It is not always the noise that needs to be conquered — finding the order in the chaos — sometimes, it is the quiet that most disquiets us. How daunting it is at times to a writer the blank piece of paper; how inflexible is emptiness: nothing to draw upon, nothing to work with, nothing to nurture and make one's own. Sanity breaks when there is too much of it. The mind works furiously to fill in the blank that surrounds us in its vacuum hold — the mind needs something there or it will fake it. It sees a blank sheet of paper and scribbles meaningless diagrams, and then it tries to make sense of what it drew.
Quiet is a small thing, about as large as a moment. A moment, too, there cannot be too much of — that is also madness. If there is too much quiet, it is not it that grows but we that shrink. Quiet is a mysterious thing, but a mystery to be solved. There is reason behind the quiet, and most of the time the reason is not hidden too deeply. To try to hide from quiet is to bring it with you, and every untended moment it fills.... I take too much time now, talking of quiet. I talk about it to overcome it this time, to scrawl my solution to the problem of quiet. This time. Tomorrow I will wake and face it again. I win for now.
b
12:41am friday, 26th april
So does writing help you fight it off? If so, keep it up. I agree with you. Quiet is overtaking, and sometimes takes so much out of us. Filling, never reveiling.
b