This is my first 'academic' paper that I am putting up here, because this one took more than 3 cigarettes and two cups of coffee before submitting to the professor, and he is always high on weed.
01st February, 2017.
Before going into the congenital academic debate on nothing again (pun intended), let us have a look at this song lyrics -
Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a streetlamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dare
Disturb the sound of silence
“Fools” said I, “You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you”
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said “The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence”.
On the face of it, this is just a song by Simon and Garfunkel released in 1964, which since then has became a cult classic.
But let’s look at the title of this song; ‘Sound of Silence’, it is bit of an oxymoron isn’t it? The idea of silence having a sound, not in it but of its own, is a paradox of an epic proportion, yet quite effectively it seeps into the formation of ideas every day.
Now there can be a plethora of meaning that can be attributed to this song and a good amount of that has already been done, so it would be a bit pretentious if I, as writing it now, claim to be original regarding that and plus, this is not about the meaning of the song but rather the implication of it. The prospect of ‘silence’ having a sound for us to hear is haunting by the very fact that silence is perhaps the other side of the nothing.
Let’s think about it, the most haunting aspect of our life is death, we don’t want to die, and no one does. The very basic idea behind the fear of death is the fact that everything will be lost and gone and nothing will remain. And as a fact, every other literature in the world has associated death with silence and nothingness and darkness, even before knowing what death is, we already have given it a number of functions regarding which we don’t know anything.
So when we say sound of silence, the thing that bothers me most is that the attributed purpose of silence as an entity (living or not doesn’t matter) is compromised to the point of paradox. If silence can speak (since it has a voice), then nothing can ‘be’ and then the idea of death as a dread is rendered meaningless.
Now let’s move away a bit from death and morbid thinking and look at nothing in some other way. Rene Descartes, who is considered the father of modern day philosophy, once said ‘I think, therefore I am’, which basically tried to show the idea of ‘us’ as being a real entity with individual perceptions and everything. If we think we are something, whatever that may be, then by default we are not ‘nothing’.
That means, by theory, there is no such thing as nothing, not in the human existence of individualism per say, because the idea of ‘I think therefore I am’ is based on the fact that people think. They have individual thinking pattern and thusly everyone is something or the other regardless of any other factor.
That would mean then the idea of nothing is merely constricted to the material zone of the world, feeding on the individual perception of everyone. In a more simple term, it may mean that ‘nothing’ must be linked to what we there is and/or there isn’t, or, to make things more confusing, it must mean that whatever we think there isn’t but in actuality there is.
A good example of such I can think of is the following statement – “there is nothing in this room”. I have always found this ironic because the speaker is in the room with the listener who receives the statement. So how can it be both? If there is nothing in the room, what exactly is the person? Isn’t the individual, who passed on the statement ‘something’? Now the basic answer to this would be the fact that the speaker was addressing the general emptiness of the room minus him/herself but that doesn’t really answers anything. It simply means that the person just interpreted the room’s emptiness and by all possible means (and somehow by the theory in quantum physics of observation changes the outcome and the reality), the room wasn’t empty after all. That will mean that as humans we already have a good and solid (supposed) notion of things like nothingness, emptiness, silence and we want them to act in the predetermined way, because anything else would be entirely out of the notion of normal behavior. I remember, as youngster I saw this interview of Stephen Hawking where he explained this ‘Observer Effect’ by stating an example of a chair in a room; we want the chair in the room to be there because we ‘know’ that it is the reality, that a chair doesn’t moves, because it cannot move. But what happens when we aren’t looking at it? How would one know if it just doesn’t flies out of the room to Mars or something when we leave for work and comes just before we return?
So, how would we know if the idea of nothing is just an idea that came up as we observed it and it changed its reality to suit our comprehension? The negation of something to make nothing, what if we added it because there isn’t an answer? And what if it worked? How would we know the difference?
I know this sound more like a science fiction, a bad drawing by a 5 year old, but then again, it is a curios question.
So, is ‘nothing’ nothing simply because we want it to be so? Since I quoted Descartes to prove the fact that we perceive and are persuaded to be something, because we want our reality to make sense, even if it means to concoct an enigma just to provide the idea of the other one. Again, coming back to the first conjecture I made, “Sound of Silence” isn’t just a song, it makes the paradox real enough to be a haunting idea.
If I was to make a very pretentious philosophical remark, just to add a bit more color, I have this to say – the shadow on the wall which bears my own resemblance is mine, which I believe. But then it isn’t me, it just a marker of me, it makes me ‘be’ by being nothing itself. It doesn’t want anything, it doesn’t require anything, yet it is there, within the reach but out of grasp. And perhaps so is nothing, it is just the shadow of everything and it makes us know its existence by putting minute moments of inexplicability that we fail to answer; that random thought in the middle of a busy schedule or the sudden image in the corner of our eyes or random figure in an empty room we thought we saw and we would just say ‘ah, it was nothing’.
so, this is what i wrote... pretty strong, eh? what do you think?
