Overwhelmed by images that refer to the horror of crimes against humanity and full of words that bury the truths, we call for silence.
We lift our eyes to the sky and think of the cosmos, but cosmic silence does not exist.
Long blue tunnels, in the countryside of Pisa, form the complex mechanism of the Virgo interferometer, which detects the whispers of the universe, sounds of gravitational waves that propagate occupying the cosmic space and reach us, not audible to our ears because of their low frequency.
Virgo captures and translates signals produced by cosmic phenomena occurring millions and billions of light years from our planet, in very remote places, echoes of cosmic cataclysms.
It was Adalberto Giazotto – son of the famous musicologist and composer who rebuilt, reinventing it, the famous Adagio in Sol minore by Albinoni – to create Virgo.
Where to find silence, then?
“I have known silence,” writes Edgar Lee Masters, “the silence of the stars and the sea / and the silence of the city when it settles down / and the silence of a man and a girl / and the silence with which only music finds language. / The silence of the woods / before the spring wind rises / and the silence of the sick / when my eyes turn around in the room / and I wonder / for the deep things / what language is used for”.
Index finger on the mouth, Arpocrate, god of silence of the ancient Egyptians, eight centuries before Christ, intimates to be silent, with a gesture, signum, that from the amulets reverberates in that of the Roman goddess Angerona and, surpassing time and space, is repeated in San Pietro Martire by Beato Angelico (15th Century) – which reminds the monks that silence is a rule of the Dominican order – in a lunette of the Florentine Convent of San Marco, as in the painting by Odilon Redon, Silence (1900), at the MoMA in New York.
The narrative is silenced in paintings such as Edward Hopper’s Sunday morning, and the city noise is extinguished in de Chirico’s Piazze d’Italia.
If In the great silence (2005), a film by Philip Gröning, takes up the silent, serene daily life of the monks in the oldest monastery of the Carthusian order on the French mountains, in the profane context remains engraved the phrase that Fellini, in the finale of La voce della luna (1990), makes Benigni say:
“And yet I believe that if there were a little more silence, if we all did a little more silence, we could understand something”.
If we wanted to give a face to the noise that threatens the world, it could be that of the Evil one who was feared could make its way into the human being through the mouth, and perhaps the ideal silence is precisely that of the gods “understand without talking”.
The cellist Mario Brunello, who made Bach’s notes resound on the peaks of the Dolomites, on the Mount Fuji, in convents and in the desert, confesses:
“The more I think about silence, the more the music speaks to me”.
Do not listen, but read:
Mario Brunello, Silenzio
Chandra Livia Candiani, Il silenzio è cosa viva
