15. silence like a cancer grows
1000 words exactly. I forget when I started this, but it needed to be finished. Possibly this comes across as being slightly anti-religious, but if it does, it wasn't intentional.
Silence is the new religion. A silent world is pure. A silent world will be saved.
Concrit?
It starts somewhere in the heartland of America, in the dead spaces between the great cities where the air is red with dust and heavy with heat, full of the emptiness. Someone, somewhere, in that desert, writes a book. A little book, a slim book, fifty pages or less. A book which talks about the world, and the idea of a god, and silence. It talks about the idea of silence, of the absence of sound across a whole world being enough to trigger a change in the world, the formation of a new era of peace and prosperity and hope and love and beauty. It was written by a madman, a man who spent his whole life living alone, only the sound of his own voice to keep him company.
Someone prints the book, just a hundred copies or so, and then sells them on. At first, people don't take it seriously, this idea of stopping talking, singing, dancing, stopping the music and the television and the radio, stopping everything and just waiting for the silence, waiting for the complete quiet that would bring about the new world. Then, quietly, in little ways, people start to take notice. The someone who published the book sells it on, to a bigger company, who sell it on to a bigger company. People start going silent. Not all of the time, not yet, but silent. Spending an hour in silence, just thinking or reading or writing or drawing or gardening or just being themselves. It starts, as well it might, at the edge of the desert, in the little towns and villages scattered at along the boundary between civilisation and wilderness. Soon, there are whole towns going about their business silently; loving, dying, living, sleeping, eating, shopping in silence. Nothing breaks that silence. Even the cars and vans are fitted with mufflers and layers of blanket to blot out the noise of their engines and tyres, and a strange sort of waiting settles over those towns.
Some news company from one of the big cities comes out to these little silent towns to do a report. They don't make it, crushed down by the weight of the silence and the stares from the locals, the way the silence echoes and clings to their noises, their words, like they are poison. They go back to the big city quieter and more subdued, and look for copies of that first book, read them in the darkness of the early dawn and the late evening. Eventually, that news company falls silent too, producing things in quiet, with not one noise. It spreads outwards, growing and picking up speed as it moves from town to city to town.
People from outside America start to visit purely to hear the silence, to be the only noise in a city, and when they go back to their own homes, to their countries and cities and towns and villages and hamlets, they carry the taint of the silence with them, carry some of that waiting quiet to the rest of the world. Gradually, the world begins to fall silent. First England, then France, follow the lead of America, muffling car engines and aeroplanes, shutting down radio stations and destroying music. Other countries follow, joining the spreading wave of silence. Europe falls quiet, and Russia, a continent in silence, save for the calls of the birds and the whisper of the breeze. Eventually, even the birds and the animals fall silent. The whole world is waiting, moving closer to the point at which the shift will begin, the point at which the silence will mutate, transform, open into something new and beautiful and wonderful which will start a new age of mankind and usher in a utopia for all.
The silence waits and waits, growing ever more powerful with every silent day that passes. Sunsets and sunrises go by like stills from a silent film, and still they wait. People feel the tension, that sense that something is about to happen. Knives are drawn, hammers, all of the tools that replaced the gun when the silence came. Blood spills over the silent streets and the silent policemen and women ride after the murderers, sirens dead.
The prisons begin to fill, the hospitals, loud with the quietness of breathing and heartbeats. Children stop going to school, congregate on street corners, in the dark places. They are looking for their rebellion, but none of them dare to break the silence.
Nobody dares to break the silence. They know, for the little slim book had told them so, that this is the time of waiting, the time before the time when all will be rewarded, when angels will descend from heaven and devils ascend from hell, the time when all actions will be judged and reckoned. They know that the silence will pass, and that after the silence will come the wonder.
Somewhere in the heartland of America, the man who wrote the book, that slim little book with fifty pages, wakes up. He wakes into the silence as he has always done, alone and unafraid of being alone, the only living person for miles. He goes about his business just as he always has done, tending to the seven cattle who give him milk and meat, checking for the eggs the half-feral chickens leave around the little house. He does not look at the book lying on the table, does not look at the pages that were never published. He does not like this new silence. He does not like being hailed as the Messiah, as the new prophet. He does not see himself as a prophet, he sees himself as a man.
Today is the day that he undoes all that he has done. He unpens the cattle and collects the old gun from the cowshed. The gun roars out in the silence, louder than anything that has ever gone before, and the silence buckles before it, and sound rushes back.
Silence is the new religion. A silent world is pure. A silent world will be saved.
Concrit?
It starts somewhere in the heartland of America, in the dead spaces between the great cities where the air is red with dust and heavy with heat, full of the emptiness. Someone, somewhere, in that desert, writes a book. A little book, a slim book, fifty pages or less. A book which talks about the world, and the idea of a god, and silence. It talks about the idea of silence, of the absence of sound across a whole world being enough to trigger a change in the world, the formation of a new era of peace and prosperity and hope and love and beauty. It was written by a madman, a man who spent his whole life living alone, only the sound of his own voice to keep him company.
Someone prints the book, just a hundred copies or so, and then sells them on. At first, people don't take it seriously, this idea of stopping talking, singing, dancing, stopping the music and the television and the radio, stopping everything and just waiting for the silence, waiting for the complete quiet that would bring about the new world. Then, quietly, in little ways, people start to take notice. The someone who published the book sells it on, to a bigger company, who sell it on to a bigger company. People start going silent. Not all of the time, not yet, but silent. Spending an hour in silence, just thinking or reading or writing or drawing or gardening or just being themselves. It starts, as well it might, at the edge of the desert, in the little towns and villages scattered at along the boundary between civilisation and wilderness. Soon, there are whole towns going about their business silently; loving, dying, living, sleeping, eating, shopping in silence. Nothing breaks that silence. Even the cars and vans are fitted with mufflers and layers of blanket to blot out the noise of their engines and tyres, and a strange sort of waiting settles over those towns.
Some news company from one of the big cities comes out to these little silent towns to do a report. They don't make it, crushed down by the weight of the silence and the stares from the locals, the way the silence echoes and clings to their noises, their words, like they are poison. They go back to the big city quieter and more subdued, and look for copies of that first book, read them in the darkness of the early dawn and the late evening. Eventually, that news company falls silent too, producing things in quiet, with not one noise. It spreads outwards, growing and picking up speed as it moves from town to city to town.
People from outside America start to visit purely to hear the silence, to be the only noise in a city, and when they go back to their own homes, to their countries and cities and towns and villages and hamlets, they carry the taint of the silence with them, carry some of that waiting quiet to the rest of the world. Gradually, the world begins to fall silent. First England, then France, follow the lead of America, muffling car engines and aeroplanes, shutting down radio stations and destroying music. Other countries follow, joining the spreading wave of silence. Europe falls quiet, and Russia, a continent in silence, save for the calls of the birds and the whisper of the breeze. Eventually, even the birds and the animals fall silent. The whole world is waiting, moving closer to the point at which the shift will begin, the point at which the silence will mutate, transform, open into something new and beautiful and wonderful which will start a new age of mankind and usher in a utopia for all.
The silence waits and waits, growing ever more powerful with every silent day that passes. Sunsets and sunrises go by like stills from a silent film, and still they wait. People feel the tension, that sense that something is about to happen. Knives are drawn, hammers, all of the tools that replaced the gun when the silence came. Blood spills over the silent streets and the silent policemen and women ride after the murderers, sirens dead.
The prisons begin to fill, the hospitals, loud with the quietness of breathing and heartbeats. Children stop going to school, congregate on street corners, in the dark places. They are looking for their rebellion, but none of them dare to break the silence.
Nobody dares to break the silence. They know, for the little slim book had told them so, that this is the time of waiting, the time before the time when all will be rewarded, when angels will descend from heaven and devils ascend from hell, the time when all actions will be judged and reckoned. They know that the silence will pass, and that after the silence will come the wonder.
Somewhere in the heartland of America, the man who wrote the book, that slim little book with fifty pages, wakes up. He wakes into the silence as he has always done, alone and unafraid of being alone, the only living person for miles. He goes about his business just as he always has done, tending to the seven cattle who give him milk and meat, checking for the eggs the half-feral chickens leave around the little house. He does not look at the book lying on the table, does not look at the pages that were never published. He does not like this new silence. He does not like being hailed as the Messiah, as the new prophet. He does not see himself as a prophet, he sees himself as a man.
Today is the day that he undoes all that he has done. He unpens the cattle and collects the old gun from the cowshed. The gun roars out in the silence, louder than anything that has ever gone before, and the silence buckles before it, and sound rushes back.