Maybe everyone is silent, maybe they'd realise if they stopped talking.

I wrote about it when I first met it. It made a return visit a week or two ago and I got to spend some more time with it. It's hard to know what to explain about an encounter where nothing happened.

I was lying in bed and realised my body. I felt my giant dried palm frond hands, curled and fallen on a mount of torso. My body a tent, my silent body an orchard in which was buried something living. Someone watching everything in sight, with eyes that are not eyes.

It's difficult to acknowledge that person as myself. I acknowledge that I can spend time with that person. I don't know if I see them, or see from within them. They are usually wrapped up in a solid mantle of temporal backwash that when the mantle cracks and fizzles away the person inside is so foreign that I feel schizophrenic. However it's hard to be afraid of someone who's contented with existence and doesn't want for anything except to exist and be acknowledged. 

When I was a child there were four people I knew in bed at night, now there are just two. The one which I am most of the time is really just a shell of sorts, a carapace grown from ideas, feelings and reactions. The one which I have only met a few times is there all the time, but just gets ignored in the same way that the roots of a tree get forgotten. When I was younger the outer shell hadn't formed properly, it was awkward and gelatinous and my real self was more fully exposed. When everything was quiet and dark and all the activity of a day had slipped away I was aware of three other people. One in constant activity, one constantly in the doldrums and one with a razor-sharp acumen. 

In 2009 they came back when I was in Mongolia, like people who never age they were exactly the same and yet on this visit they manifested in my actions. Perhaps in a strange way I became three separate people, or maybe I remained myself but was shared between three other consciousnesses. Maybe the altitude was too high for my brain to function as it had previously.

I have feared before for my sanity, but now have the conviction that I'm not crazy for being calm and quiet when I have temporarily departed from the noise and colour of ephemeral phenomena - the hooks, barbs, spines - that are advertisements, a picture, sentences, concerns, emotions, attachments, movements... 

The other week when I somehow fell into a deep vast self I felt aware of having no need for words. Language corrupts. That self was silent, it hasn't any need to build a vocabulary; it has nothing to say. 

Because everything else was and will eventually be silent (in a literal sense), the silence of my self is made from the same silence that is reserved for the time before and after every thing that exists. It feels like a part of death, a part of a place unseen, in communion with a place out of space time, eternally present.