Silence in 4 Movements

"What is the relation of [contemplation] to action? Simply this. He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas."
—Thomas Merton

"Those who know do not talk.

Those who talk do not know.

~

Stop talking,

block off your senses,

meditate in silence,

release your worries,

blunt your sharpness,

untie your knots,

soften your glare,

harmonise your inner light

and unite the world into one whole!

This is the primal union or secret embrace."

Tao Te Ching 56

"Make stillness your criterion for testing the value of everything, and choose always what contributes to it."

-Evagrius Ponticus

"Silence and Beauty - Eco" (Minerals and gesso on canvas, 2016) by contemporary Japanese American artist Fujimura Makoto (藤村真, born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1960). Abstract expressionist piece done with nihonga techniques. Picture found online.

I read Fujimura's book Silence and Beauty last year, which was inspired by the Endo Shusaku's 20th century novel Silence (itself adapted to film by the great Martin Scorsese). Fujimura reflects on his relationship with Japanese culture in the light of Shusaku's work, the Hiroshima bombing, and his own experience as a Japanese-American: most importantly how it has manifested in his work as an artist. Shusaku's work itself dwells on "silence" as absence. But I think this painting shows absence-as-presence: something is there, something beautiful, but its not clear what or even why - in fact that presence changes over time for the viewer, depending on vantage point or even focus.