Freshly Laundered & Hanging Out to Dry: Chapter10

Chapter 10
About Silence

Speech is one of the harmful activities of man
that prevent his spiritual progress. _JG Bennett

There was still more to our daily schedule—much of it orchestrated by Mr. B. Between dining with him, his leading Morning Exercise, reading aloud to us each evening, and his introducing and closing weekly Themes, he was a constant presence. Despite classes and practical work with other teachers and his short excursions elsewhere, he seemed to always be with us.
At lunch and dinner we ate in silence and began those meals with a prayer that Mr B. wrote:

All life is one and everything that lives is holy.
Plants, animals and man, all must eat to live and nourish one another.
We bless the lives that have died to give us our food.
Let us eat consciously, resolving by our work to pay the debt of our existence.

Only for limited periods of time had I practiced prayer before a meal. I was glad to have a cue for attending to our food, even though the reminder of having a debt to pay for our existence awakened a sense of alarm.
Eating in silence softened the sensory overload. At breakfast, which wasn’t silent, the children ate with us before going off to school or day care at Sherborne. They ate lunch and dinner earlier than the adults—under the watchful eyes of whoever was assigned to childcare. Early in the course, the noise at breakfast tended to escalate until Mr. B would have to point it out. We didn’t have a traffic light that would flash red and set off an alarm such as I’d seen in my local school lunchroom. As we adjusted to Sherborne’s unique culture, the need to talk became less urgent.
When first eating without talking, everyone was a bit self-conscious, avoiding eye contact. The need to signal for salt or pepper, water, or a second helping had to break through the self-imposed isolation. Later, it became almost a game to anticipate other people’s needs and surprise one another by passing a platter or saltshaker before being beckoned to do so.
Without the sounds of our voices at silent meals, we learned that clamor could be caused in other ways. Dishes clattered if they were set down with a heavy-hand, spoons and forks clanked against the plate when we were lifting food off of it, water burbled as it was being poured into glasses. Everything echoed in the uncarpeted and uncurtained hall. In the servery next to the dining hall, servers, forgetting how sound traveled, dumped the dishes into sudsy dishwater and swirled the stainless utensils, attempting to loosen clinging food. When the clatter carried into the dining room, Mr. Bennett corrected the situation by making a cameo appearance in the servery. Eventually, we became more aware of the many ways we disturbed the silence.

A lengthy crescendo of noise slowly fills what had been the silent dining room. I realize it is the sound of my own voice in my own head. When I put a halt to the internal chatter, the room returns suddenly to an eerie silence.

To err is human—but devine! _Mae West

In addition to gaining information about stillness, we are also learning about the sharing of food. In the servery, the cook is doling out generous portions of potatoes to each plate the servers hold ready. However, he runs out long before all have been served and almost a third of us are deprived of receiving any. It can’t be undone. People who have already been served their meal have dug in and are eating. The cook is distraught; the possibility of running out hadn’t even crossed his mind.

For weeks, all the first helpings became meager, cooks played it safe, offering second helpings when they become sure there’s enough. Over time, we all improved at estimating portions. Another safety factor we invented was to serve some courses family style. It was easier to divide a course of food into ten large bowls each of which the servers placed at a table. Then it became the burden of the diners to split the table’s allotment fairly.

I’m sitting at a fully populated lunch table when I notice someone with an angry pout pointing to the empty bread platter. All of the slices are gone. I never eat any and there are only nine of us at the table. Three other people respond by shooting looks of poison at one poor fellow. He took more than his share and despite the silence we all know who the culprit is.

We were asked to limit our speaking with each other to topics relevant to the activity in which we were engaged. This caution had the dual effect of making us more attentive to the tasks at hand and more aware of what we were saying. Mean-spirited talk while washing dishes took on greater significance than when such behavior is considered ‘normal’ as it was in our lives outside of Sherborne. That small amount of clarity also gave insight into personal motivations for talking, which often were neither kind nor logical.
Having been given some guidelines about speech, some people felt the need to enforce silence as a ‘rule’ toward all conversation, even when dealing with children. What a tiresome human trait we displayed—to take every caution and turn it into law.
Issues regarding talking resurfaced at regular intervals throughout the course. When we went to the Social Club, for example, the local residents inevitably asked us questions about the school. The challenge was to understand what the questioner actually wanted to know. When one patron of the pub remarked on the wide age range of Sherborne students and wanted to know whether the school was a place for people with disabilities, he most likely did not need to hear a lecture on Systematics. A married couple who knew Mr. Bennett from church inquired about the amount of time the school devoted to spiritual practices. They were dumbfounded by being given the impression of an apparent code of secrecy relating to the daily schedule. We each had our own interpretation of Mr. Bennett’s recommendation to use discretion when answering questions about Sherborne.
Nothing was secret. The question was: How should we share information in a way that made sense to people who were not participating? Anyone could be invited to attend open weekends that comprised all the activities of the school. Could we discern who would welcome such an invitation?
Several times during the course, everyone at the school participated in a day of silence combined with a special physical task and inner exercise. Paula, a woman who could have given orders to Zeus, found not talking so unbearable that she was awarded special dispensation not to participate. Instead, she focused on taking care of the children, a common task for her since she had a young son. I found silent days, like silent meals, a welcome comfort that simplified life.
The first full day of silence, we were to do the sixty-point attention exercise. Every fifteen minutes when a bell was rung, we sensed a different point on the body following the pattern we’d been taught in Morning Exercise. The physical task was weeding the immense lawn, an undertaking akin to counting grains of sand on the beach. Yet it awed me to see how much could be accomplished in a rather short amount of time when one hundred people were working together.

It is another silent workday. We are cleaning out debris from the property that is beyond the scope of our day-to-day chores. We have a huge bonfire for items that can be burned. Rubble that isn’t burnable is collected and taken to the dump.
My eyes never stop watering from the smoke. The silence, focus, and length of time we work makes it feel like a personal cleansing. I experience no irritation or impatience as I often do when we work extra hard. In fact, the overall quality of the day is like looking through a veil into another plane of reality.
A couple of weeks later Mr. Bennett asks me about my sense of that day, I tell him what I just described.
“Did you see the Virgin Mary?” he asks.
“Uhh… no.”
Without any hesitation, he goes on to discuss other things. Later in the day, when I tell some friends about Mr. B’s question, I learn that a couple of people had reported seeing Mary. I didn’t ask about the visions, more concerned about whether I was supposed to have had one.

Between 6 p.m. and dinner at 7, Mr. Bennett read aloud to us from Beelzebub’s Tales To His Grandson by G.I.Gurdjieff. It’s alternate title, An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man, describes a little better what the series of three books is about, but still doesn’t convey the convoluted language, creatively re-named concepts, and humor that forces the reader to consider the absurdity of human behavior including our erroneous notions about education and the possibility of purposeful human development.
This last was, for me, perhaps the one concept that kept me feeling that Sherborne was where I needed to be despite my reaction to the dour mood of the place. Nowhere else in my experiences did anyone express the possibility for human development, only improvements to the material world.
For me, even the passive activity of listening to the book being read was a formidable test. My sleepiness in the late afternoon was profound. Since college it had been my habit to nap at that time of day, waking for dinner and then staying up late to finish homework or personal projects. The problem of adjusting to a new schedule was compounded by my inability to relax at bedtime.
During Mr. B’s reading, I sat on the library floor along with most everyone else, propped myself against a wall or one of the few overstuffed leather arm chairs reserved for the older folks, put my knees up, and wrapped myself in a warm shawl.
Compared to the rest of the building, the reading room, which was the downstairs library, felt relatively sumptuous. It had dark wooden built-in shelves, a well-worn oriental carpet on the floor, and fitted interior shutters, crafted with such expertise that they kept the cold at bay. Close to one hundred warm bodies huddled together in a singular sense of comfort. It wasn’t long before my eyes drifted shut and sleep would overtake me. Throughout the year, this was my pattern.
There were times when Mr. B reprimanded students for inattentiveness or for directing too much care toward their knitting, one of the few automatic activities allowed during reading hour. Never, much to my occasional wonderment, was I told not to sleep. Maybe he thought I would learn more in my sleep than when my mind was awake to build barriers of analysis.
Exhaustion during the reading was in sharp contrast with other times of the day when our focused endeavors were energizing; I was able to do more physical work with greater ease than ever before.
Companionship with a hundred people day and night, however, was simply too stimulating. Time spent by myself was as necessary as food and air, so after everyone was asleep at bedtime, I would bask in the quiet. The physical silence felt healing, and so did the lack of other people’s mental and emotional turmoil. I might read a few paragraphs, jot some notes in my journal or, just as often, lie in the dark with my eyes open, taking in the delectable serenity.

I have a new philosophy.
I’m only going to dread one day at a time. _Charles M. Schulz

In Morning Exercise and in Movements we were introduced to complicated patterns for directing our attention and coordinating it with our breathing. For example, in one Morning Exercise we were instructed to breathe five breaths at each point on the body where we were focusing attention.
At the end of a Movements class when we were aware of having made great efforts, it was suggested that, while we sat for a few minutes, we also say an invocation silently, “May the results of my work enter within me”, or “May the energy raised by my work be transubstantiated within me”, or whatever words we wanted to use to honor our efforts and the help we were given. The invocation could also be coordinated with directing our attention to our limbs, again, one after another in pattern.
While I didn’t feel very connected to Morning Exercise, the bows called rukus following it and the invocation at the end of Movements almost welled up from inside—a sacred stillness. Movements were like an hour-and-a-half of prayer by gesture and being still afterward was a time to absorb strength and energy. The only type of event from my past that felt related to this experience was a profound sense of revelation that sometimes occurred after a creative session of art.
The rukus and sitting after Movements felt natural. Why was so much effort required for some practices and almost none for others?
In contrast with the positive feeling from making efforts with Movements, most of the other exercises, physical activity, or meditations brought to my awareness just how little I wished to or was able to sit peacefully.

One day during meditation, a feeling of gratefulness comes over me for my growing ability to direct attention. Without noticing, I slip into a lively internal dialogue. I am challenging a relative of mine whose remarks about my poor memory years before still sting. She is a teacher of learning disabled children. ‘Where is your compassion for me?’ I demand to know. And then I realize how through some mysterious progression my grateful thoughts have seamlessly deteriorated: For how many years have I been carrying a pool of sour feelings before this moment of seeing that my energy is locked into feeling injured by some thoughtless comment?

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