Symposium, Spring 2026
from Vol. 39, Nos. 2 & 3
What is a notable use of a silence, a blank, a gap, or a void in a work of art, and what purpose does that absence serve?
First Positions, Please: On the Void in The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago’s groundbreaking The Dinner Party bloomed in March 1979 after a difficult delivery. Hailed as a feminist Last Supper, the similarities are striking; it, too, is lit in theatrical spotlight, emanating its own holy and/or mystical glow. The installation has carried great warranted weight in the intervening decades as a signifier of the consumption of women’s contributions to history, rather than a celebration of them.
The Dinner Party is a 1463cm equilateral triangular table that, significantly, points downwards (see if you can catch that imagery from every angle) where the ancient and predominantly feminine pursuits of embroidery and painting china plates clash violently with blatant ceramic vaginal imagery, with genitalia literally served up for dinner. Said plates sit at a table set for thirty-nine women of history and note, placed on a tiled “heritage floor,” with a further 999 women commemorated in gold scrawl, at a cost of $250,000. To put it simply, The Dinner Party made a bigger splash than a Hockney and has earned its fixture in the pantheon of modern art with international acclaim, as there is still very much an appetite for Chicago’s offering.
Theatre is all about presence. It requires a venue to take place, an audience, performers, a set: things that also can be found in a museum or gallery. When I call The Dinner Party performative art, I do not do so to demean it. Here, it is art that truly performs. Studies of modern acting use the term The Moment Before. It usually applies to actors preparing in the wings before entering, that purgatorial moment when the inciting incident of the play is also the impetus to begin to act. Take Lady Macbeth’s sudden entrance when her bloodied hands reveal she has committed a murder offstage—this action injects context and energy into the scene, and the audience into the play. As Alexander Lee-Rekers writes in Stagemilk, “[“The Moment Before”] helps to set the tone of a scene: it loads the characters with plot and emotional baggage and pushes them out into the lights with purpose." Chicago’s Moment Before is the distinct lack of knowledge and celebration of these women and their impact, and that she is, in turn, creating a Moment After—that being the art landscape post The Dinner Party. In person, the artwork suggests the guests honored at this dinner are on the cusp of arriving, to claim both their seats and plaudits, that the past will somehow change, creating a near theatrical air of expectation, tension, even a threat—as if Boudicca and her enraged horde are about to enter and lay waste to the attending audience. Instead, we enter a scene that is suspended in time as the cast of this play, namely the thirty-nine women honored at this table, wait eternally in the wings.
Peter Brook’s The Empty Space may explain the charge of energy and performance of the installation, in particular his Holy Theatre concept: “a powerful explanation of the arts is that they talk of patterns which we can only begin to recognize when they manifest themselves as rhythms or shapes; we observe that the behavior of people, of crowds, of history, obeys such recurrent patterns.” In creating this art, Chicago fills the space with subheadings, paragraphs, duologues, monologues, verbatim stories—all without saying a word. In Brook’s verbiage, she made the “invisible appear,” or rather, the said unsaid—specifically, without lecture, and crucially, without the body present to speak it. Chicago has us enter the space like a venue, to metaphorically take a seat and pick up a program—to view the layers of the piece frozen in time. Upon coming closer, the feminine-coded signifiers and the names act as the epilogue to make the point.
Chicago, like in theatre, asks you to internalize the work and not to obey the recurrent patterns, to have communion. But what about actually speaking? Actually sitting down to watch theatre? It’s hard to write of The Dinner Party and not refer to Caryl Churchill’s landmark 1982 play, Top Girls, wherein the playwright hosts a dinner held by a modern woman of the 1980s—a business owner and single by choice, breaking bread with Pope Joan, Lady Nijo, Dull Gret, and more. Here, Churchill gives each historically traumatized historical figure their chance to set the record straight, to speak unfettered, and the production has rarely been out of both regional theatres and classrooms ever since.
In both pieces, we arrive at the same informed place, whether we speak or not—the truth is expressed. Art as a mouthpiece, sure, but Chicago achieves enlightenment personally by what Churchill sparks intellectually. The Dinner Party makes just as much use of the void as it does the physical sum of its parts, creating the layered sense of look at this, sure, but really take it in, I dare you. In dressing, providing the props, the means, the lighting, she sets a scene that will never play. She creates an artistic, political, and theatrical void to insert your own thoughts, what you choose to believe. You exist on the other plane with the dinner guests in both the physical and political no-sphere, burdened at once by their erasure and your part in it.
Linger Here: The Power of Silence in Comics
In the opening moments of Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel Sabrina (Drawn and Quarterly, 2018), we watch the title character move around a darkened house. She looks over her shoulder. She peers behind the drapes and pushes aside the shower curtain. She is searching. Listening. She goes to her bedroom, checks the closet. When Sabrina crouches to peer under the bed, she breaks the silence for the first time. “There you are!” she says, dragging an immensely floofy cat out from her hiding place.
The silence of these early panels is doing a lot of work. The tension builds. Sabrina’s vulnerability is palpable. When she speaks, her isolation becomes banal, even silly. She talks to the cat, filling the empty house with one-sided banter until her sister shows up. Why would we ever be concerned?
Sabrina is murdered sometime after this scene (though we never see it), and this event shapes the narrative of the rest of the book. Her final panels appear benign, much like the beginning might have seemed. After her sister leaves, Sabrina locks the doors and walks through the darkened house again. She brushes her teeth, reads, and falls asleep in her childhood bed. She gets up in the morning, feeds the cat, drinks coffee in the kitchen, writes a note, and leaves the house for the last time.
We tend to talk about comics in the parlance of film. This is likely due to movies’ (and their slightly less refined cousin television’s) domination of visual culture over the past century. But “sequential narratives” predate film. Early American comic strips share more with vaudeville than silent film (and one might argue that silent film’s use of captions and subtitles was borrowed from comics). Given the glut of memoir and otherwise dramatic options available now, we might also forget that comics are comedic in origin. Funnies dominated newspapers, and the colorful Sunday pages were big drivers of sales for publishers. The language of pregnant pauses—frozen moments before the hammer comes down or the donkey kicks someone in the ribs—was all in the service of a laugh. Comic strips then used “silence” as a deliberate, selective strategy to heighten comedy. It’s a tool cartoonists like Drnaso still find useful.
Before Sabrina finishes the note and leaves the house, there is a square panel of a few trees and sky. In this panel, a dark-bellied cloud hangs over the scene. As readers, we can linger here and let Sabrina write for as long as we want, or we can skip ahead, pushing aside the seemingly throwaway detail and accepting the day that greets her outside as pleasant, downright balmy. If we have read the book before—or possibly had an important detail spoiled by some thoughtless comics scholar—we can delay Sabrina’s departure. Maybe she’ll stay home. The panel of sky and trees, then, is not simply a void but an active aspect of storytelling that deepens the emotional resonance of what will follow.
Silence is utilized in comics in such a way that cannot be replicated in other forms of storytelling. Some comics (known as “silent,” “wordless,” or “pantomime comics”) completely forgo text—whether in captions, dialogue, or thought balloons—relying entirely on images to convey a narrative. While ink on paper is inherently a silent medium, even these comics aren’t entirely devoid of sound. Through visual cues, they imply sound and movement, reminding us that the worlds they depict are rarely truly silent. The silence, then, is not the absence of sound but the absence of verbalization or exposition.
As a fiction writer, I struggled with depicting moments that were quiet. Describing characters as they paused to take a drink or moved across a room felt cumbersome. But I wanted those moments—which are often weightier than times when the character is caught up in conversation—to be there. I could strip everything down in the way of Hemingway, relying on coy banter and hoping the reader catches on to my winks and nods. This only works for so long before it gets annoying.
I saw comics and their use of silence offering a distinct way of engaging the reader. In novels, the author controls the passage of time through the rhythm and sequence of words; silence is often only implied through pauses or gaps between scenes or awkwardly described. Silence in comics manipulates time differently. The experience is more immersive in a way that is not prescribed by its creator. When reading a novel, we are pushed forward relentlessly by the narrative. Progress is the only important thing! Onward! Some readers may double-back to a particular chapter or marvel at the construction of a sentence, but as a partially visual form, the shape of letters on the page does not reveal more the longer one stares at them (the poet’s two-step with punctuation notwithstanding).
Bowing to the influence of movies and TV, I do like to think of my characters as actors. I allow them to show us what we need to know, and they can bend even my most stringent scripts to their will. Comics have to be the ultimate example of the “show, don’t tell” idiom so key to creative writing workshops. This may also be true of film, but comics again have the advantage of being a somewhat passive medium in that the reader controls the pace. The “silence” of the paper is filled with the sound of their experience. The birds I hear outside Sabrina’s house on that balmy day may not be the same as the birds you hear. They may not even be the same the next time I read Sabrina. Whereas the soundscape, or lack thereof, in film was decided long ago, comics remain unrestrained in that way. Perhaps this explains their popularity in a culture so hung up on freedom. Silence in comics is an invitation—a pause that permits the reader to linger, to reflect, to listen for what is unsaid. These moments are what makes Sabrina’s world feel so alive. The silence allows us to fill the absence with ourselves.
Much Ado About Not(h)ing in Antonioni’s Blow-Up
Blow-Up (1966)—Michelangelo Antonioni’s first English-language film, riffing on a short story by Argentinian author Julio Cortázar—has all the trappings of a Swinging Sixties murder mystery. Over the course of one day, a London fashion photographer becomes convinced that he’s witnessed and captured a murder through his camera. On the surface, that log line is accurate. But anyone who goes into the film expecting a clearcut resolution will be disappointed. Frustration is the point. Antonioni blows up the cardinal rules of the crime genre, giving us zero answers as to whodunit or why. Instead, we’re left with a lacuna. That absence leaves room for something more interesting: a meta-meditation on the slippery nature of perception, narrative construction, and the male gaze.
A more accurate distillation of the movie might be “Much Ado About Nothing.” The Shakespeare title contains puns aplenty, all of which resonate with Antonioni’s artistic vision. In Elizabethan parlance, nothing was pronounced noting. In both play and screenplay, the stories hinge on men spying on women and coming to all sorts of erroneous conclusions. Back in Shakespeare’s day, nothing was also a double entendre, standing for “an O thing”: in other words, a vagina. A woman is seen as a void, a hole to be filled, a dark riddle to be solved. In Blow-Up, photographer Thomas (played by David Hemmings) is a peeping Tom. During photo shoots in his studio, he fixes his phallic camera on beautiful models, or “birds” as he calls them. Straddling Veruschka, he coaxes, “Give it to me, really give it to me.” (That image appears on the poster for Blow-Up, a sort of shorthand for the film.) Later, when he spots a young woman and an older man during a walk in the park, he takes the furtive approach of a voyeur—and we’re right there with him, thanks to cinematographer Carlo Di Palma. Thomas darts behind trees and crouches in bushes to capture the couple’s unguarded intimacy. It’s silent except for the rustling of the wind in the trees, the chirping of birds (avian, not human), and the click, click, click, of his camera shutter.
His surreptitious photo shoot comes to a halt when the woman (Vanessa Redgrave) returns his gaze and demands that he return the film. It’s a violent confrontation. “Stop it! Stop it!” she protests. “Give me those pictures. You can’t photograph people like that.” Thomas is used to treating his subjects like objects. He’s accustomed to issuing the orders: “Give it to me.” He doesn’t care about ethics and consent. “I’m only doing my job I’m a photographer.” The woman gets down on her knees, trying to wrestle the camera from his hand. She bites him on the wrist. Thomas barks, “Don’t let’s spoil everything. We’ve only just met.” The woman counters, “No, we haven’t met. You’ve never seen me.”
This single exchange alludes to the story’s central paradox: people and things are both there and not there. Thomas returns again and again to the scene in the park—replaying it like a movie, trying to pin down what he’s seen and what he hasn’t seen. Try as he might to possess this woman with his eyes and with his camera, she eludes him. Her name is never spoken, but the end credits list her as “Jane,” suggesting “Jane Doe.” It’s a placeholder name: an enigma, a phantom. Antonioni subverts the masculine gaze and narrative expectations to create a new and ambiguous approach to filmmaking.
The film canister is a MacGuffin, like something out of a Hitchcock thriller. Shrouded in intrigue, the photos from the park drive the plot without ever being explained. Thomas wants to know what’s so goddamn important about the pictures that Jane needs them back. He rolls up his sleeves and gets to work in his darkroom, processing the film with the forensic precision of a detective: first unloading, then cutting; holding a magnifying glass up to the negatives; marking them with a white pencil; setting up the enlarger; soaking the paper in the chemical bath; and tacking the developed photographs onto blank walls for a better look. He rearranges the stills to assemble a storyboard. The camera—that is, the movie camera—glides back and forth between the pictures, focusing in on them so that they take up the entire frame. There’s no dialogue. Herbie Hancock’s jazz score fades away. The resulting montage is a silent, black-and-white film-within-the-film.
We notice details and tally them up alongside Thomas, eyes darting to and fro as if watching a tennis match. As he forms connections between the images, we hear the sound of wind rustling through trees, putting us in the protagonist’s head while he’s transported to the park. The couple clasp hands, then embrace. What is she looking at over her shoulder? Magnifying glass held up to the photo, Thomas traces her eyeline with the white pencil. What’s that in the bushes? Is someone hiding there? Back to the darkroom to make a blow-up of the image. It reveals a hand holding a gun, aimed at the man. Thomas wasn’t the only one taking shots in the park....
He constructs a narrative that centers himself, not as a predatory voyeur, but as a hero averting an assassination plot. The extended silence is punctuated by a phone call to his agent, with whom he shares his epiphany: “Ron? Something fantastic’s happened. Those photographs in the park—fantastic! Somebody was trying to kill somebody else. I saved his life. There was a girl What makes it so fantastic. ” Repeated for emphasis, the superlative fantastic implies a sense of unreality. To fantasize is to imagine. Can Thomas—and we as the audience—trust what he sees?
The case continues to nag at him, so, it’s back to the photographs. One final blow-up presents the outline of a corpse in the bushes. His narrative theory doubles back on itself. There was a murder. Thomas rushes to the park, where he sees and touches the corpse lying in the grass. But when he returns to his apartment to collect the photos, he finds they’ve been stolen. All that remains is a single image of the crime scene, enlarged to the point of blurred, pointillist abstraction. “It looks like one of Bill’s paintings,” a friend later observes when he tries to describe what’s happened. Gone is any pretense of photographic evidence. The objective becomes subjective.
There are a whole lot of holes in Blow-Up. There’s the swirl of shapes in
Bill’s paintings. Surveying his works, the artist tells Thomas: “They don’t mean anything when I do them. Just a mess. Afterwards, I find something to hang onto... Then it sorts itself out and adds up. It’s like finding a clue in a detective story.” There’s the propeller that Thomas impulsively buys at an antique shop. “What’s it for?” Jane asks when it’s delivered to his apartment. “Nothing. It’s beautiful,” he replies. And there’s the matter of the murder: a gaping plot hole. In the final exchange of dialogue, Ron asks, “What did you see in that park?” Unable to explain, Thomas says, “Nothing.”
All those nothings add up to something more than nil—even if it’s not the satisfying denouement of a conventional mystery. Dawn breaks, and Thomas is back at the park with his camera. He looks for the corpse, but nothing is there. What is a murder case without a dead body, or a body of evidence? He walks away as a caravan of counterculture youth in striped shirts and white face paint (seen also at the beginning of the film) make a circuit around the park. Thomas watches them stream into and around the tennis court for a pantomime match. Evoking the Shakespearean fool, their antics transcend comic relief. They unveil an absurd truth, sense in nonsense. The mimes are engaged in the silent but collaborative process of making something from nothing, like an audience sitting in a dark theater, watching shadows on a screen. Together, they suspend disbelief and look for meaning—or, as Bill would say, “something to hang onto.” When the collectively envisioned tennis ball flies out of the court, Di Palma’s camera follows it in a graceful arc onto a distant patch of grass. All eyes land on Thomas. It only takes a beat for him to catch on and become a willing participant in their game. He jogs after the ball, retrieves it, and mimes throwing it back so they can resume the match. The camera stays on Thomas as we hear the percussive sound of a tennis ball contacting a racket—neither of which are there. In a reversal of Thomas’s obsessive zooming in throughout the film, the camera pulls back in a crane shot. He, too, dissolves into nothing as the end credits appear.
Although Blow-Up is a series of nothings, it’s not nihilistic. The fact of its incompletion makes it liberating and funny and strange and full of possibility. Antonioni tosses us the ball. It’s up to us to catch it and throw it back, inviting more players into the game.
Revolutionary Silence: Reimagining Resistance in Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic
In Ilya Kaminsky’s groundbreaking collection Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019), named after a poem that consists solely of white space on both sides of the paper, silence transcends its traditional role as absence or void. This use of pure white space immediately establishes silence as something tangible—not a void, but a presence that requires our attention. Through this and other innovative formal techniques, Kaminsky crafts a work that reimagines how we understand both silence and sound, creating a revolutionary poetics.
The collection opens with a gunshot that paradoxically creates silence: when soldiers kill a deaf boy named Petya during a puppet show, the citizens of the occupied town of Vasenka respond by collectively becoming deaf. In “Gunshot,” the poem ends with the haunting line, “The sound we do not hear lifts the gulls off the water.” This strategic deafness becomes their form of resistance, transforming what could be a tool of oppression—enforced silence—into a means of preserving their community and identity. In “Deafness, An Insurgency, Begins,” the transformation is immediate: “Our country woke up next morning and refused to hear soldiers.” On the gates of the soldiers’ barracks, someone writes in chalk: “NO ONE HEARS YOU.” As the chorus observes, “Our hearing doesn’t weaken, but something silent in us strengthens.”
Beyond the title poem’s striking use of white space, silence takes shape through visual and spatial techniques throughout the collection. Sign language illustrations scattered through the text create their own form of silence, teaching readers to understand communication beyond sound. These visual elements work in concert with caesuras and theatrical spacing to create a multidimensional experience of silence that readers must physically navigate. In “Checkpoints,” we read “DEAFNESS IS A CONTAGIOUS DISEASE,” and the poem concludes with the defiant declaration, “In these avenues, deafness is our only barricade.” As a two-act play, complete with stage directions and a dramatis personae,
the collection creates a framework where silence becomes performative—something actively created rather than passively experienced. The chorus’s collective voice speaks of shared experience while simultaneously enacting the power of coordinated silence. Their observations about strengthening silence suggest how communal resistance can emerge from shared vulnerability, reinforcing how silence, paradoxically, can amplify collective voice.
The puppet theater serves as a crucial nexus where various forms of silence intersect. As a space traditionally associated with visual storytelling and silent gesture, it provides the perfect setting for exploring how communication persists in the absence of sound. Here we meet Alfonso and Sonya, the young married puppeteers, whose love story demonstrates how intimacy can flourish in silence. As Alfonso describes in the poems “Of Weddings before the War” and “Still Newlyweds,” their relationship is marked by profound connection that transcends speech. The puppeteers’ ability to convey meaning through movement presages the town’s later reliance on sign language. Even more striking, under Momma Galya’s direction, the theater transforms into a site of active resistance, where her “girls” turn the tools of silent performance into weapons against the occupying forces.
Kaminsky’s exploration of silence and sound emerges from his own complex lived experience. His journey with deafness began in Odesa at age four, when a misdiagnosed case of mumps led to hearing loss. After his family sought asylum in America in 1993—fleeing anti-Semitism in Ukraine—hearing aids at sixteen provided partial restoration of sound. Yet Deaf Republic transcends autobiography to explore how silence operates differently for different characters: for the soldiers, silence represents a failure of control—their inability to penetrate the citizens’ quiet resistance; for the townspeople, silence becomes increasingly layered—protection, protest, and ultimately a new way of being.
Perhaps most striking is how Kaminsky’s work challenges traditional assumptions about silence and power. In the collection’s author’s note, he writes, “The deaf don’t believe in silence. Silence is the invention of the hearing.” This profound observation suggests that what appears as absence to one group might contain entire languages of resistance for another. The citizens of Vasenka don’t lose anything when they become deaf; instead, they gain access to a different way of being in the world.
The collection’s opening and closing poems frame silence within contemporary contexts, moving from examining historical forms of resistance to questioning modern complicities. The speaker in “In a Time of Peace” observes a police shooting while noting, “I do not hear gunshots, / but watch birds splash over the backyards of the suburbs. How bright is the sky (forgive me) how bright.” This modern American setting forces readers to consider their own relationship to chosen and enforced quietness, suggesting how silence continues to operate as both protest and acquiescence.
Formal innovations reinforce its thematic weight. White space becomes active rather than passive, caesuras create visual silence on the page, and stage directions suggest movement without sound. Through these technical choices, Kaminsky demonstrates how absence can generate presence—how silence itself can speak.
By presenting silence as something that can be actively created rather than passively experienced, Deaf Republic transforms our understanding of how communities can preserve their humanity and agency even under the most oppressive circumstances. In a world increasingly filled with noise—political, digital, cultural—Kaminsky, through his innovative structure, layered narrative and profound investigation of how communities resist, reveals silence not as a void to be filled but as a space where new forms of meaning can flourish.
Bach and the Silence of the Soul
Nina Simone might never have made it to New York City’s Town Hall in the fall of 1959 to record one of jazz’s finest live albums if, as a child, she hadn’t discovered Johann Sebastian Bach.
“Once I understood Bach’s music I never wanted to be anything other than a concert pianist,” Nina Simone wrote in her 1991 memoir. “Bach made me dedicate my life to music.”
The German composer of the 18th century may not be the obvious taproot for the counterculture and civil rights queen of the 1960s, but the Bach diaspora reaches across centuries and includes everyone from Beethoven to Bill Evans to Paul McCartney and Jimmy Page—“Blackbird” and “Stairway to Heaven” both derive from Bach’s “Bourrée in E minor.”
Next year, Bach turns 340. And while countless musicians have extolled his high seat in the musical pantheon, we still only understand the man through a glass, darkly. As scholar and composer John Eliot Gardiner wrote in his 2013 book Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (Vintage), a turn-all-stones inspection of Bach and his music, “We seem to know less about [Bach’s] private life than about that of any other major composer of the last 400 years.”
His death in 1750 left no posthumous trail of meaningful correspondence, meditations, or interior examinations. Through sparse biographies, we do know loss carved the deepest contours of his life. An orphan before he turned ten, Bach endured the deaths of both parents, two siblings, a wife, and ten children by his fiftieth birthday.
Bach, too, was a man of fervent religious conviction. He spent decades as the cantor of St. Thomas, a Lutheran church in Leipzig, Germany, where he determined to write new music each week for church services and festivals. It was a herculean task that produced 150 original cantatas—complex works of twenty to thirty minutes in length—in just four years.
“The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul,” Bach once wrote. He often signed his compositions with “S.D.G” for the Latin “Soli Deo Gloria,” or, “for glory to God alone.”
For him, music represented the serious business of vocation. He viewed his compositions not as the indulgent musings of a genius, but the discovery and reconstruction of possibilities already set by a higher order—not talent and proclivity, but mastery and work ethic.
“I was obliged to be industrious,” he said in one of his most famous lines. “Whoever is equally industrious will succeed just as well.”
Regarding Bach, Nina Simone said, “all the notes you play add up to something—they make sense. Each note is connected to the next note, and every note has to be executed perfectly or the whole effect is lost.” For Bach’s beauty to come fully into view, Simone implies, it requires undivided attention.
“There’s nothing remarkable about it,” Bach once quipped about playing music. “All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.” In this way, knocking out the Goldberg Variations on a Steinway should be a little bit like long division on a TI-84, right? After all, one of the dominant critiques of Bach is that much of his music, with its mapped out counterpoints and fugues, exhibits a cold, almost mathematical drive toward harmonic perfection. Yet Pablo Casals, the man who, in the early 20th century, rescued Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites from obscurity on the page by bringing them to the stage, said Bach’s discernment for perfection shows a deep understanding of the soul.
“This man, who knows everything and feels everything, cannot write one note, however unimportant it may appear, which is anything but transcendent,” Casals once said. “He has reached the heart of every noble thought, and has done it in the most perfect way.”
In his book, Gardiner points out several passages Bach underlined in his copy of the Lutheran Calov bible, including the old German proverb: “With one’s own thoughts, like a tautly held cloth, much falls off.” Mastery holds within it the virtues of diligence and patience, but Bach understood that perfection, the point at which there is nothing left to remove, requires self-restraint and humility.
That austerity may be difficult to pinpoint in the famous choral works of Mass in B Minor and The Passion According to St. Matthew, liturgical walls of sound of sweeping, maximalist scope. Yet, what can be more tempered and humble than a single musician behind one, unaccompanied instrument? Here, in works such as The Goldberg Variations, The Art of the Fugue and the Unaccompanied Cello Suites, mastery and mystery meet as the notes must commune with only an exacting silence.
Silence quietly demands perfection. So many of us can comfortably engage in conversation and even surprise ourselves with flashes of rhetorical flair, but then require relentless rehearsal to give a speech or solo presentation. “To be, or not to be?”—the very question we face before breaking a silence—wouldn’t carry the same weight in dialogue. The words echo against the silence and return to Hamlet with new force; it’s no longer a question he is asking, but instead one he is being asked. Silence can at once urge us into action while representing something more primordial than action itself.
Nearly four minutes into the first movement of Art of the Fugue, as performed by the late Canadian virtuoso Glenn Gould, the work abruptly stops with two five-second stretches of silence, broken up by the stroke of a single D-minor chord. Since there’s no avenue for approaching or properly interpreting Bach that avoids his deep sense of faith, the silence captured here seems to reference the divine. Bach bows to his master and allows a greater perfection to shine.
In the case of the Unaccompanied Cello Suites, composed during the three-
year span when his wife, son, and two brothers died, Bach guides the listener through the spectrum of human emotion, from a solemn sadness and despair to unbounded energy and optimism. Each note shaped by the silence the cellist’s bow breaks. The pianist who takes on the Goldberg Variations must pluck porously so silence finds its place.
For the secular ear, however, the silence inherent in these works might emphasize something aside from a holy duet. The unaccompanied composition leaves room for two types of performance. In one, the desperate performer claws for the survival of their own voice. In the other, knowing silence only makes room for the necessary, the humble artist aims more for dance than domination. Whether it’s Casals or Yo-Yo Ma on the cello, or Gould audibly humming in that almost haunting baritone as he strikes the keys, the silence that settles between notes and movements reminds us of our own human potential, and that such immense beauty can come from the action and intention of a single person.
Winter Kill
Wing feathers frosted to a shuffle of fallen leaves, ribs and neck vertebrae picked clean. If the hares and woodpigeons that root among the remains fear the predator’s return—the dagger clutch that transforms a songbird into a sticky quantity of sinew and bone—they don’t show it. Death from above happens less frequently now. The gray sky is a silent void, but a much more cunning predator crouches out of view.
“The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there,” J.A. Baker writes at the outset of The Peregrine, a slim volume published in 1967 that details the author’s obsession with the peregrines that winter near his cottage in Chelmsford, thirty miles northeast of London. Structured as a series of diary entries dated from October 1962 through April 1963, The Peregrine is drawn from a decade of Baker’s observations, a period in which the local peregrine population dwindled rapidly. “It was a grail to me,” Baker writes. “Now it has gone. The long pursuit is over. Few peregrines are left…they may not survive.” The book’s central tension emerges from an absence that is incomplete, yet easily imagined, especially for 21st century readers.
The story of the peregrine’s decline began when Baker was still a teenager. In 1940, with the country at war, the British secretary of state for air designated peregrines as enemy combatants. Raptors preyed on the carrier pigeons that RAF pilots sent home in the event of an emergency water landing. Hundreds of adult peregrines were shot, countless eggs smashed. With the lifting of the order in 1946, the peregrine population rebounded, but when Baker’s observations began ten years later, they were in decline once again. This time, it was due to the impacts of DDT, dieldrin, and other widely used organochlorine pesticides. From their perch at the top of the ecological ladder, the pesticides accreted in the peregrines’ bodies with each kill, leaving them sick and confused, rendering their eggs brittle, decimating their numbers.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Mariner Books Classics), which brought the harmful ecological impacts of DDT to wide public consciousness, was published in the United States in 1962. Around the same time, in the UK, ecological scientist Derek Ratcliffe began the research that would establish the link between what Baker called “filthy, insidious farm chemicals” and the decline of birds of prey. Baker draws on the same concerns as Carson and Ratcliffe, but his work in The Peregrine is of a very different nature—it had to be. Baker was a warehouse
manager without a college degree. He was profoundly near-sighted, relying primarily on a bicycle for transportation and binoculars to observe the hawks. Though he acknowledges the harmful effects of organochlorine pesticides, he leaves no space for statistical evidence, policy critique, or calls to action. Baker seems interested only in a trail of bloody death, the looping path to his vanishing grail.
Sightings are sporadic, yet Baker’s lyrical prose washes over and shimmers upon The Peregrine’s flat, episodic structure. Ideas and impressions flow with meandering energy. The fog, for instance: “It smelled acrid and metallic, fumbling my face with cold decaying fingers. It lay by the road like a jurassic saurian, fetid and inert.” Baker is not just describing the fog of October 9th, 1962, but the fog that descends on a landscape quieted and hollowed by the toxic seep of humanity’s incursion. It is a stalking kind of fog, a shade of the translucent death by droplet that seared a hawk-shaped absence in Chelmsford’s winter landscape.
Baker’s relationship with the peregrine gains a fresh dimension as the unremarkable days and weeks pass. “I found myself crouching over the kill, like a mantling hawk. My eyes turned quickly about, alert for the walking heads of men.” Baker can be forgiven this desire to inhabit the absence left by his beloved peregrine. When the unforeseen consequences of war, scientific discovery, and industrialization are so blatant, when they are felt so acutely in one’s backyard, it is tantalizing to cast off modernity’s glittering restraints and attempt to return to a state of reciprocity with the natural world.
But Baker recognizes that the fantasy cannot last. In one memorable scene late in the book, he spots a tiercel perched just five yards away. He locks eyes with it and makes no attempt to close the distance. His “human taint” is inexorable. In 2017, the English nature writer Robert MacFarlane called The Peregrine “uncannily prophetic” of a present in which human activity has become the dominant influence on the environment. The irony is that Baker’s primary mode of depicting humanity is oblique, conveyed through implication. A sickly heron unable to take flight as the estuary freezes around it. The chimney of a vacant factory repurposed into a roost (and later felled). A swan shot in the breast and left to rot. Looming over it all is the diminished peregrine, the apex predator on the verge of becoming the next casualty of human progress. Another winter kill. It has been almost sixty years since The Peregrine was published, and the total absence Baker feared has not yet come to pass. DDT was banned in the US in 1972, and the EU followed suit in 1986. Robert MacFarlane, who authored the introduction to the 2005 NYRB reissue of The Peregrine, wrote that efforts by the likes of Rachel Carson, Derek Ratcliffe, and J.A. Baker are what saved the raptors from extinction, but circumstances were assuredly more complicated. Growing insect resistance to DDT and the development of more effective pesticides were also pivotal factors that led to the bans—and to the peregrine’s resurgence.
Then again, J.A. Baker didn’t set out to save the peregrines, only to preserve their glory and detail their changing ecosystem. Vivid prose and a hyper-local focus add texture and emotion to the absence at the heart of The Peregrine. Baker wasn’t writing toward a silent void after all, but an imaginative terrain that inscribes our past, present, and potential futures as ecological actors. His writing permits, in an elegiac mode, both grief and celebration. The Peregrine demonstrates how to inscribe the kind of absence that might be useful to writers grappling with ecological concerns in the era of climate change. It teaches how to carry sorrow and beauty in equal measure.
Jessica Bailey is a London-based freelance writer with an irrepressible love for all art, be it theatre, culinary, or visual arts. She has had work published both online and in print reviewing, interviewing, and dissecting art. She also creates and writes theatre. In her free time, she likes to take her analogue camera for walks, play the piano, or visit a gallery.
Liam Cassidy is a cartoonist, writer, and educator. You can find his comics and writing on his website (cheap-fun.com) or on Instagram (@liamcazzidy).
Emma Kantor is a Brooklyn-based writer and senior editor at Publishers Weekly. Her essays have been featured in the New York Times Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and Pigeon Pages, among other outlets. You can find more of her writing on lit and film at emmakantor.com.
Dr. Tamara MC is a memoirist, poet, and journalist whose work appears in Newsweek, Salon, HuffPost, New York Times, and ninety-plus publications. She holds a PhD in second language acquisition from the University of Arizona and studied creative nonfiction and poetry at Columbia University. A recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Ragdale, and VCCA, her forthcoming book Poetry for English Language Learning (University of New Mexico Press, 2026) merges creative writing with language education.
Christopher Neely is a California-based writer whose longform journalism has appeared in outlets across the U.S. His work, often locally focused, has touched everything from state politics, homelessness, and climate change, to artist profiles and the future of classical music. Neely’s reporting has earned a Pulitzer Prize, as well as honors from the Scripps Howard Foundation and the Society for Features Journalism.
Christopher Santantasio’s writing appears in Story Magazine, The Pinch, One Story, SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere in print and online. Raised in the Hudson Highlands, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and edits fiction at The Rumpus. He is working on his first novel.
