While Creating the Literature of Silence!

(A daily dialogue among ourselves!)

Hashem Khosroshahi (Haşim Hüsrevşahi)

1. There is no doubt that we are living in an age of great decay. A decayedness that encompasses the entire world without exception! What is decaying? What is causing the decay? What is the most defining feature of our era? Today, our world is governed by the laws of the capitalist system. The foundation of this system is based on a production and consumption relationship geared toward profit. Those who dominate this system strive to spread the idea among people that it will continue indefinitely. Since they also claim that what exists forever is the god they believe in, they seek to imbue the capitalist system—profit-driven production and consumption—with a divine yet illusory hue. People, regardless of their class, live by the dictates of these laws. Nothing, absolutely nothing, exists outside this order. Bread, education, health, information, technology, religion, love, honour, rebellion, morality, anger, literature, art, and everything else we can think of is redefined within this order, this wheel. What can be put on the market is put on the market; what is objectionable is suppressed. Wars are the product and the result of this order. Armies, police, courts, and prisons exist to protect this order. This is a scenario.
2. We are living in an age of great decay. Those who hold economic and political power are recreating and reorganizing universal moral values according to their own interests in order to maintain their dominance. In the name of the human rights (!) and democracy (!) they have newly shaped, they are raining chemical, biological, and nuclear bombs on millions of people in countries that do not belong to them, kidnapping innocent people and beheading them, gouging out children’s eyes, ripping open soldiers’ chests, removing their hearts, and eating them (and doing it on camera!), they are stabbing pregnant women’s wombs with bayonets and impaling their babies on bayonet tips, kidnapping hundreds of thousands of underage girls and turning them into prostitutes, cutting down forests to create drug fields, making people addicted to various drugs, replacing workers with the technology they produce, condemning millions to starvation, shaping education from elementary schools to universities according to their own worldview, they are ruthlessly continuing their mental and cultural wars by controlling communication, the media, and all means of communication… All for a handful of dollars and hegemony! This is a novel.
3. We are living in an age of great decay. According to data from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2012, the world’s super-rich make up only 0.5% of the world’s population and directly own 40% of the world’s wealth. Together, the super-rich and the rich make up 8% of the world’s population, and this handful of wealthy families own 82% of the world’s wealth. What does this mean? It means that if there are 100 pieces of bread and 100 people in the world, 8 people eat 82 of the pieces, and the remaining 18 pieces are distributed unequally among 92 people. Unequally, because 70 of these 92 people get only 3 pieces (1 piece for every 30 people)! A study conducted in the United States a few years ago showed that in this country with a population of 310 million, 40% of all wealth belongs to only 1% of the population. Approximately 40% of the population owns nothing, absolutely nothing. In other words, in America, 40 out of 100 loaves of bread go to just one person, while 40 people get nothing, and the remaining 60 loaves are shared among approximately 60 people. So, one person gets 40 loaves, 60 people get one loaf each, and 40 people get zero loaves! This is the source of the rot I mentioned, and it is dominated by a handful of bosses, 0.5%. They don’t just own the means of production and the profits; they own the earth; they own the people on earth… This is a joke! No, it’s a nightmare, and we are all prisoners in this nightmare!
4. We are living in an age of great decay. There are two camps in this order: on one side are those who have everything, on the other are those who have absolutely nothing! Of course, these camps will have their own language, their own literature, and their own art. On one side, there is literature that desires the continuation of the system and helps to achieve it; on the other side, there is literature that desires the destruction of this system and helps to achieve it. One of the most important characteristics of the former is that it is geared towards rapid consumption and profit. This rapid consumption also aims to alienate people from the inhuman order of life they live in, to keep them from perceiving it. Subjugation is one of the most fundamental elements of this effort. Bowing one’s head is sanctified. Rebellion is a crime, a mental illness, a sin… those who rebel must be imprisoned, treated in closed wards, burned in hell. The literature of submission to the laws of decay develops in a language that is appropriate and unique to itself. The language and literature of the second stage is the literature of rebellion, revolt, and a new world that breaks through the hard shell of a peach pit fallen to the ground and emerges from the soil, and of course, it has its own unique language and develops within that language.
5. We are living through an age of great decay. The language of this decay has created a deep rift, an abyss, between people and the reality that actually exists. This is a real crisis. The language of decay strives to keep this reality away from the eyes, ears, perceptions, and consciousness. The curtain of noise grows thicker every day. The curtains are filled with colourful illusions. Within the “language” of these curtains, the literature of this crisis and deception is developed, along with the appropriate marketing and feeding phenomena and methods. The noise created by decay deafens the ears, prevents other sounds from being heard, and leaves everyone “speechless,” pushing them into “silence,” condemning them. Michael Strawser from the Philosophy Department at the University of Florida quotes a paragraph from Kierkegaard in his article “Gifts of silence from Kierkegaard and Derrida” (Soundings 89-1-2, Spring-summer 2006): “Ah, everything is so noisy… and man, this clever fellow, seems to have become sleepless in order to invent even new instruments to increase noise, to spread noise and insignificance with the greatest possible haste and on the greatest possible scale. Yes, everything is soon turned  upside down: communication is indeed soon brought to its lowest point with regard to meaning, and simultaneously the means of communication  are indeed brought to their highest with regard to speedy and overall circulation; for what is publicized with such hot haste and, on the other hand, what has greater circulation than – rubbish! Oh, create silence!”  What is that emerging from and within the noise resulting by decay? Silence! Those who pull the plug! Those who turn off televisions, flip radio switches opposite direction, stick out their tongue at newspapers, march with rally grounds behind them, block out advertisements, lose the addresses of shopping malls, and engage in similar active silence! A silence filled with sound, repeating “la la la la laaa la” as if it were meaningless, creating a childish, chirpy cacophony against their aged noise, thumbing its nose at their speeches, creating and spreading humour against their seriousness, and acting as if its ears cannot hear. The oppressed classes resist this rotten literature with the noisy, meaning-twisting, emotion-driven literature of the feminine language, countering the masculine language of the oppressors. This is the continuation of the story. There is more to come!

6-    Albert Camus, in his essay “The Rebel: Man and Rebellion” (1951), states: “In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.”  What is the language of this cessation, this end, and how does it emerge? Nietzsche says: “Reason” in language – oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” The literature of the oppressed primarily attacks the grammatical structure of the sanctified masculine language. It begins to strike it at its most vulnerable point. It uses a talkative language. It is vocal. It is polyphonic. It escapes the dominance of the center and authority. Words gradually lose their nominal and referential prestige. Silence and, consequently, feelings come to the fore. The eloquent language of the oppressed in their rebellion becomes silent as the dominant “language” of the rebellion’s victory. This silence is not a lack of communication, nor is it mute, of course. It is not the silence of submission born of fear—of any kind of fear. This silence is, in a way, a declaration of the inadequacy of words that have lost their grammatical authority. Thus, speech (voicing, vocalization) and silence (quietness, silence) form, in a sense, the mutable boundaries of language. The prerequisite for this transformation is that social development does not proceed in a linear fashion but rather in a cyclical, spiral progression. From the noise of decay emerges the world’s new, vibrant language of silence. The evolving and revolving society takes place within its own language, and language renews itself! Wittgenstein’s states, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus).

The boundary “between” silence and speech is the geography ‘between’ “being and non-being,” as I have expressed elsewhere (Genderless Language, Timeless Narrative, and The Eve of the Second Commune, October-November-December 2011, Patika Magazine, October-November-December 2011, issue 75). As Heidegger said, “To keep silent does not mean to be mute!” (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time) The silence referred to is a form of expression (call it silent speech if you will). Youru Wang, in his article discussing language, silence, and speech in the context of Western and Eastern philosophy, explains the silent communication of Zen masters as follows: “We should not mistakenly perceive the views of the Hongzhou Zen masters as a return to logocentric speech. After the words are spoken, ‘the silence of Tatagata speaks like his speech’… silence is certainly not a silence opposed to speech, but silence is undoubtedly a strategy of denying and rejecting the duality between speech and silence.” (Liberating oneself from the absolutized boundary of language: a liminological approach to the interplay of speech and silence in Chan Buddhism. Philosophy East & West, V. 51, No. 1, January 2001, pp. 83-99) “Denying duality” conflicts with Susan Sontag’s view: “Silence” never ceases to imply its opposite and to demand on its presence. Just as there can’t be “up” without “down” or “left” without “right,” so one must acknowledge a surrounding environment of sound or language in order to recognize silence. Not only does silence exist in a world full of speech and other sounds, but any given silence takes its identity as a stretch of time being perforated by sound.” In her essay titled “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Susan Sontag examines the many forms, situations, and meanings—or lack thereof—of silence. She asks the question: “How literally can the notion of silence be used with respect to art?” and answers by drawing on codes from various thinkers: “Silence exists as a decision – in the artist’s perfect suicide (Kleist, Lautermont)… Silence also exists as a punishment—self-punishment, in the perfect madness of artists (Horderlin, Artaud), where one’s great intelligence is perhaps the reward for crossing the acceptable limits of consciousness…”, “However, the choice of permanent silence does not deny that it works.”… … “Pure silence is impossible—neither as a concept nor in reality… The artist who creates silence or emptiness must present something dialectical: complete emptiness, enriched emptiness, resonant or uplifting silence. Silence inevitably remains a form of speech (in many cases, of complaint or assertion) and an element of dialogue.” It seems that whether it is the silence born of the inadequacy of words in the presence of Zen masters, or the silence defined by Sontag as resonant emptiness, ultimately a transition from one to the other is possible and, moreover, inevitable. Perhaps it is not out of place to repeat Derrida’s words here: “Silence plays the irreducible role of that which bears and haunts language, outside and against which alone language can emerge-“against” here simultaneously.” (Derrida, Jacques Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1978:54) This is listening to the language of nature, listening to the music of nature, feeling its silence. Perhaps this is part of John Cage’s magnificent silence performance, which he first performed in 1952 and which they called a scandal. This is a perspective. A design.

7-     We are living through an age of great decay. This decayedness and rottness also bring us good news! The rottenness of this system, which is on the verge of extinction, is undoubtedly a harbinger of a new order to come. New lives and orders will spring forth from the seed of the fruit that has fallen to the ground and rotted. In place of the putrid language, a new language; in place of putrid relationships, a new relationship; in place of the literature of the language of putridity and decay, the literature of the feminine language sprouting from this order and the hermaphroditic language evolving from it, and finally, the literature of the genderless silence ‘language’ as a unique part of nature where feelings reign supreme, will develop. This is a longing.