Chatter, Silence and Focus

Our lives are full of chatter, full of the noise of human voices, a constant chattering that not only comes from all around us, but that emanates from within our own heads. Radio and television provide a constant barrage of idle chatter, of small talk. Take talk back radio: It’s hardly ever a discussion we’re hearing – simply the sound of people who like the sound of their own voices. The airing of someone’s usually poorly articulated view.

We chatter to each other to fill the silence, prattling on about this or that, and it is, to quote the Bible – Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians – ” a clanging gong or a sounding cymbal … signifying nothing”. And therein lies the nub of the thing: the lack of significance.

In a wonderful line in his poem Australia, A D Hope writes – in reference to Europe – of:

The Chattering of apes that passes as civilization over there …

And let me be clear – I am as guilty of this “idle chatter” as anyone.

There is a scene in the film “As Good As It Gets” when the Jack Nicholson character attempts to express what it is that attracts him to the Helen Hunt character. He is an anti-social misfit, a writer of romance novels whose only pleasure in life is to insult and upset other people, an isolated, alienated, desperately lonely, thoroughly unlikeable man. But he sees something in the Helen Hunt character that others don’t see: that she only says things that she means, that she only talks about things that really matter, that when she speaks, it is about things she cares about deeply; she is honest, she is not putting on a show, a front, a façade. She speaks from the heart.

There is distinction between ‘chatter’ and “conversation”. Conversation requires engagement: we engage with each other, we talk of things that matter. In one of his earlier songs, “The Dangling Conversation”, Paul Simon writes:

And we speak of things that matter

In words that must be said:

Can analysis be worthwhile?

Is the theatre really dead?

And we sit and drink our coffee

Couched in our indifference

Like shells upon the shore

We can hear the ocean roar.

Simon gives us a brief glimpse of a couple whose relationship is drained of all meaning and life. The talk of “things that matter” is, in fact, superficial chatter; each is actually “couched in indifference”, they are “shells upon the shore” – no longer living creatures but empty shells, capable of seeming to produce the sound of the life force – the sea – but in fact lacking in substance, in life. The heart has gone from their “dangling conversation”.