Silence on Sand

Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes

“This earth eats men and women and yet we are sent to eat the world, this place that tries to fill us with tomorrow” - Rumi

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Picture a beach.  Millions(billions?endless?) hot grains of sand building a soft yet coarse rug undulating underfoot, so thin it squeaks with each step.  This rug leads us to the wonderfully cold green blue water with waves laying themselves ceaselessly onto the sand, worshiping.  Behind is the verdant lush of the rainforest hills we hiked over to get here.  All around, small children in colorful bathing suits making sand castles. 

One of them looks up from their grainy blond kingdoms and asks you, “where does the sand castle end?”  

Where does the sand castle end?  The question arches and resonates in the crinkles of your mind.   

You think: osmosis.  It could end where the sand is no longer temporarily molded into meaningful shapes you identify as “castle.” But maybe its grounds stretch the entire beach; it’s all sand waiting for the shaping.  And everything that’s not it is only not that because of the sand castle there.  The child looks at you, waiting for an answer.

You think maybe you could talk about Heraclitus, who says no man ever steps in the same river because it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man, but you’re not sure that will explain much.  The tail of a wave foams and gurgles between your toes, fills the castle’s moat, which she just finished digging.  The way the water becomes absorbed by millions(billions?) of transient divots in the sand brings you to the cliché that all endings are also beginnings.  

“It ends where you say it does,” you smile and respond after she sighs, still looking at you.  She doesn’t respond, but looks back at the next wave whose waters refill the moat.  

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“Everything transitory—the knower and the known” - Marcus Aurelius

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As the year comes to a close, everyone is thinking, at least in some capacity or to some extent, about endings, finalities, conclusions.  There’s a kind of ending that comes as routine: school years coming to a close as snow falls on dead grass or as the northeastern cherry blossoms flourish and release their awkwardly stale scent in summers; you come to your favorite book’s pages or favorite show or movie’s final minutes; the year reaches its final 31st.  

There are others, however, that albeit always bound to happen, feel different, worse, maybe, or deeper: Your children, your friends,  or you graduate from one of the academic cycles––preschool, middle- and high-school, college; a friendship wrinkles into dusty shadows of its former warmth and delights; an aging family member dies.  While a sense of shock, of sudden unpreparedness tends to accompany those endings, a knowledge that it was bound to occur also slides underneath––though often to no respite of the shakiness, the giddiness of all that comes with crossing the frontier.  In those cases, things end where we said they did, or where we were told they were going to.  Where the ‘ending’ begins is a matter of classification.    

Things ending where we say they do—that an ‘ending’ belongs to a property of language and labeling—is a principle upheld by the properties of matter and energy as the widely held concept is that matter is never created or destroyed, only transferred or transformed.  An ‘ending,’ therefore, is a category of experience bound by the realm of possibilities contained within our narrative of who we are and what our life is.  

If a book, television show, or movie has a bad ending—the Game of Thrones series has an infamously shoddy one—it shapes our entire conceptualization of that text’s quality.  Likewise, in ancient eudaimonistic philosophies, the aim of life was to have a good and happy one as a whole.  With that goal arises an epistemological question of when can we actually form an evaluative belief about whether a life has fulfilled these categories, because it seems that only in retrospect is that possible.  Moreover, it raises the question of who has the authority to foist this qualitative judgment.  

Ludig Wittgenstein––a Book XI and Marianne Janack favorite and famously disconsolate and solitary philosopher––is said to have claimed as his last words, “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”  Looking at Wittgenstein’s often punishing life, this claim of happiness is not one that we would expect, and our surprise shows us how the texture of an ending shapes the thing’s value.  Wittgenstein shows us that it doesn’t just end where you say it does, but how you say it does. But then there’s the question of the ‘saying’ part of it all.

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“In silence, there is eloquence. Stop weaving, and watch how the pattern improves” - Rumi

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I’ve always seen endings as silence.  As someone to whom words matter a great deal––to whom, in inebriated college and post-college meditations on existence, the conclusion settles that words are everything, or that everything is words––silence emerges as ‘end.’  I think of Hamlet closing the play: “the rest is silence.”  

This year, each morning I sat at the warm wooded table in my living room with my cup of dark, steaming coffee and two books, the works of mystic poet Rumi and ancient Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.  Rumi, as most mystics, makes a big deal of silence.  Only in silence, escaping from the words, do we create space for the pattern, as Rumi puts it, to make itself manifest to us.  Rumi tells us that silence is not the end of the weaving process, but an essential part of it.  

Without silence, the sounds we use to shape the air do not come into distinct and meaningful units of words.  From emptiness form arises.  From life does death arise.  From silent sands do castles rise up and topple over back into the horizon.  

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“Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy” - Marcus Aurelius