Keeping quiet
If you don’t have anything to say, better stay silent*.
A man sits in a chair in an empty room. He is quiet, contemplative, as if gazing at the immensity of the world, unable to process or grasp it, struck dumb by its complexity and magnitude.
This is the brief I gave my AI art worker, Midjourney.
At first I envisaged a picture of a workshop facilitator sitting empty and stupefied after 4 days of consecutive training in a basement conference room (that’s who I was last week, running a course for strategy consultants called Taking Control) - wrung out to a degree that felt existentially fascinating.
As the week rolled on and the war in Israel intensified the image evolved into a generic portrait of awe and powerlessness, grief and emptiness, a stunned void with no answers inside it beyond perhaps the cosmic hum of silence.
I remember after 9/11 how difficult it was to believe that writing, comedy, music or any other kind of creative work was relevant unless it spoke to the new world context. This week feels similar - articles about personal productivity or team flow suddenly feel lame without some connection to the foregrounding of human suffering and geopolitical tectonics. Just like you’d feel odd giving a stand up routine about romantic relationships right after a major earthquake.
So this week I am allowing myself to have nothing to say. Already there is more information and love and pain expressed than the world can possibly process.
I’m also trying not to get too addicted to the news.
Like everyone I love people and I wish they loved each other. I understand why people fight each other. I wish they didn’t. I prefer it when people reach for a balanced and non-judgmental view.
Other than that, I have no opinion.
But this podcast - on history and geopolitics in the region - is very, very good. As is this (on the economics).
Laurence
*Googling this quote about staying quiet I discovered it was a sort of historical meta-sentiment expressed in many ways by many people - from Pythagoras to Benjamin Franklin. My favourites are usually the mysterious existential ones:
Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know - Lao Tsu
Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent - Wittgenstein
You can find dozens more here.