CHAPTER 16: SILENCE AND SOUNDS

What boots it to wear out the soul with anxious thoughts? I want not wealth; I want not power; heaven is beyond my hopes. Then let me stroll through the bright hours as they pass in my garden among my flowers . . . Thus will I work out my allotted space, content with appointments of Fate, my spirit free from care. —Lao Ch’ien, The Peach Blossom Fountain

The wholesome fusion of work and non-work that characterized our early pioneer days has largely continued intact. We still spend a chunk of most every day puttering around the place. The earthy work of growing, harvesting and processing food remains at the core of the undertaking. We still do more than our fair share of arduous and sometimes dirty work—moving big boulders, emptying the compost privy, cleaning the chimney and the like. I consider it entirely appropriate to get out there, get down and get dirty every once in a while. Dirty work is like roughage for the soul, scraping off globules of psychic fat. To my mind manual labour requiring physical effort is something to be actively pursued rather than avoided, so long as there’s nobody in charge telling you that you have to do it and how. I enjoy the fact that an archaic meaning of the verb ‘labour’ was to cultivate, as in ‘to labour the ground.’ Denied that possibility, I suppose I might jog along city streets stylishly attired in colourful, body-hugging spandex or shuffle off to a fitness centre to ‘work out,’ but really I far prefer to work outside.

Outdoor work is largely determined by the seasons and is subject to a rhythmic seasonal flux in intensity. The days surrounding equinox are invariably the busiest while those following solstice seem to subside into a welcome slackening of pace. Spring equinox kicks off a particularly manic stretch because the gardens are then at their most demanding with seeding, transplanting, weeding, thinning, staking, clipping, watering and everything else, it seems, all demanding to be done right now! Simultaneously I usually have an extensive round of speaking bookings—a score or more speeches scheduled for March, April and May—during which Sandy is left to manage things alone.

Summer solstice, on the other hand, is usually followed by at least a month or so of relative calm during which the gardens can be tended and savoured at a civilized pace. The tempo quickens again around the vernal equinox when there’s a torrent of garden produce to be harvested, processed and stored, firewood to be brought in, compost to be made, leaves to be raked, and preparations made for winter. But again, after winter solstice the new year’s marked by a stretch of relative peace during which far more reading and writing get done, and outdoor work involves doing what’s desired rather than demanded. This seasonal ebb and flow of work intensity is I think more gratifying than either of the modalities would be on its own, and likely results in untold physical and mental benefits that any day now teams of clever researchers will discover and publicize.

I also welcome the daily give-and-take between intellectual effort and physical exertion. Each constitutes work in its own way and yet neither is what normally might be classified as going to work. There’s no getting dressed up, leaving home, commuting, taking directions from management, dealing with co-workers or collecting a regular paycheque.

Harried as we may be around our place at times, still the intent is to make haste slowly. To meander, to savour, to ponder. When I was young, the epitome of sinful sloth was the person who lay abed late on Sunday morning rather than get up and go to Mass. The late Sunday sleeper was bound for perdition, no matter how hard he or she may have toiled all week, no matter how in need of rest. Nowadays, after six days of early rising and steady work, I find a good Sunday lie-in is precisely what’s called for. Then a day given over to old-fashioned leisure—quiet reading, fine music, maybe a special brunch, perhaps a football game on TV or a delicious afternoon siesta in the summerhouse. In such languid repose one is far more inclined to consider the merit of Oscar Wilde’s observation that work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.

Among the many possible ways of being in a garden–physically, intellectually, socially–one of my favourites is the refined state of reverie. By this I mean being immersed in a dreamy, musing state in which thoughts, memories and imaginings play subtly against one another. Warmed by voluptuous sunlight, gently prompted by the sights, fragrances, textures and sounds of luxuriant vegetation, I wander the garden, entirely given over to sweet abstraction. ‘It is a good idea,’ wrote James Douglas in Down Shoe Lane, ‘to be alone in a garden at dawn or dusk so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought.’

This whimsical state of mind is, above all, sublimely unpractical. It is not a time for solving problems, or for focusing on projects that are crying out to be done. It is the very opposite of our workaday bustle and hustle. We will formulate no plans in this fanciful state, nor will we make demands upon ourselves. We will simply let everything be what it is for the moment, entering what poet Andrew Marvell called ‘this delicious solitude’ that seduces the mind into ‘Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade.’

Easier said than done, of course. Surely among the greatest challenges of the gardening life is this one: to be able every once in a while to set aside all practical considerations and simply allow sensations of delight and wonderment to flood into us for as long as they will. A host of mighty strictures work against it. Certainly in my own case the earliest classrooms of childhood frequently rang with stern admonishments against ‘daydreaming.’ The inquisitive wonderment of childhood was something best abandoned early on, before it curdled into capriciousness. Whimsy was equated with flighty, erratic, unstable.

Don’t mistake me: I am all for practicality and proficiency in their proper place, but not at the cost of reverie. Not by choking off that part of the spirit that craves the freedom to simply drift and remember and dream, to enter what Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space called ‘the space of elsewhere.’

In this regard the gardener is perfectly situated to indulge in what appears to be the lost art of reverie. In a provocative small volume titled A Philosophy of Gardens, British philosopher David E. Cooper argues that, ‘the garden offers precisely the combination of conditions conducive to reverie.’ While it is certainly possible to attain this visionary state of mind in any number of settings, Cooper maintains that in the garden, reverie finds ‘a place of special hospitality.’

We are intimately acquainted with the garden’s environment, so the unexpected, the startling, the dangerous are less likely to intrude upon our musings there, than they might be in wilderness. The desert, the mountain or the ocean, while more than capable of inspiring awe, perhaps exhilaration, also require that we remain alert for the unforeseen and unpredictable, and thus engender a different state of consciousness than the calm reflectiveness of reverie.

On the other end of the spectrum, indoor spaces often lack the spontaneity of small occurrences–the chirrup of a songbird, the hauntingly evocative scent of a particular rose–that are so conducive to the amalgam of memory, imagination and thought that comprises true reverie. In the garden our attention might be snagged for a moment by a particular plant given to us long ago by a loved one now departed. An apple tree heavy with fruit might suddenly stir a childhood memory of having pilfered a couple of apples from a farmer’s orchard and been chased by his ferocious German shepherd. These fragments of visions come and go, requiring neither analysis nor judgment. Some induce a state of delight, others of melancholy, or perhaps of a yearning for something elusive that we cannot name.

I believe that it’s not only desirable, but also necessary to enter into states of reverie at least every once in a while, just as it is necessary to dream, if we are not to become mentally disordered. They take us out of ourselves into other realms in a way that’s similar to, but distinct from, the experiences of meditation and contemplation. That the garden is an especially suitable locus for these goings-on adds immensely to the appeal of entering the dreamy, musing elsewhere of reverie.

Achieving this refined state requires both an inner and outer silence. On many occasions Sandy and I will sit out of an evening and remark upon how hushed the soundscape is. It’s never absolute silence—there’ll be the trickle of the creek, perhaps a rustling of leaves, the chittering of birds among the shrubs. But it’s far from the mad cacophony of noise that so many North Americans now accept as normal, the pandemoniacal clangor of demolition and construction, transportation and manufacturing, amplified music, wailing sirens, blaring horns, thudding helicopters, and all the rest. One of the garden’s highest purposes is to serve as refuge from the jostle and hubbub of ordinary life, and few things are more inimical to the spirit of a garden than the roar of road traffic or the thundering of aircraft. Over the years I’ve visited any number of fine gardens made impossible by excessive noise. Peace, tranquility, contemplative solitude—these are among the primary attributes of the garden, the states of mind it is intended to induce, and they cannot coexist with invasive noise.

Throughout my time of doing television and film work, we were regularly visited by production teams that normally consisted of a producer, one or more camera people and a sound technician. The ‘sound people’ were a type unto themselves, headphones clamped to their ears, a portable control panel dangling from a strap around the neck, a big boom mike wielded like a lance. No-one knows sounds and silence quite the way a sound technician does. Compulsively fiddling with dials on the control panel and darting looks in odd directions, they could pick up a hint of faraway sound the way a bloodhound will sniff out a scent. During outdoor shoots, if an airplane was thrumming away in the distance, scarcely audible to the rest of us, the sound person would call a halt to proceedings and we’d have to wait until the intrusion was past before restarting the take. Despite their eccentricities, I felt a certain kinship of spirit with the sound technicians concerning the issue of intrusive noise, and most of them appreciated working at our place because of its relative quiet. Frequently they’d comment upon how rare it’s becoming to find places as relatively quiet as where we live. Even in the remotest spots, they’d say, often it proved difficult getting out of earshot of vehicles, planes, ATVs, snowmobiles and other noisemakers as more and more of the natural soundscape is invaded by non-natural sounds.

But even at our place, the level of background noise, although insignificant by urban standards, has gradually increased over the years. When the wind blows from the west it carries the rumble of semi-trailers racing along a new superhighway on Vancouver Island. Low-flying aircraft are an ongoing annoyance, and certain islanders are partial to perforated mufflers as a preferred method of announcing their passing through.

Whether as a product of tiptoeing around my childhood home so as not to disturb our sleeping dad, or of meditative hours of silence in the cloister, the long and short of it is I’ve become a bit of a crank on the topic of silence. I particularly appreciate my brother Vincent’s perspective on the issue. ‘I am content with silence,’ he tells me. ‘I am happy to live in silence. I prefer silence to sound. I find sound to be distracting and bothersome especially when I’m concentrating on something. Sound is noise to me, uncomfortable and alien, whereas silence is golden, bringing a sense of tranquility, calmness and peace.’

As the Arabian proverb has it, ‘The tree of silence bears the fruit of peace,’ and I wonder how much of human delirium—of war and violence and exploitation—would abate if we all just turned down the volume. Most of the noise can be traced back to the combustion of fossil fuels, and I for one rejoice at the passing of peak oil. I also take heart in the work of noise pollution activists everywhere, like the people who achieved a ban on gas-powered leaf blowers in Santa Barbara and the Right to Quiet Society in Victoria lobbying against ubiquitous loud music in every public space. I wish every day was International Noise Awareness Day, that every place was designated a ‘noise sensitive area.’

Another silence now haunts the world, one we do not hear—the silence of extinction. Every species of bird that disappears into the black hole of extinction carries away with it a repertoire of songs that will not be heard on Earth again. The catastrophic collapse of frog populations occurring around the globe results in wetlands of morbid quiet where once were heard magnificent serenades of throaty croaking. Behind all the noise, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is upon us. And human languages too are falling silent. Year by year the number of indigenous languages shrinks, dialects disappear, and with them a particular way of perceiving the world and ourselves. The dreadful silence of their loss is filled, but not really, by the relentless noise of progress.

I suppose a kind of silence will reclaim the Earth when our species takes its turn, as every species must, at extinction. In the interim I dream of a world in which silence can exist, like the hush of the garden on a perfectly still evening, the clear crisp quiet of a high mountain meadow, or the deep contemplative silence of the cloister wherein exists the peace that surpasses understanding.

If there has to be tone and sonance in the garden, I say let it arise from the sounds of earth or the sweet sounds of music. Our occasional overseas rambles, which generally focus on gardens and landscapes, usually result in a refreshed appreciation of how ingeniously certain musical traditions reflect the landscapes, and perhaps seascapes, of their origin. Several extended rambles through the villages and countryside of Ireland boosted my appreciation of Celtic music into the realms of obsession. The soulful laments of harp and pipes, whistles and bodhran, drenched with longing and loss and love of place, sounded to me inextricable from the high lonesome hills and craggy shores of Ireland. No music lingers more plaintively around the stone walls of our garden or our ancient, brooding trees; none reminds more plangently that all things will pass in their time.

While visiting Yunan province in southwestern China, we attended a concert of the Naxi Orchestra, several dozen mostly aged musicians playing ancient music on gongs, chimes, wooden clappers, bells, and a variety of ancient string, wind and percussion instruments. Each of the sacred pieces the orchestra played was a small symphony of rising and falling cadences, a stately layering of rhythmic waves punctuated by the ringing of chromatic bells and the sonorous reverberations of the great gong. Writing in Forgotten Kingdom, author Peter Goullart described this classical Naxi music: ‘It was a recital of the cosmic life as it was unfolding in its grandeur. It was classical and timeless. It was the music of gods and of a place where there is serenity, eternal peace and harmony.’

In the old town of Suzhou, ‘the Venice of the Orient,’ south of Shanghai, we visited the Master of the Nets Garden one evening. The scent of a 200-year-old wisteria perfumed the mild spring air while the lights of dangling lanterns shimmered in reflection in the garden’s central pool. As we sat in a small and exquisitely decorated kiosk overlooking the pool, a lone flute player stood on the opposite shore, the plaintive melody of his bamboo flute seamlessly interwoven through 3,000 years of Chinese gardening.

When all else is set aside for the moment, as it was in that lovely interlude, the combination of music and garden can exalt the spirit as close to a beatific state as it’s safe to achieve without risking everything. Throughout the warm months of the year, I am in the habit of occasionally wandering our gardens and woodlands for hours while listening to music on headphones. An eclectic program fills the bill, music from all over the globe—the Scottish Gael, North Africa, India—so long as it’s got transcendence in its playing. A lone Shakahatchi flute will do the job; so will Sufi dervish music or Jascha Heifetz playing a Brahms violin concerto. I wander the gardens and woodlands blissfully transported by the beauty of the playing and the place.

And certainly the garden plays music of its own, as intricate and intriguing as any concert piece. The tricklings and gurglings of a little cascade, the murmuring of leaves and grasses as the breeze combs through them, the cacophony of ravens, the bustling hum of hummingbirds zipping from one nectar source to the next, the electric buzz of feeding bees in summer sunshine, the rustle of falling leaves in autumn, the mournful rain song of tree frogs, the high thin cries of bald eagles, the almost inaudible whisper of spent peony petals or foxglove flowers cascading to the ground. These are the tunes of the garden, songs of the earth, dramatic and sultry, profound and ecstatic and perfectly attuned to the most exquisite music humans have ever written or played.