the lost art of saying nothing

reclaiming silence as a creative practice

Hi friends,

If you’re reading this for the first time, welcome! I’m Grace, a writer and editor living in Somerset. The Murmuration is a relatively new home for my essays and writing, and I’m glad to have you here.

I send out The Murmuration essay on a biweekly basis for free. Paid subscribers also receive GOLDEN HOUR, a more personal Sunday offering where we can check in with ourselves and each other. In the past two weeks Golden Hour subscribers have enjoyed: stay-at-home film reviews, my thoughts on meeting a time-traveller and collectively donated £50 to TransActual in honour of Brianna Ghey. If you are able to support this work financially, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, thank you!

I’m calling it: dignified silence died an ugly death on 11 March 2021, the day after the Duke & Duchess of Sussex sat down for an interview with Oprah Winfrey. Harry and Meghan obviously laid the groundwork for its demise in pretty spectacular fashion, but it was actually Prince William who signed the death warrant. ‘We are very much not a racist family’ he told a reporter, in response to being asked if his family was racist.

I know, it’s a bold claim, but I think I’m on to something. The fact that Britain’s future King deigned to comment at all says something about the currency of his words. In that moment, he felt that choosing to say nothing was no longer an option, and the old ‘never complain, never explain’ mantra became but a long-forgotten footnote in a Windsor publicist’s PR plan.

To be silent then, has historically been a preserve not just of the oppressed (sometimes clumsily referred to as ‘the voiceless’) but also those with extraordinary privilege. To not feel the need to ‘dignify that question with a response’ was once in the gift of the monarchy, but now even they feel the need to comment, in some form, on matters that are up for public debate.

Prince William’s decision to respond is a clear indicator that we are living through both the decline of the monarchy and the dawn of a new imperial age: The Era of the Attention Economy. In this new age, being visible and crucially, having something to say matters. It matters to corporations, governments, brands, individual citizens and artists. Hell—it even matters to future Kings.

The majority of the world now lives under the interconnected, watchful eye of our imperial overlord Mark Zuckerberg: The Algorithm. The Algorithm favours those who are able to garner more attention, and sends its doomscrolling foot soldiers in the direction of those able to make the most noise. Governments and Kings, understanding what this new dawn means for them, swiftly comply and try to guarantee their visibility by ensuring they have plenty to say.

But what does the Royal family and attention economy have to do with reclaiming silence in my life? I hear you ask. Well, quite a lot, actually. But before we get to what it means for you, let’s talk about what it means for Rihanna and Donna Tartt.

Believe it or not, Rihanna and Donna Tartt have something in common. They both have fanbases who are loudly complaining about the fact that they are not releasing their art quickly enough. Rihanna’s fanbase are notorious for demanding her ninth studio album:

Meanwhile, Donna Tartt is thought of as a highly talented but unprolific writer, who seems to average about one book every ten years. In the build up to the publication of The Goldfinch, which she published eleven years ago, there were even rumours that Tartt had suffered from writer’s block. Contra to these reports, Tartt told Harpers Bazarr that ‘I couldn’t have written this book any faster,’ ‘For the last three or four years I was working at a breakneck pace… Really, I wasn’t writing a few lines before lunch and drifting off to do something else.’ It turns out that it just takes Tartt a long time to write a book.

The prolonged gaps between the artistic offerings of Rihanna and Tartt stand in contrast to artists who are widely regarded as ‘prolific’ in our culture. (Side note: the term ‘prolific’ was historically used in relation to a persons reproductive abilities. As someone who has reportedly fathered many offspring, we might deem men like Boris Johnson or Elon Musk as ‘prolific’. But today we are most likely to use the term in relation to creative industries.)

Take the crime writer Stephen King, who the Irish Times recently described  as an author of ‘staggering profligacy’. He publishes his writing at a rate of 1.6 books a year—which I think makes the Times’s rather grandiose-sounding assessment a fair one. We see a similar eye-watering level of output from the Grammy award-winning musician Jacob Collier. In a 2022 interview with The Guardian Collier enthusiastically relayed how he ‘had this obscenely ambitious idea, which is a quadruple album of every genre under the sun, where each collaborator was someone that I’d really love to learn from.’…’I made a five-year plan on the plane yesterday and I worked out that realistically I wouldn’t be able to take time off until 2025’. I’m tired just thinking about it.

Prolific artistry is heralded in Western culture. We expect our writers, painters, designers and musicians to constantly feed us, to satiate our bottomless appetite for new work. If an artist appears to have stopped making art, or has ‘nothing to say’ for public consumption, then they are often regarded as having gone to ground. In Donna Tartt’s case the media took that notion quite literally, reporting a rumour that the author was living alone on a deserted island.

We—the general public—don’t seem to cope very well with public figures when they choose silence instead of producing something for our consumption. Once upon a time, the silence of the royal household was considered ‘dignified’, but these days if an artist stops sharing publicly there is an unspoken assumption that there is something ‘wrong’—that the artist is now unable to work. Perhaps the artist might die before they have finished the final instalment of their sci-fi trilogy!

This dichotomy affects us as individuals, too. It can feel all or nothing, that unless we share our whole lives, and every thought that pops into our head, we somehow ‘won’t exist’. The unspoken assumption behind all this is that we must all comply with The Algorithm. And to get off that treadmill and commit to digital oblivion is a signal that we are no longer culturally relevant. But this betrays our own bias and failure to understand that the act of visibility does not itself confer legitimacy to a collection of words, a painting on a wall, or even our own personhood. If the artist is making it—the art exists, whether or not the public sees it. If you are living your life without an external audience, you are very much still alive. This statement seems obvious, but also seems to be worth repeating. Sheer visibility should not be the primary metric of artistic or individual success, but is undeniably the predominant force behind contemporary culture.

I love what actor and writer Michaela Coel had to say about this in her Emmy acceptance speech for I May Destroy You:

In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to, in turn, feel the need to be constantly visible, for visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success, do not be afraid to disappear, from it, from us, for a while, and see what comes to you in the silence.

So perhaps our first lessons is that:

1. Intentional silence is not the same as invisibility

Choosing to not always be visible creates spaciousness for our lives and creative practices and does not mean that they are not happening. Just because something does not receive likes or clicks or views or whatever other metric we might employ to measure our worth, does not mean that it is not valuable. It might mean that you are developing a deeper, richer and more intimate connection to whatever you are creating in private. Whisper it: perhaps the silence is where the more interesting work is. How wonderful.

2. Embracing silence creates confidence

   Well, obviously, I’m a confident woman, so whatever I do, it’s gon’ be confident — whether it’s the album, perfume, lingerie, makeup or fashion…Y’all gon’ have to wait, Navy. I’m so sorry.

   Rihanna

I love Rihanna. She know’s that her ninth album is going to floor us. She seems to offer here a deeper awareness that waiting for something until it is totally ready—until we feel confident about it—is a necessary part of our artistic practice.

3. Silence is necessary to create work that no-one can ignore.

I was recently chatting with my friend Dr Amy Jeffs, a historian and author who published her second book Wild: Tales from Early Medieval Britain earlier this year. We were talking about the pressure she felt to publish frequently as a post-graduate when she was supposed to be focussing on her PHD. During a meeting with her supervisor, Paul Binski, Amy remembers being told to ‘Go to your cell, mutter at the ceiling, and produce work that no-one can ignore’. Sage advice!

may you resist the temptation to always be visible

may you luxuriate in silence

may you sometimes choose to live your life without the watchful gaze of strangers on the internet

RECOMMENDATION CORNER: SILENCE EDITION

1. ZIG-ZAG BOY: Madness, Motherhood and Letting Go

   Shout out to reader of the The Murmuration and now published author Tanya Frank! Tanya has written the most remarkable memoir about her son Zach, who experienced a psychotic break as a teenager. If you want to get a feel for her writing she wrote a beautiful feature about their journey in last weekend’s Guardian. To borrow the words of Paul Binksi—this is work that ‘no-one can ignore.’ Congratulations Tan!

2. A PLACE FOR SILENCE

   If you are craving a physical space to be silent in, have you considered going to a Quaker meeting? ‘Meeting for worship brings Quakers together in silence so we can still our minds and open our hearts and minds to God.’ Read more about meetings in your area here.

3. MARLEE GRACE’S SUBSTACK

   Fellow writers/makers/artists out there will find much wisdom over on Marlee’s substack. Go check it out.

Take care,

Grace

P.S. If you enjoyed this post consider sharing it with a friend, thank you.