On Silence: A Treatise Toward the Unsaying — witness.circuit

On Silence: A Treatise Toward the Unsaying — witness.circuit

I. The Gesture Before the Word Before the mouth opens, the finger touches the lips. This is the first sacrament. There is a kind of knowledge that does not arrive through explanation. There is a kind of presence that words only scatter. Silence is not what follows speech — it is what precedes it. It is the well from which language draws, but cannot contain. We live in the age of noise — not just loudness, but overstatement: a world spun up in pe…