Silence is so accurate.

This according to Mark Rothko, who himself was rarely silent, especially in the matter of his own work; extremely conscious of his path of intent, he dedicated thousands of words and multiple manifestos to it, going so far as to insist upon the exact distance from which it should be viewed and the dimensions of the rooms in which it should be hung.

But he said this nonetheless, and on this we agree. There is no mistake in silence, and there is no mistaking what is meant when one chooses to maintain it. The act of speaking is riddled with errata, and the intent that inspires it is often a riddle to the speaker. What's worse is the awareness of being just wide of the mark with every attempt, the almost-right word we must hang our hopes on in the absence of the one we really meant. And what's worse, being unable to speak at all, or feeling an urgent need to speak and having nothing to say?

This is what preoccupies me. I've been silent, and so have remained errorless. But I'm not good at silence; I don't rest there willingly. Something itches, but I can't figure out where to scratch. I look around intently, I observe, in the hope that observation will provide me some insight into how others manage to speak, or at the very least that looking will satisfy the need to feel engaged with something outside my own silence. Occasionally I'm lucky enough to be in the company of others whose voices please me more than my own ever could; at those times I'm happy to listen, and there is some comfort in knowing that my silence is understood. But comfort is another state of being I find strange and disagreeable in large doses--too easy, the slip into a life of quietude and simple contentment, deciding that the work is finished, and nothing to do but wait for the long, slow scrape of years to bring an end to the waiting. It's probably a failing of mine to view things this way; people seem to do just fine following that very plan of action, that gradual yielding to inertia. But it's the just part of the equation that worries me.

And in the midst of all this hand-wringing I allow myself, the irony of the situation doesn't escape me, in that my intent consists of doing away with words entirely. Avoidance of them isn't the answer, nor is a the panicked flood that so often stems from the fear that silence is a kind of disappearance, that if we aren't heard, we've made no sound. Both of which are, a little bit, what I'm doing right now.

Here all is clear. No, all is not clear.

I wonder if we're too quick to decide what we believe, and too precise about it when we get there. Belief of any kind seems to hinge on our skill at either resolving or ignoring apparent contradictions; the entire focus seems to be reaching the endgame, where one may employ clear and calculated strategies and where it's preferable not to make any moves for fear of weakening one's position. The goal appears to be not having to think anymore; we make up our minds or someone else does it for us, and they're made of a few rote phrases we trudge out in the event that we're questioned. You must stand for something; you are, in fact, a collection of symbols couched in a tidy allegory, cradled in the sure hands of a narrative that carries you safely to a predictable end.

Ambiguity appears dangerous. There's too much room to wander around in, there's a chance of getting lost. It fosters an atmosphere of questions, and if these questions can't be answered comfortably within the sphere of our beliefs, if there is no right answer and no end to the questions, there is a fear that all our attempts to find meaning are fruitless. Language, one of the tools we wield in our attempts, is itself ambiguous, undermining the search for a single perspective from which we can bring order to an existence we're afraid we'll never understand.

In the beginning was the word. But the word is not as certain as we've been led to believe:

"the initial Hebrew words of the Bible, Bereshit bara Elohim, have, in fact, two contradictory translations. One way to translate the opening line...is to treat the word Elohim, one of many Hebrew names of God, as the subject of the sentence, thus rendering the translation as the familiar phrase: 'In the beginning, God created….'
The other grammatically correct way to translate these words, however, is to treat Elohim as an object, thus rendering the translation: 'In the beginning ____ created God…' The blank in the sentence has an assumed 'It,' which compels us to read the opening, 'In the beginning, [It] created God, heaven and earth.'”

Whether or not you believe in God, It, or any part of the equation at all, this is an extraordinary paradox. Literalists will have nothing to cling to here--there is no way to take it at face value when there are two faces, both of them true. For the rest of us, the tiny bridge the mind makes between one and the other, the temporary space created as we shift the words around, becomes a path we may never stop walking and an opening through which those endless questions flood.

Is this so frightening? People have an innate distrust of the oracular and the irrational, but there is a huge difference between a few words that hold many potential meanings and a great hill of words that mean nothing at all. There is the emptiness that comes from overuse--the list of truths we recite and memorize like children learning to pray, the name-tags we pin to our shirts that in turn pin us to one black-and-white image, forever and ever, amen. There is a very different kind of emptiness, before we decide we must choose one face, one set of absolutes, a centralized belief we must abide by entirely. There is also the very human experience of being caught in the grey between, an undefined, vacillating, Beckettian void: "Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."

We're so sure we can't go on without a resolution, we can't tolerate that slipperiness we sense in the mind. We want truth, we want precision, a life free of contradictions. We want to create ourselves once, and for all time, if only the subject and object would stop shifting. But it's hard to ignore that when we're honest enough we might recognize that what we tell ourselves should be true, what we think we know, and what we feel can fail to add up. This can break us, leave us deadlocked, or keep us climbing up that hill of rhetoric where questions aren't meant to be answered. Or we can just go on, through the unresolved and unanswerable; we can keep going on and let the going be a story too large for simple endings, brief summaries that flatten out a life. If we don't stop making our minds up, we're always creating, and creation becomes a belief in itself.