Archive

THE SILENCE OF THE ELECTRIC SAW (Part I)

It is one thing to see the unity of silence and sound when our teachers are birdsong and the sea’s breaking waves. But what might Wallace Stevens or Robert Penn Warren say about unpleasant noise? Can noise also be a vehicle of that “peace after perfect speech”? Does the sound we would prefer not to hear have anything to reveal? Can noise, too, be a teacher pointing to the Silence that is the ground of

The Open Porches of the Mind: On Silence and Noise (Part I)

The result of justice will be silence and trust forever. -Isaiah 32:17  Let stillness be the criterion for assessing everything. -Evagrius  If you love truth, love silence. -Isaac the Syrian  THE BLACKBIRD SINGING With hopes of teaching them all how to draw, Kathleen Norris stands before her classroom of elementary school students. She recounts in Amazing Grace her remarkable way of going about this. Before teaching them to draw, she first needs to teach them