The poem "Silence"

Dileep Jhaveri

In an obscure and small workshop known for its knives, nails and bullet shells

a man is forging silence

It must be his pastime

Nobody orders for silence

and nobody would purchase it as a knick-knack

not even a scrap dealer

The junk pickers also move on with an occasional kick

Like a keen marksman he is a master craftsman

Once he made a wedding ring for a sparrow

Then he thought why not a watch for the spider?

With great patience he collected from many

drops of tear and welding them seamlessly he created a mirror

Once he melted coal and dipped a circular cardboard

and made a half moon that cleaved land from waters

He knew how easy it is

to make rivers flow from trickling facets

to grow forests from shavings of planks

to pick and pack pebbles and raise them into soaring sierras

and surround them with deep oceans

to gather straw from the sweepings and scattering them to make meadows

He made a feather breathe like a fish

With great persistence struggle and skill

he made a stuffed and limp doll

with two black dots for eyes and a crimped red line for mouth

It called each visitor by name and present leftovers

marked home, road, street lamp and squares

He knew of the deep and vast mines of silence

between two breaths or heartbeats

He also knew of underground lakes of silence

hidden between the pages of books

He knew of invisible fissures between stone blocks

of towering and imposing cathedrals

But that silence was not his

He wanted to make his private silence

With his pliers he wanted to single out the moment

when a flower is to turn into a fruit

Scoop out the silence from the holes after unscrewing a creaking hinge

Pick it before fear turns to sweat

Skim it from the calm laid thickly over a storm

Scrap it from the darkness of a couch before gold chains shackle it

Mop it before the greenish grease becomes black

within the wheel of his milling machine

He wanted to squeeze it out from the space

amid forgotten dreams swathing concealed sleep

In short after creating so many colours, shapes, sounds and infinity of articles

for such a long time that is beyond memories

he wanted to find his personal silence in this small world belonging to him

He never knew that much before him

Death had created warehouses of silence in every tiny village to the most distant all the stars

17.4.2016

My dear Hatto,

I am not well. Today I opened the mail and was very happy and obliged that you and your friends have appreciated the poem Silence.

You are very generous to have granted so much of your time to both the poems and commented at length on them. You have very refined sensitivity for images and make me feel humble by having noticed them in minute detail and creating patterns cohesively.

Silence was written on 24th February. I was not reacting to any contemporary events. If a reader finds connections that is his right. That right creates aesthetic possibilities beyond the text planned and penned by the poet. And that is my pet theme: The poet is merely instrumental and Poetry is eternal.

In this poem I wanted to incorporate creation myths ( Marduk cleaving Tiamat and the sword being replaced by half moon to hint at Patriarchal forces annihilating Matriarchal signified in the moon and Tiamat. Just a piece of cardboard! ). Genesis from Old Testament also is put to use in creating Earth and oceans and meadows. Finally comes the creation of humans suggested by the doll and civilisations later as houses and roads and so on. The skill of the Creator is described earlier in fine details like the ring for a sparrow or the mirror of tears. The silence is the ambition of the craftsman after having achieved so much and also its negation. The silences described are the play and joy of the poet (that is me). In very short lines in the end the palace of playing cards collapses when Death makes an entry. From here and now of villages to the eternity of the stars extends Death as a denial to the creation and the Creator. This is what this poem is about, in brief. What gives me pleasure is the Play that is expressed in images like a feather breathing like a fish and such others. What gives me freedom to play are the associations with several cultures and their mythologies. What makes me contented is the design that comes easy to us after decades of reading great poetry and having exercised under their gaze. Only by renouncing and eliminating ideologies, philosophies and politics from art a poet may be able to connect with language and the masters, even if momentarily.

Dileep Jhaveri

Comments by Hatto Fischer

The silence before and after the bombs

Dileep Jhaveri's poem 'silence' comes presumably after he had written most recently a deeply philosophical poem wondering about what is called 'democracy'. That one was all about the strife for immortality, when in fact the continuity of life is only secured through the memories people retain of each other, and which has to be preserved over time in history by people keeping those memories alive. Needless to say such a continuity differs greatly from the kind of immortality sought by going to heaven which a suicide bomber thinks to gain by taking down in one and the same act not only himself, but many other innocent lives.

When reading the poem 'silence', such thoughts come to the mind due to recent events. For when suicide bombers strike as they did on March 22 in Brussels, thoughts go out immediately to what appears to be by now a pattern made by those who are doomed by violence. And this is not just an ordinary, but dirty violence. The bombs are filled with nails and other sharp objects to underline a deliberate act to maim people as badly as possible.

In recollection of Brendan Kennelly's poem called 'nails', it shows this is not a new phenomenon nor necessarily relates solely to so-called 'terrorists'.

Nails

The black van exploded

Fifty yards from the hotel entrance.

Two men, one black-haired, the other red,

Had parked it there as though for a few moments

While they walked around the corner

Not noticing, it seemed, the children

In single file behind their perky leader,

And certainly not seeing the van

Explode into the children’s bodies.

Nails, nine inches long, lodged

In chest, ankle, thigh, buttock, shoulder, face.

The quickly gathered crowd was outraged and shocked.

Some children were whole, others bits and pieces.

These blasted crucifixions are commonplace. ¹

While Brendan Kennelly's poem relates to the IRA in Northern Ireland planting such bombs, and which hit innocent children who happened to pass by just at that moment when the blast went off, the question after Brussels is not only why it happens again, but from where does such perversion of love into hate stem from? The bomb is fabricated in a way to maim deliberately others for apparent no other reason, but to shock a vulnerable humanity into submission to a specific 'silence'. Is it the intention of the bombers, and more so of those who stand invisible behind these acts and who have created “schools” where they train these bombers already into submission so that they are ready to give up their own life for an obscure cause, to silence the sort of questions which could expose their abuse of human lives? In short, silence has many implications and, therefore, the poem of Dileep Jhaveri is of utmost importance, since he draws attention to some weird, likewise very different images which never occur to us since we associate with silence quite other things.

When the suicide bombers attacked on March 22, 2016 people at the airport of Brussels and at the Metro station Maelbaeck, it struck something personal. Having lived and worked in that city, thoughts went immediately to the people one knows there. It should be added that the station is used by many who work at the European Commission and for the European Parliament. The walls of that metro station are of white tiles and are decorated with simple drawings. The station indicates an interesting attempt at another aesthetic for public spaces. The attempt may be best described as a wish to create a peaceful, equally playful atmosphere being conveyed by light hearted drawings.

However, the aesthetic of violence wishes to shatter the kind of silence to be associated with a peaceful atmosphere and establish quite another one. To mark that difference, one needs to remind that silence in nature is often associated with a storm gathering. Just before unleashing its forces, a hush seems to go through the meadows and forests. All animals go quiet. They seek as quickly as possible shelter. Not so the case of a violent blast going off in a public place. There seems to be no such natural warning, but is this really true?

Once the blast goes off, silence will take on a specific meaning at that place not really signified until then. There was till then nothing unusual to be noticed, except for being a transitory public space used by travellers of all kinds of backgrounds and with different destinations. The silence which follows the blast reflects a society being frozen for a moment. It is just a moment. Then people try to flee the place having now become dangerous. Many walked along the tracks after the blast at Maelbaeck station. Then, ambulances arrive, police cars wail, curious onlookers and more so those wishing to record things with their digital cameras confuse the flow of people. Some flee, others hedge closer, but then the entire zone is marked by the police using tape to show what areas are off limits. For the forensic experts need to examine all possible details. Modern video cameras allow even a re-run of what happened at the airport terminal just before the blast went off. Repeatedly an imagine of three men with their baggage trolleys is shown on public television. Since two of them killed themselves, the public focus is on the third man with the hat. Two days later he is arrested but then strangely enough released for lack of evidence that he was involved. How did he end up side by side of the two others, and why did he run away suddenly from his luggage cart? Questions like these and many others show what puzzle is being created in the aftermath, but no one seems to speak about the silence hovering the entire affair. The public focus suggests it was only these three who were involved. Everything else is blended out. No wonder when Elias Canetti would write about 'Verblendung': deception. The real reasons for such an attack are hardly discussed.

Why modern society is not really willing to talk about structural problems which are behind such attacks has to be asked in a much more consistent way then what talks shows and opinions of so-called security experts seem to allow for. One aim of these attacks seems to be to divert public attention from many other much more serious matters. Public opinion is easily influenced by sensational news. Already Kant had defined news as the expected meeting the unexpected like a car accident. It is a stepping outside of the normal. But the diversion is far more serious if it succeeds in preventing people from meeting in public spaces to hear and to discuss public truths. According to the philosopher Bart Verschaffel, such a public discourse is a dialectic process by which a city re-designs itself constantly. ²

There is as well another kind of silence which follows such an attack. That kind reflects people in shock. They are lost for words. Those who do survive, they end up wandering about as if in a daze. As to the rest of society, it is immediately informed by the media that something deeply eruptive has happened. Here Zygmunt Bauman's remarks are significant, for the 'breaking news' silences all other news and carries only the messages the terrorists wish to convey. ³ No wonder when such a blast makes not only birds fly away, for something else erupts into public consciousness even if 'normality' returns once the metro runs again. It is a new form of 'mental mistrust' in public spaces and reflects how culture and daily self-understanding are interrelated by this subtle form of trust. People enter usually an air plane to fly to another destination without ever thinking the pilot would want to commit suicide and take everyone down with him as was the case with German wings. This mental mistrust is showed like an extra layer underneath the surface of normal appearance since deep down everyone knows nothing will be normal or self understood after such an attack. Thus people adopt a peculiar silence to hide their fears and doubts. They tend to become the shadows in the folds of the clothes they wear to appear as if normal citizens going about their daily lives.

Literally said, all the people who are too close when the bombs go off, they have rarely a chance to escape. Many kinds of silences follow their death. Graves keep that silence alive for centuries.

It is impossible to escape this context when reading Dileep Jhaveri's poem. It is too strong a reminder as to what kind of silence we cannot escape from, even if we wonder what Michel Foucault meant when declaring in “History of Insanity”, that “we have to discover the places of silence before the lyrical protest covers them up!”

Dileep Jhaveri's poem begins with a single man forging silence. He seems to do so as if making knifes, bullets and nails. The list of these things indicate that something far serious is being fabricated. The strange thing about these specific things is that they are being produced despite no one having ordered them.

The poetic grasp of such a silence being fabricated entails the identification of a weird kind of activity. Since things are being produced although apparently not needed, it may explain already from the outset the the kind of virtual reality in which many live in now. Business has turned into a kind of manipulative seduction to convince people they need something which they never knew beforehand that it even existed. Thus what the poem tries to do right from the start, is to reveal the very deceptive appearance of many strange things being produced and what goes on even though often not noticed. In a subtle way, the poem suggests that society tends to notice only when it is already too late to do something about it. Consequently the poem opens up a range of questions as to when intervening on behalf of human lives is not merely the task of governments, police or military, but rather a matter of the poet to draw attention to succinct elements which move the human spirit.

Dileep Jhaveri circumscribes 'silence' to suggests if there reigns a deceptive calmness, then for sure there shall slumber underneath the surface strong currents. They do not make themselves felt as of yet, but something can be expected. Likewise what can stir a man's emotions despite appearing to be calm is a secretive engagement best performed by staying out of sight. The aim is to become so uncontrollable at a certain point, that fear, human reason and doubt have no longer any say or rather are silenced by something more powerful. This can be rage. It can push man into such turmoil that he cannot escape this dilemma.

Still, a turn towards violence is not easily explained. The poem suggests that a sudden outburst of violence can happen more likely once the mind finds no longer any rest. It can be called delirium of the mind. Yet for violence to burst out into the open, time is needed to prepare. During that phase a special silence prevails. Everything is planned carefully, all details considered and above all care is taken not to arouse curiosity and suspicion as to what is being one. The unusual is camouflaged by the usual. The driving force behind being so ascribed has to be explained for it means as well to prepare for a sudden, but artificially provoked death. Presumably it entails a kind of fascination with things which are not real enough in human terms unless they threaten directly life. The absurd knowledge on how to frighten others till they freeze and stay not only put, but also silent, seems to reflect a rather childish trait. Only now the childish play in search for a true self recognition is displaced by something far more serious. It is nothing to laugh about, even though laughter can create only then a distance when the means and ends do not meet due to the bomb not going off. Preparing thus for all eventualities, it transforms truth into probabilities. In due course, the readiness to instil horror serves as mirror to replace any effort at true self recognition having to do as well with being open to doubt. Thus the very act of suicide bombing may be the ultimate revenge for lack of recognition by society.

The junk pickers also move on with an occasional kick

All the more amazing is that the poem refers to the junk pickers. They are ready to move in for an occasional kick. What does this say about human beings? It is not so certain at first glance. However, one clue is provided. They move only in, when taking a chance relates to a different set of opportunities. The latter have to become visible by new diagnostic methods. Here Dileep Jhaveri speaks more like the doctor he is aside from being an outstanding poet. Once something has become visible, then how to live with that knowledge? In the case of learning to have cancer having become visible thanks to new diagnostic methods, this knowledge can easily become an agony.

After having been diagnosed with cancer, the person feels suddenly to be set apart from everyone else. He will look back upon normal life and realize to be now in a different sphere. Set apart from normal life, the separation is as visible as invisible. It is drawn by the full knowledge that the chance to live again a normal life is gone. At least, this is the first need of any cancer patient, namely the need to confront death. Hence the only chance to counter that is to grab something matching the force of death, even though unsure if it is at all possible to stem the tide or to reverse the flow of things, so to speak. Otherwise the danger exists to be swept out into the sea. It would spell a definite end.

Those with cancer risk to separate themselves ever more from the living. This is especially the case, if they cannot keep up the dialogue with their healthy self. It is not a fictitious dialogue, but a needed one if they are to overcome a deadly separation from life itself. If cut off once for all, then all what remains has been demonstrated by Nietzsche. Once without that dialogue, he was left during his last ten years to sit just in a chair and to look back upon life. Alone such a glance in the eyes can tell that there is no possibility to re-enter the life stream and to converse with the living.

No one knows really how treacherous are these kicks until they are made. Life is elongated only in very rare occasions but modern medicine has managed to elongate life. Something of that is entailed in the saying if you wish to do that, you need 'to kick the can down the road.' As if death can be evaded just one more time! Still, death remains an unresolved challenge to life.

While some would work hard to re-affirm their healthy self, many abide to the circumstances and merely move in for the kick once the chance is given. As said before, the chance depends upon other opportunities being given. They can range in the case of cancer from advancement in operation techniques to alternative concepts of medicine. But once nothing seems to work, then desperation sets in because everything appears futile. So what usually happens is to let go of the healthy self and to bury oneself in a new kind of silence.

However, something else is set off underneath that silence. It is like letting the self explode one final time before death sets in. In anticipation of the explosion, the suicide bomber like all others who have given up to live in conscious relation to the future of mankind, will merely ride a wave of outrage fed by realizing the futility of it all. Once that resignation has entered the consciousness, nothing seems possible to reverse this determination to end life. What makes it perverse is the reversal of the relationship to other human beings since the death chosen will not be done alone but only bear fruits if others are taken down by the same act.

The lack of any certainty in knowledge about life and death only aggravates the condition. Often it is highly intelligent persons who are completely frustrated by not getting any sure answers. Fuelled by impatience, they sum up in their negative view what life could muster until now, and that is too little for them to still their impatience. To this has to be added, however, another even more frustrating ingredient. For deep down they realize even when wishing to evoke through their action a final end, that life never ends. That then makes them mad and feeds their rage. These are the only emotions left to be felt once their use of silence has eradicate every other human sentiment. Interestingly enough, the puzzle as to where life ends, it was also the making of Samuel Beckett's plays.

Like a keen marksman he is a master craftsman

Once he made a wedding ring for a sparrow

Then he thought why not a watch for the spider?

With great patience he collected from many

drops of tear and welding them seamlessly he created a mirror

Once he melted coal and dipped a circular cardboard

and made a half moon that cleaved land from waters

Dileep Jhaveri moves on from there to describe what the maker of silence did in the past. The poem becomes a kind of recording of his history. The aim of the poet seems to be to show that there exists a pattern which is about to break through once again in the present. And while still unsure, the expectation is that this time everything shall be both credible and predictable. That secret promise underlines the peculiar silence.

Again the reading of the poem can evoke associations with a parallel story due to the recent attacks in Brussels, Istanbul and Paris, and elsewhere. The ring for the sparrow starts off this series of production. It was not a ring to symbolize imprisonment but rather is meant for a wedding. The symbol leaves open which forces are to be joined in matrimony? Aristotle said the purpose of a constitution is to bring together those elements which are needed for a common life with others, while it should keep those apart which would cause an explosion. In other words, the special silence marks that difference when the wrong things are put together or as the poet says, are wed. At the same time, it is noticeable that the poem becomes incredible richer in images.

He knew how easy it is

to make rivers flow from trickling facets

to grow forests from shavings of planks

to pick and pack pebbles and raise them into soaring sierras

and surround them with deep oceans

to gather straw from the sweepings and scattering them to make meadows

Important details are mentioned about what the man knew would make things work. His knowledge is based on both natural observations and his capacity to draw some practical conclusions. Here the poem enters the making of a synthesis. While the observations may be of a scientific nature, the conclusions drawn are of a different order. Upon a closer look, they appear to be a part of what is called metaphysics or speculative philosophy. In line with expectations and promises to realize something once prepared to undertake something with a definite risk not to succeed, configurations are circumscribed as to what counts in society as a successful model.

Needless to say, the poem shows that things can go from rivers to forests to pebbles, and then out into the oceans, if only to return to the meadows. It appears to be a natural order, but a strange one for the return to the meadows is not a return to the origin. Rather it entails an unfolding of a mysterious course which adds something to nature. Why it has not been perceived or understood so far? The explanation which follows suggests that it has not been identified as something man-made. The natural elements still dominate.

He made a feather breathe like a fish

With great persistence struggle and skill

he made a stuffed and limp doll

with two black dots for eyes and a crimped red line for mouth

It called each visitor by name and present leftovers

marked home, road, street lamp and squares

In a next step, the poem describes what the man managed to make. It is a realization of something he knows will work. It comes close to making the impossible possible. It begins with making a feather breathe like a fish. The association elongates another notion as to what man is capable of making others do, and this despite being against all odds and physical laws, never mind personal will. Since the force is still invisible, the silence not shattered, the breakage point has not been reached as of yet. Instead the poem elongates interests in searches for the end when nothing ends. That was implied by the previous reference to Samuel Beckett.

He knew of the deep and vast mines of silence

between two breaths or heartbeats

He also knew of underground lakes of silence

hidden between the pages of books

He knew of invisible fissures between stone blocks

of towering and imposing cathedrals

But that silence was not his

He wanted to make his private silence

With his pliers he wanted to single out the moment

when a flower is to turn into a fruit

Scoop out the silence from the holes after unscrewing a creaking hinge

Pick it before fear turns to sweat

Skim it from the calm laid thickly over a storm

Scrap it from the darkness of a couch before gold chains shackle it

Mop it before the greenish grease becomes black

within the wheel of his milling machine

He wanted to squeeze it out from the space

amid forgotten dreams swathing concealed sleep

In short after creating so many colours, shapes, sounds and infinity of articles

for such a long time that is beyond memories

he wanted to find his personal silence in this small world belonging to him

A poem like this reflects a practical discourse the poet is waging with the language which is available to him. Clearly it is search for a way out. Thus the previously mentioned natural observations linked to some practical conclusions allow the impossible to become possible. In the final end it is something nearly self-evident, and yet highly evasive. It cannot be pinned down even if it there exists a strong wish to do so. The conditioning of accepting the unacceptable does here the full work. While the doll is made explicit with two black dots for the eyes, the drawing up of the map is even more expressive. As the saying goes in the case of theatre, here thickens the plot and ever more can be heard the silence.

Again attention is turned towards the silences he knew but none of them are his silence. So he is driven by the desire to produce something to comprehend his own silence and subsequently fails because that is impossible. Once that force to make things impossible becomes his knowledge, all his tools and all his observations are applied with a still greater effort. As if nothing is in vain, the maker manages to squeeze out of silence at least something like sleep. Interestingly enough, the poet calls that the last reserve of a silence still unknown to the one the man seeks.

The poem ends with the private space being dwarfed by the world, as if his knowledge is concealed entirely by silence. Such a knowledge in which he is engulfed in now, this he did not have previously. Now he has at least some notion about that other life but to get there the silence to go through is greater and far more endless than any desert or ocean on this earth.

Silence in real life means an economy of words. By leaving out superfluous words, the ones spoken convey a special meaning. It is like men at work not saying everything. They make only hints as to what has been completed and set this in ratio to what is still incomplete. Michel Angelo knew about a stone being more complete than any art work he could produce. Likewise the poem becomes a confession about silence. Sometimes acknowledgement nothing has been really completed, might be the best way out. The difference between the complete and the incomplete can be bridged by acknowledging that life has been flowing past in silence. Hence the last two line of the poem say it all:

He never knew that much before him

Death had created warehouses of silence in every tiny village to the most distant all the stars

Nothing is forgotten in that silence creating an invisible extension of the warehouses to the distant stars. Yet in departure from the ending of the poem, stars do remind that the world consists not only out of man made objects. Alone the cosmos entails that other, indeed endless quality. Given this greater unknown, the world can be best understood through poetry. The philosopher Adorno put it aptly when he recommended to write down everything one does not understand.

Such lyrical comprehension of the unknown, as in the case of Dileep Jhaveri about “silence”, can evoke a wish to create in silence but not one which hides the real truth. Rather it would be the kind of silence which allows to hear one's breath while writing. It matters to break out of the silence. The way to do it is best when emerging out of the water like a dolphin enjoying a leap into the air before splashing back into the water.

Definitely, it is like breaking through the sound barrier once the poem is said out aloud. Even if a mere whisper, once put to sound, the poem touches others. Like stones being banged together under water, people will hear the sound if they hold their own breath. Once sound can be deciphered into words emerging out of silence, then the poem is made. Such a silence is what birds and men alike share, for that is something they can live with. It is a silence which opens up everyone. It is then that the poem makes something not only audible, but also visible as to what is possible and more so conceivable, since now encapsulated in human language.

Hatto Fischer

Berlin/Athens 3.4.2016

1Brendan Kennelly, Cromwell Poems, http://www.poieinkaiprattein.org/poetry/brendan-kennelly/the-cromwell-poems-by-brendan-kennelly/

2Bart Verschaffel, “Public Space – Public Truth” http://www.poieinkaiprattein.org/europe/european-debate-2/political-and-philosophical-appraisal/public-truth-and-public-space-by-bart-verschaffel/

3 Zygmunt Bauman “A Few Comments On The Mis-imagined War On Terrorism”, 29 March 2016 https://www.socialeurope.eu/2016/03/comments-mis-imagined-war-terrorism/

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The poem "Silence"