“’Shut up,’ he explained.”
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In this season of gaseous bloggery and vacuous news commentary, I have been contemplating the power of proverbs.
In our household, where we share 130 years of combined experience, the most-used saying of the past months has been Pennsylvania Dutch—that is to say, emigrant German. Internet surfers may have observed that the suffix for Germany is dot de, not dot ge, because their own name for the place is Deutscheland. Irene and I share partial Germany ancestry (our dating went double Deutsch, you might say) so when we use the saying, we say it the way a Mennonite great-grandfather might: “Too soon old, too late shmart.”
It’s worth observing how many pithy pronouncements relate to the way human action tends to precede human learning, especially where speech is concerned. Back when I was teaching an Elderhostel poetry course at the College of St. Joseph, we spent one session brainstorming as many sayings as we could reiterating this home truth, and came up with a bundle. Here they are, the collective wisdom of a circle of Elders plus a few I’ve added as a 60-something semi-Elder.
Silence is golden.
Still waters run deep.
Beware the wrath of a quiet man.
Think before you speak.
Children should be seen and not heard.
Actions speak louder than words.
Make sure mind is engaged before putting mouth in gear.
Speak softly and carry a big stick.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Better to be silent and thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
Talk is cheap.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
Mouth flies open, brain slams shut.
The brain begins where the mouth ends.
Loose lips sink ships.
Empty barrels make the most noise.
Not much happens in a small town, but what you hear makes up for it.
The last factory to close in this town will be the rumor mill.
--The volunteer recording secretary added at the bottom, “All above explains why we have two ears and one mouth.”
Vermont’s sayings offer a rich harvest, and no one has done more to assure their survival than UVM’s Wolfgang Meider, author of numerous books of proverbs from around the world (see New England Press, Shelburne). Here is his collection of wise words on the subject of “speech and silence,” from a book that I would guess took its title from a Town Meeting favorite: “Talk Less and Say More.”
Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
Few words are best.
Saying and doing are two things.
The belly is not filled with fair words.
Anything worth making is worth saying.
Soft words break no bones.
Say nothing and saw wood.
He can’t speak well who always talks.
A story without an author is not worth listening to.
Deeds are fruits, words are but leaves.
What soberness conceals, drunkenness reveals.
If you have to whisper it, better not say it.
If you can’t say good things of others, keep your mouth shut.
He who thinks by the inch and talks by the yard gets moved by the foot.
A person’s speech reveals the soul.
Silence is prudence.
Nobody ever repented holding his tongue.
A kind word never broke a tooth.
Be silent or speak something worth hearing.
In my own spiritual tradition, the phrase “stink of enlightenment” sometimes gets applied to people who have experienced the liberation of realization but who get carried away with trying to communicate it rather than working to deepen, broaden and apply that understanding with truly selfless compassion. Another phrase that comes up repeatedly is that such “spiritual” talk is the finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself.
I’ll close this compendium of non-silence with a poem that I once sent to someone connected with the San Francisco Call, and which they unexpectedly decided to publish.
World Supply
There is enough wise silence.
Under the Holy Land and Fertile Crescent and Empty Quarter it waits in measures big as dead seas beneath the graves of certain Sufis, Bahais, Druses and Kabbalists, its music unplayable in the key of Asia Minor. We have not begun to exploit it.
If flows through Africa like a swollen jungle river steeped with the lost remedies of tribal herbalists, seeps northward like civil war from unjoined wedding song to unled work chant, finally spreading beneath the sand-grind of the Sahara, varicose hieroglyphs of the old maternal order.
And in Europe still so much not so much in the vaunted spaces of vaulted cathedrals as in the stones themselves and everything made and unmade from stones, the bones of the saints only their masonry, Canonic Civilization a child's drawing connecting those post-glacial dots.
And in Asia, of course, steep stone faces watching its vines adorn them, entire terra cotta armies marching safely through it while over them ropes of yellow dust keep whipping those who have forgotten their ancestors' burial places.
It is the highest, snow-capped peak of the Amazon and the lowest, steaming swamp of the Andes, the earthquake waiting lavalike beneath the cracks of contested national boundaries--it is the unconquered empire that wears the storms off Cape Horn as crown.
Even in the outbacks of the outlands it is everywhere and everywhere as eager and quiet as a crocodile's stomach, as a shark's in the ocean uncomplaining about the need to be ceaseless..
The Americas? Like deafness after shouting we have more of it every finest hour, game-critical minute, global market uptick, race-winning electronic split-second: avatars, gurus, yogis, swamis, lamas, mullahs, rebbes, roshis, senseis, shamans, council elders--a whole preschool of color-coded xylophones banging out tunes by skipping its tones.
Somewhere there is the story about the tyrant
who tried to fill the wise silence but fell into it,
but long ago it was lost, no one knows it.
It will always be there.
The clearness of the air.
-----ps And we can always wave to each other when one of us drives by. See you around.
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