academia · x · observing silence
The society observes silence — not as a discipline, not as a virtue, not as a religious practice, but as one might observe a bird, or a candle, or the slow drying of paint. The observation is the work. Members keep, between them, a small ledger in which one entry is made by each member each month: a date, a place, and a brief account of a particular silence noticed in the world. Not silenced silence; not the absence of speech; just a silence that occurred, and was attended to, and is now described.
The society meets twice yearly in a low-ceilinged room with the door closed. The agenda is the reading of the ledger; the reading is conducted aloud, slowly, in turn, with the room sitting still between entries. After the reading, the ledger is closed and the room sits in silence for the time it would take to read it again. This is the substance of the meeting. The society has no further business and seeks none.
The seven members keep relations of long affection with the seven-lamps society, with whom they share certain customs and one ledger; with the dawn walkers, who often supply the year's most precisely placed silences; and with the more populous society of keepers, whose items, the observers note, are themselves a kind of silence. A new member is co-opted only when one dies; an empty chair is left where they sat, for one year, observed.