I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell your name - the livelong year -
To an admiring Bog!
- Wise Emily Dickinson's persuasive case for just shutting up.
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There I was, reading rapt reviews of a loudly-praised new book all about Silence, when the SouthCare helicopter came noisily clattering low over my roof on its way to the nearby (almost next door, really) Canberra Hospital.
It was as if the cacophonous helicopter itself was joining in the lively discussion of matters of noise and quiet raised in Kate McLoughlin's scholarly and entertaining Silence - a Literary History.
My ears have pricked up at this discussion of silence because my ears are a Canberran's ears and Canberra, so thinly populated (the citizens so vastly outnumbered by trees) is so unusually quiet. The notion of a "quiet metropolis" sounds oxymoronic and Canberra's superabundance of silences is one of this odd city's defining oddities.
Not quite at ease with Canberra's sepulchral silences (after all, we will have more silence than one can poke a stick at after we are laid in our fine and quiet graves), I really love the mansion-shuddering, tile-shaking racket of the coming-and-going hospital helicopter. It is an exciting city sound, one of the very few truly city sounds Canberra makes.
But Oxford professor Kate McLoughlin is interested in many, many more sorts of silences and noises than these literal ones.
One of her wider notions of noise is the 24/7 "noise" of news and news-comment.
She is English and writes, "In 2016, the 16,141,241 people [Britons] who voted Remain in the UK's Brexit referendum, myself included, got to know what it felt like to be on a losing side in an historical turning-point."
"Disbelief, anger, grief, shame, denial. After the US presidential election later that year, I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts. Part of me knew it was more important than ever to keep fighting; another part needed to turn off the noise."
But of literal noise she tells us how "The Anti-Noise League, founded in 1933, led efforts literally to turn down the volume of everyday life. In 1935, the League held an exhibition at the Science Museum in South Kensington featuring exhibits such as the Silent Symphonic W.C. Suite, a lavatory with a 'very silent' flush."
Canberra has its own informal anti-noise league and every year its member fogeys write noisy letters to The Canberra Times shrilling that the boisterous sounds made by the Summernats revellers (even though those sounds last for just 3/365ths of an otherwise deathly quiet Canberra year) destroy the sepulchral paradise of dead-silent Canberra as we prefer it.
Of 24/7 media noise - the incessant news about Donald T***p (I am trying not to mention his name in my column) is somehow the noisiest news of all and I read with admiration of the new US podcast and YouTube show America Actually. It offers the radical pledge of doing its best to intelligently discuss American politics while being "T***p free" or at least while presenting "Politics without T***p at the centre."
I commend this plucky podcast's example to the Australian media, including the T***p-fixated Canberra Times.
In his witty essay about/review of the 696-page Silence: A Literary History for the New Yorker, Anthony Lane feels fatigue and concludes that "so dense has been the crowd of creatives (listed and quoted by McLoughlin) advising us, through the ages, on the essential art of silence that by the end you've had enough. You just want them to shut up."
Perhaps, but in Australia we have just had an important, sordid illustration of just how essential the art of silence can be. What wonders it would have worked for our Prime Minister's image and legacy if only (listening to the advice of McLoughlin's 'creatives' and of our Emily Dickinson) when asked on the now famous "comedy podcast" which female celebrity he would most like to "shag", he had stayed silent (instead of nominating Kylie Minogue). If only he had indicated with a shake of a statesmanlike head that he had nothing to say on so grubby a subject.
A connoisseur of silences, McLoughlin is appreciative of the witty petering-out of Haydn's Symphony No. 45, the Farewell. The score directs the rebelling musicians to section by section snuff out the candles on their music stands and leave the stage. And so what had just been a loudly music-filled space is left serenely silent. Why not go and see the symphony's finale now (it is such cultured fun) on YouTube?
It amuses me to imagine the members the House of Representatives occasionally entertaining the nation by imitating Haydn's Farewell. I see a Question Time that begins with all 150 members being their usual vulgar, shouting, hooting selves but with members party by party and backbench by backbench gradually leaving the chamber (with perhaps our Prime Minister the symbolic last to leave, perhaps making a suggestive gesture with his hands). And so what began as a seething bog of ear-splitting party political amphibians (see our Emily again, above) would delight us by becoming a still billabong where uplifting silence reigns, save perhaps for the shy musical whisper of the wind in the reeds and rushes.
