"The Intensity of Silence"

by Deannalynn Arzola

I can actually recall the very first time I put pen to paper. I was 5 and 1/2 and had recently learned to read, a gift from  my beautiful mother, who began my love affair with words for me by being the most beautiful creature in my world, a soft bedside light illuminating, ever so peacefully, the first face I ever fell in love with, and her long chocolate locks tenderly caressing her flawless skin, reading to me with the voice I was most familiar with. Like everything else in my life, my mother is a piece of me. While she comprises many duplicitous memories form the limited time I shared with her, for me, and perhaps only me, of all the people she knew, the good ones outweigh the bad, and it is my mother who recognized that her daughter was born with a creative spirit and fostered that spirit, encouraging talent and sharing with me the things I loved most, words. I was in first grade at the time and I had a teacher named Ms. Symanski. She was the second most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and she was my literary soul mate. A lover of theatre, music, and words, she infused our classroom with a culture of art and creativity. Ms. Symanski imposed a challenge on her students. "There will be a great reward for the students who read the most books by the end of the quarter!" I remember sitting at the bar that separated our kitchen from our dining room in the house I grew up in on Crestwood Drive, apple juice in my "boot cup", and what I now assume was 7&7 in my mother's glass, reading with her. We read daily and nightly and by the end of that quarter, I had won the contest, read the most books, was honored with a party and got to choose three brand new books from a stash Ms. Symanski must have purchased from The Interscholastic Book Club. Later that year, I was cast in my first play, "Bambi".
 In the few years that would follow, my mother's mental health would decline at a steady pace. I found my escape from her madness and subsequent alcoholic oblivion inside the stories of Lewis Carroll and DH Lawrence and Nathaniel Hawthorn and Edgar Allen Poe. Upon opening a book for the first time, I felt the warmth of the sun on my face. Inside the pages, I became friends with the characters. Deep within a wicked plot, I lost myself for a magical moment. My life has always seemed to be in a state of suspended animation, whether w/in the pages of an amazing story, anticipating the next act or in my reality, anticipating the next act. I've sort of learned to live my life within the parameters of that existence. The bottom line of that existence is there's comfort in the knowing. With words come confirmation. 
When the people in my life required me to live their lives, with such great intensity, I began to understand that words could also release me. The words in my head needed an outlet. Enter pen. I wrote poetry and short stories and kept a journal. Until I reached high school and met that one teacher who seems to take it upon himself to change your life, writing was my sanity. My adolescent years were the stuff Grimm's Faery Tales were made of. It was that piece of my life where I learned what true evil really is. Evil, I came to understand, empirically, was not what Poe and King were were writing about. These men serve to enlighten us on fear. Fear of death, of madness, of things that go bump in the night. That, my readers, is entertainment. Evil, on the other hand is a possession of the mind embodied by a person. My mother's madness was mostly organic, my father's second wife's madness was a manifestation of pure, unadulterated insecurity. Jealous of a dead woman, a little girl and the knowledge that a man she chose to be with, almost ten years her senior, actually had a sex life prior to her knowing him, her mind became wrought with thoughts of abuse, both physical and mental, but mostly, social. One cannot live with this kind of evil. Escape is the only thought on the mind of the victim. Escapism as survival. Until I could physically extricate myself from this situation, I locked myself in my cell and read about a book a day, I wrote feverishly and I fantasized, about a life more ordinary. About what love must be like. If hatred is this intense, love can only be as so.
 When I finally got away, I met my mentor. His name was Mike Keeley and he was my freshman English teacher. After what I had been through for the past few years, I had forgotten what it was like to be recognized for your talent. Mr. Keeley shared his admiration with me almost immediately and he fostered that on the most exponential level a teacher can ever do. He introduced me to Shakespeare. He knew in what role to cast me in every play we performed. He is the very reason for my unabashed ability to communicate, verbally, as I do, as he taught me the art of prose. He could pick a story that would suit my style and teach me how to enunciate it in front of other students, his colleagues and scholastic judges. It was the simple act of reading a story aloud, something I took from my mother, that made me the person I am today. That gregarious personality is a gift from Mr. Keeley. Before that, I was as shaken as a beaten dog stuck shivering in the freezing rain. My sophomore year, we read Romes and Juliet in English class. Mr. Keeley believed we would learn this timeless tale of love, destiny and tragic consequence best by reading it out loud, together. The play was cast, each student with their own part, required to stand at the reading of their part. There were two characters left to be cast. Mr. Keeley would read the part of Romeo Montague and I would read Shakespeare's tragic teen, Juliet Capulet. When he made this announcement, he literally said, "Because of Deanna's almost inexplicable talent for the arts, she will be reading the part of Juliet Capulet..." This man made me appreciate words on a completely different level. I went on to act in plays and read prose for competition and chose Literature as my minor in college. At University, one is required to take subjects like Business Accounting 101 and Organic Chemistry to earn a Bachelor's Degree. These were the hardest hours to get through during this piece of my life, but it was the knowing, the anticipation that the next few hours would be spent cloaked inside the warmth of Nineteenth Century Lit and Drama 102. I was working hard for that Business Degree, but only because I have taken with me since I was a child the knowledge that one of my favorite authors was the first American writer, ever, to attempt to write for a living. Mr. Poe was a contemptuous literary critic. He only wanted to create his beautiful art and be paid for it. It's been over 170 years since his death and one must be extremely fortunate with Jupiter in Saturn to have that rarest of rare privileges, writing for a living. Perhaps words are simply supposed to be free, anyway. To me, they are priceless. For a lengthy piece of my life, I didn't write. I really didn't read much, either. I was preoccupied by another pain killer. The trade off was that I lost my creative desires for the desire to love and to be loved.
A beautiful man I have loved deeply for over a third of my life is a quiet, surreptitious man. I remember observing him in the back seat together on a car ride through Red Rock Canyon one hot summer day. He was sitting in silence only inches from by breath and he was a million miles away. I would often catch him observing me, as well. He would sit in the dining room of a favorite dive and stare at me as I sat at the bar, cigarette in one hand, eighteen year old scotch in the other, as if to readily observe this effervescent and very different creature in her environment. We would look at at one another for a longer period of time than would be comfortable for most, and seem to communicate without words. I still remember thinking, "Wow, the intensity of this superfluous situation is far greater than the sum of it's parts." This man, I knew from the start, was worth understanding on a completely different plane from which I had come to know with my husband, my daughter. Words having been my greatest comfort, I was totally out of my element, but there was another type of communication that this man was capable of, and it did  not take me long to recognize that when I held that stare along with him, I could see what he was saying. The thing I remember understanding the most was looking into his eyes, I knew, one day, he would give me what I wanted most from him, the thing I've wanted most all of my life. Words. Several moths later, he came to me with a letter. A hand delivered letter, consisting of seven handwritten pages confirming, not explaining, that had already been achieved through silence, but confirming all the information I only assumed I understood. Many years later, when I found myself in a slightly similar situation, I went to him, as best friends do, and without really wanting advice, just my confidant, I eluded to the birthday of the friend with whom I was having a problem. My friend said to me, "Remember that car ride in the summer of 2000? There's this place I go. It's my comfortable place. With what you find with words, I find with silence. It's dark and it's deep and if you haven't been going there your whole entire life, it's not even a place you want to visit. What you do need to know about this place is, one, as I said, it's my comfort zone, and two, when I'm there, I'm really here, just on another level. With what you read and come to understand from what you read, this is my library. I am studying, here. I am learning here. And, my friend, what I take from here is an ability to see, recognize, and understand you on what can only be describes as a metaphysical level. I need to know that you know that this is who I am and this is how I communicate. I chose you to speak with in this way, when I finally, after 8 or 9 months let you in, because after observing you, I realized that I could tell you I love you and will care for you my whole life, even seek you out in the next one, without those words you rely so heavily on. This is different and I know you know this. If I didn't know with all my heart that you can understand the way I talk to you without talking to you, after all those months, I would never have called."
 Having been comforted by words my entire life, I now find myself with out them and feel lost on a sea of terror. This piece of me leaves me speechless for the first time in my life. When I am stopped in my tracks, about to simply practice the art I have always known, I am stunned at the knowledge from a place so deep inside me, it's not something I access very often, that words are not the key, here. It has often been said that silence speaks volumes. This is a lesson I have been learning most my life. When so many days go by without words, I run to them. I surround myself in the eloquence of my favorite authors. For many years, they have taken me out of my pain, fear, sadness. They have been the ultimate opiate at almost every turn. However, now, I am easily distracted. I find myself simultaneously reading the words and reading the silence. The words are so easy to digest. The silence takes work. That is the thing most people don't realize about a writer. To the writer, it's the words that are easy. That is why we write. We all have a million words inside us. The writer feels an almost addictive call to get them out of their head. Not even so much for the reader, as the for the writer herself. This is my most natural form of self expression. Altruism does lie somewhere in the psyche of the writer. As I have said before, "There is no more satisfaction to the writer than the shaken affect of her reader". We wish to tell a story that people want to read, but I must be honest, it is for me, that I write. Words are my tranquility. Silence is my education.
The education that lies within the silence is metaphysical. It is expected of the recipient, to understand what is being said without the use of words . This, too is an art form. For a writer, it takes a hell of a lot of work to listen this way. There was this Scorpio who so eloquently once said, "Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work." That man was Booker T Washington, a writer. A Scorpio. Albert Camus, another Scorpio wrote an entire essay on rebellion. I cannot tell you how many times the words "All or Nothing" are used in quotations and italics.
The intensity in the silence may appear to some to be the hardest part of all, but in this piece of my life, I have had the privilege to come to know that that intensity is necessary to the mute as an addiction, a way of life, a character trait. It has made the act of surreptitiousness empirical to me. In other words, I am blessed with the ability to write, to share words on such a social platform, and I will always turn to literature to ease some of my pain, but, this piece of me finds great comfort in my ability to read the greatest story with absolutely no words at all.

"Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul and sings the tune with no words"
-Emily Dickinson