When Silence Hides A Scream

In silence there is an absence of words, it is true. But silences also involve a presence, the presence of a message that has not been said but is there. Silences are not communication failures, but communicate something that is not said in words.

Just as there are words that say nothing, there are silences that say everything.  There are silences that accuse and there are silences that kill. Silences that are born of impossibility, fear or confusion, and silences that express supreme power. Prudent silences and distressing silences. Silences that are born from repression and silences that release.

In fact, we could talk about an entire language made up of silences, but within the multiple forms of silence there is one that is brutal because it contains a scream. It’s the kind of silence that comes after an overwhelming experience, at a time when there are no words to describe what it feels like.

the silence and the horror

The silences that hide screams are almost always associated with horror.  Horror is not the same as terror. As the dictionary says, terror is intense fear, while horror can be both a feeling of fear and aversion. Likewise, while terror is caused by a material source, horror comes from an imprecise source.

To make it clear: terror is experienced in front of an identifiable object or situation; it could be an insect, a dictator or an imaginary monster. On the other hand,  horror is experienced in the face of a latent threat, which comes from an object that is implicit but not fully defined. Horror is what one feels in front of “beings from beyond”, “catastrophes” or “persecutions”.

Precisely, the vagueness of these threats is one of the factors that lead to the installation of silence. How to speak of extreme fear, or extreme aversion, if it is not even clear where it came from, or exactly what harm it can do? It just feels like “something terrible”, but beyond that nothing is clear.

Horror is what you would feel standing in front of an angry lion in a deserted place. Horror is what you experience when someone you love and who is close to you suddenly dies. In both cases there is a kind of lethargy, but in the horror is added the weight of the impossibility of describing or explaining.

Horror surrounds these silences that hide screams. Words cannot express the magnitude of everything you feel. Words are owed. Everything that is said seems useless: it neither frees you from pain nor allows others to understand how far it goes.

In such cases, it seems that words are useless. Therefore, verbal communication is replaced by silences, but also by tears, by gestures of discontent, by sighs… These expressions do not allow us to overcome the pain, but they are its reiteration.

the scream and the poetry

The word is the only force capable of giving a new meaning to our experiences. It is through the word that we can give order to the world in our minds and extract from within us all the forms of pain that inhabit us. Freeing ourselves so we can move forward.

The cry is our first expression of life at birth. With that initial cry, we announce that we are already here, that we have had the first great success of our lives. We separate from our mother and with the first cry we tell the world that we need the world to go on living.

Sometimes, when we are adults, we feel that only a huge scream can express what we have inside us. Only a disjointed and stray expression would be able to say that we are a helpless being who needs the world.

However, we cannot go around screaming wildly in these extreme trances of life. Therefore, the cry that cannot find its way is replaced by silence. But both the muffled scream and the silence itself show the inability to articulate a discourse, that is, a coherent testimony about what happens to us.

What’s the way out then? We need to scream and we can’t. We need to talk and words are not enough. What is left for us to continue to process this suffering that hurts us every minute?

When ordinary language doesn’t work, poetry becomes an urgency. And poetry is not just a set of structured verses, but it also refers to all forms of expression that use figurative senses to materialize.

Poetry is singing, dancing, painting, photography, crafts. Knitting, sewing, decorating, catering. Every creative act intentionally performed to shape the pain we feel is worth poetry…

Carving, carving, cooking … Cooking? … Yes, cooking. Has anyone read “Like Water for Chocolate”? There Laura Esquivel shows us a woman who transmits her pain to food, and makes others cry with pleasure.

Wherever words are insufficient and where the cry is drowned, there lies the germ of poetry in all its forms. And it is to this place of ourselves that we must go when the pain and horror are beyond us.