Silence

What is to follow is a passage I took out of a book I need to read for one of my classes that I found really intriguing. Soo...BEWARE!! SCHOOL TEXT TO FOLLOW! ;)

"'Silence' is not a straightforward or unproblematic description of the experience of deafness, however. First, few deaf people hear nothing. Most have hearing losses that are not uniform across the entire range of pitch--they will hear low sounds better than high ones or vice versa. Sounds will often be quite distorted but heard nevertheless.

"And second, for those who do not hear, what does the word silence signify? Unless they once heard and became deaf, the word is meaningless as a description of their experience. (Even for those who once heard, as the experience of sound recedes further into the past, so too does the significance of "silence" diminish.) Silence is experienced by the hearing as an absence of sound. For those who have never heard, deafness is not an absence.

"As used by hearing people, "silence" is a metaphor rather than a simple description of the experience of deaf people. Deaf people may use the analogy of visual clutter to understand noise, and blind people may use tactile sensations of heat and coolness to approach the idea of color. Such analogies, in the absence of direct experience can promote understanding because they juxtapose equally complex phenomena; neither is reduced by the comparison.

"On the other hand, hearing people may plug their ears and sighted people may close their eyes and then, speaking of silence and darkness, use these experiences to try and understand deafness or blindness. But these metaphors are less helpful.

"Speaking of deaf people as inhabiting a world of silence is metaphorical rather than analogous because it is an attempt to understand the complex and abstract in terms of the simple and concrete. When hearing people think of the world of the deaf as silent, they are comparing and reducing an identity, a way of life an infinitely complex set of social and cultural relationships to a simple and concrete phenomenon: a temporary absence of sound.

"What then did deaf people mean by their use of the word "silent"? Rather than the experience of soundlessness, most often their use of the word seems to point in a different direction and to call up different associations. Deaf people only rarely used it as hearing people did in such phrases as "living in silence," Instead, "silent" usually seems to have referred more to not speaking than not hearing, meaning mute more than deaf, and pointing to a social relation rather than a state of being. It indicated a social identity, setting "mutes" off from "speaking people"

"To be deaf is not to not hear for most profoundly deaf people but a social relation--that is, a relation with other human beings hearing and deaf. What the deaf person sees in these other people is not the presence or absence of hearing, not their soundfulness or their silence, but their mode of communication-they sign, or they move their lips. That is why deaf people in the nineteenth century typically referred to themselves not as deaf people but as "mutes." That is why the sign still used today that is translated as "hearing person" is made next to the mouth, not the ear, and literally means "speaking person."

"Deafness is a relationship not a state, and the way that the "silence" metaphor is usually understood by hearing people is one indication of how they view the relationship. To hearing people, deaf people are incomplete. They are different but not merely different: their difference is also a deficiency (which is probably the shared characteristic of all perceived as "other"). hearing is defined as the universal, and deafness, therefore, as an absence, as an emptiness, as a silence.

"Silence can represent innocence and fertility, and it can represent darkness and barrenness. In both cases it is empty. In both cases it needs to be filled. Images such as these---images of light and darkness, of society and isolation, of soundfulness and silence-- construct a hierarchical relationship in which deaf people are said to lack what hearing people alone can provide."  

 - Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language by Douglas C. Baynton p. 23-24

Congrats you made it through the "school text." :)
What do you think? I thought it was very thought provoking...about how people 'judge' others and try to say "oh yes I know exactly how that is..." when....they don't...because they never can experience something the same way as another person. We all come from different backgrounds and were raised in different ways...so what one sees as a lack, another sees as a gift, or of no value.

Silence.....it has a different meaning to different people of different cultures.

Interesting.

Until you next see these words;
I'll be watching the leaves.
Enjoy the day!

-Sarnic Dirchi