On Mindfulness, Silence and the Art of Listening
Earlier this summer I had an experience that fits very well with the subject of today’s article.
We were driving along a road in Lower Austria we had travelled before when I suddenly noticed a sign pointing towards a so-called Peace Stupa. I had never seen it before, although the sign had obviously been there for some time.
We decided to have a look and were impressed for several reasons. The stupa stands above vineyards and fields, prayer flags moving in the wind, and the architecture is quite unusual for this part of Austria.
The interior surprised me even more.
It is an almost empty circular space under a high dome. Because of its shape, its hard surfaces and the absence of furniture, the acoustics are remarkable. In the centre stands a large, high-quality gong.
I stood in the middle of the stupa and my companion struck the gong. I closed my eyes and listened.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I had stored the information that the human ear can hear a sound for about twenty seconds. After twenty seconds I was therefore ready to leave, when I suddenly realised that I could still hear something.
The sound was still there.
This occupied me for the rest of the day and in the evening I did some reading. My twenty seconds turned out to be a rather questionable piece of information. How long a sound remains audible depends on many things: the instrument itself, frequencies, resonance, the acoustics of the room, background noise and, of course, our individual hearing.
Under favourable conditions, the sound of such a gong can remain perceptible for considerably longer.
But who actually hears it for that long? And we can work on ourselves to be able to hear a tone for longer? That raises a fundamental question:
When Does a Note Begin – and When Does It End?
We have probably all come across the term mindfulness and have tried, in one way or another, to get something useful out of it for ourselves.
Meditation and mindfulness have been essential to me for various reasons. One aspect that interests me particularly is of course their relationship to my art.
For me personally, imagination is closely connected with attention. Attention is something like a muscle that can be trained. [1]
Attention and Imagination
When we watch a fantasy film, somebody else has already created a fantasy world for us. We can immerse ourselves in it, of course, but we move within a space that has largely been predetermined by somebody else. When we read a book, things are different. From a few words we create landscapes, rooms, faces and often an entire world of our own.
The ability to be attentive is fundamental to my painting—especially when I am working in an abstract or minimalist style.
Several times people have told me that they are not really interested in abstract art but that, for some reason, my paintings appeal to them or “say something” to them. Of course, I cannot know exactly why. But I think one reason may be that I try to give even the most insignificant things – a dot, a small brushstroke, a trace – meaning and therefore a certain kind of life.
I think something similar happens with a musical note.
If we play even a relatively simple piece of music ourselves and afterwards hear it played by a master, we quickly realise that the difference cannot lie in the notes alone. After all, the same score is lying in front of both of us.
It is what we put into those notes.
Before going any further I should add that this article is neither scientific nor music-theoretical. I simply do not have the training for that. Kindly defined, I am a passionate amateur, although music has always been an important pillar in my life.
What exactly is a musical note?
As always when we deal with a subject, it is useful to define it first. Unfortunately, even the apparently simple question of what a note actually is is not so easy to answer.
Are we talking about the horn of a train, the sound of a drop of water falling onto a stone, or only about what we usually call a musical note?
To make things easier, I will stay with one musical note today and reduce it even further to, let’s say, middle C.
One note should be enough for our purposes.
Sound and Silence
A note is something that exists, something we can hear. Its opposite would appear to be silence.
It is tempting to think of sound and silence in terms of yang and yin, although this should not be understood too literally. Yin and yang are relational rather than fixed categories. One exists and is understood in relation to the other.
But does silence really exist?
If we meditate on silence, or simply think about it attentively for a while, we soon notice that the often-mentioned silence of a forest is not very silent at all. There are leaves moving in the wind, branches creaking, and there are birds, insects and all the other inhabitants of the forest.
The silence of a deep cellar would sound quite different. This silence has a different quality and can even contain something slightly threatening.
And the silence of lonely mountains is different again. There may be hardly anything consciously audible, and yet there is wind around the peaks, atmospheric sounds and perhaps distant noises finding a resonating space in the valley.
The more closely we listen to silence, the more difficult it becomes to say where silence actually begins.
Dot and Note
At this point I come back to painting.
A dot is one of the simplest things imaginable. The tip of the brush touches the paper and for a very brief moment we have something that I like to imagine as two-dimensional. Then it develops relationships to the space around it and becomes part of something three-dimensional. And as we have already discussed in earlier articles, an enso in painting can be understood as an infinitely large dot that encompasses the entire universe.
I see a certain similarity with a musical note. There is the first moment in which the note is produced and then it is amplified by the resonating body of the instrument and spreads through the surrounding space.
This is not meant as physics. Rather, it is about mental practice aimed at expanding the range of our sensory impressions.
I once made a playful attempt to paint the moment in which, in my imagination, a dot changes from two dimensions into three. For me this is also the moment when light enters and space begins to develop.
We are talking about an extremely short unit of time. But time does not really matter for our little meditation. Sounds existed long before humans began dividing day and night into hours, minutes, seconds and eventually nanoseconds.
Can We Hear a Painting?
I have asked myself before what a musical sound actually is and touched on some of these ideas in articles such as Can We Hear a Painting→?
Later I thought of a good example from one of my favourite painters, Pan Tianshou.
Even with relatively little imagination, I think we can almost hear the cry of this lonely bird into the mist, or into nothingness.
There is, of course, no sound in the painting.
Nevertheless, I hear one.
This interests me because it says something about what we ourselves add to a work of art. A painting gives us something, but we do not only receive. Our memories, associations, imagination and attention contribute something as well.
Perhaps that is one of the places where mindfulness and imagination meet.
Cause and Effect
Let us return to our middle C.
The heard note is the effect. But something must have caused it. In the case of a piano, a hammer strikes a string. But the hammer did not do so by itself. It was set in motion by the mechanism of the piano because a key was pressed.
The key, in turn, was pressed by the pianist’s finger. The movement came from the hand and wrist, which received their impulses through the nervous system and the brain.
But this is still not the beginning.
The pianist saw the middle C on the score. The eye transmitted the information; the written notation was thus first recognized and interpreted based on further information. It was played softly, loudly, gently, or thunderously—embedded within a specific musical context.
So perhaps the beginning of our note lies in the moment in which the pianist sees it on the page.
But even that does not take us very far. Somebody composed the music, somebody printed the score, somebody produced the paper and somebody else built the piano.
We can continue this chain almost indefinitely.
And with this rather simple meditation on one note, we have arrived at something that plays an important role in Buddhist thought: cause, effect and interdependence.
The Dalai Lama has repeatedly used ordinary objects to illustrate this idea. Things that appear to belong to one individual depend on the work and contribution of countless other people – from the production of raw materials to transport, manufacture and all the other steps we usually do not think about. [2]
Looked at in this way, our single middle C has a surprisingly large family.
Back to the Gong
Our little meditation has shown me at least two things.
The first became very clear to me in the stupa. I had assumed that the sound was finished because I had a certain number in my head. Had I stopped paying attention at that point, the sound would indeed have been finished – at least for me.
But it was not.
That does not mean that mindfulness somehow improves our ears beyond their physiological limits. It simply means that attention can change how much of what our senses provide actually enters our conscious perception. [3]
The second point is the chain of cause and effect. The more closely we look at even a very simple event, the less isolated it appears.
For me, both things are closely connected with creativity.
If I pass a dot without really looking at it, it remains a dot. If I hear a note without really listening, it remains a note.
By giving apparently insignificant things our attention, we can give them meaning and extend our world of perception.
I consider this important for someone who creates art, but equally for someone who receives it.
A Small Case Study
The following painting has already appeared here in an unfinished version. Its working title was Zen Meditation by the Sea.
Basically, I liked the first version, but something was missing.
It “didn’t make music.”
I realise that this is not a particularly precise art-historical or technical description. 😊
After thinking – or perhaps meditating – about it again, I returned to the painting. I added several glazes of oil paint and changed a few passages.
Now it “sounds” to me.
Perhaps the forms communicate differently with each other. Perhaps some areas have become quieter and others more active. Or perhaps all the meditation on notes and silence has simply changed the way I look at it.
In any case, I like it better now.
OK, I am biased. 😊
footnotes:
[1] I use the relationship between mindfulness and imagination here primarily to describe my own experience. Research does suggest a connection between mindfulness practices and aspects of creative performance, although the results vary considerably depending on the kind of mindfulness practice and the creative task being measured.
[2] Interdependence is a recurring theme in the Dalai Lama’s teachings. He frequently illustrates it through ordinary objects and everyday life: what appears to be an individual achievement or possession depends on innumerable other people, materials and circumstances. I have not attributed the particular example of his clothing that I remembered to a specific lecture, as I have not been able to verify its exact source.
[3] Research into mindfulness and cognition suggests measurable effects on some aspects of attention and executive functioning. The effects are not uniform across all cognitive abilities, however, and mindfulness should not be understood as simply making the senses physiologically “better.”
Related articles: The Principle of the Balance in Chinese Painting I How to Kill Your Muse I The Journey to the Zen Master
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