Silence
Silence
In July 1967, the Unesco Courier published an issue entitled "Noise pollution". The contributors to it reported on what was then being done to halt the invasion of noise in the modern world and to mitigate its harmful effects on the human body and on society at large.
In that issue of the Courier, silence was perceived negatively, as the absence of noise. But there is more to be said about silence than that. Rather than an absence, it can be a presence in the self, in the world, in the sacred. It is closely associated with religious experience is often achieved through silence and with art the poet's words speak out across silence, which is at the heart of painting and the fount of all music.
Contributors to the present issue bear witness, each in their own way, to the power of silence when it is the culmination of an inner journey or a bond with others.
Historian Christophe Wondji describes the importance of the spoken word of the traditional African chief, whom silence surrounds like a sacred halo, and ethnologist Myriam Smadja describes the secret harmony that a ritual of silent mourning creates between the living and the dead of West Africa's Tammariba people. Psychiatrist Miguel Benasayag, author of a first-hand account of torture in the gaols of the Argentine dictatorship, and film-maker Hervé Nisic, who has made a silent documentary about Sarajevo abandoned to martyrdom by a cynical world, suggest that there are some situations to which silence is the only dignified response.
Other contributors describe the role of silence in mystical rapture (flautist and musicologist Kudsi Erguner), in musical performance (concert pianist Elizabeth Sombart), in poetry (Claude Louis-Combet) and in painting (Kumi Sugai). Silence is felt with particular intensity when there is harmony between body and mind. For physiotherapist Jacques Castermane those who achieve this silence have learned a lesson in the art of living and the practice of peace.