The Sound of Silence

By Bobby Neal Winters

I was walking down the Watco Rail Trail today near where it meets Broadway when the Youtube music algorithm brought me Disturbed's cover of “The Sound of Silence.”

It’s always been a haunting song. While there are some surface interpretations to it, I’ve always felt there was more there.  Just as Bob Dylan was prophetic in many of his songs, I think Paul Simon was playing that role when he wrote this one. 

Not long after hearing the lyric

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls//

And tenement halls

I was walking down Broadway and read the graffiti-style mural that read: “Your music is in you.”

This is an example of what Carl Jung called synchronicity.  I can’t actually define synchronicity. I’m not that smart, for sure. But I know an example of it when I see one.

In any case, I’ve been thinking about words and numbers.  There are folks--both English majors and Math majors--who like to draw a line, a very dark and thick line, between words and numbers.

I believe that is a mistake, a really, really big mistake.

Numbers are words.

This came to me when I was watching one of my grandsons learning to count.  He was laying out potato chips on the dining room table counting, “One, two, three, four,...” and continued to do so, saying a word every time he put down a potato chip.

It occurred to me that the only thing that would stop him was when he ran out of the names that he knew for the numbers. (Or ran out of potato chips, but it was a pretty big bag.)

In American English, at least the nontechnical part, we run out of names for numbers at about a trillion.  Well, let me make that more precise: most educated people start struggling to think of names for numbers at one trillion (1,000,000,000,000). There are names beyond that: quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion. And you can go a lot farther, but it gets complicated and the vast majority of humans aren’t going to know and don’t want to know.

Some of you might be old enough to remember the folks back in 2012 who were all worried that the world was going to come to an end because the Mayan Calendar ended in the year 2012.  My understanding--and the person I think I learned this from has an office next door to mine--the truth of the matter was the Mayans simply didn’t have words for the numbers in their calendar beyond that date.

But let me get on with my rant. 

Numbers are words. Since there are more numbers than we know how to pronounce, there are words we have no way to say. Words that are forever silent.

Truths that can never be uttered.

The poets, the prophets, and the mathematicians stretch themselves to try to pass on these silent truths, but the struggle is in vain so much of the time.

The math lecture is slept through.

The prophet is ignored.

The words of the poet go unsung.

They echo in the sound of silence, as it were.

That doesn’t mean that the truth dies. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get passed along.

It means the truth is not passed from mouth to ear. It must go from heart to heart.

The truth doesn’t die.

And while it can always be spoken, it can never be silenced. For certain, what can’t be spoken most certainly can’t be silenced.

Because your music is in you. It always was and always will be. It will echo in the sound of silence.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.