The face of the truth : both word and silence

Abstract

It might seem strange to commence a paper by referring to silence. After all, it is in the very nature of a paper to breach at least the lethargy of the intellectual breed. But this paper – which breaks the silence – commences and ends with a reference to silence. For, the very notion of meaningfulness depends on silence as well as on sound. Speech emerges from silence and never quite transcends it: there could be no speech unless it were interwoven with silence. It is significant that silence is never negated completely but is always com-posed with sound in a pattern of some kind. Sound informs silence with a new pattern of relationships so that it becomes multiplex. ‘Thus, it is the complementary patterning of sound and silence which both rescues the natural sign of death itself and lifts elements out of acoustic chaos in order to constitute a cosmos of meaning. In our world, silence and language are inseparable Siamese twins.’