Art without moving your lips

[Art's] voice owes its power to the fact that it arises from a pregnant solitude [silence].
(Malraux).

“… silence encloses all things, including speech, or language, or discourse, or any form of expression.
Art is thus essentially a grammar or rhetoric of silence…”
(Caranfa in reference to Saint Augustine).


In art any distinction between language, philosophy and art is blurred, for all three are manifestations of the invisible in the visible, of the unknowable in the knowable and of silence in discourse.
(Merleau-Ponty)

Silence silences what we think we know, it teaches us to listen – in an integral way.
It promotes an encounter with the “other’ or oneself as another (Ricoeur).

“what we know is more than we can tell and we can tell nothing without relying on our awareness of things we might not be able to tell (Polanyi)


Knowing is ultimately unknowing … and discourse is the voices of silence.

The voices of art are the voices of silence – or the silenced, or the unspeakable, or the unspoken.
Art is silence coming into being or articulation – things said without breaking the silence.
(Merleau-Ponty)


This post references liberally from:
Voices of Silence in Pedagogy: Art, Writing and Self-Encounter.
Angelo Caranfa.