The Ellen Kemp Memorial Prize for Short Story 2016
The Shortlist
She is the Cat - Mez Lanigan, Trentham
War Wounds - Simon Dalton, Parkdale
Stewing - Fredericka Arthur, North Carlton
Sounds of Silence - Suzanne Ferris, Malmsbury
The sound of Reading - Gail Llewellyn Prain, Yarraville
As if I Care - Tricia Power, Daylesford
The Grief Code - Joshua Pomare,Clifton Hill
Domestic Hush - Tess Corbel, Rosanna
The Wash - Tiffany Plummer, Heidelberg
The Winner - Suzanne Ferris, Malmsbury
‘'Sounds of Silence’
Silence is multifaceted. To say that it means mere ‘absence of sound’ is absurdly inadequate; its meaning is always contextual. Take, for instance, the sullen silence of a resentful partner in a relationship dispute, the passive/aggressive stance, or the spine-chilling silence of suspense in a film in which even the sound-effects have stopped and we grip the chair in self-inflicted torment. Think, too, of the brooding silence hanging between thunder-bursts in a tropical storm. Silence can be threatening, alienating, peaceful, reassuring, tense, awkward, gentle, hostile, even monotonous.
We enter life from the silence of the womb; we leave it to return to silence. The noise of life is punctuated throughout by many forms of silence. Without them, the bustle and clamour of everyday living would be without meaning. Silence is as crucial as breathing. Reflecting on all this brings me to the intrinsic connection between sound and silence. Like all binaries, they complement each other.
Think of a walk in the bush. It is early on a clear summer morning. You are alone, enjoying the peace and solitude after a frantic week. It is so quiet that the snap of a small twig as you tread the gravel track seems unnaturally loud and intrusive. It will scare off the kangaroos out doing their morning fossick. So you stop to sit still on a fallen log. Gradually you become aware of an orchestra of sounds: staccato twitters of twitchy birds, some familiar, some not; the deep-throated croak of pobblebonk frogs and some other kind you can’t identify, coming from the all-but-dry creek bed; the distant drone of a plane somewhere overhead. Then a faint trampling in the dewy undergrowth, suddenly getting louder as a small mob of those roos, no longer intimidated by your noisy tread, bound nimbly past, quite close to where you’re sitting.
We need this kind of silence if we are to ‘hear’ the vitality of the natural world. Our daily lives are crowded with so much noise. Even early-morning runners jogging in busy cities and suburbs seem to have their ears plugged with news, pop music, whatever. It appears we are afraid of silence, even the purest, most healing kind.
Recall, perhaps, a relationship under siege. You have been accused of something, and fight to defend yourself, becoming all-the-more verbose because you know, deep down, that you deserve this challenge to your integrity. Only this time he (it’s usually a he in these situations, or am I being biased?) doesn’t reply. He goes silent. He holds this grim silence so long that eventually you get the message that this time it’s over. A silence signalling that the door has finally closed. Conversely, think about a relationship in which silence is easy, reassuring: two people who know and trust each other, who have reached a point of tacit understanding which doesn’t require constant banter to reaffirm their connection.
Film and theatre can extend our experience of other forms of silence. Think of the two hapless protagonists in the stage play, Endgame, tossing words backwards and forwards into the uncaring, vaguely sinister void. For the audience, as for these lost souls searching for meaning and a sense of identity, the tension becomes almost unbearable. Or think about the powerful film ‘The Road,’ based on Cormac McCarthy’s confronting, post-apocalyptic novel. An eerie silence prevails throughout in such a sinister, existential way that when it is unexpectedly broken, the impact is all-the-more terrifying against the backdrop of stark silence. Film dealing with war and crime can take us into realms outside the confines of personal experience. Silence here is often employed to disturbing effect. I speak of quality films in these genres, of course, not those which peddle non-stop violence. The best of the Scandinoir series make dramatic use of silence as part of their technical repertoire. And old Hitchcock certainly knew how to use suspenseful silence: think of ‘Psycho.’
Silence can be alienating in some contexts. We’ve probably all – especially if we were adolescent girls – experienced the awful hush that instantly descends on a group when you enter a room; that paranoid certainty that they were just talking about you. Silence can also be awkward. I think of a class I once taught in Canberra, comprising mature-age, second-chance Year 12 students. We were seated in our usual circle discussing, I still remember, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, when a guy with tattoos and a shaved head, aged about forty, suddenly stood up and announced loudly ‘I just wants yez all to know I’ve left the Neo-Nazis.’ The stunned silence around the room was luckily broken by Yvonne, a feisty redheaded girl, Yvonne, who declared cheerfully ‘Good on you, Al!’
If you’ve ever sat beside a distressed baby, trying to soothe her to sleep by rocking the cradle, singing, stroking, whatever resource you could muster, you’ll recall the blessed peace that descends when the sobs finally, finally give way to soft ‘moth breath’, as Sylvia Plath so tenderly puts it. Today I remember another, more complex kind of silence: the day my first daughter was born. I lay, wide awake but in a haze of unreality, in what slowly revealed itself to be the delivery room. The big clock on the wall opposite said 4.17 and I realized this must mean morning. The stillness was unnerving because there were no people and there was no sound apart from that hideous clock, loudly clicking each moment that passed in this sterile space. Nothing but this barren room, with no baby to hold.
But for me, nowhere are sound and silence so integrally brought together than in music: the notes signify sound; the rests on the score, silence. This is epitomized in some music, and for me, perhaps nowhere more so than in the Sarabande from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 5. I first heard this tiny gem when I was a university student of twenty, but the deep connection I made with it then has been with me ever since. It’s an inner resource I carry with me always, and it feels as if it’s been there all my life. Absurd, you think? But some music – and this sarabande is definitely one of these – seems to be part of the ether, always there, just waiting for the right composer to draw it out, give it voice.
As I listen to this sarabande I am taken out of this moment into a deeper space, a vaster realm. Today I am back in Canberra pottering about with food-preparation in the kitchen, listening to my younger daughter, fourteen-and-a-half, as she practises her cello in the living room, which is only partially divided from the kitchen and dining rooms. It is autumn and late afternoon as she reaches the end of her practice, the light waning to the point that electric lights will need to be switched on.
‘OK, Mum, request time!’
‘Oh, you can probably guess: the Sarabande from Suite 5.’
There’s a pause, then gently, in the half-light, out of the stillness of silence, the pure notes of the cello float softly into the room. In a single thread, it weaves its spell as it meanders through the darkening air, now high, now loud and deep, then soft, softer, until it is barely audible as it probes the stillness. It is a journey of sorts, no doubting this, with me a totally rapt fellow-traveller. The voice is questing, yet the music seems simultaneously to propose both question and answer in a totally open-ended way.
This sarabande is probably quite short, though I’ve never bothered to find out, because each time I hear it I am transported me out of the temporal, making the question irrelevant. Following its thread becomes like a life journey, metaphorically, emerging into sound like a mysterious birth, tentatively exploring the space, now cautious, now climbing boldly upwards, now descending, till finally it fades almost imperceptibly out of consciousness and back into the ether from which it came. As I listen, there is a hazy transition where it is impossible to be sure exactly where sound ends and silence begins.
I suppose it could be described as a meditation, under the gifted guidance of J.S.Bach, but this seems too prosaic to account for my experience of it. Simply, I surrender to the wistful longing, float fearlessly down into the realm of exquisite sadness, the calm, upwards drift, floating, floating, till at last I realize the sound itself has been reabsorbed into the ether and what I am straining after is simply its fading memory. This sarabande embodies so completely for me the paradox of being and unbeing, of aspiration and evanescence, of longing and of almost, though never quite, reaching fulfillment. I think T. S. Eliot captures something of what I am groping towards here in ‘Little Gidding’, the last of his Four Quartets, still a favourite of mine. He speaks here of ‘a condition of complete simplicity’ and of how ‘all is always now.’
By the time I realize Charlotte has played the final note and that the sound is fading into the silence of memory, it is almost dark. For a while there is utter silence, until I break it:
‘You know, it’s almost as if Bach hadn’t so much composed this music as somehow accessed it …’
‘Of course, Mum.’