness. You can be alone in enforced solitude amidst the noisy, noisy crowd. Wars run on the tracks of noise, destroy the silence and destroy the nights of the spirits.
Peace does not satisfy the greed for weapons, which feeds on the poison of discord and destruction. If there is a God, it will be difficult to find him because he hides in the folds of silence, shouting words of peace.
We live in a civilization where words that were supposed to convey illusions have become tenacious expressions of hatred and relentless lies.
Whoever shouts loudest, who lies most boldly, gets the biggest response and the biggest applause on the pitch. Speed and noise are two algorithms that are taking over the world today. There is no longer any space or time to watch in silence, to listen to the heartbeats of the soul transformed into Cinderella against the royal noise.
Today, young people who study little geometry, which is also philosophy, are deprived of the illusion and fantasy of hyperbolic asymptotes, those lines that approach infinity without ever touching. Infinite? Incomprehensible word for a society that feeds on what is outdated, what is disposable, what is ephemeral, what will no longer have the privilege of shining in an antique shop tomorrow.
Yes, we have a lot of words because most of them are empty. They lack the power and power of metaphors and their function of being pregnant. They are no longer full of life as they were at the beginning of the world. It was the evangelist John who began his most intellectual gospel of all with the enigmatic sentence: “In the beginning was the Word… Everything happened through him, and without him nothing happened.”
Word and silence. According to mythology, the world came into being through the combination of silence and words. And the word can save or destroy. It is a mystery and a revelation at the same time. There are words that are just knives that try to destroy the illusion of living in a world of saving silence.
Through my work as a journalist, I had the opportunity to meet and interview several geniuses from various arts, from literature to cinema, from religion to atheism, and strangely enough, most of them were stingy in their words, brilliant in their silence. For example, I remember an interview in Rome with the filmmaker Federico Fellini, the man of his immortal films. You had to extract the words with a corkscrew. He reiterated that he has already said everything in his films. Her silence was frightening.
One day I finally managed to get him to do an interview, albeit reluctantly. He called me into a huge, run-down room almost at dawn. He sat at a table that held all the characters in Leonardo da Vinci's painting “The Last Supper.” He had a few blank pieces of paper at his side on which he made a series of doodles while I tried to get a response from him.
I told him that I was curious about how the titles of his films came about, for example the last one, which was: “And the ship sails.” He raised his eyes, looked at me strangely and continued drawing. Finally he made up his mind and explained to me that the title didn't come to him all at once, that it germinated within him, just as life arises in a woman's womb. It was like a lightning bolt in its silence and a whispered scream in that cold and dilapidated room that was full of energy between the silence and the artist's few words.
Art and culture in general are more silence than noise. The etymology of culture is reminiscent of the earth and its cultivation; the life that springs from it is nothing other than silence. There is no noise or stridor in the seeds that rot and germinate in the darkness of the earth. Neither in the grass that grows nor in the fruits that ripen in silence and without noise. Every seed, every flower on the mat of nature, every segment of a grape are works of art nourished by the silence of the sun and the song of the rain. Is there a better art museum than a lush orchard?
Each ripe fig, pecked by birds and decorated with drops of honey, is a painting that imitates the beauty of the greatest brush geniuses. Teresa, Saint of Avila, loved “quiet music and sonorous solitude.” The worst noise? The one with the chains pulled from the slaves' feet. And the music better? The silence in which creativity germinates.
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