Storying Silence: A Visual Essay

The Goose The Goose

Volume 18 Number 2 Article 27

10-15-2020

Storying Silence: A Visual Essay Storying Silence: A Visual Essay

Galicia S. Blackman University of Calgary

Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, Language and Literacy Education Commons, and the

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons

Follow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:

https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose

Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée Blackman, Galicia S.. "Storying Silence: A Visual Essay." The Goose, vol. 18 , no. 2 , article 27, 2020, https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss2/27.

This article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by an authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrante de la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactez [email protected].

https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose

https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18

https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss2

https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss2/27

http://network.bepress.com/hgg/discipline/438?utm_source=scholars.wlu.ca%2Fthegoose%2Fvol18%2Fiss2%2F27&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages



https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose?utm_source=scholars.wlu.ca%2Fthegoose%2Fvol18%2Fiss2%2F27&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages

https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss2/27?utm_source=scholars.wlu.ca%2Fthegoose%2Fvol18%2Fiss2%2F27&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Storying Silence: A Visual Essay Storying Silence: A Visual Essay

Cover Page Footnote Cover Page Footnote With thanks to my supervisor, Professor Jim Field who encouraged me to respond hermeneutically to the topic. Also, much gratitude to Professor Jackie Seidel for her guidance on earlier versions of this essay.

This photo essay is available in The Goose: https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss2/27


GALICIA BLACKMAN

Storying Silence: A Visual Essay

A Backstory

In this visual essay, I present eight visual vignettes (images accompanied by poetic

interpretations) to explore the idea of silence as generative. This work was the result of a self-study where I questioned my interpretations of the phenomenon of silence. It is a principle of interpretive work that a researcher needs to acknowledge assumptions and pre-understandings, recognizing that the research is shaped by the researcher’s presence. Interpretive studies are typically organized around a “biographically meaningful event” (Denzin 2). Maureen Jane Angen notes that we cannot separate ourselves from what we know, because our “subjectivity is an integral part of our understanding of ourselves, of others, and of the world around us” (385). A self-study is not a matter of being self-absorbed or an act of self-indulgence, but a recognition that “self-understanding always occurs through understanding something other than the self, and includes the unity and integrity of the other” (Gadamer 83). I conducted this self-study in preparation for a hermeneutic inquiry into instructors’ and students’ experiences of silences in class discussions about literary texts.

Scholars have called for greater attention to be paid to the role silence has in educational contexts (Belanoff 420; Zembylas and Michaelides 210). Therefore, my study has been grounded in a theoretical orientation around silence (Dauenhauer 78) and silence pedagogy (Mosher 369; Ollin 265; San Pedro 144), and a philosophical grounding that silence is a part of language (Risser 6). I pursued the self-study in the hopes of curating vocabulary to describe the phenomenon I sought to explore.

I was studying the idea of silence as generative, but to speak of it in that way was proving to be challenging because in educational contexts student silence is often thought of as a deficit, a lack, an emptiness, or an indicator of a lack of intelligence (Schultz 17). How would I be able to pull together the language to describe school silence as something generative and productive, when a literary studies class expects discussions to flow readily from students? Can silence support class talk when there is a propensity to see talk and silence as opposites?

During my routine walks where I cherish silence and its power to help me think, I noticed that the landscape offered a metaphorical rendition of the complementary relationship between silence and speech. I considered Freeman Patterson’s idea that looking at naturally occurring phenomenon, what appears to be random contains “an invisible but pervasive order” (42), and

1

Blackman: Storying Silence

Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2020

that order can support efforts to understand that which seems abstract. As much as I am tempted to present a conclusion or a result of the experience, I think it is more appropriate to allow the visual vignettes to imply the emerging understanding of the process I went through.

I went on a series of walks between 2017-2018 and when certain vistas evoked the aspect of silence that I had been thinking about, but I had been unable to verbalize with precision, I captured the image. This process was in keeping with interpretive research methods. For example, Sandra Weber notes, that it is the “paying attention, the looking and the taking note of what we see that makes images especially important to art, scholarship, and research” (2). The broad body of interpretive inquiry is a quest to understand lived experiences (Van Manen 31). An assumption guiding this kind of research is that lived experiences are distinguishable from experience, in that lived experiences are experiences where there is consciousness, reflection, or ongoing interpretation of what one is living through. Our experience in the world is subject to forgetfulness of being (Freeman 549) and understanding happens when we encounter our lived experiences through reflection and attention on our lives. The process of paying attention to my personal experiences of silence allowed me to find routes to the language to describe the phenomenon.

When I had collated a series of photos over a few weeks, I noticed that there were themes in the academic literature that were exemplified by some of the images. The poetic renditions came much later, while I was preparing for fieldwork and I was searching for ways to further verbalize the phenomenon I was seeking to study in detail. I found that poetic writing practice supported my quest because as Margaret Atwood notes, “Poetry is an uttering, or an outering . . . it lets the shadowy forms of thought and feeling come out into the light, and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we are and what we want and what the limits of those wants may be” (76). This essay is a culmination of that work. In some places I include references to selected academic literature and literary works. I do this without elaboration in order to allow the visual and poetic to intersect in an interpretative way for the reader, because as António Nóvoa has pointed out the pictorial turn in academic work does not mean converting images to text or vice-versa (22). The poetic renderings were also in part to guard against the literalism of the interpretations of the images, and a way to engage in dialogue with the ineffability of the text of silence, because as David Jardine recommends, “for interpretation to engage, the text and I must be allowed to play” (57).

Maureen Jane Angen notes that “interpretive research might disrupt received notions of how research is formulated, carried out, and written up” (389), with implications for how we pass on knowledge and understanding, as well as how we continue to live our lives. This idea that interpretive research challenges traditional processes and modes of representation is a caution that method might not be laid out in a step by step form in interpretive work. Melissa Freeman recommends that in this work, one does not pursue a rigid answer for the topic, rather one pursues “the desire to keep the conversation open and give it the space it needs to say something about itself” (547). In this essay, I seek to let silence say what it needs to say, if it can be said.

2

The Goose, Vol. 18, No. 2 [2020], Art. 27


1. A Thing

Gnawing at the naught is something.

A thing, not fully thinged

But barely there. And where I reach to fetch

I recoil, ‘cause nothing roils the will

To be, to do, or see, or hear. The unsaid.

3



2. Space

out of the void the vast emptiness and surging silence,

a deity spoke or tumbled out somewhere,

emptiness which gives rise to all manner of explosion and birthing of lighting

and

star dust

just when we think we got it, it gets us wound up in its mysteries,

space feigned fertility, while dark matter churns away within the vastness

making a something of the silence of space, the spacing

of silence making a something

4



3. Making Something

And just like that I remember the miraculous of the past:

Days spent striding hopeful,

To where the sky meets the sea,

And briny breezes greet me with the grit I harness to claim a dream of poesis.

The sun bakes my dreams into utterances scowling on the pages,

Scowling back at me, too loud,

Understanding which is half-baked from the silence of solitude

Becoming full cooked in the recognition of a villanelle half formed:

5



I’m searching deep for inner peace and waves come crashing upon me,

With ripples that distort focus on the page I want to fill;

Despite the words that creep on me like the green of the hills that I see.

And now

I’m searching wide for inner speech and flakes come tumbling upon me,

With ripples that distort focus on the sense I long to fill;

Outside of words that escape in the chill of the scene that I see.

6



4. Something

The rush and roar of a furling whirling Ferris wheel

Stopped

Short

Mid

-air

and all you hear is trouble.

7



Not that silence.

The heavy hush which comes over a crowd waiting for the team to score a roar of a goooal!

Not that quiet.

The shuddering shush of let me hear this, let me listen, because so much depends on this

news.

Not that silence. But

the lush lull of a luxuriant pause in a frenetic conversation.

8



5. Power/Disempowerment

“Apollo said – I wonder what would happen if we gave one of these creatures our language?

– Our language? said Hermes. No mortal could learn so many shades of silence. – I didn’t say teach, said Apollo. I said give.

– You’ve been down here too long, answered Hermes. Let’s go home.” (Alexis 157)

Ready to hand, or ready at hand, my pen drives the will to consciousness of the essence Senses affronted by the hard reality of the hands which have had a hard life to toil at this too might be hard to work at, bracketing my pre-meanings and see at hand what is in hand not a tool for my using but the what it is as it is, with or without my seeing it can be, what it needs to be.

9



6. Discord and Furtive Evasion

I catch the pattern Of your silence Before you speak. (Hughes 234) —what the scene said: thinly thick with the has been and the will be story this vista before me and instead of parts, I see layered into the now hurtling through space like consciousness that has pelted at a pace beyond the imagining and layered with the has been and the will be that though I look, long lines of meaning move past me as the movement through space traces a compact square

10



of meaning? I sense, a spiral into a semblance of sense, consciousness unpacks lines upon lines, I line them up, further into thick thick thickened description of the is

11



7. Rest

A something reaching out and for into being, into seeing into the delicate sturdiness of softness which lands and lingers, obscures the determination of being as a yearning to be insists on being seen touching all within its reach and reaching it enriches my view,

12



its view which asserts itself into consciousness willing and wiling its way onto even the sturdiest of intentions, to not be swayed by its purpose to be while my purpose to see confirms, I may need to pause. And rest.

13



8. Contemplation and Coming into Being

“A listening silence is not just a withdrawal, but a coming forward. It is not just the removal of oneself from the space, but an entering into the space differently, to welcome what else may come forth.” (Mosher 369) Child, if you feel your heart beat like hand to a drum hum know the strut of a beat is a beating onward and the unknown is the bedfellow to the known, beating understanding into your palm facedown, hold tight to that line down the middle until understanding oozes from between your finger while some remains within the grip unseen. Child, if you hold understanding taut like the skin of a song beat know that the heat burns and cools into light and dark, so lightly touch the meaning

14



which is and isn’t like the beat of being. Contrary to knowing firmly, the finer detail is in the finitude of being knowing finally the beat does go on

15



9. The Pedagogy of Silence

I went into the wide-open spaces and heard my thoughts louder in the silence.

From an earthen birthing, they rose to meet the air, sheer will shot up through the too cool

cold.

And though my voices seem subdued by the temperate times,

my inner tomes of trembling forth to meet the world, timidly tucked away in the comfort of

whispers,

when I while into wildness of the trees’ wilderness, rising to talk to the heavens,

I find my voices rise with them,

And then. I speak.

16



10. Possibilities

what if it were not just that the trees pushed through to meet the space,

to fill out the space as it allowed, aloud

but the space drew out the trees,

etching little strokes, delicate little nourishments that the trees might feel safe to grow,

or grand showers that the roots might seek out,

or cool hoarfrost to temper a heat,

what if educare and educere, learn the trees to lean into and through the wide expanse of

possibility?

17



Epilogue: The Limits of Understanding

Throughout the interpretive process of gathering images and playing with words, I began to operationalize silence as spaces, as expanse and panorama, while the vegetation appeared akin to speech. That metaphor is not without its flaws, but it allowed me to think about the breadth of meaning in the ways silence relates to speech. Understanding might be the goal in interpretive work, but as part of a process of the craftwork of interpretive inquiry, it is not a preordained outcome. Understanding is fraught with ambiguity and depth which can confound one even more than the beginning of the research process. David Abram states it thus, “the ambiguity of experience is already part of any phenomenon that draws our attention” (34). However, right up through and to the end of the research process that quality of amorphousness can linger in varying degrees. John Smith expresses a similar idea by asserting “traits that are expected from inquiry are gathered into lists that are open ended in that they are constantly subject to change and modification” (6). To approach this work is to be open that kind of nebulous, yet resonant understanding. Silence, personal, or in a public space, while it may sometimes be an emptiness, it is not necessarily an insurmountable void, but to interpret the range of meanings, even in a single encounter, is an unpredictable, sometimes ineffable task.

18



Works Cited

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Pantheon Books, 1996.

Alexis, André. Fifteen Dogs. Coach House Books, 2015. Angen, Maureen Jane. “Evaluating Interpretive Inquiry: Reviewing the Validity Debate and

Opening the Dialogue. ” Qualitative Health Research, vol. 10, no. 3, 2000, pp. 378-395. Atwood, Margaret. “Why Poetry.” In Measures of Astonishment: Poets on Poetry. U of

Regina P, 2016, pp. 69-77. Belanoff, Pat. “Silence: Reflection, Literacy, Learning, and Teaching.” College Composition and

Communication, vol. 52, no. 3, 2001, pp. 399-428. Dauenhauer, Bernard P. Silence, the Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance.

Indiana UP, 1996. Denzin, Norman. “10 Interpretive Biography.” Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative

Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues, SAGE Publications, Inc., 2008, pp. 117-126. doi: 10.4135/9781452226545.n10.

Freeman, Melissa. “Validity in Dialogic Encounters with Hermeneutic Truths.” Qualitative

Inquiry, vol. 17, no. 6, 2011, pp. 543-551. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by J. Weinsheimer and DG

Marshall, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Vintage Classics, 1994. Jardine, David W. “The Fecundity of the Individual case: Considerations of the Pedagogic Heart

of Interpretive Work.” Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 26, no. 1, 1992, pp. 51-61. Mosher, Ronna Scott. “Silence, Listening, Teaching, and the Space of What is Not.” Language

Arts, vol. 78, no. 4, 2001, pp. 366-370. Nóvoa, António. “Ways of Saying, Ways of Seeing Public Images of Teachers (19th‐20th

Centuries).” Paedagogica Historica, vol. 36, no. 1, 2000, pp. 20-52. Ollin, Ros. “Silent Pedagogy and Rethinking Classroom Practice: Structuring Teaching Through

Silence Rather Than Talk.” Cambridge Journal of Education, vol. 38, no. 2, 2008, pp. 265-280.

19



Patterson, Freeman. Portraits of Earth. Key Porter Books, 1997. Risser, James. “Speaking from Silence: On the Intimate Relation Between Silence and

Speaking.” Journal of Applied Hermeneutics, 2019, pp. 1-14. San Pedro, Timothy J. “Silence as Shields: Agency and Resistances among Native American

Students in the Urban Southwest.” Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 50, no. 2, 2015, pp. 132- 153.

Schultz, Katherine. Rethinking classroom participation: Listening to silent voices. Teachers

College Press, 2009. Smith, John. K. “Interpretive inquiry.” The SAGE encyclopedia of

qualitative research methods, Vol 1, edited by M. Given, Sage, 2008, pp. 459-461. Van Manen, Max. Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive

Pedagogy. Routledge, 2016. Weber, Sandra. “Visual Images in Research.” Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research:

Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues, edited by Knowles, J. G. and Ardra L Cole, Sage, 2008, pp. 42-54.

Zembylas, Michalinos, and Pavlos Michaelides. “The Sound of Silence in Pedagogy.” Educational

Theory, vol. 54, no. 2, 2004, pp. 193-210. GALICIA BLACKMAN is a PhD Candidate in Educational Research at the University of Calgary. She is conducting a hermeneutic inquiry into instructors’ and students’ experiences of silence in class discussions about literary texts.

20



Storying Silence: A Visual Essay

Documents

Transcript of Storying Silence: A Visual Essay