Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
—from “Keeping Quiet” by Pablo Neruda
They gave me a tiny cabin in the woods. Living room, bedroom, kitchen and bath. No TV. Spotty internet over a dial-up connection, long distance. I am a Chicago girl who was invited to be Writer-in-Residence at Interlochen Arts Academy, a remarkable high school with boarding and day students from all over the world, students with jaw-dropping talents. Music, theatre, art, filmmaking, dance. Writing. Autumn into winter, short, dark days in Northern Michigan. Quiet. Quiet. Quiet. Silence, really.
I was a little terrified.
My regular Chicago life at the time was two trips a day on the CTA, chatter and noise all around me, sirens and engines and other people’s television sets on too loud in the building next to me—our windows less than a foot from one another—an apartment that was never dark because the streetlights from outside stream in through the blinds and the curtains. Cars drove up and down the street in front of that building all day and night, a huge dog in the apartment above me always barked when his people weren’t home, and barked even more when his people were. Our place was underneath the flight pattern for jets coming into O’Hare from over the lake.
I didn’t know silence. I didn’t even know quiet very well. But soon enough, in my cozy rooms with wood-paneled walls and orange shag carpet that held the sand tracked in from beneath the trees, in this space that smelled like summer camp, smelled of forests and bug spray, I got over my fear of silence, of disconnecting. After just a few days, I felt myself yearning toward the velvet quiet.
Then, a week after I arrived and on the first day of classes at Interlochen, September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center was attacked.
Talk about noise.
When I walked through the lanes on campus and under the trees behind the cabins and dorms, I could see the blue flicker of television in the students’ common lounges; I could hear phones ringing from inside the buildings; I could see through their windows, people huddled together talking furiously and sadly. I could hear, I swear, that strange mechanical sound of internet connections made over phone lines, the small bong and screech of them.
Back in my own cabin, though, without a television, with limited internet access, I could hear nothing. I could turn it all off. I did have a radio, and I will be forever grateful to Interlochen Public Radio for its news, for its level-headed reporting. It kept me updated on what I needed to know, when I felt I needed to know it. But when I turned off the radio, like I did for most hours of every day, the silence that filled my cabin allowed me to pay close attention to the story unfolding, to the humanness of it, to the emotional pull of our country’s narrative as it developed over those weeks, those months. In the quiet I could, in fact, listen deep.
I seldom went out then except to teach, to grab a few provisions, to run by myself near the lakes and the wetlands. I never have been more lonely than I was during that time. More immersed in silence, more deeply distracted by my own thoughts, more prone to wallowing in my own self-imposed disconnection and boredom.
I also never have written more than I did during those five months.
I was drawn to “an inward silence,” as Terry Tempest Williams calls it: “a howling silence that brings us to our knees and our desk each day.” Quiet and stillness lead me to the page, like Terry Tempest Williams also said, “Silence is where we locate our voice.”
We know this about silence, I think, and yet, we continue to allow ourselves to be taken out of the silence we crave, the silence we need. The silence our work needs. We compose on a computer because we tell ourselves we type faster than we can hand write—as though this were a good thing, writing faster. And the clack of the keys disturbs the silence in a way no whispering scratch of a pen on paper can. We keep the internet in the palm of our hand now so we can look things up whenever we need to, or at least tell ourselves that (I need to, I need to) as we let go of a sentence in progress because our phones have buzzed, or we really, really must see right this instant if we got a response to that email or how many people liked the photo of our cat we posted on Facebook this morning.
Even now, as I write this, I find myself shallowly distracted, caught up in the daily noise of my regular city life, even though now, today, we are in the desperate quiet of stay at home orders in the middle of a pandemic. Cars (fewer than usual) and sirens (louder in this unusual, relative quiet) run beneath my ninth floor window. I want to check my email, to make a list of the things I should do today. I stop to listen to the bus on the street outside, its recording that calls out the route number and the intersection; was that my phone that just dinged? I want to see what the orange man in the white house tweeted this morning, I want to watch the news. I fight the pull of technology and 24-hour information, the lure of laundry and dishes, of student papers and of that lovely hunk of Australian cheddar cheese in the fridge. I am easily, shallowly distracted.
Still, despite my bad habits, I am a fan of distraction. Not the kind I just spoke of, that behavior that keeps us skimming on the surface of things like humming birds, dipping and flitting, dipping and flitting. The distraction I yearn for, the kind I advocate for is something else. Deep distraction, born of quiet. That is what I want.
What I mean: I used to be a runner. For various reasons that include a new titanium hip, I no longer run. Instead, I would use one of those tedious machines at the gym—now closed, like the restaurant across the way where we enjoyed happy hour and our fellow regulars at its bar is now closed, like the bank and beauty shop and resale shop along the street are closed. When I used to run, and later when I could still use the machine, I never put on headphones or listen to music. I listened, instead, to the meanderings of my mind. I listened until (Terry Tempest Williams again) “in silence the noises outside cease so the dialogue inside can begin.” I listened—I listen, here above it all closed up in our high rise apartment—deep and allow (invite?) myself to be deeply distracted by the memories and questions and stories I carry with me always.
Like this: outside the window of the gym where I would sweat, teenagers would pass by on their way to school. There was always a group of girls and a group of boys, and in between the two groups there would be a couple, a boy and a girl, hands in one another’s back pockets. When I was in junior high, I remember seeing that gesture for the first time. At the shopping center where I’d go to the Woolworth’s to play with white, pink-nosed mice in their cages, I saw my next-door neighbor with a boy (she was sixteen) and he slid his hand into the back pocket of her jeans. That seemed so intimate and grown up to me, I yearned for that sort of closeness with a boy. What is it about those ages, 13, 16, that make us so eager to be older? My brothers were all older than me, and getting into various sorts of trouble. Roger ran away with the carnival. Don would cut class some Fridays and have parties at our house while our folks were at work. Allen was unhappy and sometimes filled with such an acute sense of otherness that he first attempted suicide when he was just 18. Was this, our bad behavior (I ditched school a lot in high school, too, I took a lot of drugs, even though I was a good girl, in the drama club and the National Honor Society) connected to the fact that my father died when I was just 15, Roger 17, Don and Allen brand new adults? Maybe, I don’t know. Perhaps. Let me write about that a bit. Let me see what I can figure out.
That is how it works for me.
I think of this…
That reminds me of this…
That makes me think of that…
And that reminds me of this…
And this, finally, moves my pen towards that.
If I had been on my machine with earbuds filling my head with Morning Edition or MSNBC or Fleetwood Mac or “This American Life,” I would not have been able to hear the progression of these deep, internal distractions.
You try:
Turn off the noise.
Think of something you saw this morning or yesterday or this week or sometime recently. Let yourself see the thing, the moment, the interaction, in your mind. Recreate the image.
What does it remind you of? Think about it for a minute. Tell it to yourself in your head. Speak it through. Now what does that remind you of?
And that makes you think of…what?
Don’t write, not just yet. Look. Listen. Tell.
And when the pull of the words, the images, the moments is too strong to resist, when they lead you to the page, follow them. Write. Write. Write.
Arundhati Roy tells us “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” This gives me comfort right now, in this superbly messed up time in our history. Further, to my mind, that is a good summation of this practice of deep distraction. The other world is on her way, listen. Listen deep.
Here is something else I believe about silence and deep distraction: in this quiet and intense internal listening, I can discover resonance. The moments from my memories, my work, what I’ve read, what I’ve seen—those moments, emotions, and bits of life that come back to me again and again resonate for me. In some cases, these are the things I might try to ignore, to forget, to drown out. The pain of my past, the ache of loss, the odd moments that have left me vulnerable in my sadness or even, sometimes, in my elation. When I am quiet, I can hear the resonance of those things, too.
Marianne Moore reminds us in her poem “Silence” that “the deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.” And while this deep feeling might make me (us) uncomfortable at times, the creative possibilities in what resonates in the silence are essential. Henry David Thoreau said “If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.”
But for me, perhaps for you, too, silence is hard to come by. Even if I do the things that invite it—turn off the radio in the car, drive in the quiet; leave the television dark for an extra hour or two each day; turn off my phone; leave my earbuds in my bag; write with a pen that whispers over the page; listen to my thoughts, my memories, my questions, my stories—even if I do all of this, there is still noise and bustle around me. Even now, when there should be more quiet than not, when we are supposed to be behind our own doors, when we are asked not to gather and go. My next challenge then, is to cultivate my internal listening even as I am interrupted by the external noise. I will be part of this hubbub if I must (talking too loudly to the faces on my computer, listening to the birds in the trees) but while I am, I will try to use what I hear, I see, I notice, and let my stories and sentences and essays develop in my mind. I will talk to myself (maybe not out loud, but if so, quietly. Maybe just breath and lips moving) and tell myself the lines, the scenes, the stories I hear inside. I will mine these moments of life’s distractions for possibilities at the writer’s desk.
Some writers say you need to live an active and engaged life in order to have something to write about. And for some, that might be true. But what if an active and engaged life keeps me from moments of exquisite solitude, from the rich and nourishing states of loneliness?
Henry Miller was a proponent of loneliness: “An artist is always alone,” he said, “…what an artist needs is loneliness.” And Henry Rollins said this: “Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.” I believe this.
Here’s something more I know about loneliness. Years have passed since my time at Interlochen, since I returned to my noisy life in my noisy city. I have an attentive husband and dozens of friends and students and colleagues, so I don’t ever need to feel lonely. But some of my loneliest moments are the most fruitful to me as a writer. When I am lonely—and I can be lonely in a crowd, feel apart, feel other (don’t most writers feel some sense of otherness?)—when I feel lonely, I look and listen inward. I listen deep to claim my own ground, to establish my own presence. This, I believe, is where my best writing comes from. Loneliness makes for good writing.
And then there’s loneliness’s fraternal twin, boredom. Boredom is often a form of resistance, I know; it can stand in the way of pushing through to the good work. Sometimes I work on a piece through a couple of drafts, make it good and then better, and then, when the real work is on me, the push through to making it as best I can, I am apt to say, “I’m tired of this.” I am apt to sit back in my chair, turn on my phone. I am apt to flip through headlines and posts, to say, “I’m bored.” It would be so easy to set the piece aside now, letting it be forever better, but never best. But in order to get to my best, I must push through the boredom until the work becomes something new, something fresh. Don’t most things take some struggle to get to the next level? (I am not just talking about writing here.) I understand, too, when I feel the boredom pulling me away from the desk, that it is just a defense mechanism, a way of keeping me from the work that is not only hard, but potentially complex and painful, risky perhaps, yet interesting and ultimately satisfying. Boredom pretends that it is saying, “quit, give up, change course.” Really, though, it is whispering, “don’t quit, make it better, listen closely, try this, follow the tangents, explore the distractions, make a leap, take the risk.”
Now I will count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.
—from “Keeping Quiet” by Pablo Neruda
In my light and noise-filled apartment in the city, just like on those dark, post-9/11 mornings in my cabin in the woods, I yearn toward the velvet quiet. It’s there, no matter how loud the world may seem. I can hear it breathing. No matter my loneliness, my boredom, the levels of my distraction, I can hear, too, when I listen deep, this: “Write, damn it. Write.”
A version of this piece was originally published on Michael Steinberg’s Blog “Fourth Genre: The Art and Craft of Nonfiction”
Patricia Ann McNair writes fiction and nonfiction. The Temple of Air, stories, won Southern Illinois University Devil’s Kitchen Readers Award, Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year, and was a finalist for Society of Midland Authors Adult Fiction Award. And These Are The Good Times essays, was a Montaigne Medal finalist. McNair’s work has been published widely, including in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Good Men Project, Superstition Review, Solstice Lit Mag, Hypertext and other journals and magazines. She is a contributor to The Rumpus, and The Washington Independent Review of Books. She was named to Chicago’s NewCity Lit50 list, and to Guild Complex’s 30 Writers to Watch. Her work has been featured in creative writing textbooks, and she teaches graduate and undergraduate students at Columbia College Chicago where she directs the undergraduate creative writing programs. McNair is artistic director for Mining the Story, a writers’ retreat in Mineral Point, Wisconsin.