How can love heal
the mouth shut this way?
Say something worth the breath.
(Komunyakaa)

Between, beneath and behind each word is silence. The silence is the wilderness, the place where the soul is “an archaic language, a pre-alphabetic reality” (Romanyshyn 25). This thought, that the soul was pre-alphabetic, hurtled itself at me when I first read it. It changed everything. Never had I imagined that the depth of my identity was outside language. Contemplating the idea sent me free-floating into the void. Like Humpty Dumpty, I had egotistically been enjoying the belief that when I used a word it meant just what I wanted it to mean, neither more nor less, and that this meaning went so deep it held me hard and fast to the fabric of the universe. Having to suddenly contemplate that language emerged ‘late’ in the day of a child’s evolution, as an interface between soul and ego was disorienting.
When trapped within it, silence is frightening and more lonely than you can bear. It is flat, and the echoes go on forever. Once able to weave the threads of language, able to use words to “unite sound and a meaning” then silence may become a thing of beauty, the place the poets go to “knock” (May). Silence then exists as the other side of the word, like the dark side of the moon; its absence being its presence, that Hadean place of hidden wealth.
The silence of our fear, the silence of peace, the terrifying silence, the muted, sorrowful, and the sweet silence. Silence lies beneath the word, hiding meaning yet, paradoxically, containing all meaning. It is the ‘absolute negative’, naked but for the velvet dark of infinite space; that unknowable depth which each word holds mysteriously at its core like a seed holding every detail of the entire plant in its tiny shape.
If, when we listen to someone, we do as Heidegger suggests: “listen to what we don’t know in what we know”, for “what is spoken is never, and in no language, what is said” then are we not allowing language to lead us toward something, risky though it may be? Our task is to follow words where they lead us, to ride these vehicles as they weave. Language stitches us between silence and meaning, forever weaving the universe.