There is a silence where hath been no sound

Okay, okay, I know it's formulaic to put up two poetry posts in under 24 hours, but the discussion on silence as a form of music on the Bismillah Khan post made me think of these lines from a Paz poem called 'Reading John Cage' [1]:

"Music:
I hear within what I see outside,
I see within what I hear outside.
(Duchamp: I can't hear myself hearing.)
I am
an architecture
of instantaneous sounds
on a space that disintegrates.
(Everything
we come across is to the point.)
Music
invents silence,
architecture
invents space.
Factories of air.
Silence
is the space of music:
a confined
space:
there is no silence
except in the mind.
Silence is an idea,
the fixed idea of music.
Music is not an idea:
it is movement,
sounds walking over the silence.
(Not one sound fears the silence
that extinguishes it.)
Silence is music,
music is not silence...

...Music is not silence:
it is not saying
what silence says,
it is saying
what it doesn't say.
Silence has no meaning,
meaning has no silence.
Without being heard
music slips between the two.
(Every something is an echo of nothing.)...

....Music is real,
silence is an idea."

- Octavio Paz (translated from the Spanish by Eliot Weinberger) [2]

P.S. Just in case, the title of this post comes from a Thomas Hood poem called Silence

[1] From East Slope. Cage, of course, is the most well known proponent of the theory that silence is music too.

[2] Phrases inside parantheses are in English in the original poem.

Categories: Poetry