Silence and Privacy
Despite our culture’s insistence consuming new media and experiences, we are pretty habitual. I keep seeing it in our culture, this insistence of repetition over novelty. It’s most clear in the movie industry where we are on volume 400 of Fast and the Furious and remakes of mean girls as musicals. This is, in part, the result of the difficulty the movie industry is now facing with pandemic capitalism where there is little appetite for risk. Consequently, we get offered stories with familiar characters and storylines that the movie studios, which often invest tens of millions of dollars into making a movie, know will provide a return on investment. However, I think that there is also a desire to revisit our favorite stories. We also go see these movies because we enjoy the worlds that we have already visited before, even if its at the expense of having new ways of seeing the world presented to us.
I don’t make this point to rip this capitalist impulse toward repetition a new one, because even new media is sorta compromised. For instance, only a few storytellers get the sort of funding to pursue their vision in an uncompromising manner. I am sure there are folks that like Chris Nolan movies, but I personally don’t think the experiences of his last 6 movies were worth the over billion dollars that were invested in them. Everything, Everywhere All At Once had a budget of $25 million and told a mind-bending, human story without being overly complicated or reliant on primarily white actors. AhhhHEM Interstellar AHHHHEMM, sorry, I had something in my throat. I actually think that the bright, flashing neon lights of NEW, NEW, NEW are not all that they are chocked up to be, especially given this reality. I certainly didn’t think we needed another world war II era movie about the dude who created the nuclear bomb. Yes, dear reader, I refuse to watch oppenheimer and would gladly watch Greta Gerwig’s Barbie over it anyday.
Yet, I am the sorta person who thrives on repetition and digging deep into specific storytelling worlds of niche genres like zombie movies. I, for one, have enjoyed watching over a decade of Walking Dead-related shows. I still remember sitting across from my PhD advisor in Columbus in the early 10s shooting the shit, when he noted to me in that zombie movies and shows always find a ready audience in economic downturns. Consequently, we cant be that surprised that folx have found so much meaning and entertainment in the Walking Dead universe, which first appeared in 2010 at the height of the great recession. I would say that the entirety of the last 15 years has felt similar to that sort of apocalypse and I am saying that as an employed person with a roof over my head. I think that should say a lot about where I think we are as a country that I find the most resonance in the current moment in realities where small groups of people fight for survival in a harsh world. These stories have felt more alive and vital than the latest Chris Nolan Chin-stroking fest.
I have often treated religious texts this way as well, pouring over them repeatedly. This sort of practice is drilled into you as a kid that is forced to go to catholic schools. You have religious instruction everyday and go to mass as a class weekly or biweekly. You talk about the same stories year after year. When I left catholicism and was exploring other faith traditions, I used to read the Tao Te Ching repeatedly. It was a simple little practice my mom suggested to me where I would read one verse a day and journal about it. Now, in the last two weeks, I have found myself returning again and again to Meditations on the Tarot (Apparently, the full text is on the internet archive). I guess old habits die hard. Specifically, I have been pouring over this year’s tarot card, the strength or force card. Just like the lessons I learned from returning to the bible (yes, I begrudgingly note the impact of catholicism on my leftism) and the Tao, I have been rewarded in similar ways for returning and re-reading the meditations over and over.
You can read my first reflection on Meditation’s take on the force card in last week’s essay “Just Chillin’ With my Imaginary Friend,” where we resolved to mind our own f%^&$#’ business last week and keep doing our work.
This week, I want to draw attention to the importance of silence and privacy as discussed by our anonymous friend. In one section of their meditation on the force tarot card, our friend is discussing how important it is for individual people to carry out the work of integrating spirituality and intellectuality so one sees with “two eyes” in the world. They note that when does this work they are engaging in “the magic of the constant work of service done in silence.” For a hermeticist, like our anonymous friend, their approach is grounded in coming to and understanding established wisdom through their own individual meditation and reflection done in private. They go to great lengths to underscore how important privacy is while noting this is not secret. No, the privacy and silence are just essential to be able to live that “authentic spiritual life” where one can see clearly:
In a world where we are routinely lied to by corporations seeking to stoke our consumption and by our government seeking to gain legitimacy for bombing Yemen for maintaining a naval blockade to stop a genocide, living a private, silent life of authenticity is an incredibly subversive act. I know this feels counter intuitive, so let me elaborate. Last week, we talked about being able to not be “swept away” by the orators or polemicists. Exhibiting our own power, in such a case as Gaza, would be staying home in our own assessments of the injustice of the situation and not allowing the spin doctors of the Israeli or American government to sweep us away into their storytelling that attempts to make the last 100 days of genocidal violence legitimate. I think the next step of that process is to re-embrace the silence and private contemplation that is our right as humans. For me, this means that I do not need to rot my brain by rage watching CNN, MSNBC, or CSPAN, even if it is appealing to yell at Wolf Blitzer when he is in his situation room. I also do not need to rage scroll social media, engaging in endless arguments with internet trolls. No, instead, I continue my little small bits of work. I will stay informed, keep educating myself, and take the requested steps to advocate for the end of a genocide while also leaving space to return to my own safe harbor of silence and privacy each day.
Now, in this day and age of love and light spiritual bypassing, we are not advocating a retreat from our responsibilities as citizens of a democracy that is culpable for a long list of human rights abuses. This is where silence and privacy have gotten a bad wrap. Too many people in our day and age have called for quiet and privacy when really they just didn’t want to sacrifice going to brunch or stopping the party to help someone else. No, the silence and privacy of a hermit’s path is not a retreat. It’s a principled position of turning down the incredible noise of our day and age to stand in a simple moral principle of dissent. Yes, we only retreat from the endless attempts to persuade, to justify, to shame, and to guilt others; in short, we retreat from the attempts to sweep others away from themselves. We stand in the simple truth of an atrocity like the genocide in Gaza and lead by example by continuing to talk about it and taking action to voice our opposition with our tax dollars being used in this way.
This may seem like a silly hill to die on, but I just need to draw this line in the sand for myself. I have to be honest I can feel the absence of silence and privacy in my life. This dearth doesn’t come from wishing we we were back in some nostalgic pre-crisis age where things weren’t so hard. No, it comes from feeling like I am dying from thirst for not having kept up with my contemplative practice and the wellspring of contentment that comes with practicing discursive meditation on symbols. I take this stand for privacy and silence in an attempt to thread the needle of being a compassionate person whose life is devoted to justice that also maintains the silence and privacy necessary for spiritual development. I don’t think these pathways are incompatible, but, nevertheless, they represent two poles on a tightrope that will require constant micro adjustments to stay in some semblance of balance.
Despite this essay being about my own thirst for silence and privacy, I can’t help but feel like I am not alone in this longing for a life of justice and quietude. As social media and traditional media continue to try and dominate our attention, I feel that a lot of folx will be trying to thread this same needle. Is this something that resonates for any of you? If so, I would love to know in the comments below. It certainly doesn’t feel like this call is very common, but I have yet to see anyone call for it.
Anyways, I hope y’all are well. We are currently in a polar vortex with temps in the single digits, so everything is a little bit harder over here. As always, I appreciate your support and attention. It means the world to be able to show up to this practice each week knowing people believe in my prose.
Until next time, dear reader,
James
Meditations on the Tarot, pg 308-309, in Internet Archive version. ↩
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