My Principality

Before you speak, ask yourself: Is it kind, is it true, is it necessary, does it improve upon the silence?

- Sai Baba of Shirdi

[Photograph by Ineke Kamps.]

An excerpt from director Anne Bogart’s November blog post Permanence:

I wondered if this is a typical American attitude – distrust of empty space and unfilled time?  And yet how can anything new be engendered if space and time is not allowed in order that the new event might occur. I do know that an artist must be capable of stopping time and allowing for silence.  A great landscape painting halts the ephemeral rush of time.  A play in production changes the time signature radically and can bring us all to stillness and quiet.  But to welcome the moments of stillness and quiet in one’s work, one must welcome and cultivate stillness and quiet in one’s own life.  One must find the capacity to be still with nothing happening in order to realize that in fact something is always happening, movement and sound are all around. Always.

Silence does not exist, at least not as long as we are alive and breathing.  But the leaning in towards silence, the welcoming of the gaps and dark places in between stillness and action, bring a great restorative reserve to our perceptual mechanisms and our sense of humanity.  Much like mulch in gardening, the stinking dead leaves during the silence of winter are transformed into the fecund conditions that produce sweet tender bulbs.  For the artistic process, the winter of quiet and invisibility is necessary for a burst of new life and expression to occur.