In early 2004, editor M. Mark e-mailed the following query to the members of PEN American Center for issue 5's Forum:

Subject: Unspoken, Unspeakable
From: Journal@PEN.org
To: PEN Members

1) What is unspeakable? Why? (How have writers’ ideas about the unspeakable changed? Are some things better left unsaid?)

2) When you hear the term "silenced writer," who comes to mind? Have modes of censorship mutated during the past decades? Why? What forces silence writers? Whose voices have been lost because of those forces? Have you ever silenced yourself?

The responses are reproduced below in their entirety.

ROBERT CREELEY: 1) Most simply put, the "unspeakable" is what one can find no words for, what can’t be said with the characteristic resources of language. It can be "good" or "bad," i.e., one can be "unspeakably" happy or, sadly, be witness to an "unspeakable" atrocity. As to what might be "better left unsaid," that’s a judgment each one of us would have to make each time. Especially for the writer, I would feel, one says all one can.

2) Just now at Brown University, as you may know, there is an active program much supported by the novelist Robert Coover’s efforts, The International Writers Project, which has particularly to do with "Freedom to Write" issues and situations. Thinking of what I’ve learned from it - and, really, from many situations of the past years - so many "silenced writers" come to mind it would be impossible to offer a fair list. Nazi Germany silenced writers, Franco’s Spain - and those are simply the most obvious. Writers are silenced by political and legalized repression in so many parts of the world. Then there is also another pernicious mode of silencing: the prevention of means, the refusal of access. CBS’s refusal to accept MoveOn’s ad for airing during the Super Bowl program despite their ability to pay for it is quick if comfortable instance. Such situations seem endlessly to occur, and at this particular moment, one feels the resulting "censorship" to be growing daily.

PAUL KANE: This question of the Unspeakable or the Unsayable usually turns upon political considerations - matters of overt or covert censorship and oppression. But there’s another aspect of the Unsayable that can be central to the writing process itself: the way writing can give expression to what is repressed or silenced within. This can have a psychoanalytic basis, as Freud suggests in his essay on "Negation," in which denials become ways of speaking the unspeakable (how many times, for example, have we heard someone begin a critique with: "I don’t mean to be critical, but . . ."?). In a larger sense, this mode of negation allows for the return of the repressed - all those repudiations, rejections, and contradictions that are a secret source of who we are. But the Unsayable also embraces the gaps, absences, and silences that mark so much modern and contemporary writing, from Beckett to Celan, Blanchot to Carson. We have learned to call it by the term Negativity. What is not said but felt; what is apparent because it is left unsaid; or what is obviously impossible in the end to say - this is the enigmatic heart of expression.

MEENA ALEXANDER: Silenced writer: I start with that. Not words but silence. Without silence the words we treasure, the words we measure our lives by, could not appear. But silenced is different. I see a child who has no books, no pens, and scribbles words in the dirt, words that threaten to fly off and join the stick insects on the bark of a nearby tree. I see grandmother dressed in a wrinkled white sari, her hand on the cloth that covers her thigh; over and over again she marks the jut and whorl of a classical script she taught herself with such difficulty. She writes lines that can never appear, skid of invisible script. I see bodies in public places threatened, beaten, banned. Barbed wire, coils of it glinting in sunlight. Bars of a prison cage, the writer crouched inside, parrots above the cage chattering in monsoon heat. In the market place fear so palpable, people wrinkle up their noses and cover their faces with their handkerchiefs. Fear stinks, no one can breathe properly. Who will have the courage to write? I see tunnels of smoke, gushing flame where once the great libraries stood. Barbarians, their faces covered with ski masks, looting, burning. Brick, mortar, marble melting with precious imprint of thousands and thousands of human souls, traces of truth the barbarians are afraid of. And the barbarians, who are they? Where are they? Are they outside our gates? Are they inside?

IVY GOODMAN: Your inability depresses, or your depression disables. You cannot. If you insist on being different, only the extraordinary is good enough. Besides, how different are you, really? Writers with sufficient talent and technique easily fabricate the happiness and love that readers want. You must have a plot. You must make a scene, not a fuss. Your characters must be real. Remember, readers will assess them as potential friends. No, don’t use language like that. Tell the story, not your distorted thoughts and feelings. What does your protagonist desire? Does he change? I can’t imagine what his parents were like, but you must tell us. Don’t waste time with effects. You must provide the cause and then, of course, the cure for all this mess. But first you must cure yourself. Have you no heart?

WILLIAM GASS: I shall breach decorum - once more - and simply quote from something I’ve already written.

"What is unthinkable? Think it. What is unutterable? Utter it. What cannot be spelled without a dash? Fill in the dashes with doubts. What is obscene? Dream it. In all its tones, in seamy detail, at indelicate length. What is too horrible to contemplate? Describe it. With cool and indifferent interest. As though peeling a peach. You will not be the first, for the unthinkable has already been thought, the unutterable uttered innumerable times, God’s various names have been taken in vain, the obscene has been enjoyed, the horrible carried out. This is the value of Miller, Genet, Burroughs, de Sade, and Celine. Even the simplest thought, given the simplest form, must be uttered as though cast into a context which contains all of its conceivable opposites-not so that it will waffle and betray itself, but so it will be strong. But that means, for all those who lack confidence in the resilience of their ideas, that every fine line, even if it seems to be standing securely on your side, is open in its confident stride to every other pace, realizes the great range of human attitude and feeling on every issue, and invites these differences along; and what narrow mind or intolerant ear or suspicious eye wants that kind of crowd?" [from Tests of Time]

PATRICIA LAURENCE: Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer in Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, announces her lifelong preoccupation with silence and the barrier between the sayable and the unsayable: "I want to write a novel about Silence, he said; the things people don’t say. But the difficulty is immense." Seeking to "devise a method for conveying not only what people say but what they leave unsaid, not only what they are but what life is," Woolf confronts the narrativity of silence and the cultural constraints of her time. Distinctions are made in her novels between what is left "unsaid," something one might have felt but does not say for personal reasons; the "unspoken," something not yet formulated or expressed in voiced words; and the "unsayable," something not sayable based on the social taboos of Victorian propriety or politics or, perhaps, something about life that is ineffable. What Woolf does, as a novelist of subjectivity, is to confront and narrate these silences between islands of speech, inviting us, as readers, to enter into the obscurity and to consult our own minds.

BELL CHEVIGNY: One writer’s unspeakable is another’s opportunity. If it does not kill us, the unspeakable makes us strong. Culture grows as we learn to name our unacknowledged life. Perhaps more than the rest of us, women and men in prison are immersed in the unspeakable. Their suffering-crime and punishment-often beggars description. Those who find the words-and the PEN Prison Writing annual contest as well-enlarge our experience. Among this year’s winners is Malcolm King, incarcerated in Arizona. Quite literally speaking the unspeakable, King’s poem voices the predicament of so many who never escape the stigma of prison.

PRISONER
by Malcolm King

In the confusion
of the thunderstorm
they broke out, sliced
their hands to ribbons
on the razor wire
because they had to,
made it to the river
and then swam, drifted,
clung to their insurgency.
In the rapids it all
fell apart. Days later
the survivor read
in a newspaper
about the capture,
the drowning, and
the presumed drowning
in the flood waters.

Twenty years later,
in that foreign country
of another identity,
his students ask him why
he writes poems of prison.
He looks down at the scars
on his hands and cannot tell them
it is all he knows.

GEOFFREY PHILP: Writers from Jamaica and the Caribbean are often silenced by the culture of shame that exists in the islands. Writers such as Judith Ortiz Cofer, Dany Laferriere, Kwame Dawes, and Colin Channer are sometimes censored because they deal with the topics of sex and they use "bad words." In my own case, I have had several old ladies and decent church-going women walk out of readings of my novel Benjamin, My Son because they expected me to read something that sounded like Naipaul instead of a description of a contemporary Caribbean hell (with the dialogue to match) that I attempt to portray.

DEAN KOSTOS: This pertains to silence simply in terms of not speaking, or so I thought. I recently attended a five-day yoga retreat; four of the days were to be held in silence. I was extremely apprehensive about it, and imagined feeling suffocated. Then the dreaded moment came: The retreat leader announced we were not to speak for any reason from that point on. After the second day, it seemed as though energies normally spent speaking words were charging inside me. I began to perceive patterns everywhere: in spaces between branches, in stripes on chipmunk’s backs, in gravel, in laughter. Suddenly, nothing seemed arbitrary or chaotic. This perception crescendoed until the final day when we were told we could speak again. When asked to express my experiences (as everyone was), I was reluctant to leave my rich interior space, which only days before seemed like a void. Upon speaking, I was overcome by tears.

KAREN MALPEDE: Many writers are carriers of tales that were not allowed to be told. Truths of the oppressed, of women’s lives, of homosexuals’, the disabled. These stories make literary movements. But the interior struggle rages and ravages. Simply because a writer speaks successfully to an audience once, or many times, it is not to be assumed the scarring is negligible. Beneath most efforts to speak the forbidden lies a terrible and terrifying shame. Writing sometimes overwhelms, by releasing new toxins, so to speak, through the power of its truth. This may be what happened to Sylvia Plath, who writing of domestic violence succumbed to her own fury. Emily Dickinson managed to transmute the knowledge of early sexual violation which rose up through her poetry. The Civil War, oddly, might have helped. It is more permissible to write of public violence than of private, especially sexual, shame. For many writers, as also happened after 9/11, mass trauma jogs personal memory and at the same time provides the common ground from which to speak. Dickinson wrote about the war from the point of view of a soldier (like many she knew) whose corpse is being buried. She felt a "creak across my Soul . . . And then a Plank in Reason, broke . . ." Dickinson identified with the violated body. She understood the pain of ruptured consciousness. She linked her private suffering to the public sorrow and gave two muted victims voice. She would also enter into spirited dialogue with an anarchic god of her design-part father, part heavenly father-whom she constantly defied: "For I have but the power to kill,/ Without-the power to die-." Writers who manage to outlive their shame-filled demons write against violence from a self in constant struggle to be freed. They expand the reaches of imagination, which, in turn, expands what is possible.

PAUL MULDOON:

BURMA

Her grandfather’s job was to cut
the vocal chords of each pack-mule
with a single, swift excision,
a helper standing by to wrench
the mule’s head fiercely to one side and drench
it with hooch he’d kept since Prohibition.
Why, Carlotta wondered, that fearsome tool?
Was it for fear the mules might bray
and give their position away?
At which I see him thumb the shade
as if he were once more testing a blade
and hear the two-fold snapping shut
of his four-fold, brass-edged carpenter’s rule:
And give away their position.
[From Horse Latitudes]



SUZANNE RUTA: Algeria, Spring 1993. Silenced by assassins who shot him coming out of his house one morning, the genial young novelist, poet, and journalist Tahar Djaout (he wrote in French) died after a week in a coma, the first writer targeted by a massive campaign against intelligence and art and music by Algerian Islamists, including holy warriors who had served against the Soviets in Afghanistan, to which field of battle they had been recruited by the CIA. Blowback wreaks havoc in the Republic of Letters!

Djaout’s last published novel before his death, The Watchers, 1991, is a tender parable of a corrupt, bureaucratic, and misanthropic government, a North African East Germany. The Last Summer of Reason, published posthumously in 1999, is a parable of that same society surrendered to the madness of religious fundamentalism, a North African Afghanistan under Taliban rule.

His killers were quite specific in their aims; he was targeted because "he wielded a fearsome pen that could have an effect on Islamic sectors." Every historian of the recent civil war in Algeria, with its tremendous death toll, quotes Djaout’s poem, "Ruptures": "Si tu te tais, tu meurs. Si tu parles,tu meurs. Alors, parle et meurs!" If you keep quiet, you die. If you speak, you die. So speak and die."

ROXANA ROBINSON: Oddly enough, I’d say that the unspeakable subject now is love.

Responsible for this is not the government, but literary fashion, which produces its own subtle but exigent form of censorship. In the past, compassion has always been at the core of our greatest fiction, but, today, the notion of a strong, generous, and enveloping love for humanity makes one squirm. It’s over-earnest, unsophisticated, old-fashioned. In fiction, there’s a tacit rule against it.

The word "love" itself is suspect, tainted by the despised notion of sentimentality. But they are very different: Sentimentality is easy, unearned emotion, emotion without responsibility. Sentimentality has never formed the center of great writing, but real, demanding, difficult love, in all its varied and powerful forms, has always done so. Sophocles, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Bronte, Woolf, Faulkner: All these writers deliver powerful intellectual components to their work, but love is their common engine. Love creates the true, deep connection between reader and writer, writer and subject, subject and subject. It’s only through compassion that we can truly come to know a character-or an author. A writer who holds himself apart from his characters, who disdains them, who feels himself superior, too intelligent, too sophisticated, and too ironic to embrace them, a writer who feels no compassion for them, is a writer who creates an empty shell at the heart of his fictional world.

It seems, though, that this is what we want-this emotional emptiness. Writers who want to make a real connection, to explore and reveal and nourish the powerful world of the emotions, are marginalized. Writers who embrace irony, who maintain a cool and edgy distance from their characters, are celebrated. It’s strange, in this age of liberation, for love to be the unspeakable notion, but it seems that it’s so.

ROB WECHSLER: Self-incrimination is exceptionally unspeakable. I don’t mean confession, because people are only too willing to confess to having done or thought all sorts of horrible things, even things they’ve never done. But these are things they want others to know about. For some, it’s easier to speak about committing bestiality than about committing racism. Usually, what’s easier to confess to is what we can justify: No one was hurt, everything’s okay, I’m not really bad, or at least not anymore.

How many of us have confessed to not giving someone a voice (if we have the power to, and silencing is all about power) without justifying it, at least to ourselves? Telling ourselves that the author’s work wasn’t good or the author wasn’t a good person or whatever, when it was really something else? Or giving a book a poor review (another form of silencing) when we should have told the book-review editor that we weren’t the right reviewer, that we didn’t understand or weren’t the right audience for the book?

It’s easy (and, of course, right) to point the finger at authoritarian governments as well as big corporations (and those who do their dirty work), but in our own little ways most of us play a part in silencing writers because that’s preferable to speaking the unspeakable, to rejecting the protection of our own justifications and coming to terms with our own prejudices and limitations.

DAVID KNOWLES: 1) As readers we are hungry for the unspeakable. Our talk-show culture has decided that it’s better to turn over every rock than leave anything unsaid. The flood of "shocking" tell all memoirs has seeped its way into fiction, raising the dramatic bar so that books like American Psycho seem tame. Taboo subject matter has become the best ticket to publicity. The question is no longer whether take up such matters, but how loudly to do so.

2) The Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Considered by many to be his country’s greatest author, the government banned the circulation of his books and imprisoned him for over ten years. We have it easy in America as far as censorship goes, when compared to countries where political religious and social censorship lead to incarceration or worse.

DAVID GRIMM: Censorship, like a virus, is constantly developing new strains and mutating into new forms. I write primarily for the American theater which, as a bourgeois institution, serves as a wonderful breeding ground for a particularly pernicious form of censorship. Let’s give this bug a name. Censoria Capitalistii. This viral form of censorship breeds and grows in bank accounts, on checks, and on the cash that changes hands. It infects Producers, Artistic Directors, Literary and General Managers of theaters across the nation. Its effect is to instill in them a crippling fear of challenging, or in any way offending their subscriber audiences, or any segment of the general public. A coldness in the feet grows ever more pronounced and they seek the cozy warmth of old chestnuts or platitudes or simple, two-dimensional issue-driven plays which confirm their audience’s beliefs in the black-and-whiteness of the world around them. Writers who create strong, deserving, but "difficult" work are turned away for fear of ruffling feathers. The Theater has not censored them (they say), "Financial Considerations" have. The beauty of this virus literally lies in the "passing of the buck." The American Theater has learned to censor itself, and it does so with alacrity, draining Art out of the Theater, leaving only a commercial shell. "Where are all the exciting new voices for the theatre?" ask the infected. There are literally hundreds of these voices, in America and abroad, whose work holds fast to the theatrical art or writing plays. They speak the truth. They celebrate and cry out for humanity. And while those who work in American Theaters know much of this work (and love and cherish it deeply), they are too scared to share it with their audiences. If you’re out there, I beg you to be brave. I beg you to say what needs to be said, rather than what people think they want to hear. As we continue to live in a time of Patriot Acts and zealotry, please let us not continue to give away our souls in the name of Nationalism or the All-Mighty Dollar. Art isn’t a business. It’s a folly. And only folly can cure us of this disease!

MURAT NEMET-NEJAT: Historically, the "unspeakable" was the forbidden-"the unspeakable evil," "the unspeakable thought." The unspeakable then has an objectivity. It is a ban established by society with which even the one desiring to cross it agrees. This is the age of great villains like Richard III, Macbeth, Milton’s Satan, Dante’s Ulysses, or Ugolino.

Here, the writer speaks the unspeakable-projects its aura, its lure-by placing it in an objective framework as "other," the evil.

The reverse of this sense of the "unspeakable" exists in a modern democracy where, objectively, there is the freedom of speech. If everything is sayable, what is unspeakable? Does the picket around the unsayable disappear? No, only the nature of punishment for crossing the line changes. The speaker of the unspeakable is ignored.

The poet who spoke the forbidden in the past may have had nightmares of punishment in hell. The nightmare of the present poet-maybe the quintessential present user of unspeakable language-is irrelevance, insignificance. But the poet must insist on speaking it. The unspeakable is the language of the invisible, of what is suppressed by the plethora of images assaulting us.

Even in a modern dictatorship the meaning of "the unspeakable" is different from what it was in the past. Though a quality of objectivity exists in both of them, in its modern version, its speaker does not have to internalize the values imposed by the outside, by authority or society. He or she can assert the validity, the countervailing objectivity, moral reality of his or her language.

In both modern democracy and tyranny, the speaking of the unspeakable turns into a necessary, political act.

BRUCE BERLIND: "Unspeakable" is not a word I can remember using. I associate it with overheard snippets of conversation at uppity black-tie cocktail parties. Taken literally--as that which must not or should not be spoken--there is nothing, or should be nothing, unspeakable, certainly for a writer, but one hopes for everyone. What is not spoken about disappears from memory. Should the genocides of the past millennium be allowed to disappear from memory? Some, alas, almost have, as Hitler well knew when, just days before invading Poland in 1939, he asked his top officers "Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians."

DAVID SCHANKER: Censorship depends upon the existence of the unspeakable, and it is the responsibility of the censor to determine what expressions fit that category. Those who cherish freedom of expression must insist that nothing be unspeakable, neither the most horrific acts of human beings nor the most divine. For us, other than the things from which children should be sheltered, everything must be spoken and shared, discovered and considered in our discourse.

SALLIE TISDALE: I’ve taught classes in essay and memoir for many years, and students always ask about the blurred lines of truth and fiction and what is "allowed." Some want permission to hide the facts, revise their histories and compose somewhat more intriguing or comfortable ones. Others want permission to tell absolutely everything, regardless of who gets hurt. Neither extreme makes for good writing, I think. But why should we be afraid of addressing the moral question involved?

The published writer is the star witness-sworn in, widely believed. We can tell carefully shaded truths or lie with impunity. Object all you want-it’s the testimony that people remember. Of course I’ve silenced myself. Easy to claim that we are so driven by art, by the urge to express, that the bodies we leave along the way are justified. Easy to be glib about using everything in our lives-using it up sometimes, forgetting there are people involved.

I used to tell my students to ask themselves, "Is it fair?" Then I came to believe that it’s never really fair. So I told them to ask themselves, "Is it true?" And then I came to believe that no one knows the whole truth. So now I tell them to ask themselves, "Do I have the right?" And I know that no one really has the right.

MICHAEL KANDEL: In my experience as both a colleague and translator of authors, sexism, often coded with "not politically correct," is unspeakable. Raised as a feminist by my mother, I do not object to such censorship and on a few occasions have even participated in it (in the form of editorial suggestions). I’m also strongly for free speech, so this attitude is a problem, a contradiction. My personal anger wins out over the high principle.

SARAH SCHULMAN: 1) In my field (fiction and playwriting with lesbian protagonists) nothing true can be seen. Whereas ten years ago there were eight novels a year from authentic lesbian perspective published by mainstream houses, it has dwindled to one every two years. There is still no authentic lesbian play in the American repertoire.

2) In my field, anyone who depicts the cruelty of homophobic heterosexuals, and the consequences of that cruelty on gay people-or shows how gay communities and movements changes the world-cannot get their work seen.

Have modes of censorship mutated during the past decades? Gay, lesbian, and AIDS-content authentic work has been replaced by corporate product that re-enforces the inherent pathology of gay people (alone, self-oppressed) in which heterosexuals are depicted as heroically overcoming their prejudices to rescue gay people who have been abandoned or hurt by other gay people.

In our case, the AIDS crisis made it impossible to continue to pretend that gay people do not exist, so the dominant culture created its own public fake homosexuality with corporate power to overwhelm and replace authentic work.

What forces silence writers? Humiliation, disrespect, exclusion from production and publication.

Whose voices have been lost because of those forces? Have you ever silenced yourself?

I have silenced myself by continuing to write well and powerfully from my authentic perspective, when it is not only unwelcome, but actively punished.

LARRY GELBART: When you hear the term "silenced writer," who comes to mind? Any writer who is not writing original or speculative material.

ANNE WALDMAN: 1) Can we have beauty-can we create our art-after Auschwitz? I think we must, in order to manifest alternatives to the psychosis of war and degradation. Recent events-the political lies-the layers of unspoken abuse propel us to speak out and continue to fight for freedom, justice, peace, and our inalienable rights as citizens of humanity. What is the unspeakable? We have seen the charnel grounds of cities and villages, and sifted through them for the body parts. Is it our fear and hatred of ourselves gone awry?

2) I think of those-& we know they are out there-we never heard from. Is there a poet locked in a cage in Guantanamo? Yes the mode of censorship seem more subtle, more insidious, because in the US the corporate media sets a kind of standard of what’s acceptable & what’s fashionable in the larger culture. The rise of the death penalty, the backlash against sexual and racial difference seem retrograde. I have silenced myself rarely, although sometimes airing a personal injustice or abuse can take a lifetime. One transmutes suffering-often unspeakable-through the work.

MICHAEL ANDRE: In my opinion a creative silence will ensue when PEN stops wasting my money on this redundant collegiate journal.

THOMAS GLYNN: 1) Nothing is unspeakable. And nothing is more tempting to write about than the unspeakable. To solicit a voice from the dregs of the deepest terror, give form and shape to a humiliation so abject no one has dared enter its portals, is a writer’s dream. It’s like spoiling fresh snow with footprints that say "I am here, listen to me, what I have to say is important."

But that doesn’t mean we have to do it.

The truly unspeakable, by definition, can never be spoken about. Its horrible nobility and bizarre beauty lies in the depths of a wound so deep and grievous that to bring it to light and give it voice can spoil it, cheapen it, allow us to dismiss what should never be dismissed.

Only the most anguished and excruciating of tragedies is unspeakable. The pitfall is that tragedy is the breeding ground of bad writing. Millions of words have been written about 9/11, most of them forgettable. And apart from Primo Levi and a few others, isn’t most of the Holocaust writing a reflection on the pathology of the writer?

A more interesting question is why we as writers have so cheapened tragedy. Why have we allowed ourselves to profane the unspeakable by exploiting it?

Is nothing sacred? Perhaps writers should recognize the value of silence, of saying nothing. Perhaps we should recognize that life is too grand to be used simply as fodder for the pen. The world is much more than a playground for our mutterings. As in music, it is the silence, the gaps in sound that give meaning and measure to our noise and words. And if we do not value meaning and prefer to rant and rave, what do we value?

JANET NEIPRIS: Silenced writers are those in democratic and non-democratic countries whose opinions are antithetical to those so-called truths held by the government, the press, the publishers, and the producers of those countries. In every country, including the US and other considered democracies, those peoples who have power over what is printed and produced, are able to silence writers. In many countries where I’ve have taught playwrights and screenwriters, I have heard everything from "There is no violence" and "There is no AIDS" to "There is no audience for that sort of thing," which can cover and silence almost anything.

The voices of those who see a truth which is not popularly recognized are always subject to censorship.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM: 1) For some reason, the proximity of Americans who despise George W. Bush with the millions of people elsewhere in the world who feel the same way remains unspoken and, for the most part, apparently unfelt. This is very curious. Thirty years ago, when we didn’t have the Internet at our disposal, solidarity of thought and feeling between the US and outside the US was seemingly more within everyone’s grasp. What have we lost, and why?

If someone could figure out a way to use the passion and energy of non-Americans who feel the same way we do, and feel less alone and less landlocked as a consequence, it staggers the imagination to think of all that might be accomplished from the freedom and empowerment we might derive from this. What’s stopping us from taking such an obvious step? After all, people all over the world probably have more in common today than at any previous time in history. Why? Because the companies that run the world are doing the same things everywhere.

Perhaps the key fact that remains unspoken today is that nations no longer exist--except on paper and as markets--at the same time that laws and rhetoric inflate them as never before. It even seems that we have more iron curtains blocking us than we ever did during the Cold War.

2) The principal force that silences writers is probably fear, and the presence of fear probably accounts for the mysteries described above. The greatest mystery, however, is where this fear comes from, and what seems to make it much more powerful than it used to be.

JAYNE LYN STAHL: Can you see the headline now? "Moses struck dumb by the burning bush." Or, was it the Ten Commandments that took his breath away? Was his inability to articulate what he saw the result of awe, or shock and awe? Was he speechless in amazement, or only when confronting the unspeakable, that which is outside the range of words. Maybe Moses learned, and we along with him, that everything that matters is intrinsically unspeakable, that standing naked before the creator means being without the shield of language. He was, perhaps, bereft of speech in the face of a presence larger than he was-a challenge we writers continue to face today.

From the Bible on, it’s clear that what we’re unable to say has been endowed with a kind of nobility which is ironic in light of the context--a book in which "the Word" is king. The author who gives us Moses rendered speechless by his vision is not unlike a cinematographer who exposes the invisible; to think the Almighty prefers "dumbness" to a diatribe against the carcinogens found in smoldering ash if nothing else demonstrates that the piece was written in antiquity. Does the sacred have an expiration date?

The unspeakable becomes a kind of nakedness in which revelation is without the cover of concept, or the cloak of context. If words are masks, or shields, that help enable our anonymity, silence nagging at the void is a troubling sight. If, like Tiresias, being a seer means to overcome what we see, does it follow that being a writer means crossing the boundary of silence, and accepting that to speak is to profane?

Some modern scribes have dared to take us inside the silence, Sterne and Joyce among them, to reveal busy minds, voices morphing from Bloom to Molly to Bloom; the moment of conception as a different kind of awe. For Joyce, thought becomes an attempt to defrock silence, to turn the word into humorous, spirited clay, to stand where Moses stood, infused with wonder.

Others, like Beckett, suggest that words are ways we exclude ourselves from each other, and from the immediacy of experience. Silence then becomes a respectable thing, a graduation, Vladimir and Estrogen’s feverish, futile gestures on the road to redemption. From the earliest days, the senses were perceived as obstacles to awareness. Now we accept the profane as part of the package, another potential carcinogen to look out for. So, curiously, we join with the ancients in thinking that most things are better left unsaid as we feebly grope for the real thing behind the image when there really is no-thing behind the image, but a shadow on the wall of a cave; the sound of a vowel escaping from a verb.