“We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.” ~ Rumi
I came here, in part, to find my voice as a writer, my music as a poet. But finding your voice in a world full of voices is a bit like listening for your name at a party that everyone’s been invited to. We’re all talking at once, shouting over each other. Yet I think each of us wishes for a brief lull - a moment when all the sounds and stories can be ordered and absorbed. And then, with love, forgotten.
In Greek mythology, Lethe (forgetfulness) is one of the five rivers running from the underworld. Virgil writes that only when the dead have their memories washed away by the Lethe can they be reborn again.
Perhaps the voice must go on a similar journey. First, there’s the business of living to be done. The voice needs plenty of grist. And London is full of it. The city is constantly metamorphing. New cities spurt up each day, carrying their old bones with them.
Blitzed churches become gardens butting up against glass-and-steel bulwarks. London Bridge may fall but it will be replaced overnight - doubtless by something bold and controversial. The smell of curry mixes with car exhaust and the stale perfume of Victorian pubs.
Then, amid all this music, there’s a pause. A moment, not of death, but of silence. Writer’s block. When, despite the overabundance of material, your hands hover over the keyboard, or the blank pages of a journal. When you take long walks, and wage hot war on wordlessness.
As much as I dislike these pauses (and I do), part of me knows they are good. Necessary even. For how else can the voice be born except by forgetting all that’s come before? All the voices it has heard and mimicked over the years?
Emily Dickinson called Nothing “the force that renovates the World.” I think something similar can be said of silence. Silence is the force that renovates the Word. Yet with the 24-hour news cycle and the constant pressure to publish, writers seldom allow themselves a good dose of guilt-free silence.
Of course, true silence is more than just the absence of noise. 'Renovation' comes from a Latin word meaning 'to make new' and was originally used to indicate spiritual rebirth. When faced with writer’s block, sometimes it’s the soul that needs reviving more than anything. So put down your pen, and putter in the garden. Visit a new city. Teach a child to ice-skate. Do something that gives your word-smithing a rest and at the same time replenishes your wonder and engagement with the world.
Or take singing lessons, where learning to breathe is just as important as the notes produced. Then next time you find yourself lost for words, or wondering where your muse has flitted off to, you’ll just think of it as the big, deep breath we all must take before plunging headfirst into song.
