I often feel that I talk too much and, indeed, I often do.  Some of this is innate, I think:  I have such an urge to try to express things, I gain such relief and pleasure in my quest to find words which communicate, and all I have to work with most of the time are my own feelings and experience.  But some of my verbosity is, I am understanding, a compensation.  It has been not so much a filling in of silences as a modelling, trying to show by example that it can be done: words can be found. Imperfect, unstable words – as Eliot (of course) puts it with ironic, oxymoronic fluency:

Words strain

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still.

TS Eliot Four Quarters – Burnt Norton

Nonetheless, they are all we have and if we work at it, if we keep trying, if we review and retry, rearrange and redress, they are a miracle.  The way St John describes the incarnation, the essence of our connection to the infinite and divine, is as The Word.  Words are all we have.  The rest is silence.

To keep silent when words ought to be spoken is, to me, unnatural; it feels damaging and destructive: damaging to those we ought to be trying to communicate with, but most of all to ourselves if that’s the decision we make. A politician might say that, by not speaking, they have not lied.  I disagree. It simply moves the lie from the explicit to the implicit.  It means they lie in their deeds, by their silence, by their secrecy – secrecy, which is not the same as privacy and we should be very careful not to confuse the two:   our right to privacy (and I value it highly) must be set against our responsibility to communicate and whether others have a right to know what we are … and we are by now… hiding.  Fear, of course, holds us back. It is so often, perhaps always, fear.  Fear, hurt, love – at heart we are motivated by very strong, simple, basic things. 

As I’ve said before, it is by speaking that we make sense:  it helps us to think, it helps us to connect with, to acknowledge the emotions which swirl and slosh away often confusedly, close to, stirring and stirred by our primitive brain stem responses.  Finding words draws these emotions out, strand by strand, into our cerebral cortex.  It’s a tentative, recursive occupation (what we start to think in turn generates more feelings); it is often flawed and halting, certainly it is transient just as life is mutable.  But through all this, there comes enough overlapping, intertwining, growing consonance – like an orchestra tuning up – so that we can say with sufficient confidence ‘yes, that’s what I think.  That’s what I feel. I own these emotions’.  And often – ‘that’s what I need to tell you’.  It matters.   I feel enough assurance about this bundle of thoughts and feelings that it is as if it is now a physical thing I must ‘show and tell’. 

And if we don’t say things, they will often ‘go’ anyway, they still ‘go without saying’.  They don’t go away – they go alongside, or they go deep and disrupt our sub-conscious;  they go their own way and lead us – perhaps unrecognising and blindly – in directions we would not want to take.  They become implicit, a word I have now discovered comes from implicare (Latin, ‘entangle’, ‘involve’) and even further back the Proto-Indo-European root plek ‘to plait’).  Things we don’t actually say are still implicit: still intertwined and interwoven.  I find a strange parallel between this metaphorical inter-folding and the cortical folding of the human brain, somehow essential (says Wikipedia) for the wiring of the brain and its functional organisation.  Surely, therefore, it seems to me, if we try to deny, to block something and refuse to give it words, refuse to give it shape – or equally if we try to do this by keeping it separate from all the other strands of interwoven emotion and intelligence and experience and memory which make our identity and sense of being, then, surely, we are damaging our very selves.  Maybe down to a cerebral level of not allowing little sparks to fire, pulses to move, connections to be made. We can stop thinking about things, but it might stop us being able to think about things. 

Conversely, the more we think, the more we speak, then the better we get at making our own sense of things.  We become stronger and better at working with our emotions, recognising them, rejoicing in them (even, perhaps, the painful ones like grief because we better understand how it relates to love).  In friendships (and for most of us, blessedly, in family) we have good listeners who will hear our words, however garbled they may be at times, with love and compassion and patience.  And of course the whole realm of fiction (which includes books and theatre and spoken word radio and drama on tv and in films) – these glorious thought experiments offer us models of how things might look to others, how it might feel to be someone else, they offer an escape from our own limited perspective and they do it through words which we can read, and hear, and treasure and use for ourselves.   And so, In the Beginning was the Word… and so, the Light shines in the Darkness.

Postscript: 

There are, of course, other languages apart from words:  music and the visual arts;  and for all of us on a daily basis, there are deeds.  When we smile, and touch, and hug another person.  These are not places where feelings go without saying.  These are places where feelings go beyond saying, into that peace of deep communication. When I started to write this, my best friend kept vigil at a death bed.  The silence there is profound.