gefräßige Stille
devouring silence
it has no sound, but you know what it sounds like.
everyone is chewing, conversation comes to a standstill, god, the food is so good, little crackles only your ears can hear as your molars do their job, and the gurgle-slurp as you squish another bite past your uvula and into your belly. you don’t even look up because how can you put this <whatever you are eating> down? and everyone else is doing the same.
Minutes go by.
no words, nary an audible.
just eating. silently. together.
~
another memory of learning German… it took a Berliner to connect my mind to the animal rawness of the word devouring in the phrase “devouring silence.”
people eat (essen), and animals eat (fressen), and if you use fressen for a person, you are implying they are ‘eating like an animal’… which you can do, if you want, but it’s not that polite…unless they’re really going for it, and then you’re just reporting the situation…ymmv
and then we have the root for fressen appear in this glorious phrase.
die gefräßige Stille
I don’t remember where i was when I heard it, but someone broke the mouthfuls of silence, own mouth still full, and nonchalantly spurted, “die gefräßige Stille” … chuckled a bit, and went back to their bliss.
my eyes probably rolled around in my skull looking for my rolodex of German, like, what did they just say? DEVOURING SILENCE? WE ARE DEVOURING, IN SILENCE…
This. Has. A. Name… and it’s a cool one too…
to devour.
not just to eat, but like to EAT.
there’s a primal joy in that kind of eating, so primal we lose our tongues to the food and forget speech, we are silent. chewing. together.
Because while we’re busy getting lost in our indulgence, the silence is devouring us.
The silence devours our senses.
Your sense of self, socially constructed, reverts back to a state of communal encounter, all mouths engaged in engorging bellies and not bloviating into air. That time will return, when the bites wind down, but for a moment, there’s that frenzy, faces planted into <whatever you are eating> for that brief time that the dishes are served up, perfect, ready to become one with you, (well mostly), and everyone quiets into enjoying their food before going back to talking… it just happens.
devouring silence
And I share this in the context of food, but let’s play a bit and bring devouring silence into wider frames.
Flow-state creating has its own devouring silence to it, that inflection point where you lose your Self in the work, in the craft, in the where-did-all-that-time-go looking-up-ness and coming back into your body.
The silence that devours…. what, exactly?
It’s the sonic equivalent of a kind of focus, an attentiveness to an elsewhere, while being inescapably here.
Precipitating things from your imagination into manifest reality requires that we lose our hereness for a bit while we go over there (wherever that is) and bring back what’s ours to share.
I was going to insert a Rilke poem, but I’ll save that for another day. We’ve devoured enough German for now… That said, this week is a great time to get lost in a tunnel (catacomb?) of books. I know a place…
~
For this bound, navigate that edge, not losing your Self entirely, but becoming more comfortable in the devouring silences, noticing them, noticing where they are for you and how to embrace them, the attentiveness to another way of being in the world that lets us be nourished deeply, silently, thoroughly.
See you again on October 6th, 2025.