Silence

I couldn't remember if we were supposed to post about "I, Rigoberta Menchu" or this Tuesday's readings so I'll just stick with posting about Rigoberta because we haven't had a full discussion about her story yet. As I looked through my notes, I came across a quote that I guess I thought was significant enough to write down. In Chapter 4, Rigoberta describes the horrid conditions of the lorry and how terribly the Quiché were treated. While my experiences will never ever compare to hers, I felt like I could relate to her when she said, "The children, who are hot and hungry, are always asking their parents for treats and it makes parents sad to see their children asking for things they can't give" (26).

A friend of mine just sent me this video, which features Steven Powers, who is the artist behind the "Love Letters" murals that you can see  from the El.

http://www.psfk.com/2011/11/graffiti-artist-paints-a-love-letter-to-brooklyn-video.html

I thought you all might like it!

Today was an emotionally intense Silence class.  It's been a few hours since class ended, but my mind is still racing, and processing.  But its 6:45 and that means my post for Barb's class is already late.  I was planning on writing a post about how the language of the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (technically last week’s reading, though I believe we’re discussing tomorrow) reading bothered me and was damage centered, but I couldn't even focus enough to pull quotes out and explain, and it seemed disingenuous to post just for the sake of posting.  But now I’m struggling with whether it’s better to not post if I’m just writing to get my checkmark or whatever, or whether it’s unfair to Barb that I am not committing enough time to her class because I feel so emotionally all over the place from another class. Should I be able to compartmentalize? Is it because the nature of the 360 that I feel I can even post these thoughts and not actually respond to the assignment? I don’t really know, looking forward to the 360 lunch tomorrow, hoping I’ll be more centered by the class time.

from Tuesday's class has now been scanned and uploaded on Serendip. You'll find it listed in (and accessible from) our protected reading file as SilentDialogueScanned. Might we all read through it, looking in the comments (and the spaces between them!) for some guidelines to help us all flourish here...?

I watched this movie almost 3 years ago when I first visited Guatemala, and it shook me to my core. I know our classes are already really intense and heavy, but I just requested this from Magill at Haverford and if folks want to watch it with me I'd love to have a movie night (maybe this weekend?). As I remember it gives a really good background of the Guatemalan Civil War and why it happened, which I think would be helpful for us to be aware of in our discussions of Rigoberta Menchú.

http://www.pbs.org/pov/discoveringdominga/

...over the relationship between those murals and poverty,
prodded by this graph, which shows a direct correlation between
poverty and the Baltimore City mural program:
http://geocommons.com/maps/166122

My little sister is away at a boarding school focusing on science for girls this semester. Part of what they do every day is wake up in the morning and experience silence to gather their thoughts and goals for the day. One of the girls in the program wrote about her experience and I thought it would be relevant to share. Here's their blog.

http://girlwaves.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2012-09-19T06:16:00-07:00&max-results=7

Hey guys, here is a link for the album where I uploaded the photos I took yesterday! Feel free to share and download them. The password to access it is serendip .

http://s749.beta.photobucket.com/user/sharaai/library/Mural%20Arts%20Tour%20and%20Eastern%20State%20with%20360

Silence feels a whole lot more complicated than it did when I wrote my first paper on the images of protest that Esty used to represent silence, and the difference between my feelings and thoughts about silence now and the image I posted three weeks ago of the moonrise, my image of silence, is huge. Over the summer, because I was alone in a country where I did not speak the language fluently, I became accustomed to silence, and though I hated and feared it at first, I grew to appreciate it, even need it to some degree. That, I suppose, is where the calm, peaceful image of space comes from.

Since then, I’ve begun to see silence everywhere and nowhere, to relish breaks in conversations or class discussions even as my skin crawls from the discomfort, to take out my headphones as I walk so that I can better hear the silence and noise of my mind. There are so many ways to conceptualize silence and so many judgments to be made; is it good or bad? A privilege or oppression? A presence or an absence? I have come to see that it is all of these things and more, though I’ve yet to show whether or not I can articulate my feelings. “How would you now visualize-and-vocalize silence?” The visualization is not so hard, but the vocalizing, the explanation, being coherent…that’s where I often stumble and retreat to silence.

I have to admit that the permanent nature of our posts do seem more scary now especially when I look at my own writings after two weeks. Three weeks of in-depth discussion of silence with different kind of silence practice make my first analysis of silence so unconvincing and simple. I guess that’s why people always say writing is an endless process. I will not try to overthrow my reactions about silence but try to organize my thoughts in a more logic and connected way.

At this point, I am still not sure about whether I get the essence of silence. Last time, I try to visualize my perception of silence from two extremes. However, silence is too hard to be categorized by any standard. It can become so complicated or so simple depending on the situations. 

To visualize the silence, I chose the picture of deep sea. I do have a reason to put my picture in front of my words. For readers, I believe a picture will give them more direct answer which represents my perception of silence. However, for me, I think my rambling words actually can reveal my understanding of silence better. The way of expressing silence has to change for different purposes, doesn’t it?

I will stick my visualization image of silence, the deep sea. The serene but mysterious deep sea still can always remind me of my visual construction of silence in mind. The state of relief and being able to be completely isolated from the outside to focused on internal self.