#3 / silence
"I have no luggage to bring but my own heart"
Dear friend,
and dear new subscribers of which you are several, and of your severalness and your indivual-ness I am glad, hello
FLORENCE has been a bit quiet and may be thus a little while longer while I am busy studying for the National Ayurvedic Medical Association board exam, coming up….soon enough. While I study, I feel quiet inside, and outside of myself am able to perceive a kind of silence also. I remembered that it is entirely possible to share writing with you other than writing written specifically for FLORENCE, and I remembered that four years ago, in April of 2020, I was also thinking about & experiencing silence internal and external, and posted the following text up in some other online space I was keeping at the time. I am tempted to edit it, but will refrain. It’s a quick & quiet time capsule of a particular period which, I noted to myself in the grocery store this morning, is, in fact, functionally behind us.
Enjoy, & see you “soon”. Your friend, Suzanne
I have no luggage to bring but my own heart
The line I borrow is “We have no luggage to bring but our own hearts”, written by a 17th c. Portuguese Jesuit missionary as he prepares to sail out of Macao for Japan, in Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence, one of the few things capable of sustaining my attention right now. It’s a dark story, but strangely peaceful to experience as the scenes and trials of rural, impoverished, brutalized 17c Japan are so distant from my own worries, which are all of our own worries. The depiction of the priest imprisoned but hearing confession through the grate where the Christians are locked up together before the surprising silence of an afternoon execution doesn’t give the same sense of alarm that seeing people shaking hands or sharing a table or hugging each other—on a television show or in a movie, or god forbid on the street in real life!— does. The novel makes me feel the great silence of all gods which is simultaneously the great sound and hum of all gods, all creation, all energy, all emptiness. It’s really terrible, it’s really….it’s the pink noise I’m listening to and the pink noise for and with the pink moon that’s rising tonight, outside the window which is outside the door and outside another door, my back is facing the door, and my face is facing the other window, which looks in a direction opposite the direction that the pink moon is rising. Therefore my back is facing the pink moon rising.
I have been working at home for the last three years, so this video meeting thing isn’t new to me, nor is the non-need to regularly dress for the conventions of social intercourse, not the top-half-dressed, bottom-half-fuck-it thing, not the silence of being often alone, but now, every single day, with nowhere to go ever, I find myself making meticulous effort of appearance.
I spent half an hour selecting a necklace the other day, for a call with a girlfriend, but I am doing that sort of thing every day, on days when there are no calls. Mark would see it—though really he doesn’t take notice of a necklace all that much—but no one else. Wearing lipstick, something I do only rarely in “the normal case”, ordering new lipstick shades online, panic-wiping the packages when they arrive, guiltily opening the packages when they arrive, greedily trying the colors on when they arrive, trading black eyeliner for white one day and white eyeliner for black the next day, painting my toenails, shaving my legs, waxing my bikini line, meticulous flossing, regular whitening, exfoliating, moisturizing, choosing a skirt, discarding it and choosing a different skirt, taking it off and choosing a third skirt, trying a sweater with the skirt, putting a blouse on under the sweater, taking off the sweater, taking off the blouse, taking off the skirt, changing the bra, changing the panties putting it all back on, smoothing it all down, combing my hair, a sweet-smelling pomade in my hair, rose-scented underarm cream, a little scented oil on the face, a little spray of perfume on my wrist, on the back of my neck, on the back of my knee. You’ll do it your way, I’ll do it mine.
I tried to see the pink moon but I can’t, it’s clouded over here tonight and raining. I was really giving up writing, giving up poetry, for some other forms, but the other forms are closed to me at the moment. I wasn’t really giving up writing, giving up poetry, but I was giving up writing, I was giving up poetry. For silence! But not really. Although I did have the needle and thread out yesterday, and that’s an old form that gave me a lot of silent pleasure for a long time. So maybe that form, in place of the dirt forms I don’t have access to today.
Meanwhile, sentences. Here’s pink noise, pink moon, for your pink pink pink pink pink pink mood.
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