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[ by Charles Cameron — or as John Cage once said, I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry ]
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JV Cunningham has a poem which runs in its entirety:

Life flows to death as rivers to the sea
And life is fresh and death is salt to me.

Brilliant and brief. Samuel Beckett goes him one better, writing:

My birth was my death. Or put it another way. My birth was the death of me. Words are scarce.

It’s the scarcity that interests me here. Earlier, in Godot, he had written:

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

That’s too wordy. “My birth was the death of me” packs a colloquial punch, while “My birth was my death” is more succinct and correspondingly powerful.

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Birth > death.

They are opposites, obviously, and almost tautologically so — and yet there is a less-than-obvious “double meaning” to them — when brought into close conjunction they can be said to fold the universe from many back into one.

This business of the conjunction of opposites is one which Carl Jung made the centerpiece of much of his later work, writing for instance:

Whoever identifies with an intellectual standpoint will occasionally find his feeling confronting him like an enemy in the guise of the anima; conversely, an intellectual animus will make violent attacks on the feeling standpoint. Therefore, anyone who wants to achieve the difficult feat of realizing something not only intellectually, but also according to its feeling-value, must for better or worse come to grips with the anima/animus problem in order to open the way for a higher union, a coniunctio oppositorum. This is an indispensable prerequisite for wholeness.

Consider the current US election campaign in this light…

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Shakespeare’s “insult, exult, and all at once” in As you Like It, and Dylan Thomas’ “Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray” in Do not go gentle are 0other instances of brevity in paradox.

Beckett, Jung, Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas — heady company.

[ by Charles Cameron — sometimes a DoubleQuote — or even a triple or quad — is not enough ]
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So here is the first in a new occasional series I’ll call Chain-links. I haven’t figured out a format for presenting these things yet, but something of that kind will probably emerge along the way. In the meanwhile, my first entry in the series is about silence.

You are invited to consider the series of quotes here as the flow of a single idea down a sequence of steps, fluid, shifting in emphasis..

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A Roman courtroom appearance:

And Jesus stood before the governor: and the governor asked him, saying, Art thou the King of the Jews? And Jesus said unto him, Thou sayest. And when he was accused of the chief priests and elders, he answered nothing. Then said Pilate unto him, Hearest thou not how many things they witness against thee? And he answered him to never a word; insomuch that the governor marvelled greatly.

                        Matthew 27. 11-14

A British courtroom, many centuries later:

Not so. Not so, Master Secretary. The maxim is “Qui tacet consentire”: the maxim of the law is “Silence gives consent”. If therefore you wish to construe what my silence betokened, you must construe that I consented, not that I denied.

                        

                        Thomas More, in A Man for All Seasons

Contemporary diplomatic protocol:

A proposal with strong support is deemed to have been agreed unless any member raises an objection to it before a precise deadline: silence signifies assent – or, at least, acquiescence.

                        GR Berridge, Diplomacy: Theory and Practice

Before a Congressional committee, under interrogation or in court:

On counsel’s advice, I invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment not to answer, on the grounds I may incriminate myself.

                        “Taking the Fifth”

When journos ask truth of power:

No comment.

                        Press secretaries and their bureaucrats everywhere.

And for good measure:

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How does Thomas More before Cromwell — or Christ before Pilate — compare with the American who takes the Fifth, the harried executive who won’t comment?

What kind of speech is silence?

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Water flowing down the steps in the Fort Worth Water Gardens: