AFTER SILENCE, PT.1

Exploring silence in the post-human worlds of Wall-E and Angel's Egg. Part 1 - Wall-E.

Silence is a complex thing. Its dictionary definition – ‘complete absence of sound’ – makes it seem something easily understood­, but this definition strips it of any quality, it casts it purely in the negative. Why do we call some silences deep? Some pregnant? Or morbid? The way we speak of silence suggests an infinitely changeable phenomenon. Can we really accept a definition that considers it simply not sound? Silence may be without qualities of its own, but it is not without qualities.

‘The firstborn of the basic phenomena,’ Max Picard calls it in his book The World of Silence. This definition is bolder, richer, and more concerned with reality as experienced rather than as relayed to us by cold, factual understanding. It puts silence essentially in the same category as God, or the universe itself – the foundational condition of existence.

‘Silence contains everything within itself. It is not waiting for anything; it is always wholly present… it completely fills out the space in which it appears.’¹

Naturally, for something so readily compared to God, it is a thing of paradox. It is true in a rational sense to think of silence as an absence, but in an experiential sense it is a vessel of residues. As such, it is by itself as multiform as all of the individual phenomena that the world contains.   

Silences are defined by what precedes them. They are like the overtones called into life by a resonant chord. The silence after a party is not the same as the silence after an argument. Silence is an enigma that we can never see uncovered by the garments it borrows from sound. It makes itself felt by borrowed qualities alone. Behind every event, sleeping inside of every act we witness in life, is its own particular silence waiting to emerge like night following the day. In this way silences resemble the poetic objects I spoke about in my essay The Human Animal.² Every moment has a life of its own, and in its aftermath – if we listen – we experience its poetry. The world needs silence like the clapper of a bell needs its chamber.

Moments happen in time, so in order for their deep centres to be revealed to us we must wait until the actuality of their happening has passed. There is too much commotion in the moment itself; it is pure kinetic incident. In silence we let time – the primordial storyteller – speak of what has passed through its domain.

Our own inner lives are not so bound up in chronology, but nevertheless demand silence of us. If we are to pursue our own centres the silence we are looking for is not the silence of an aftermath but the silence of the deep sea. We must dive. As Jung says in Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious:

‘The sea is the favourite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives.’

To live well, however, we must be careful not to become too preoccupied with these inner diving excursions – the outside world is, after all, our true field of play – but we can carry with us back into the world what we learn in the deep silences of our interiors. And what we learn is how to listen to ourselves. How to make of ourselves a tuning fork against which each thought and each impulse strikes. Our resonance is singular, and to hear ourselves we must first be still and silent.

Once we understand this process, and begin to feel its benefit, we can carry the same receptivity into the events of our lives. We can allow them to have their corresponding silences. Not every minor event, of course, as we are all necessarily swept up in life too much to always be silent witnesses of its echoes, but significant events – and really, as many as we can make space for – deserve to be heard and felt fully. We will be carried along on a tide of restlessness if we don’t allow ourselves these pauses, if we don’t allow silence to do its healing work and its creative work.

‘If you throw even a cursory glance into the past… you are struck every time by the singularity of the events in which you took part, the unique individuality of the characters whom you met. This singularity is like the dominant note of every moment of existence; in each moment of life, the life principle itself is unique…’³

One of the reasons why modern life can feel like it passes by with so little weight is because events are rarely being allowed to reach their full resonance. With our attention pulled permanently in multiple directions, many of the acts of our lives are in a sense passing us by only half complete – skimming along the horizontal axis of time but making very little dent in the vertical axis, which gives depth and digs into the passage of time wells of silence to which we can return and reflect.

‘A man in whom the substance of silence is still an active force carries the silence into every movement… the fact that his movement and his words are made individually distinct from one another by the intervening silence makes his whole personality clearer than if the silence were not there at all and the man and his words were all part of one continuous noise.’⁴

A few months ago, my brother and I stumbled upon a few minutes of one of the Fast and Furious movies. True to the franchise’s title, the thing seemed to fly by on the screen in front of us, anxious not to stay still long enough to be caught for even a moment. In the couple of scenes that we watched before turning over to something else, we counted the length of each shot, and didn’t see a single one that lasted longer than three seconds. Even thinking back on it now makes me feel an anxious tightness in my chest. More and more these days I get into the kind of mood where every advertisement strikes me like a mortal insult and every TV show seems to be shouting at me, and the only cure is to watch Stalker for the thousandth time. The silences of Stalker are beautiful and deep, and time itself is calmed by its patience whenever I watch it.

Two other films that play with silence – though very differently – are Wall-E and Angel’s Egg. I could talk about Angel’s Egg forever⁵, I like it almost as much as I like Stalker, but Wall-E is an interesting case because it breaks its own spell after the opening act. In my memory the first 20 minutes or so of Wall-E exists as a separate film, mostly because the film after that point barely exists in my memory at all.

Not to be too harsh on Pixar⁶ – children’s entertainment had come a long way in 2008 from the silent cartoons of early Disney or Tom & Jerry, and releasing a feature length film with no dialogue would probably be considered commercial suicide for the studio. Besides, the ‘silent’ portion of the film lasts long enough to be taken into account like a standalone episode.

Not that its first act is quiet, per-se. It’s not without some loud explosions and musical numbers. But as discussed above, silence knits itself from the fabric of sound – and so it’s what a film does with the moments in between the noise that matter as far as we’re concerned here. That, and the world that it creates. Is it a world that fosters silence, a world in which we feel the presence of silence even when we can’t hear it?

The way that it opens certainly uses sound in this way – as a tool for making silence. As the credits flash on screen the 1969 song Put On Your Sunday Clothes immediately starts to play. At first we are in space, but then we pan down to hover over an earth that has been abandoned by humans and where piles of garbage are stacked as high as skyscrapers. The music continues to play as we take in this trashified cityscape, but gradually it fades, and as it does so it becomes drenched in reverb, as if it is literally receding into the distance. It makes us hear the emptiness of the space in which we have arrived.

‘Music is silence, which in dreaming begins to sound. Silence is never more audible than when the last sound of music has died away.’⁷

There is a double-distancing going on with the use of this song, which makes the silence that it leaves behind seem all the wider. It is an old song that so recognisably represents a bygone era, and this distancing in time is mirrored by the use of reverb which creates the impression of a distancing in space. The life that the song initially gives to us contrasts both temporally and spatially with the desolation of the world that we are seeing. The filmmakers borrow the energy of Put On Your Sunday Clothes to dig a well of silence in which to leave us when they take the song away.

We soon see that the song was being played from a radio installed in the body of Wall-E, a little trash-compacting robot, and as we watch him zooming around at his work the song is given back to us and taken away a few times more, reverbing and echoing as we cut between our industrious robotic hero and the deserted streets. We understand that this is a post-human world, and Wall-E’s filling of the silence with human music takes on an extra-ghostly presence. We now have a haunting silence, to prefix the word with another of its most oft-used adjectives.  

Echo is a sister of silence, or maybe it can be better described as silence in its infancy, or sound halfway through its resurrection into silence. Reverb is also part of this family tree, hence why so many musicians, particularly in genres like shoegaze, dream-pop, and post-rock which try primarily to evoke feelings of nostalgia and loneliness⁸ employ it as their primary sonic affect. When a sound is echoing or drenched in reverb it contains the premonition of its own death – it is already in the process of disappearing, and this bleeds a kind of sorrowful silence into the music.

This idea was taken to an extreme by ambient musician The Caretaker, who presented old ballroom music cloaked in a reverb that feels like the resonance of the dance halls of a dead world. On his 6-hour-long project Everywhere at the End of Time, the tape loops he uses gradually degrade and deteriorate. The idea was to present an artistic representation of the onset and advancement of dementia, and as the album goes on silence asserts itself more and more, colouring the texture of every sound. Through silence time itself becomes an instrument.

‘[Silence] does not develop or increase in time, but time increases in silence. It is as though time had been sown into silence, as though silence had absorbed it; as though silence were the soil in which time grows to fullness.’⁹

Silence, time and memory form a trinity of human experience. Silence the godhead, time the animating force, and memory… us. What are we made of if not memory? Pixar knows this, their films have always sought to entertain the adults watching alongside the children that make up its primary audience, and they’re great at evoking childhood memory and nostalgia. In Wall-E, they do this through the objects that Wall-E finds and collects in his home, which is like a little junkyard museum of humanity. It arouses not just personal nostalgia – sorrow over lost time – but a sadness for the loss of humanity itself. The film keeps its tone light, but the lamenting undercurrent is there, in the objects themselves.

We see the little robot play with a ball and paddle, find an engagement ring still in its box, an old boot, a dirty trophy… but then he picks up a green shoot. He carries it delicately in its clod of soil and houses it carefully in the old boot. Whatever Pixar was trying to tell us via the inanimate objects, this tiny plant comes bearing a different message. There is a different kind of sadness inherent in the image of a green shoot, even and perhaps especially as it is also an archetypal symbol of hope.

There is a promise in living things, a promise that can always be broken – that will always be broken. Living things promise the future, but the future will eventually become past, and all living things will pass away.¹⁰ Inanimate objects do not make this promise. They speak of the past. They promise nothing of what is to come, but instead retain something of what has gone away – in the same way that silence is charged by the sound that precedes it, objects emerge from the past carrying it inside themselves.

We do this too, of course, but we change. Our time is short. And in us the past changes too, memories alter. We can offer no stability as shelters for the past. Objects, though, do not interrupt the silence from which they have come. In them we read the rut of vanished time like an unbroken track in the dirt, a track that might lead us back to the source. The life of most objects, compared to ours, is effectively endless. They are like tokens of immortality. There is no death in a stone, or a diamond – not to our eyes.

So when we give a gift to someone – and the most expensive and traditionally meaningful gifts are usually precious stones, deathless jewels – we are trying to lock our affections up in a container that will not age and change as all affections do. It is a tacit acknowledgement that we want this particular act, this particular moment of affection to last unchanged. The love that the gift is given with can – we hope, through the vessel of the gift itself – outlast even the death of that love.

We constantly wrestle and bargain with time in ways that we don’t even realise. The silence out of which we have come and into which we will return accompanies all of our words and all of our actions whether we acknowledge it or not.

‘It belongs to human nature that speech should turn back to silence, for it belongs to human nature to return to the place whence it has come.’¹¹

When we take heed of the silent weight of our words, then we can speak and act according to the preciousness of our limited time. We can hear in our words the silence they already contain, and use this to make them resonate. How much more urgent, how much more significant, it feels to tell someone you love them when you know that time is short. When you know that silence eventually replaces all that has come before, the project of life comes to be to impart upon that silence the qualities of yourself and your affections that you wish to persist.

On a global scale, this is analogous to the project being undertaken by humanity in Wall-E. They have abandoned the earth temporarily to allow a clean up operation to be conducted by robots. They have realised that what they wanted to persist was the very thing that they had killed – the human capacity to live alongside nature. They removed themselves from the earth in order that it might be reborn, that they might be welcomed back into the cradling arms of the mother they had murdered, to be able to hear again the teeming silence of jungles, the time-soothing silence of rivers, the breaking of silence by birdsong in the morning. In the meantime they stay glued to their screens, endlessly consuming so as not to have to spare a thought for what they have lost. So as not to have to hear the sorrowful cry of their own hearts in silence. They are twice removed (at least) from their origins – their origin in nature and their origin in silence.

EVE is a robot that comes to earth in a spaceship and almost immediately begins to blow things up. WALL-E instantly falls in love with this sleek and dangerous alien and shows her his collection of objects. She scans them all with a tool built into her chest and none of them seem to satisfy whatever criteria she seeks to meet. Until she scans the living plant. A green emblem of a leaf lights up in affirmation on her chest. This is what she came for. Everything that she had scanned up to now relayed the earth to her as a dead world, but here is an object that is alive, that contains in itself a future. Life begets life. Life promises more life.

But even without the small miracle of plantlife, the same world does not appear quite as dead to us humans watching on – or at least, its death is redeemed somewhat by our gift of memory. With memory we can dredge life out of the junkyard objects that to the robots were nothing more than curios and playthings, but to us are like portals through which the disappeared world can be touched. Perhaps this doesn’t really make the world any less dead, but it does make it echo. It widens the silence to envelop time as well as space.

We keep hold of objects so that we can touch the past. And what a mercy it is that memory shares their re-enchanting effect. What a blessing that we remember the past as populated, as it was for us then, and not as some abandoned place, with all its inhabitants gone ahead. Memory can stretch the living moment over reaches of time that burst the boundaries of the present, of the now in which our bodies are marooned. We must keep the past alive because it is the flame that animates us – all life comes to us through memory, such is the brevity of the instant. How sad would the world appear if the past died to us in its passing? Nothing would hold meaning; each second, and each fraction of a second, would be another absolute death. Yet it isn’t. Even our dead friends and relatives – in our memories – live.

And the mementoes that we keep of them carry within themselves the time in which their allotment of moments was spent. Like stones retaining the heat of the day after sundown. They assure us that the world of memory out of which we have emerged and through which we must continue to progress is not only a phantasm of the mind. The feel of an old scarf that belonged to our grandmother, the smell of a favourite childhood meal… the body retains the permanence that the mind can’t hold. The body persists in time in a way that the mind can’t do, and through sensation and contact with the world and the things of the world we build up the reserves to weather ourselves through the eternal silence of the moment. It is what we bring with us from each previous moment, what we gather and carry with us like the accumulating body of a wave, that adorns our lives with meaning, that tunnels into the silence of the future trailing behind us a wake of memory like the animating song of our life. As we move forward we animate the inanimate snapshots of time and give to them their fluid motion. We give time to the world.

Henri Bergson’s concept of Duration correlates with this understanding of time:

‘…I speak of each of my states as if it formed a block and were a separate whole. I say indeed that I change, but the change seems to me to reside in the passage from one state to the next: of each state, taken separately, I am apt to think that it remains the same during all the time that it prevails. Nevertheless, a slight effort of attention would reveal to me that there is no feeling, no idea, no volition which is not undergoing change at every moment: if a mental state ceased to vary, its duration would cease to flow… My memory is there, which conveys something of the past into the present. My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates: it goes on increasing – rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the snow. Still more is this the case with states more deeply internal, such as sensations, feelings, desires, etc., which do not correspond, like a simple visual perception, to an unvarying external object… The truth is that we change without ceasing, and that the state itself is nothing but change.’¹²

Probably my favourite moment from Wall-E is when EVE finds a lighter among Wall-E’s collection of items. He doesn’t seem to know what it is or what it’s for, but she sparks the flame to life. ‘Ooh,’ they both exclaim, in fascination. Two robots discovering fire.¹³ In this moment I feel the film’s apocalyptic tone looming largest.

The discovery of fire was probably the single most important advancement in human history, so much so that the flame could be taken as the emblem of human survival and community. Think of a campfire. Is there a more archetypal setting around which for humans to gather? Fire is the first home. Our first home. But the metal bodies of robots have no need for protection from the cold, they don’t need to cook food and eat, presumably they don’t even need much light to see by. And yet they do see that the flame is beautiful.

In this moment these two beings, 700 years after earth’s abandonment, are looking upon the very nucleus of human life, of all human flourishing, as in a snow-globe, or a pretty picture in a locket. The song that plays on Wall-E’s TV in the background tellingly contains the line: ‘And we’ll recall, when time runs out.’ But in the end, to the two robots it is just another object, another trinket, no matter what it might represent to us. In this world, human flourishing has come to an end. The first home has been destroyed. The earth is dust and waste and deep, hollow silence.

But it was a silence that was once so alive. I will let Max Picard offer this epitaph in memory of what has been lost to the screen-affixed, earth-exiled humans of Wall-E:¹⁴

‘In spring when the leaves sit shyly on the branches like butterflies, and the blue sky moves among the branches so that the leaves quiver more in the blue than on the branches, the tree belongs more to the sky and to itself than to the silence. A deer jumps between two trees, and the bright patch on its coat is like a sound travelling through the silence. Then all at once the moon appears, and the crescent of the moon is like the opening slit through which the silence trickles down into the forest and covers everything…

Not the darkness but the light belongs to silence. That is never so clear as in the summer noon when the silence is utterly transformed into light. The silence is as it were uncovered, and light appears as the inwardness of silence… The light seems so much the essence of silence that the world seems quite unnecessary…

In the night silence moves nearer to the earth. The earth is filled with a silence which seems even to penetrate the very surface of the soil. The words of the daytime are dissolved in the silence of the night. A bird suddenly begins to sing in the night. And the song is like the residue of the sounds left over by the daytime, which, taking fright, embrace each other in the birdsong and make the song a hiding place. A boat travels over the lake and the beat of the oars is like a knocking on the wall of silence. The trees stretch up high into the night as if they were taking something up with them along their trunks and were going to hand it over into the silence. The next morning the trunks are even straighter than the evening before.

Strangers to themselves and suddenly strangers to the place where they are, things stand in the night as though they had not been there in the daytime but had been set down in the night by silence without noticing it themselves. They seem to have travelled in on the silence as on a ship, secretly: as Odysseus was brought to Ithaka and put down on the shore and treasures laid beside him...’¹⁵

Maybe this was the dream of the first humans to leave Wall-E’s earth, 700 years before the film takes place – to be brought back one day on their ship like Odysseus, to rediscover the shore and the restored treasures that had been choked to death by their greed. It seems they’ve forgotten this dream, if that was the case. Without silence in which to reflect, not even memory can keep the world alive.

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Part 2 focuses on silence in Angel’s Egg. Read it here.

1. Max Picard - The World of Silence

2. Each of the poetic objects that exist in all of us, as the enigmatic core of our creative impulse, are like the silences that constitute the inverse of the noise of our outward lives.

3. Andrei Tarkovsky - Sculpting in Time.

4. The World of Silence.

5. I will, don’t tempt me.

6. I love me some Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Monster’s Inc.

7. The World of Silence.

8. Just look at some of these post-rock song titles:

• Remember Me as a Time of Day

• A Tender History in Rust

• She Dreamt She Was a Bulldozer, She Dreamt She Was Asleep in an Empty Field

• Memory Gongs

• Fading Lights are Fading/Reign Rebuilder

• Broken Chords Can Sing a Little

• A Little Longing Goes Away…

9. The World of Silence.

10. Contrary to the claim of my favourite post-rock album title: Tortoise’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die.

11. The World of Silence.

12. Creative Evolution.

13. Well, if you don’t take into account the explosions of EVE blowing things to smithereens, which, judging by the tenderness of this scene’s presentation, we’re probably not supposed to.

14. You might think Picard uses the word silence a little bit too much. I also might think this. But that’s up to him.

15. The World of Silence.