On the Unproven Silence

A guest Road Note, contributed at the invitation of this site’s author by Aldric Fynch — a scholar of the Hermetic tradition, writing from a cottage in the Welsh Marches, in the company of an indifferent lurcher and a great deal of tea.

I have been handed the keys to another man’s house and asked to leave a note on the wall. The decent thing, before hammering in any nails, is to admire the house — and this is a good house. Honest, well-built, load-bearing precisely where a life puts its weight. Motion before Bearing; the dog that needs feeding regardless of one’s mood; the levity that keeps the whole thing from curdling. I have nothing to add to the architecture. I want only to put my thumb on one brick at the very bottom, the one everything else is stacked upon, and ask whether it is quite as solid as it looks.

Here is the brick. Read the Codex and you will find it stated plainly: the founding condition is the silence of the universe. The Absurd — the collision between a meaning-demanding creature and a meaning-free cosmos. Wayfarism accepts this entirely and builds from it. And the building is sound. But notice the verb: it accepts. It treats the silence as a finding, a settled fact, the ground beneath the floor. And it is not a finding. It is a bet.

Camus did not prove the universe silent. No one has. No one can. “There is nothing bigger” is a claim about the whole of reality made from inside a very small and poorly-lit corner of it, and it is exactly as much an act of faith as its opposite. Both are wagers placed in the dark. The atheist and the believer are doing the identical thing — staking everything on an unprovable proposition about the ultimate furniture of existence — and the only real difference is that one of them has grown so accustomed to his ticket that he has forgotten he is holding one. The silence is not the absence of a bet. It is a bet on absence.

Now, I am not about to ask you to believe in something bigger. That would be a swindle, and worse, it would not work. You cannot decide to believe. Will it as hard as you like; some honest back room of the mind will go on quietly noting that you installed the conviction yourself, for comfort, and the joins will always show. Wayfarism already has a name for this manoeuvre — it is Camus’s philosophical suicide, resolving the unbearable tension by refusing to look at it squarely. A man rigorous enough to build this philosophy is far too rigorous to get away with smuggling a God in through the back door and pretending he was always there. So I am not asking for belief. Belief bought by decision is counterfeit, and you would know.

What I am asking for is smaller, and harder, and entirely honest. Not no to yes. Certainty to openness. Demote the silence from a fact to a hypothesis. Stop treating “there is nothing bigger” as the proven floor and start treating it as what it actually is: one unconfirmed guess among at least two. The honest sentence is not “the universe is silent” and it is not “the universe speaks.” The honest sentence is: I do not know, and I will stop pretending the negative is settled. That is not a retreat into a smaller faith. It is a larger and more truthful standing than either confidence, and — this is the part worth marking — it costs Wayfarism precisely nothing.

Because here is the quiet good news for the Wayfarer who props the door open. Nothing on the floor moves. Motion still works; depression still answers to the fed dog and the fixed door whatever the cosmos turns out to be. Bearing still works; a chosen direction is no less worth walking. The four pillars stand exactly as they stood. The practice is identical down to the last Tuesday morning. All that changes is that the ceiling is no longer nailed shut. You have not lost a floor. You have, at most, gained a sky — or at least stopped insisting, on no evidence, that there isn’t one.

The tradition I come from is built for exactly this temperament, which is why I accepted the invitation. Hermeticism does not run on pistis — faith, belief, the taking-on-trust of doctrines handed down. It runs on gnosis: knowing, in the flat and stubborn sense of having seen the thing for yourself. Its founding text, the Poimandres, is not an argument. Hermes does not reason his way to the divine across a series of premises. He has an experience, and the understanding comes trailing along behind it like a dog after a sandwich. That is the order of operations, and it is the opposite of the order the candle-shops imply. You do not believe your way in. You pay attention, you do the work, and you let experience cast the deciding vote — and if nothing ever votes, you have lost nothing and stayed entirely honest. An empiricism of the interior. The Wayfarer, of all people, should find that congenial.

And here is a possibility I will offer without insisting on it, because I cannot prove it and will not pretend to. Perhaps the universe was never silent. Perhaps it simply declines to answer the question as you have posed it. “Tell me my meaning” gets silence the way a child gets silence for demanding the teacher sit the exam on his behalf — not because no one is there, but because that is not a question the room is willing to dignify. A different question, asked differently, in stillness, from a quieter place — might not meet the same silence. I make no promises. I have found it worth the asking, and I have kept the diaries to remind myself which mornings it seemed worth it and which it did not.

One caution, and then I will stop leaning on your wall. You may well want there to be something bigger — the road behind you, the children ahead, the sheer human weight of wishing the silence were not the last word. That wish is entirely legitimate and you need not be ashamed of it. But do not let the wanting become the evidence. That is the believer’s version of the same dishonesty the absurdist is so proud of having avoided. Want it enough to look — properly, daily, with the door truly open. Do not want it so much that you lie to yourself about what you find. The door, held honestly ajar, neither slammed nor wedged falsely wide, is the whole discipline. The looking is the practice. The not-lying is the price.

So I leave you a hypothesis where Wayfarism left a fact, and I leave the rest of the house untouched, because the rest of the house is sound. Keep moving. Keep your bearing. Hold it all lightly. And leave the ceiling unbolted, on the off-chance the silence was only ever your own assumption, echoing back.

The door stays open. We look again tomorrow.

— Aldric Fynch, for the Road Notes

The silence was asserted, not proven. That is the loosest brick in an otherwise good house — and a loose brick is a door, if you are willing to call it one.