underneath the pond

So yesterday I read this great sentence: "Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live." The entire article is about how silence is misconstrued as powerlessness, when really, speech, discourse, and analysis can make us even more entangled in a past that need not exist into the present.

Maybe silence is sometimes the best option available to us. What is so interesting about ordinary days, ordinary thoughts, and ordinary people? What is so significant about them that merits so so so many words in proliferating memoirs, reality shows, blogs? Wasn't speech invented for bridging a gap between I and the other? When did it become a tool for making an insignificant, self-important distinction (and thus, barrier) between me and the next? Has it really become so perverse that it now completely serves an opposite purpose to its original one? Have words now, spearheaded by an obsession with Freud's id, Madonna's self-exhibition, and the overuse of terms like "special snowflake", become the chosen tool of an egocentric generation, sharpened into a shiny, colorless point?

Its edges are so sharply defined, its reflective surface so smooth and vacant, its stabs at the defenseless air so persistent and never-ending, its sound(lessness) and fury signifying nothing nothing nothing at all. Is this what words have been reduced to and imploded into? Where has the silence gone? If it's indeed a "drowned" thing, does it still "live"? What would it mean to live underneath such a pond? It's been unthinkably long since I bathed in silence with another. For all I know, the world of communicated silence could have evolved into literal firework shows between two sets of widened eyes, and I would have no idea, because I choose to wade in uncommunicated noise instead.

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