In that wild, imprecise, ineffable space — where neither words, emotions, imagination, nor music can hope to describe — something has changed.
I sit on a bench in a Frankfurt Oder train station, shivering in the cold and waiting for a train that Deutsche Bahn has delayed ninety minutes. Beside me sits a woman of about sixty, a back-and-forth migrant between the various Polish and German states of her time. She complains about missing the New Year’s performance at the Katowice Arena — Sting is performing, did you know? Her frustration bounces between familiar topics: the names of politicians, the agony of being unheard over Christmas dinner, of being told by her son to “shut up about politics” when what could be more important in these times.
For the first time in many years, I don’t feel the urge to tune her out. For the first time in many years, I listen. And in that ineffable space where words and imagination don’t reach, I hear something new.
Five years ago, as the world turned inward — having decided that the solution to a global crisis was to bunker down and wait for it all to blow over — her words would have meant, “Why haven’t they fixed yet, acting all mighty?” But now, her words mean, “Why aren’t we fixing?”
So I hold her meaning and respond in kind. I pull out my phone and battery pack and search for a livestream of Katowice’s streets: the arena awash in neon lights and snow, exploding every few seconds into a thirty-two-meter-tall disco ball of white light. Our postures shift; the cold and tension wash away. She says that if the train is delayed another half hour, she’ll return to Berlin and spend the rest of the night with her nephew. A third passenger chimes in, offering a couch one city over—for both of us, should we need it.
Out of habit, I try to explain using inadequate words that politics don’t happen in parliaments anymore; they happen here in cold German train stations among found communities providing solutions with whatever is on hand. My words miss the mark, of course—the language I want to speak doesn’t exist yet between us. So I return to Silence, and that communicates my meaning.
Five years ago, a crisis hit, and we waited it out, building new rules and new communities in the spaces around us. And when we heard the crisis was over, we told our bosses, our systems, and our politics that we’d go back to how things were, (maybe with a few concessions). And our systems believed us, returning to their plots of optimal resource extraction, happy that their spreadsheets and parables were back how they liked them.
But in that strange, ineffable space where words and numbers and images don’t reach, something changed. Our stories found new footing, and our words meant something else than they used to.
In times and places without access to modern statecraft, anthropologists described a “cycling” between hereditary-hierarchical states and stateless communities. These cycles operated not just on material concerns, but also on a rivalry between the cosmologies of clans who wanted control and wealth, and those who wanted all to have the power to solve their own problems. In Zambia, historians struggled to place the lineage of many highland groups, because history and material facts were left unclear— inconsistent stories combating the Han’s meticulous records and censuses, discernible only to those with context.
Pythagoreans vowed to silence, because words of truth could only harm the uninitiated. Platonists and Merkavah mystics insisted fundamental reality cannot be described, only experienced. Masonic and Rosicrucian orders, even now, design elaborate rituals to convey experiences where no other communication will suffice.
Silence isn’t new. But something is. A tool of understanding and power that flows beneath our conversations – for ages accessible mostly to the disenfranchised and esoteric – has grown mycelial roots under the thick concrete of our most robust institutions. The fruits are sprouting in spaces that haven’t had a taste in millennia.
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