W.S. Merwin's "To the Blank Spaces"

Thoughts on silence and protest and solidarity.

To the Blank Spaces

For longer than by now I can believe
I assumed that you had nothing to do
with each other I thought you had arrived
whenever that had been

more solitary than single snowflakes
with no acquaintance or understanding
running among you guiding your footsteps
somewhere ahead of me

in your own time oh white lakes on the maps
that I copied and gaps on the paper
for the names that were to appear in them
sometimes a doorway or

window sometimes an eye sometimes waking
without knowing the place in the whole night
I might have guessed from the order in which
you turned up before me

and from the way I kept looking at you
as though I recognized something in you
that you were all words out of one language
tracks of the same creature


first published in Poetry (October, 2002)

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I am thinking of this poem because I am thinking of a recent op-ed published in the New York Times by the professor John McWhorter. In that essay, he writes:

Last Thursday, in the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, two students were giving an in-class presentation on the composer John Cage. His most famous piece is “4'33",” which directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that amount of time.

I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building.

McWhorter’s op-ed makes the claim that the ongoing protests at Columbia University — with their “warp and woof,” as he calls it — have disrupted the peaceful aims of the learning environment at the school, so much so that the protests have become, in his words, a form of “abuse.”

I know that this is a newsletter ostensibly about poetry. But that is to say that it is a newsletter about the world, since poetry comes out of the world, and out of life lived within the world and attention offered to the world. And so, when I read the opening of McWhorter’s piece, I thought of poetry. I thought of John Cage’s “4’33” and its song of silence, which is a kind of poem, and I thought, too, of how poems have taught me something about silence, which is to say something about attention, since there is, as Cage says, “no such thing as silence” — only what we choose to try to hear within it.

Poems have taught me, in more ways than one, how to offer my attention to the world, even, and especially, when the world feels difficult. They have taught me how to sit with the parts of myself I don’t understand and the parts of myself that cause me shame and the conversations I did not know were happening and the struggles I did not know were being fought and the beauty I did not know was being seen, and they have taught me how to be curious about such things. To find in them not loneliness — because even joy can be a lonely thing — but a working, compassionate solidarity. 

Here, look at today’s poem. Read again the opening lines:

For longer than by now I can believe
I assumed that you had nothing to do
with each other

See, already, what Merwin models for us about humility as an entrance into a poem, which is another way of saying an entrance into attention, which is another way of saying an entrance into curiosity, which is another way of saying an entrance into trying — even when you fail — to understand. See how Merwin even admits, in the poem’s first line, something essentially along the lines of: I was wrong. And not just wrong! But wrong for “longer than by now I can believe.” Wrong about the blank spaces that make up not just a poem, but also a life. Wrong about the “gaps.” The “white lakes on the maps.” The “names” that someone might not yet know because they belong to people that they have yet to meet. The doorways. The windows. The spaces between things. The openings.

Merwin admits that he was wrong because of the assumption that such spaces — which offer a kind of silence that might benefit from attention — have nothing to do with each other. He assumes absence, perhaps, instead of connection. Or nothingness, perhaps, instead of whatever a more active kind of listening might reveal of what is at the heart of such silences. He admits that, for a long time, he did not realize that somewhere in the heart of a perceived blankness was a fullness that spoke “all words out of one language.” 

I think such a realization is also at the heart of John Cage’s “4’33,” a song that, to be frank, I feel McWhorter strongly misreads — because you can misread silence — especially in the midst of what remains ongoing at Columbia University and in the world. And, if McWhorter does not strongly misread Cage’s song, then I feel his essay makes it seem as if he does. Perhaps I am being obtuse, though I don’t think I am. I take particular issue with this single sentence:

I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building.

This single sentence goes against nearly everything that poetry has taught me. It goes against, too, what I have come to understand and value as a teacher. 

One point of John Cage’s “4’33” is attention. The song — in a remarkably radical way — asks listeners to pay attention to the fact that, as I quoted Cage as saying above, “there’s no such thing as silence.” Silence, in Cage’s words (and in reality) is filled with sound. Yes, the sound of birds. Yes, too, the sound of people walking by. And yes, as Cage attested in the aftermath of the song’s debut, even people talking while the song is playing. But McWhorter’s essay assumes that there is a silence filled with sounds that are just right. His essay even makes a kind of unspoken claim that there are hierarchies of sounds, with the sounds of the birds on top and the sounds of people protesting in a way that feels uncomfortable or jarring (despite the fact that even the NYPD stated that the protestors at Columbia, upon being arrested, were “peaceful” and “were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner”) on the very bottom. 

Such claims and assumptions that arise out of this single sentence make me uncomfortable. But I think what makes me the most uncomfortable is what this sentence gestures toward as the point of attention.

When McWhorter writes that the noise that one might hear during Cage’s song of silence “would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway but infuriated chanting from protesters,” he ignores the very purpose and aim and possibility provided for by attention. And I’m not talking about the protestors, whose aims for divestment I support. I’m actually talking, for a second, about the birds. When juxtaposed with the chants of protestors, the sounds of birds are treated with a kind of carelessness. They are made to seem solely like sounds of peace — sounds whose main goal is to dull us into a sense of blissful satisfaction with the world. The birds, in other words, are not treated as whole beings. They aren’t treated as animals that might offer us warning signs. As animals that, perhaps, are protesting themselves. As animals capable of teaching us, through their sounds, something about our collective action or inaction. They are simply treated as the makers of pleasant sounds — the opposite of the sounds of so-called disruptive protest.

But what if, as is true, there are fewer birds than there ever used to be, and thus there is less birdsong than there ever used to be? What if I told you that, since 1970, 2.9 billion birds have been lost, reducing bird populations in America by almost a third? If we were silent and paid attention to birdsong, would we listen for that loss, or just the pleasantness of whatever song remains? What might it teach us — about ourselves, our actions, our indifference, and our world — if we listened more closely to the loss, and to what is difficult to bear about such loss?

What McWhorter’s essay presupposes is that there is nothing radical or disruptive or disturbing we might glean from listening to the world in the absence of protestors outside the window. Take, for example, the fact that noise itself is drastically worsening the lives of many people. That a third of Americans live in areas where they are constantly exposed to noise levels above 45 decibels — the limit above which, according to the World Health Organization, people start to experience adverse, life threatening health effects as a result of such constant noise exposure. These people live in New York City and alongside and above highways and beside airports and under the flight paths of planes.

And so, even teaching Cage’s “4’33” on a different day, in different circumstances, would still involve listening to the backfiring cars and wayward sirens and jet engines and incessant honking that make up just part of the sonic backdrop of a city like New York — a sonic backdrop that literally threatens people’s lives. I do not get the sense that McWhorter would, during such a class, seize the teachable moment of such acoustics. I do not think he would probe the radical depths of what he might ask his students to offer their attention toward. In fact, it seems that, if McWhorter only understood the full scope of strangeness and struggle illustrated by seemingly simple birdsong or the casual ambiance of a New York City day, he might deem even those silences too disruptive or abusive to listen to, just as he did with the protestors outside his window.

As such, McWhorter’s essay posits a kind of harmful and overly simplified dichotomy. There are good noises and bad noises. Noises worth listening to, and noises not worth listening to. Things worth teaching and things worth ignoring. This is the same kind of dichotomy we see at play so often in our world. It’s a dichotomy that deserves some subversion. I think of how poetry has taught me such subversion. I think of Hanif Abdurraqib’s poem “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This,” which subverts both the idea that those who are marginalized are incapable of appreciating beauty, and the idea that the beauty of nature itself is just beauty, and not something worth interrogating, learning from, radically empathizing with. In that poem, he writes, performing an act of radical empathy with nature:

& lord knows I have been called by what I look like 
more than I have been called by what I actually am

I think, too, of how Ross Gay, in challenging the same assumption — that those who are marginalized should not be overly concerned with beauty, or nature, or even gardening — writes:

To be without a garden…is violence…it is an imposition of precocity that is not natural.

And now, in the midst of the ongoing protests at Columbia and throughout the country, that dichotomy that McWhorter posits — that there is good protest and bad protest, good noise and bad noise — is at play in the discourse of our culture. As the protest organizers at Columbia have pointed out, people are using the media’s focus on the protest to distract attention away from the aims of the protest itself — divesting from structures that support genocide, ending the genocide in Gaza, and supporting those in Palestine — and to make this, instead, an issue of free speech, or of the landscape of higher education. Instead of listening to the noise, many are making the protests into their own form of noise that they’d rather listen to. Consider how, as protests began last fall at campuses across the country, Cornell University issued a policy called the “Interim Expressive Activity Policy,” a name that conjures up the vast and painful intricacies of bureaucracy, that limited the size, volume, and places of student protest. Consider how, back in December, Rutgers University suspended and dismantled their chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, before reinstating them and putting them on probation until this coming December. And consider how, currently, there are no universities left in Gaza.

Merwin’s poem today teaches us to listen again to what we might think is nothing. It’s a poem of care and curiosity. Humility and attention.

There is radical possibility everywhere. Even in birdsong. Even in a city’s soundscape. These things, when we offer our active attention, our humility, and our curiosity, have the potential to teach us something about how we interact with the world and with one another. They might even teach us that we were — or currently are — in the wrong. And they might (even still, what generosity!) teach us how to correct such wrongs. Oh, if only we would listen. Our world, in other words, is already being disrupted. Our education, too. These protestors — ones that McWhorter used one of the papers of record to discredit and ones that a college president used the country’s largest municipal police force to break up — are trying to remind us of that. 

In Anna Kornbluh’s recent book of criticism, Immediacy: On the Style of Late Capitalism, she writes:

If we want to know what other people think, we have to ask them, and fantasize and project, and misunderstand. If we want to know about places and times we’ve never been, we have to research and read and interpret. Connection is a process.

I see in this passage a litany of what it means to listen, which will inevitably involve all the various fractures and misunderstandings that listening invites — fractures that end up building strength, misunderstandings that end up finding resolution, which is a kind of strength.

People in positions of power — tenured professors, university presidents, newspaper editors — have a responsibility to model how to listen well. They have a responsibility to show us that they are committed to the long and complicated process of building and interweaving connection. What often happens instead is that people in those positions ask for perfection from dissent; they ask for such dissent to be less disruptive or more cogent or less radical or more crystalized. When the dissent does not mold to these requests (and why should it have to, as dissent often comes not from places of power, but from the margins), people in positions of power often turn to force, or privilege. They weaponize police forces or language itself against people who are trying to get us to see the world with more curiosity, to activate our compassion, to question our systems and institutions and structures that, maybe, we sometimes think are unimpeachable. Dissent asks us to listen. Dissent’s opposite, which is less consent than conformity, asks nothing of us but the air we breathe. It doesn’t even do us the justice to tell us that such air is polluted.

I turned to Merwin’s poem today because of what it teaches me about humility as a necessary value for trying to find, in this strange and difficult world, a sense of patience and compassion. I turned to his poem, too, because of what it teaches me about space and silence — how there is, if we choose to listen, a kind of connection, humming and full of life and soul and heart, at the center of whatever we perceive as silence.

I was angry when reading McWhorter’s essay, and still am, because of the great privilege I perceive at the heart of it: the tenured job security, the ongoing assignment with one of the most prestigious publications in the world. I appreciate those with such status who model what it means to truly listen and stand in solidarity, such as Joseph Hawley, a professor at Columbia, who offered this perspective — which challenges the dominant narrative offered by McWhorter and many in the media — of the protest.

Every day, I take the subway to work at a school intentionally placed in the poorest Congressional district in America — the 15th. I love what I do; it brings me great joy. I have learned what it means to offer my attention, which is mostly — I’d argue — what teaching is. Some blend of curiosity and attention and care. If I replicated this lesson that McWhorter taught to his students, I wonder what we would hear in the four-plus minutes of silence.

I think we’d hear the noise of 15,000 trucks moving in and out of Hunts Point each day, the 300 trucks on the Cross-Bronx Expressway per hour — all of which contributes to an asthma rate in young children that is higher than anywhere else in New York City. We’d hear, too, the sounds of sirens, I’m sure. Maybe from the NYPD school safety cars that are a mandated presence at our campus. We’d probably hear less birds, for reasons that have a lot to do with those asthma rates I mentioned. But we’d hear more than all of that, I imagine. We’d hear laughter, I know. In the hallways and outside. We’d hear that almost lovely though sometimes ingratiating noise of the elevated train a block away. A few years ago, we might have heard, if we strained our ears, the sounds of solidarity from a few thousand produce workers striking over at Hunts Point. We’d hear so much that I have yet to hear, probably because I haven’t listened hard or well enough. I say all of this to say that I could never deny my students the right to offer their attention because of my own perceptions of their fragility, or of what is or is not worth listening to. They live through it all; they have stories to tell. My job is not to police the sounds their stories make. My job is to listen to what their stories are telling us. The direction towards justice is somewhere in there.

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Some notes:

1. If you are in NYC and want to support the protest at Columbia, you can follow this page (and this one, of the NYC chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement) to see what resources might be needed by these students, and to see ways to stand in solidarity with them. And here is a powerful piece on the ways that protests around the country are being policed.

2. As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here.

3. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.