IN PRAISE OF RETICENCE

By Melvin Maddocks

THE DC-9 has climbed to 30,000 ft. You have that serene, floating, god-above-gravity feelingthe small miracle of flying. Your fellow god, the one in the cockpit, is mumbling the usual comforting inaudibles over the P.A. ("Off to the leftmmmmmzzz . . ."). You give the other passengers a quick scan; apparently not a hijacker in sight. A small prayer of thanks might be in order.

But then there is a minor throat-clearing on your right. Your seatmate is about to speak. You are about to suffer a disaster that neither man nor computer can guard against: Instant Intimacy. Relentlessly, he tells you all about his business, his childhood, his sex life. Why do the airlines spend their money eliminating the middle seat? Why don't they put up confessional grilles instead?

Let's call your seatmate Charlie O. (for Oral). He is not just a minor nuisance, but the personification of a major menace. People today tell complete strangers things they once wouldn't have confessed to a priest, a doctor or a close friend: their crudest fears; their most shameful inadequacies; their maddest fantasies. We are witnessing something like the death of reticence.

Inspect the bestseller list. Charlie O. has it cornered. He is the tattletale from whom we learn Everything W'e Always Wanted to Know About Sexand a lot we didn't really want to know, thanks all the same. Charlie O.'s Complaint is not that he can't help doing it but that he can't help talking about it. In the theater, Charlie O. is the playwright shouting the most four-letter words the loudest. He is also the journalist who will share with 7,000,000 readers a 20-year history of his drinking problem. The short version, or the long one if he can find an editor to pay. Not even his loved ones are safe. He will describe in detail his wife's change of life, his daughter's ordeal with drugs, or his son's battle against not-so-latent homosexuality.

Self-disclosure has become an art formindeed, it threatens to become the only art form. The Charlie O. who shows-and-tells not only earns an automatic reputation for honesty but for talent. Johnny, Merv and Dick fight to get him, and then he tells even more. Hang a mike boom above his big mouth and stand back. Let lesser men insert the bleeps. If he isn't already a celebrity, Instant Intimacy practiced with a closeup camera on a Nielsen audience of 7.2 will make him one. Instantly.

You call it exhibitionism? He calls it Moral Courage and Mental Health. Talking is good. This is the center and the circumference of Charlie O.'s credo. The more talking, the better.

Open your well-dinned ears to the talk show that is life. Charlie O.'s credo has carried the day. The reticent man, even as he mutters "Crashing bore!" in the direction of the nearest Charlie O., is bullied into feeling that he suffers from constipation of the heart ("What are you holding back? Don't you care?"). The old valuestalk is cheap, "strong" goes with "silent" have been reversed. Articulate and outspoken: does praise come higher? He can't communicate: this is the kiss of death from kindergarten on.

Talking It All Out supposedly helps cure everything from bad marriages to war. But your old seatmate Charlie O. is not the pink-cheeked life-giver he pretends to be. He is a monologist whose unstinting offer of himself is the purest self-indulgence. One ear is as good as another for himor even no ear at all. Like Samuel Beckett's Krapp, he might as well be sitting in an empty room droning into a tape recorder: Narcissus with a microphone instead of a mirror.

In his life, in his art, Charlie O. wants to be Me. But he has no time to develop a self, he's so busy giving it away. For all his I-witnessing, one is left with remarkably little presence. Charlie O. wears his openness like the ultimate mask. The whine of his voice, the color of his pubic hairwhat else is there to remember really? As Psychiatrist Leslie Farber puts it, he has taken the fig leaf off his genitals only to cover up his face.

There is a mischief, a self-destructiveness built into garrulity. A little-known law of psychology called the Lombard Effect states that a talker raises the level of his voice in reflex response to an increase in environmental noise (including other voices), but at the cost of intelligibility. The talker puts things less accurately and, furthermore, he is less accurately understood by his equally harassed listeners. The Lombard Effect is a fair metaphor for the distracted life, 1970.

The fact that people "can no longer carry on authentic dialogue with one another," Philosopher Martin Buber has warned, is "the most acute symptom of the pathology of our time." It is as if in our loneliness, in our anxiety to communicate, we have produced a modern Tower of Babel. Everybody talking at once, but without quite facing one another. Speech, the most social impulse of all, has turned into an act of aggressionagainst others and finally against ourselves.

One of the things talked most shrilly about these days is the need for privacyfor what a friend writing about Painter Paul Klee called "creative quiet." Klee's face, he explained, "was that of a man who knows about day and night, sky and sea and air. He did not speak about these things. He had no tongue to tell of them." Our cursed explicitness, our compulsion to tell all, has sacrificed this sense of the ineffable. Perhaps no more severe penalty can be exacted on the gift of speech.

What is the alternative? Like Charlie O., the reticent man has his credo. He believes that rests are as much a part of music as the notes, that a man's silences are as much a part of what he means as what he says. The reticent man would not reject the argument: "How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?" But he would add: "How do I know what I believe until I hear what I don't say?" He would certainly insist that the deepest feelings, as well as the deepest meanings, thrive on understatementthat the ultimate intimacy is shared silence. The reticent man may well be a Romantic at silence, but he tries to be a Classicist at speech. He believes that reticence is the art of knowing what can be said and what cannot be said, and he is prepared to stake civilization on this art.

There is a small, very private organization known as Fighters for the Freedom of Silence. They are not necessarily opposed to freedom of speech. In fact, they regard themselves as its truest friends, since they insist through their silence that words are not to be taken lightly. Guidance counselors, bartenders, lay analyststhe career listenersmake the most avid members. The FFFOS have not yet purchased their own airline, on which Trappist flight rules can be enforced. But they do have their own underground soundproof club. Numbed by the unsolicited revelations life daily forces upon them, they retreat there one evening a week to recuperate from fellow man's confessional excesses. Over the door gold leaf and Old English on fumed oakreads this inscription: PLEASE SHUT UP.

Are you listeningare you for once listening, Charlie O.?

-Melvin Maddocks

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