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.
1
Keywords: silence; witchcraft; phantasms; semiotic borders; remote
place; Lotman’s
theory
Aarne Ruben: University of Tallinn. E-mail:
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
3
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
5
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
6
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
7
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
8
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
9
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
10
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
12
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.
13
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
14
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
16
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
17
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
18
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
20
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
23
(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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