Silence

Can you say you have ever experienced complete silence? Do you believe one can experience complete silence? Do you know if it exists? As what, a concept, an audible absence-external and internal, only external? I will stop offering options for what I am asking it is, because by them I am skewing your response. I go back, and rephrase just slightly. Can one know if complete silence exists? How?

I go forward and re-ask again slightly differently, if you know complete silence exists, where, how do you find it?

Is it felt? How?

Is it calming? Does it cause fear? Peace? Anger? Freedom?

I come back, can silence even be a concept? Is it a presence? An absence?

Sometimes I can walk down a New York City street and become aware that I have not been hearing the always massive-decibel sounds surrounding me, neither original sounds nor echoes, neither mechanical sounds nor human. Why? Has a shawl of silence draped itself around me? Is noise, perhaps, only a function of attention? What does that say about silence?

When you think of silence, do you think of it as lightness? Do you think of it as weight?

Can sound be felt? Can a thrumming inside one’s head, seemingly inside one’s ear be called sound? If so, does this make silence impossible?

And, if so, can someone without the physical capacity for hearing experience sound, feel sound?

Does motion mean sound? Therefore, in life, is silence even possible? Blood flowing through our veins and arteries, constantly; organs tugging their needed sustenance out of resting or passing food stuffs; breath even held still circulating in the lungs in the vessels in the molecules–not silent?

Something just occurred to me as I sit here pondering silence “out loud”, two things actually–when you read this text, do you hear a voice? Whose?

Secondly, it seems that silence can be visual. See this picture? This guy at this moment in the presence of a rushing river, chattering and squawking gulls behind him, chirping songbirds behind me, and automotive traffic behind them; this guy embodied silence and it took my breath.