A silent, meditative word is a word rich in after-thoughts but which minimizes its degree of getting caught in merely discursive formations.

A unilateral understanding of the relation between silence and thought-languages* allows a use of the latter which both radically “deprioritizes” words and maximizes its potential to convey peace. The function of speech now becomes armistice; it loses all necessity of arguing in a combative sense. Rather, it “argues” affectively against the reign of argument as debate and division. Instead, there is honesty and exposure, a touch across one another that communicates, first, a shared spirit of vulnerable humanity, and second, a taste and appreciation of this as a sort of oneness or non-division, plainly put, of actual meeting: encounter.

Meditative words leave us indeed with after-thoughts, but they are not primarily cognitive, or the cognitive experiences here a halt or suspension which can be uncomfortable for it—and this often leads us to seek words to explain or understand it prematurely. This effort is not detrimental, but it does suggest that we are then feeling the force of language’s incapacity to encapsulate what the meditative word, the gentle voice, communicates to us affectively. It remains a mystery, but we have difficulty staying open to it.

Dwelling with these after-thoughts, allowing them to be absorbed underneath the discursive-cognitive level, is at any rate possible. Doing so often leads to quite surprising outcomes when one finally does speak and respond, almost as if the longer one dwells in this way the more likely one is to later replicate a similar mode. We see here how these after-thoughts, brewed in silence, can lead to a “discourse” that neutralizes discord and proliferates peace. Silence is held internal to itself by the unilational structure it obeys and by its intentional restraint from over-thinking.

In the end, we are led to an affective experience that isn’t before but rather after thought and that is therefore capable of mastering language “from above” as a tool for communication without fixating on significations produced at the semantic and hermeneutic level. The meditative word thus inspires no struggle to decipher, no quarrel over interpretations or the meanings of words, since there is no attachment to them; nothing of the affective experience of after-thinking depends or relies on the powers of the logos and its assertions per se (and it is well-recorded how any fixation there leads to the vain, unhelpful wars of religions and philosophies).

One realizes here that what matters is neither seriousness, wisdom, nor profundity, but the spirit of openness in the utterance, or more, the degree of generic listening-potential encoded or made manifest in it, including as an example. How does it listen to (its own) silence? How does it listen to the other’s words and silences? How does it give itself and why? When all these considerations are rooted in silence—in the unagitated mind, in a voice whose strength is quiet—there is no conceivable limit to the amount of “adorable” words that can be produced: Each word will remain at rest in a potentiality that already resides within the listener, who is always at its source and so can always open to its beauty, independently of erudition, skill with reason, or whichever other criteria might impose a hierarchy. It is a speech of which anyone who listens meditatively is capable.

*The unilateral relation between silence and thought-language means that, in the last instance, there is a one-directional influence or “causality” from silence to speech. In this model, silence causes speech but speech doesn’t cause silence, no more than speech wraps around to define, determine or influence silence. Silence is then left its purity, its freedom from speech, but without denying that it can be related (unilated) to it. The practical goal here would be to let this unilateral relation prevail throughout the discourse, against or despite the intentionality of any one given speaker. This is where my words are no longer mine, where I speak from the end of my speech, from where I am dead and only a silent language speaks. But we must focus on what is important here: you can kill a man, you can silence his voice, but you cannot kill silence. You cannot stop its—nearly immediate— return after all the glories and follies of humanity. To do justice by this return, this final destiny of speech in silence, is the purpose of the meditative word. It cannot help but inform an ethics of restraint.

—October 16, 2017

—–
Image: Samuel Bak, Time has Come to a Stop, 1965