The Maddening Silence
Guest Essay
There is a video of Dave Tate, a powerlifter and owner of the powerlifting outfit, EliteFTS, in which he mentions a phenomenon known as the void. According to Tate, the void commences when a lifter un-racks a bar loaded with weight that he or she has never lifted, and during the ensuing struggle, a sense of nothing overwhelms every other preoccupation the mind can conjure. All thoughts which normally enter a lifter’s head, from the cautious remonstrances to the fearful desire to bail out, is violently dispersed. “Your mind stops telling you anything,” Tate explains, “And you just go. And in those seconds, that’s what I’m talking about, that’s the void.” Tate remarks that regardless of all the positive affirmations or anger-inducing thoughts which typically accompany the lifter in the lead-up to their squat or deadlift, it is this void which ultimately dominates. “It is madness,” suggests Tate.
I often think of this video whenever I’m in the gym and know that today’s training session will center on lifting my max. The music I tend to play to hype myself up is usually metal or hardcore. For my training partner, and for Dave Tate, it could be anything, a Britney Spears song or even slow country music. When they lift, the music becomes white noise at worst, irrelevant at best. Simply put, it doesn’t matter. There is something about this form of silence where thinking and speaking feels disruptive, like someone tapping a fountain pen over a clear glass of water.
There is precedent for this charged absence of thought and speech when it comes to athletic performance. Many athletes will tune out the drone of cheering fans moments before they sprint the 100-meter dash, or plunge into a swimming pool for a 400- or 800-meter freestyle. Events which demand explosive power can only last for minutes, or even seconds- tracking, perhaps, our own human limitation at just how long we can block out everything until we return to the familiar rhythm of mundane existence. And what returns? The caustic jest of irony, thoughts and words which melt away the coldness of the athlete’s focus and determination. In contrast, pensive worrying crowds our minds, judging what went wrong or what could have gone better. Daily life quickly fills the vacuum which was once jealously inhabited by the void—the maddening silence. What do we make of this encroaching bombardment of words and thought, which suddenly appear tide-like, lapping against the shores of what was once the void? We are not “waking up from a dream,” as that implies a momentary lapse in control of our bodies and minds. And yet, as the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper reminds us, humans are predisposed to be open to experiences which are beyond the contrivances of rational, ordered thought. He writes:
Man is constituted in such a way that, on one hand, he needs to be forced, through inspiration, out of the self-sufficiency of his thinking—through an event, therefore, that lies beyond his disposing power, an event that comes to him only in the form of something unpredictable.1
Pieper here has in mind Plato’s notion of theia mania, or the ecstatic grip of the divine which prophets and oracles are often under.2 The condition which an individual finds himself in, bereft of clear structures of mentation when in a state of mania is “being-beside-oneself.” Providentially endowed, the affected are prone to edifying statements of un-hatched clarity—or mystifying riddles. In the story of Islam, for example, it is said that the prophetic utterances of Mohammad left him in a state where he lost control; he simply recited his message in a stupor of religious paroxysm. But unlike Mohammad and his fellow prophets, the void does not speak. It has no use for orality, nor for the maddening scribbles of the physicist on the cusp of a theoretical breakthrough. In fact, there is little to be said of the void in extreme physical exertion, mostly because it transcends a particular domain of thought—inspired or otherwise. It approximates a geography located beyond mentation, what Japanese writer Yukio Mishima once wrote in The Sun and the Steel as “the edges of the body, the outlying regions of the soul.”
The retreat of words does not, therefore, give way to a deeper state of introspection, but reveals their very uselessness to define a state such as the void – which is neither “nothingness,” nor Pieper’s “being-beside-oneself.” It is very clearly something other than the normal, pedestrian-like production of force we commit in our everyday lives. At best, the void shares a certain congruency with the unhinged blast of words which stamps divine madness; it too, is a condition which comes and goes as quickly as a moment of piercing revelation. Quoting Heraclitus, Pieper writes of the ancient pagan oracle known as the Sybil: “With raging lips uttering things unamusing, and unadorned, and unanointed, resounds through the millennia, driven by the god.”3 It is why even great lifters like Dave Tate grapple to make sense of the void. It is beyond words.
Josef Pieper, “Divine Madness”: Plato’s Case against Secular Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995): 17.
“Sacred frenzy,” 15.
12.
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