Semiotica 2013; 193: 1 – 20

Aarne Ruben

Presence of la femme: The semiotic silence

Abstract: This paper is concentrated on the phenomenon of silence

in a situation, which lacks an actual signifier: silence is

renderable, although not accessible for every hearer. Different

strata of silence are represented and thoroughly depicted.

The author observes several historical appearances of the

phenomenon of quietness: pictorial, radio silence, conventional

(arbitrary) silence. Silence is never perfect, it is only a harmony

of accidental noises. Silence in the Hell-mouth tradition in folklore

plays the role of semiotic relaxation time.

There were devils in the seventeenth century Estonian witchcraft

tradition. In cases when witches would not be quiet and revealed some

parts of their identity to their enemies, e.g, through their magic

spells, Satan could immediately run with them to a remota loca.

Through the stages of civilization’s formation, silence cast the

following roles: discursive or memorial gaps, memory traumas. The

symbols of local memory traumas are codes for the magical operators

in the mouth of Hell: you should never disclose your name to the non-

identity.

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Keywords: silence; witchcraft; phantasms; semiotic borders; remote

place; Lotman’s

theory

Aarne Ruben: University of Tallinn. E-mail:

aarne_ruben@hotmail.com

Silence is a perceptual trick because where there is no silence

neither are there human beings. In science fiction films, a

terrifying image of silence exists – space.

This is a place with actual silence; in outer space it really

exists but there are no living witnesses to enjoy it. Quietness most

likely exists inside black holes but we refer to this kind of

phenomenon more semiotically as a loss of information.

What is the loss of information in the world of silence? This

analysis is more a debate about the positions of different silencers

than the position of silence itself. In the medieval and early modern

eras, silence was a special code used to relate with the underworld

and supernatural forces. The present article offers a semiotic

approach in the field of studying silence as witchcraft and other

phenomena.

Silence exists on a large scale between the silence in space and

little ordinary silences in the everyday human routine, in empty gaps

in music and literature. This article approaches silence as a

philosopheme.

What is silence after all? Eco et al. (2000: 9) answer by

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analyzing Aquinas’ semiotic study: silence is non vocalis and with

the distinction mark non significativa. Silence is never perfect, it

is only a harmony of accidental noises. And as we will see below,

silence in the Hell-mouth tradition in folklore plays the role of

semiotic relaxation time.

Magic spells in the Old World are a common and convenient subject

in cultural semiotics. A black magic spell is a speech act that ends

the domination of a named or often nameless Evil, grasping the victim

into a hellish world.

Being silent was a last chance for a sortilegia / witch that

constantly kept in touch with evil forces. There were many forms of

silence in medieval and early modern eras – the silence of libraries

and monasteries, the silence of the demonic world or graves, the

silence of nature or the sea, the silence during the prayer of

vulgus, waiting for the end of a drought. Silence in a dark

situation, face-to-face with unpure forces, enables a witch to

maintain his personal identity.

Although according to the old legend a spell frees bewitched

knights from a curse (Paton 1970: 90–92), magic scenes also tolerate

silence as a medium, which is necessary in creating contact with the

underworld.

1 The no-words-back principle

A strange story happened in 1623 in a small Estonian place

Karjaküla (less than twenty kilometers from Tallinn, in Keila

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parish). From a housemaid of the manor, Mall, a baby was stolen and

she was lost for two hours. Although Mall found her child, she

accused a certain company of local peasants: a farm’s owner Tammeke

Wolk and a certain girl Marret. Mall’s accusation was quite serious:

alliance with Devil himself, serving him, and bringing him pleasure.

Consequently, kidnapping Mall’s baby was perhaps intended as a bribe

to Him, although there was no evidence about this kind of sacrifice.

According to the accusation, Marret established contact with the

evil world, bringing the altar bread from the mass every Sunday to a

field far away and spitting it out under an aspen tree. On the third

Sunday, a spume appeared on the bread and a small black man came out

of the earth. Marret said nothing to this person and silently agreed

with everything. Silence ruled the place and any vocal expression was

absent. Marret’s last session with Devil was on St. Mary’s Night (in

the Estonian tradition, it was in March 25th, the most poetic night

of the year); afterwards, she went to drink with Wolk’s brother,

Hindrich. That night, the other members of the company accused

Hindrich of buying drinks without having any money to pay for them.

Hindrich asked Marret to use her witchcraft to obtain some money to

pay. Then Marret raised her hands, put them on her breasts and said:

“God gave me this cross and I have to carry the cross” (Beiträgen

1939: 329).

Silence generally seems to be a common phone for supernatural

acts. Since Burchard, the bishop of Worms gave his decretalia in

1025, it has been understood that persons that have devoted their

souls to Satan could frequently find each other in quietae noctis

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silentio (Quellen 1901: 40). According to Burchard’s classical

opinion, quietas noctis silentio is needed for a witch to rise to

heaven, even in the imaginative closures of the air, clausis in aëram

(Quellen 1901: 40). Burchard’s vision reflects a purely monastic

viewpoint. Even Burchard realized that nothing could exist without

voices, even mari (a form of incubus, the horrible nightmares) limp

noisily at night on their three legs, as the medieval belief stated

(Lecoteux 1987: 13). The Christian faith in general is a noisy thing

– and the trumpets of angels are the proof of belief.

As in sagas and fairy tales, the silence ritual played an

important role in representing ceremonies among Native Americans in

the eighteenth century. These quite strange welcomings were noticed

by early English colonists among Algonquian speakers in Chesapeake

Bay: “When a stranger comes to their house, the chiefe man in it

desires the stranger to sit down; within a little while, he rises and

toucheth the stranger with his hand, saying‚ ‘You are come’; after

him, all the rest of the house doe the same. None speaketh to him, or

asketh him any questions, till he think fit to speak first”

(Pargellis 1959: 241). Information is so expensive that no tribesman

could spend it before the stranger’s message level is exceeded.

A semiotic observation of human relationships with the Unholde

leads us from Saussurian methods to zero semiotic units. There are

two main possible schemes of the ways of a sender in magic

situations.

When an addresser cannot use silence as her weapon, she will leave

without her identity, and the Devil takes over. But let us examine

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this “general” silence, which ruled over a remota loca in Karjaküla

on a Sunday in 1623.

It is not easy to determine the semiotic part of silence. We can

forget a word, but not supersede it totally from our mind. Robert

Godel called the silences in speech discursive or reminder gaps

(lacune discoursif ou mémoriel; Godel 1967: 31). According to Godel,

in the case of general silence during a conversation, the signified

of a potential message remains the same, only the signifiers

corresponding to them are latent and do not allow the signifieds to

appear as themselves. The zero sign is not an absence of a sign, the

signified only releases a discursive or reminder gap in the sign and

the signifier does not reach into phonic realization (Godel 1967:

31). This means that unspoken words still exist, they are either

simply forgotten (replaced with reminder gaps) or unwanted (replaced

with discursive gaps). What may cause the zeroness of sign in Godel’s

theory?

A zero structure in semiotics can appear as a formless lump among

very structured units. A snowflake is a good example. There are a

myriad of differently structured snowflakes, but if one snowflake has

broken dendrites, it could be a unit that maintains some signifying

knowledge, as we know that all the others still have fast pattern

building.

In this case, Marret was ordered to be silent, her silence was an

access code, not especially an entrance code. Entering into another

world was for her completely unhealthy, so she used a secure route

and did not act performatively toward a hole that leads to the

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underworld. Stealing the messages means stealing the identity.

Unlike real history, the voice and silence in fairy-tales are

always linked with promises, prohibitions, and rule-breaking. While

silence in witchcraft was a way to hold identity, silencing in fairy-

tale plots is a duty to keep oneself from the worst (Russian tales

Tsar-ptitsa and “Baba-Yaga and the Elf” are good examples).

Marret’s silencing as she confronts strong powers does not seem to

be a single episode; it appears as a part of much larger puzzle, an

element of the Western phonocentric scope of ideas. Touching the

Unholde means accepting the common principle of the relation with

supernatural forces, the no-words-back principle. In the second book

of “King Arthur’s Death” this principle is very clear: “Then Sir

Galahad came unto a mountain where he found an old chapel, and found

there nobody, for all, all was desolate; and there he kneeled to-fore

the altar, and besought God of wholesome counsel. So as he prayed he

heard a voice that said: Go thou now, thou adventurous knight, to the

Castle of Maidens, and there do thou away the wicked customs. When

Sir Galahad heard this he thanked God and took his horse.” (Malory

1909–1914: 14)

As we are reminded of Sir Galahad’s castle acts, the no-words-back

principle is very active. Sir Galahad was addressed by God, while

Marret spoke with Devil. Unlike God, the Devil is a deceiver.

(Decipiator in Latin, which contains phonetically but not

semantically close stem “decipher.” Analogues include водитель in

Russian folklore and vidäjä in Finnish-Estonian, which refer to a

demonic person that misleads wanderers and is also a decipiator in

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his inner substance.) A decipiator-vidäjä gives us wrong, cheating

signals, which we could not mirror back. In a fairy tale, we need a

magic agent to repel those signals.

Medieval and early modern European man stood before a dilemma: to

choose a positive world picture or negative forces. An access code

for the former would be an open phrase, while inner words were needed

for the latter. The people of the freshly newborn modern era even

organized symbolic white and black processions with the presence of a

witch, who was punished in the same evening. In a witch trial in

Lédec (Hungary) a mass of people all wore white or black clothes.

These “witch troops” marched on the night of Epiphany (sixth of

January), probably in AD 1722. All of them bore the same contrasting

flags, the world was either white or black, there are no middle

variants (Pócks 1999: 41). The enlightenment era had already begun,

but the world still held a simplified, bipolar, human gestalt-like

view. It was useless to fight with this gestaltic vision; it was

deeply rooted in the souls of the masses. We will see below that the

access codes for the supernatural were sophisticated both

historically and semiotically.

2 Silence as a code

The story of the priest Urbain Grandier is a story about

inquisition in the Diocese of Poitiers at the beginning of the

seventeenth century (in 1634). He reportedlybroke his vow of priestly

celibacy and a group of nuns from the local Ursuline convent accused

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him of having bewitched them. The judges, after torturing the priest,

introduced documents purportedly signed by Grandier and several

demons as evidence that he had made a diabolical pact. One of the

pacts was written in Latin and appeared to be signed by Grandier;

another looked almost illegible (but was in fact written backwards

with Latin abbreviations – and has been published and translated in a

number of books about witchcraft), had many strange symbols, and was

“signed” by several demons with their seals, as well as by Satan

himself (a signature clearly readable as Satan-as).

Silence was also a relation instrument in this case. Satan answers

to Jeanne des Anges, the prioress of the Ursuline monastery and the

main accuser of père Grandier: “When asked: Qui es tu, mendax, pater

mendacii? Quod est nomen tuum? [Who are you, liar, father of lies?

What is your name?] the demon said, after a long silence: “I forgot

my name. I can’t find it . . . ”

And commanded once more to say his name, he said: “I lost my name

in the wash.”” (Certeau 2000: 44)

“Lost in the wash” means the same silence and it breaks the chain

of phantasm-sending, which is displayed by Italian semiotician

Roberto Pellerey (Pellerey 1989: 94):

res (sender) → phantasm (message) → agent intellect (receiver and

operator) →

phantasm (message) → possible intellect (destination)

While the demon’s name is forgotten and lost in the wash, he still

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uses the method of silencing. I can’t find it – the agent intellect

(the operator) does not recognize the content of message and sends it

back to the res with a question: among which res (things) could I

finally find my name? In generally, naming wasimportant and typical

medieval practice: in Dante’s Vita nuova Beatrice’s name “is Love,”

while Guido Cavalcanti’s is mentioned in the same book as Primavera

(Spring). “Frailty, thy name is woman” in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is

even clearer.

The persons baptized with such names taken from nature also bear a

strong metaphorization in their dispositions and in this certain case

the nameless demon was simply unmetaphorized, a poor creature without

the possibility of establishing himself on a path of meanings.

Moreover, perhaps this “lost in wash” along with silence was a

simple memorial gap in Jeanne’s inner world, formed around a local

memory trauma?

In most cases, there is no habit of “saying nothing” in face-to-

face encounters with the Devil, as Marret of Badwitz did. Other court

records from Estonia in 1687 speak about a peasant that used the

words said to one devil as an entrance key to the other world, but

not said (silenced) to the other people of Hell – a mouse and a

little hutted man. In this very year, the Land Court of Tartu decided

to punish two local peasants, Luuka Tõnu and Oosa Mikk, with the full

arm of the law. A certain Peter Ronimus (which means “roundworm of

the fish” in old Estonian) complained that one of the poor peasants

bewitched him and caused him Sausewind (e.g., disturbing) moods.

After torture, Oosa Mikk confessed that he met regularly a man from a

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mouse hole dressed in red. And there was another little man and a

little mouse who were both silent. Unlike them, the red man

introduced himself and promised to give the whole world to Mikk. Oosa

Mikk bowed into the hole and told him he would not bewitch Ronimus’

little horse any more.

Unlike Marret’s silencing, it was a concrete answer to the Unholde

Welt – an opening code for sesame. According to Maritain, the magic

sign “not only makes men know, it makes things be; it is an efficient

cause in itself” (Maritain 1957: 96). It opens sesame. This unpure

world always forces one to bow – it is a symmetrical response of

bowing and kneeling in God’s world. “Silence and bow” – this was a

nobleman’s everyday command to his serving peasant and the last one

used to bow often. This was a part of their everyday practice.

Mikk’s open-sesame words act like a dechiphering of the

underworld. The promises of the underworld were here quite concrete:

“Wenn er kommt mit mir zuraus . . . ist viel . . . der gantzen Welt

ihm können geben” (EAA: 5; kann ihm geben would be more correct, but

we do not know the context as a whole, because the central part of

the sentence is deleted. However, the meaning is understood).

As we have seen, the key figures of this story were also silent.

In all of these cases, silence is not simple silence, it is a promise

to say something. Oosa Mikk went through a secure route in relation

with the second man and the hellish mouse (Satan’s equivalent), but

he went through an insecure route with the red man. It is important

to emphasize that stories with the presence of “satanic” silence are

fake and fabricated. You can never hear that which is silenced and

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unsaid. Oosa Mikk narrated this only under conditions of supposedly

unbearable torture. Silence is the signified without signifier. When

Satan (decipiator) is silent, the Sausewind moods appear.

The mouse-hole as a cultural phenomenon has its special place in

Estonian folklore. Animal holes (urruaugud) were some of the few

exits of the traditional Estonian barn-dwelling, which were small and

rich with smoke at that time. So an Estonian man in the seventeenth

century also believed mouse holes in forest to be urruauk of the

inhabited (souls) land. The mouse was wise and clever for the ancient

Estonian because he was truly capable of liquidating harvests one by

one.

Oosa Mikk’s story gives us a chance to make important conclusions

about silence as a magical process. A scene in front of the mouse’s

hole, the equivalent of Hell, was semiotically noisy, totally loaded

with information. There were voices that bravely uttered and there

were also such voices that dared to speak nothing.

This Faustian mess puts us under the question that points toward a

demonological solution to the problem: Why would the Devil allows

such messy and chaotic scenes? Why would he favor giving the

information in such a chaotic code?

Who is the Devil? The interrogation of Jeanne des Anges gives us a

strict answer: the Devil is not only a liar, he is also the father of

all liars. Therefore, he can cheat the company of smaller liars.

Every word you say can be used against you and can penetrate your

identity. And silence in witchcraft episodes is a unit of

information, sent by addressers from both sides – from the hellish

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and human “camps.” Only the signified exists in the silent “signal”;

the signifier is purely imaginary, although every witch in the scene

knows the point. You cannot bewitch without strong knowledge about

the connotations.

3 Access and entrance codes

The access code for Marret was silence and for Mikk it was a

choice between different hellish persons. It is important to notice

that the approaching unit to the hell hole was a mission, especially

for Marret. The relationship with unpure forces was cyclical. There

were presence missions in front of the hole and we consider that the

bowers’ access codes were different, but there were no entrance

codes. The world’s folkloristic tradition repeats the story of the

prohibition from Hell for some persons: “The Devil, upset at the

trick Jack played on him, refused to let him into Hell.” Access codes

are for those whom the Devil trusts, the real entrance codes are for

no one.

This leads us to the consequence that codes for the magical

operators in the mouth of Hell have a certain relaxation time. The

term comes from popular mechanics, where it signifies a state’s

transition, a time during which a device’s state turns into another.

Only tricksters can avoid those long relaxation times. Who can endure

a hellish hole? Only those persons that have magic rings, unbreakable

from the inside and outside. Only they can wait in this tense

situation.

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We must also consider the historical context where those

testimonies were given. In Oosa Mikk’s case, Mikk might have indeed

been a trickster, but in severe and official court situations, nobody

was aware of that. Mikk’s acting like a witch and a trickster were

simply humorous phenomena.

Silence in magic situations arose from a temporary lack of an

expressive signifier.

In the European context, there were centuries when silences were

readable. American people’s meetings with devils were noisier, in

some cases, different devils even introduced themselves (Boyer and

Nissenbaum 1977: 56); cats, books, and pinches became the natural

attributes of the unforgettable meeting.

The devil’s scene in both European and American contexts is a

traumatic phenomenon, full of purposeful forgettings. It was an

unusual and extreme situation for the modern and premodern people and

folktales carry only the sweetest part of this to the present. Only

through viewing and studying the sources of variation in the semiotic

process we can state that the meaning and the context of

interpersonal relations have thoroughly changed over the last 500

years. “Satanic” silence with the access codes described above

remained only until the seventeenth century and never returned after

the end of the absolutist era.

4 The glosseme of silence

In radio messaging, silences are always preceded and succeeded by

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very strong semiotical boundary markers. Silence is an uncertain

state and needs euphemisms to describe its depressing power. On May

7, 1954, a four-engine transport plane started from a Frankfurt

military airport with two important passengers on board. They were

the British MI 2 spies Hans Toomla, whose agent name was Artur (Art),

and Kaljo Kukk, pseudonym Karl, both Estonians (Ruben 2007).

By that time the Estonian Republic had been occupied for fourteen

years, first by the Soviets, then by the Nazis, and then by Soviet

powers again. Estonia had gone through two agonizing deportations,

more than 25,000 Estonian citizens were to be forced exile into

Siberia, lots of them into concentration camps where half of them

would not survive. Estonia had lost one quarter of its population.

The challenges against the ruling political regime were strictly

forbidden and harshly punished. Despite of all this, the citizens of

the newly established Estonian SSR hoped for a new beginning on the

other side of iron curtain.

That same night, the reconnaissance plane reached above the

Estonian territory and both agents were dropped down at Pärnumaa, in

a place full of extremely large, thick, primeval forest. They landed

secretly with their parachutes, having a very powerful radio

transmitter with the capacity to reach all over the Europe. They also

had two Walther P38 army pistols, two pen-shaped pistols with tear

gas, and cyanide capsules hidden under their collars. Hans Toomla had

documents on the name Karl Peterson in his pocket, Kaljo Kukk owned a

pair of false documents for the non-existent persons Ilmar Taluots

and Endel Sutt. Their dangerous incognito life inside Soviet society

15

had begun and lasted for three months.

Toomla’s radio messages to the West were encrypted, but the

encryption was quite weak. After buying a Moskvitch car, Toomla

forwarded important things to British intelligence. The following

message was sent by him from Vändra forest; it was in Estonian and in

Morse Code – their senders were true specialists in both:

“We bought a car. Art, I repeat, Art – his relatives are in good

health. I have not contacted my relatives. Give me three necessary

addresses. The addresses you have given are inexact, omit either the

street names or house numbers. Listen to me on the day, marked with a

cross. Art, I repeat, Art. Karl, I repeat, Karl. Sad woman, sad

woman, sad woman! The end, the end, the end!” (quoted in Ruben 2007,

my translation).

Some parts of their code make us think. Those were the emergency

exits from the “randomly put character language” messages: cabix

(“all our weapons are lost”) and qrt (means “the enemy is close, I

must end”). This qrt (dash-dash-dot-dash dot-dash-dot dash) sounds

very similar to the Estonian word kurat (a devil), however, it is not

a linguistic sign. Let us re-emphasize that the exit code of the

message about buying the car was “sad woman.” Semantically, it is a

specially stressed marker for the irrefutable fact that a silence

will follow all the signals, the last one included. It should have

been only a very strong, underlined semiotic unit: for example “sad

woman.” Yuri Lotman has written that semiotic processes that happen

on the borders are more intense. Toomla had to choose a very special

code unit to mark the border between the message and the following

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silence; he chose “sad woman” because it did not relate with any

woman in Estonia during their short visit to the dearest places of

their homeland. The expression “sad woman” repeated three times was

the height of absurdity and marked the beginning of radio silence

until the next transmission. Psychoanalysts could perhaps notice the

relation between Toomla’s expression and Melanie Klein’s little

patient Rita, who, in her Oedipal stage, murmured aside, shredding a

picture of woman: “Dead woman, dead woman, dead woman . . .” (Frank

2009: 131).

The main point is that the spies associated with no women in

Estonia and at the end of this story the KGB shot both of them. In

sending his messages, Toomla proceeded from typical human logic:

after the message, silence always follows. According to Yuri Lotman,

the track marker, signifying the border of his message, should

evaluate the inner and outer condition of its world – the message.

Toomla knew that you can give a strong impulse to end the radio

transmission. And it was a paradoxal ending: let’s talk about women

as ordinary men do – women, who never revealed themselves to Toomla

and Kukk until the end of their days. It was a strongest signal to

end the transmission – and the spies used it.

The conclusion: silence is silence only when strongly separated by

its edges.

Silence always hides a question of boundaries in itself.

If we forbear to metaphorize the term “silence” and approach it by

considering it as something very real, we are certainly bounding

against Ernesto Laclau’s theory of the concept. In his

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Emancipation(s), Laclau theorizes about village people living beside

a powerful waterfall. On a beautiful day, the falls stop and dry up.

“But if for any reason the fall of the water suddenly stops one day,

they will start hearing that which, strictly speaking, cannot be

heard: silence” (Laclau 1996: 94). It is the lack of something that

so far acquired full presence. In this newly born silence now

randomly and alternately appear different noises. Some of the

inhabitants may have even known about its presence before, when the

sound of the waterfall overshadowed everything. They all now

experience a communitarian lack, the unconscious longing for

something, which was in reality a disorder, a hole in the societal

continuity.

Let it be imagined, for instance, that, instead of “sad woman,”

Toomla and Kukk had ended their transmission with words “that’s all,

there is no more to say,” repeated three times. Those words would not

have been a strong, boldly marked line to end the silence and would

not have sounded good together with the qrt (a devil). After all,

they would be boring and non-mystic. Use extremely cryptic words with

an indirect semantic field that connotes women and the possible

interceptor of your cryptic message will be afraid of you!

It is very likely that frequently mentioning ladies in

intelligence language and coded messages is a result of hegemonic

exclusion described by Laclau. The British-Argentinian philosopher

often emphasized that language especially mirrors borders and

oppositions, which are always antagonistic. What frightens the enemy

most? A woman. Friedrich Firsof’s book The Secret Codes of Comintern

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in 1919–1943 cites the following sequence, which describes the

instructions given to a Comintern’s spy for a meeting with his

contact person:

“He has a brown portfolio and wears a brown suit. Your man must

read the same journal as you and hold in his mouth a pipe that he

does not smoke. Your man should ask you a matchbox and get a lighter

that contains no petrol. Then you should ask: which film runs in the

cinema and get the answer: La Femme.” (Firsov 2007: 417)

Contemplating the subject from this point of view, we reach to the

important hypothesis about the position of silence in cultural

semiotics and more broadly, in history. Perhaps the quietness of wise

kings disciplines bothersome chatterboxes?

Jesus, the King of Heavens, never answered the question of what

the truth is. He could avoid a mass of further stupid questions with

his act of silence. An enfant terrible can always be obstinate and

continue to bomb the target with information units, often invalid

ones. The information flow would be unlimited. A Voltairesque

Estonian proverb says that a fool can ask more than ten wise men can

answer. A wise man thinks more than the masses. Every real king

prefers to be silent rather than answering many questions. In the

nineteenth century, Thomas de Quincey wrote that Jesus’s silence was

a false gloss for Pilate, because the Roman governor intended to use

this knowledge in his ruling practice, but in vain (De Quincey 2008:

43) – just like the devil could not use the silence of Marret of

Karjaküla. But De Quincey was right in the semiotic aspect – silence

is a gloss and has a structure similar to a real gloss.

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5 The harmless non-silencers

Are the borders between silence and non-silence and then silence

again bilingual and translatable?

The world of radio interval signals of the Central Radio of USSR

is familiar to those who were children during Soviet times. The

signifying markers of the radio station Mayak were two signals of the

“Moscow Nights” tune (composed by Vassily Soloviov-Sedoi)1, and an

interval signal of the number one Soviet Central Radio program was

Широка страна моя родная (“Wide is My Homeland”)2 by Isaac

Dunayevsky. The information from the All-Union broadcaster Mayak

spread across a wider area; theoretically it has been listened to

from the statue of Immanuel Kant in Kaliningrad to the deerbreeders

in Chukotka, from Arctic expeditions to the border of China.

“Moscow is speaking! All the TV and radio broadcasts of Soviet

Union are open!” A surprising paradox was expressed in this statement

because Soviet society in general was not open at all, it was totally

non-informative and closed.

Every former Soviet citizen who lived during the period feels the

memories come flooding back, because they remember “Moscow Nights” in

the mornings.

Moscow Nights” aired through the night-like morning was also half

mystical; it has reappeared in some of my dreams. The tune consisted

of two monotonic signals with a gap between them; the gap that lasted

1 http://www.radioscanner.ru/uploader/2007/radio_maak.mp32 http://www.sovmusic.ru/m32/radio.mp3

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two seconds in 1972 and almost five seconds in 1982. Consequently,

the silence dividing two signals increased at a rate of 0.3 seconds

per year. A normal dream lasts far more. But even two seconds is

enough to remember it persistently. It might be a language unit,

equal to two quick breaths and therefore fitted to the action of

human organism – we can cite Umberto Eco: “A dream is a scripture,

and many scriptures are nothing but dreams” (Eco 2004: 438).

The dreamy voices were being formed in a far away childhood. The

boundary between a signal and a gap was strict, but open in both

directions.

The border of semiotic space is the most important functional and

structural position, giving substance to its semiotic mechanism. The

border is a bilingual mechanism, translating external communications

into the internal language of the semiosphere and vice versa.

Thus, only with the help of the boundary is the semiosphere able

to establish contact with non-semiotic and extra-semiotic spaces. As

soon as we move into the realm of semantics, we have to appeal to an

extrasemiotic reality. However, let us not forget, that this reality

becomes for a given semiosphere “a reality in itself” only insofar as

it has been translated into the language of the semiosphere. (Lotman

2005: 210)

We can easily find that periods of the signals are translated into

the language of the gaps of silence, the information of the voice

mirrors the structure of silence in the meantime. When a signal has

sounded, we can imagine the sound of it once more during the long

pause. Psychologists call this phenomenon perceptual masking (Toch

21

1956), human eyes’ jumping to the new visual figure, which is always

jammed by metacontrast – a noise, which bears in itself the lines of

the former object (retroactivity). We are turning our sight, but

nevertheless seeing the same object (although Toch’s experiment

involved lights, which are not quite eyefriendly objects).

Semioticians would see it as setting out the neutral term between two

different evidences of sign. Certainly, this is one of the basics of

sight and sound of witchcraft, which I described in the past

sections. Why are the interval signal’s pauses so inspiring? They

often appear in dreams, because they were awakening scenarios of the

early hours of childhood. The signals contain following connotations:

1. You should wake up and jump out from your bed (an order).

1a. But this is not difficult (a negative contingent postulate).

1b. Because this is not alarm, but a radio (an argumentation).

1c. And signals are soft (a contingent postulate).

2. Then you should start your morning exercises as your radio

commands (an order).

2a. You should raise and lower your hands as ordered (two orders).

2b. But this is also very easy (a contingent postulate).

3. So you can expect a nice day (a preposition).

4. But as you are awakened in such secure way, you can remember

sunshine, the sunny valleys, and other attributes of a dream based on

childhood memories (a promise).

There is a temptation to agree that interval signals are typical

code-bearing units that can simplify a human’s life. The signals and

the gaps are heavily loaded with connotations and therefore

22

bilingual, translatable. We can analyze the signals themselves, if we

have sufficient epistemons about the intermedium gaps. Why did the

gaps increase over ten years? Because the interval signals were

planned to be the voices and silences of the state. In 1972, the

state was young and hurried with its signals. In 1982, the state was

old and had far more extra time to represent itself. The older the

state, the more solemn the style.

It was the game of the 1980s. The radio silence, especially among

the signals of the correct time or musical signals could mean a

certain warning. The possible meanings: maybe something is happened

to “our” steadfast state? May this delay be caused by an unexpectedly

started nuclear war, dangerous to all of civilization?

Unusually long-lasting silence between the typical signals always

means a remarkable danger and the human mind is in some way

programmed to recognize it. It is a communitarian lack, too.

6 The possible universal meaning of silence

The Universe around us is empty of any messages. Potential

friends’ silence in the vast deepness of distances do not reach us.

Getting closer to the famous boxer paradox of Ludwig Wittgenstein, we

can formulate rational reasons why.

They are too proud and do not want to talk with imbecile

civilizations (usual argument).

They are small and beginners and are waiting until they grow

enough to make contact, so that they can learn from us so far

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(argument of a fool).

Our language conforms to theirs; their language is non-formal to

us (like the doorkeeper and Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial). For

example, if they handle random noise as pointed information (argument

of unfitting patterns).

They already attempted to contact but we did not notice it or

despised them.

Or otherwise we did not notice our attempt to establish contact in

the past and forwarded them something wrong (argument of the

unmemorized past).

They cannot contact, because they know about a danger threatening

us and they want to accelerate it (argument of two comrades).

They know that a cosmic letter is not a cosmic attachment and the

last one may have the opposite meaning (argument of a letter).

There is a certain order by which civilizations can contact each

other and they do it in strict order. Probably we do not know the

order, but probably we know it very well and even more – we

established it (argument of the stuck consciousness).

Or – silence is not at all common information in space. It is the

Miranda warning before the opposition with other witnesses and before

the verdict (“You have the right to remain silent”).

Or – they do not contact us not because we are pretty primitive

but, just the opposite, because we are highly developed. Their lack

of contact has one reason – we live in incorrectly compressed

timespace. Only losses of information in black holes are correct

things for them.

24

If silence is a discursive gap of information like the zero sign

with its latent signifiers (Godel 1967: 31), then it should also

contain different layers. The layers shall be: a state before

silencing, the warning, and then oppressive silence itself.

The human way of packing data looks like data compression in

computer science. When the compression level is weak, we may minimize

the size of our file by deleting unnecessary characters, especially

those that consist of parts of other characters (e.g., š). When the

compression level is powerful and we must compress a large .jpg file

to .rar format (the abbreviation for a Roshal Archive), our power

uses formulas and equations to achieve this. But if we use an

equation for data compression, we must consider that all information

would not be packed. However, in such case, the results are better.

Besides achieving far better results, superfluous patterns exist and

when we start to uncompress, the noise will mess up our bright

general picture.

The whole process is quite different in nature. The systems

described above are typical to human thinking – using formulas to

jump over odd information clusters. Nature solves the problem in

different ways. When in the human world an equation exactly preserves

the correct placement of the gaps, on the surface of a black hole all

of the borders have ceased to be bilingual, therefore it is not a

semiosystem.

A human observer can destroy the event horizon only in the case

when the black hole evaporates (Smolin and Oppenheim 2006). By the

way, if you want to understand silence, you should deconstruct it.

25

Our reader can now see what causes incorrect human vision,

transporting imaginative demons and creating a demonological

situation. It is the same element that silence has: the construction

of a recently seen/heard object onto a new one. I call this the

retroactivity of the motion of eyeballs. In the context of silence

this fact has a special meaning.

7 Silence in cultural semiotics

The language of heraldic signs shows us in unprecedented ways how

the phenomenon of silence has been understood in the past. Yuri

Dolgoruki (1099–1157), the founder of Moscow ordered the New Gate of

Yaroslavl city to be built. But Dolgoruki (“the Long Hand”) was

politically influenced by the Mokshas, people of Fenno-Ugric origin

that came from the North. Even his father Vladimir (or Valdemarr)

Monomakh (1053–1125; “He Who Fights Alone”, the metonymy also used

for the gladiators in Greek cultural space) strongly considered the

Mokshas and switched their famous bear-faced goddess Mokoshtsha to

the pantheon of Kiev Rus’ – although for the Christian layman she was

a demon with some powers and for the pious monks – the female Devil.

The point was in fastening the coat of arms of the female bear

(медведица) to the New Gate of the ancient town of Yaroslavl in the

1130s or 1140s . So these were the Fenno-Ugric tribes Moksha, Merya,

and Murom that the city of Moscow city its name; according to one of

many hypotheses it means Maa-skava in the Murom language (“Mother of

Bears”). Christian rulers of the Kiev Rus’ used the whole

26

legend to their aims and claimed that Yaroslavl’s coat of arms was

inherited from Yaroslav the Wise (Ярослав Мудрый, Jarizleifr; 978–

1054) who won a fight with a spiteful bear exactly in Medveditsa on

the left bank of Kotorosli river near theKreml of Yaroslavl.

Throughout history, the bear bearing a hellebard is always

depicted with her mouth closed on all coats of arms of Yaroslavl city

(Revo 1978: 69). In the European heraldry tradition, all the heraldic

predators furiously open their mouths (e.g., in the coats of arms of

all old European monarchies). Lions, falcons, eagles, bulls, deer,

gryphs, and even horses all hold their mouths open, anticipating a

possible attack. The bear on West-European coats of arms is also

threatening.

Even pope Benedict XVI has a bear on his coat of arms, mentioning

his heritance from Bavaria.

The medveds, their Russian colleagues, differ from Western

heraldic tradition by their closed mouths. Why then?

The possibility exists that story about the coat of arms of

Yaroslav the Wise and the history of the city of Yaroslavl gives us

half of the answer. The bear’s unopened mouth may not be caused by

her underlining of the values of silence. She is standing anyway and

therefore does not need to appear more threatening. She is frightful

enough. Thus, the bear is not only the personification of the legend,

it is the echo of the medieval abysses of the tradition of

sustainability: Epictetus said anexou kai apexou (sustain and

abstine) and St. Benedict translated it sustine et abstine,

whereafter it became English heraldic motto “Bear and forebear!”

27

It is known that the bear is a very patient animal, and if the

huntsmen’s spears are quite blunt, the mother-bear can bear their

strikes for hours on winter nights.

Silencing coats-of-arms are the representatives of the quietness

and also the symbols of the magic remota loca, as we will see below.

Most probably, the Russian bears with closed mouths are

remembrances of an old belief: there is silence in erä or weihs. In

the Finnish language, erä denoted an inhabited area, and in Old

Germanic, the protonym weihs marked the same thing. Erä and weihs

were far away from the village (Anttonen 1996: 216), which was

separated with eräpyhä for the Finnish and hiis (a holy forest) for

the Estonians.

Eräpyhä and hiis were the historical bilingual border markers and

the commune knew what was behind the boundaries of this holy forest –

it was the silence. It is not only on occasion that in the oldest

layers of Estonian folk-songs only the most silent objects wanted to

marry with Salme, the mythological girl, despising the wooing of the

Star, the Moon, and the Sun. “The Wooing of Salme” (“Star-Bride

Salme”) is considered to be one of the oldest parts of the Estonian

national epos Kalevipoeg (“Kalev’s son”; 1857) and the modal

equivalent of Salme’s wooing is songs 24–26 of the Finnish epos

Kalevala. These motives date back to the pre-Christian era, the later

Bronze Age (to the seventh century in the region) is mentioned

(Kalevipoeg 1961: 442) – when it could have been.

Once upon a time in remota loca (a remote place) lived three

sisters: a gentle maiden Salme, a secretive maiden Linda, and their

28

abandoned sister, called Crow. Sixty young men proposed marriage to

Salme, among them was the Moon, a celestial wooer. As strict

tradition in those days demanded that a potential young bride be in

the barn until the stranger conducts the negotiation about her fate,

Salme answered from the barn: “Ei mina, kuld lähe kuule, Hõbe, ei

ööde valguselle!” (No! I won’t marry the Moon, I won’t wed that night

light; Kreutzwald 2007: 26).

Salme’s motivation to reject the Moon’s wooing is caused by his

habit of rising during and after short summer nights, when in day-

time hard-working girls want to sleep. Then the Moon goes away, sadly

silencing. It comes out, he appeased, not only silenced. The next

wooer is the Sun, whom Salme understands, but he also cannot be the

best man for her: the Sun causes droughts and is therefore harmful.

As he goes away defeated, the Sun puffs and punishes in this manner

all living on the earth with his blaze. Salme accepts the Star’s

proposal in the end and comes out from her hiding place. At this

moment, she gives an order to offer the Star a place of honor at the

dinner table because he is most silent, only a blinking celestial

body. After these positive changes, the Star turns wilder, he

literally outflows of his flames. It is a freeing of sexual energy,

similar to the ancient fecundity rite, in fact, with marker

attributes of the Christian culture. At the same time, Salme’s

“secretive and enigmatic” sister Linda, the mythical foremother of

all Estonians has been simply following the events, not preferring

any of those silenced persons herself. The guests are silent and for

this reason foreigners. The fact is, the silenced persons are the

29

messengers of the pre-Creation world, as the world created from a

bird’s egg. Having the coat of arms bears be silent is the same as

considering celestial wooers: it is sacred, taboo. Silence was a

sacred phenomenon. It is a faraway echo of the pulsations of the

Creation. Even more, a bear does not belong to society, she is

totally outside of it and therefore sacred. As Veikko Anttonen puts

it: “The bear is nameless, because the name is a sign of community

only” (Anttonen 1996: 138).

Being in remota loca, as the heroes of Kalevipoeg having been, a

person should consider with different, namely, derived logic. Émile

Benveniste analyzed the linguistic formation of the

subjects/references “I”, “we,” and so-called third person. If you

want to create “you,” a subject must begin from the monotomy “I” and

proceed from the dichotomy “we.” “He” is deprived of its subjective

reference and does not demand pointing (Benveniste 2008: 253). You

could establish several “He”s in the relation situation, therefore

Benveniste argued that “He” is determined only by the communicators

and hereby faceless. A message-sender itself can choose which

predicate he/she prefers and how they can designate the subject place

of “He”/third person – either the respectful “His Majesty” or

pejorative “a Smith entered.” In both constructions, “He” occupies

the central place and speech goes about some third person (Benveniste

2008).

According to Benveniste, the fourth person derived from the second

one in near-prehistoric times, together with other linguistic

signifiers of the subject-object relation. In this situation, every

30

object called “She” is in unknown places, e.g., barns and if He turns

to She, He first communicates to She’s father, which is still

believed to be a larger and deeper generalization of She. After all,

in a remote place all the huge Egos and Cogitos change to be little

parts of Una Sumus’s. A Sami hunter in the sledge of his dogsled

sings in lonely snowy places because of being afraid to lose the

correct orientation about himself. It is a self-establishing,

avoiding the silent backgrounds (Beach 2001: 121–122).

It can be concluded that, for the ancient nations, silence is a

subspecies of Creation things. The ending of this status quo denotes

the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the modern era, the

imaginative (and in some occasions just real) border. In Lotman’s

style, the boundaries are translating, transgressing, and sequelizing

units and so is the silence.

Let’s conclude in summary. Silence could be a menace or the

zeroness of values.

For instance, Voltaire’s famous phrase “Paper money eventually

returns to its intrinsic value – zero” (1729, at the time when Arouet

happened to be in England, motherland of the money exchange) is a bow

towards zeroness. The demon’s silence in the case of Jeanne d’Anges

(before the phrase “I forgot my name”) was a covered threat.

The semiotic field of silence is uncertain, relative, and bending.

And a psychological masking with metacontrasting elements is always

part of human silence.

31

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