Words or Silence

A meditation on a phrase from Borges' Anticipation of Love

What comes to me of your life, settling in words or silence?

Words are the quality of acts.

Silence is what is.

Words are how you present yourself to the world, what I can see of you.

Silence tells me who you really are.

Words are the sculptor's chisel

Silence the marvelous marble in which David is hopefully revealed.

The blank page is silent, whole, and complete as I come to it, contemplate it. It seems a shame to write anything at all and yet I feel from the page a kind of shivering anticipation of my first division of it.

“What will be the first letter that divides me? “A,” aleph, which means Ox? The mind is the ox of the writer as the as the pen is his plow cutting deep furrows into my rich silence. Or will it be the letter “G” from gimel, meaning “camel?” Could the camel be likened to the imagination of the writer? Carrying him over vast stretches of what would otherwise be called “writers block?”

“Oh, perhaps it will be the letter B which comes to us from beth, meaning house? Could I, the blank page be said to be the house for the writer's ideas?”

“What of the letter Z? Called zed in some places and zee in others but originally meaning “sword?” Will this be an adventure story like the story of Zoro? Or might it be the pen of this writer will be the sword and I will be filled with biting political satire?”

I often wonder, after despoiling a page in my notebook or even a new text window on a computer, does the page find my divisions compatible with its wholeness? I hope the page finds some sort of ecstasy in my divisions of it but often, I am only disappointed in the result.