On Silence and Pigs
ON SILENCE AND PIGS
How can something invisible weigh so much? How can the violence of reduction turn the world inside out when really it’s proof of how things are and always have been. This is the world. I need, instead, to think of what the world could and should be. The need to change when silence is shaving my life away. But first I must speak of silence.
A woman once described something I was experiencing as a man making me small. “He likes making you small,” she said. Or she may have said, “He needs to make you small.” That would mean he needs to make me quiet, invisible, silent.
I later learned there is an official word for making something small: diminution. A dictionary offers this example: “a reduction in the size, extent, or importance of something.” (Replace something with someone.)
And clarifies in the context of use: “a permanent diminution in value," say of a person, of a woman, and of her words, stories, contributions.
Synonyms of diminution include reduction, decrease, lessening, decline, dwindling, moderation, fading, fade-out, weakening, ebb. For example: "A diminution of freedom reduces the quality of life."
Speech gives voice and substance to a body and therefore does not make a woman small. Speech is freedom and therefore life. Silence is a slow death.
I have experienced a lifetime of diminution to the point where I have become so small I often forget my value. I do things like write poetry, make art, or write things like this to remind myself of my solidity and value.
Let me be clear: Making someone small is an act of violence, a violation, a kind of murder of spirit. Traditionally, men have practiced diminution as an act of warfare against women who speak too much, say too much, expose their brains and the power of their thought as things that need to be made small.
These men and their ways of making us small, they steal our words. And we live under the weight of the silence they impose on us. So heavy the weight of silence, we find ourselves permanently exhausted and clawing at the fringes of life. Invisible. Lost and broken.
When we are banned from speaking words and truths and live in the echo of silence, our brains and bodies transform into something else. We manufacture new sounds to validate our existence, say vomiting and coughing the words we can’t speak. We hack them out of our lungs, and we puke them into the toilet. We manufacture a new set of words for those who are made small. Words that mean “no way out.”
Some days I push the button for every floor in the elevator just to affirm that I exist and can forge visible change even in my silence. You now, I make the elevator stop at floors I don’t intend to visit. Silent round yellow lights become my active voice. What does this accomplish? It gets me through the next hour.
Silence is an empty place. A space that grows more vast as the days of silence expand, become seamless. You will find yourself filling the space with words and thoughts that are not yours. But often are words that come from those who make us small. The space of silence becomes an echo chamber where the timeless doctrine that created practices like diminution becomes truth, and you become the lie and the crime. You become so small in your silence, and their power keeps filling the empty space squeezing you tighter and tighter inside yourself. This happens.
It’s like you become a silent factory that manufacturers your own tools to drill through the quiet. Tools like breathing. You can fight with the sound your breath makes when it catches the back of your throat on inhale. Really. Exhale and blow that diminution bullshit out. It can work for a moment.
Then the death sleep comes. Silence sleep where dreams are heavy as iron drums and just as loud. After the death sleep, I wake exhausted. My muscles cramped from the effort of trying to say nothing. So I drop back into more unconscious drumming. Pound. Pound. Pound. Heartbeat or fists.
I remember when I took this photo. I was on top of a lone mountain at dusk. Night and freezing temperatures dropping. I ran screaming through winter naked trees. In this silent place at the edge of the earth, a lifetime of being made small burst out of my lungs. All the screams I never screamed let loose on this freezing mountain. The bare branches both payed witness and caught my sounds. The trees whispered to me in the wind. “Your words are important. Do not be silenced. You are so big.”
This I learned. Silence is an insidious and quiet violence. It comes without big speeches or shouting profanity. Silence is the ominous profundity of turned backs and the words I imagine are written on them. For example: Go away. Or maybe this is part of the silence paranoia machine. Maybe the people whose backs are turned are just going in the opposite direction. Don’t see me. After all I am invisible. And shrinking daily.
Silence is a slow quiet killing.
Here’s how it can happen. First they pulled my spark plugs and insisted my 6 cylinder engine run on 1 cylinder, dismembering the parts of my life that needed silencing dangling, loose, disconnected from the whole body of a Me. They killed the parts of my past that ignited me, scarred me, and by not killing me gave me life, and they left them to ash. Forgotten in a field somewhere by the city dump. An in their thoughtless severance of my parts, they left me malformed and incomplete.
Then they crept through daylight where my car was parked in the garage in a place I couldn’t remember. They found it though I couldn’t. They pulled the distributor cap, like you see in the movies. Not that new cars have distributor caps. At least I imagine they don’t. Wait. Imagination is a word for women with voices. Correction. This is written from silence manufactured paranoia not from free and outspoken imagination. Let’s get our terms straight.
So silence stopped me in my tracks. I became paralyzed with zero acceleration. Dangling cords, amputated parts, and no words to speak.
Empty handed silence is a broken mirror. It gives you nothing to hold onto and no reflection of self. Shattered mirror silence. Amputating silence. Dismembering my life and its pieces silence. Pendulum silence.
I find myself choking on the totality of my life that has led to this wall, this silent living death, even as it rips me to pieces.
I swallow words not spoken. They lodge in my throat. Blockage. Food won’t go down.
The silence grows and performs a cruel act of subtraction. Taking me down piece by piece.
And to think that this silent wall was built from my lifetime refusal to be silent.
Last weekend, lying in bed through another sleepless night, I remembered the words spoken to me with such furious sound. Words that cared and meant it. They said to me simply and succinctly: “Don’t let the pigs win.”
I got out of bed and researched pig sounds. Found words like squeal, oink, grunt. Maybe not fair to four-legged pigs. But it’s the two legged pigs silencing us with their noise. Wielding their grunts like threats, squealing with power and all they are going to do with it to shut us up. Shut me up.
Well I spoke up, and then shut up.
Maybe I should spend more time making pig sounds to break this murderous silence that is suffocating me. Maybe I can beat the pigs with their own language. I could squeal so loud the endgame won’t even be a game. I will shatter the sound barrier with the force of my shattered silence, and I will bring down the tower of pigs. Hang them from their tongues and bury them in the bowels of the earth.
I will not let the pigs win. I will not let their violent silencing of me murder my voice. I will not let them mutate me and make me small. I won’t let them win, but also understand that in my new vocabulary words like “win” will mean nothing more than castrated squeals from pigs long hung and buried. Power will not be something to be won to control and silence others. It will not be a weapon of violence used to make people small. Power will be the sound of all the silenced voices rising in unity saying I am here. I am alive. I count. I am beautiful. And my words are important.
Fuck the culture of silence and the pigs who enforce it. Let the reign of pigs be over. Let all the silenced people rise in one loud clear beautiful voice. Let us sing in a new language that will never be silenced again.
End silence.
Still waters ripple.