A Half-Built Garden
26 March 2024 | 2:45 pm

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys (Tor, 2022)

Judy Wallach-Stevens is woken one night to a warning about pollutants in the nearby Chesapeake Bay. With her wife and newborn in tow, she heads out to see what’s up—and ends up making first contact with a group of friendly aliens. The story that follows delightfully explores both human and interspecies gender dynamics—there’s a hilarious and touching moment early on when the aliens, some spider-like, others kin to pangolins, are invited to choose pronoun pins—and sharply points at the ways corporations are already commodifying those personal notes to their own ends. But I was struck mostly by the strong thread of community-making inherent in the book. With her co-parents and new alien friends, Judy works towards a model of kinship that is more expansive, more durable, and more galaxy-ranging than the traditional patriarchal family. And more messy and complicated too—but that’s the price, and joy, of living.


Radio noise
23 March 2024 | 3:30 pm

In The World of Silence, Max Picard describes silence as an active presence, a kind of independent and infinite substrate upon which all speech emerges from and then descends into. He believes silence to be a sacred and necessary component of living, and is quite distraught at the perceived lack of it in his day. Since he was writing in the middle of the last century, he’s particularly perturbed by the radio and it’s ever-present noise:

Through the continuity of radio-noise, therefore, man is inspired with a false sense of security. He is led to imagine that the radio represents something continuous and that he is himself continuous. A man goes to work: radio accompanies him, it surrounds him at his work. He goes to sleep, and radio-noise is the last thing in his consciousness before he sleeps. He wakes up, and radio-noise is there again, as if it were something quite independent of man altogether, something more real than man himself, and the guarantee of his own continuity. It is always around him, always available, and the one thing that seems always ready to care for him, to provide for him.

Picard, The World of Silence, page 206

It is perhaps not terribly remarkable that you could rephrase this to refer not to “radio-noise” but to the both visual and auditory noise of smartphones and it would be just as relevant. But as ever it feels useful to me to be reminded that many of our present-day troubles have roots in the past; not because it suggests we will never be rid of them but rather because it means we have the wealth of our ancestor’s experience to draw from.

Picard is more pessimistic:

There is no longer any space in which it is possible to be silent, for space has all been occupied now in advance.

Picard, The World of Silence, page 199

Here is where Picard and I diverge. Picard worries that we have banished silence from the world, that it may not be possible to restore it. This emerges, I think, in part from his Catholicism, and from a cosmology that centers “man”-kind. (He has scant attention for women.) But from where I stand, the universe is a great and vast silence, far older and more immense than anything humans have given thought to let alone spoken of. However much noise we insist on making on this one small and fragile world, we can never overcome that silence. It will always and forever remain—even when (especially when) we have not the wisdom to hear it.


The World of Silence
23 March 2024 | 3:01 pm

The World of Silence by Max Picard (Eighth Day Press, 1948)

“Silence is not simply what happens when we stop talking. It is more than a mere negative renunciation of language; it is more than simply a condition we can produce at will.” So begins this unusual and meditative book on silence—silence not as an absence or a practice, but as an “autonomous being” which gives rise to speech and music and into which both must return. I disagree with the author on a great many points, largely stemming from the fact that he is Catholic and I am a heathen. But I found myself quite drawn to the book, both because it foreswears all effort at persuasion or logic in favor of exploring the fathomless depth of one person’s thinking; and also because his notion of silence as a tangible and powerful presence, as something that exists outside of us but which we depend on, feels somehow ineffably right.



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