Do the trees swaying in the wind broadcast their private beetle dealings to the world? Does a stray dog with the look of hunger in its eyes pine towards you? Does the pair of swans gliding lightly across the pond feel the need to make themselves appear so suddenly important that they destroy the natural soundscape? Does a boulder undergird its rightful silence by drawing a boundary around itself which says no noise shall enter here, the way we arbitrarily designate ‘libraries’ or ‘bookstores’ as quiet places but not parks or city streets? Ask an ant if it carries its granule as a paean to the boulder and you will receive no reply. 

The avenues we walk with our earbuds in can expand beyond the human stare; the gentle nod of recognition provided the acoustic double bass, the lively fern which having found its silence dances like a toddler even in the wind acknowledges the basic precondition of its existence, & it isn’t noise, it isn’t even sound, but it is this non-propositional event, its being ready-to-come-into-being. For silence’s musicality cannot be overlooked, that it contains every potentiality of sound to fill its space, the way a blank page awaits a drawing, or the letters of the alphabet poise below the fingertips’ murmurings, a violinist’s arched pinky.

How do the standard inversions work if we stick with the metaphor, what would be the relevant analogue to: your silence is my noise? It is clear that the import of the question is to redirect the significance of freedom of expression, onto the interlocutor; as though to say the experience of silence (more accurately, being in a silent state) were itself just a manifestation of personal expression (thus normalized), whose experience requires the absence of noise (or at least some form of distracting pollution). 

But to truly be in silence (not merely freed from distracting noises) is not to express at all; it is in its native condition, just to be. It is to be before Adam was given names to name; it was before the wilting of the rose, the two in shame, & Abel and his Cain. The expressions, whether violent, gentle, awesome, come later—it preceded in its elegance every long walk home, every irate gesture into falling rain, with its peace you had the obligation to respect, & yet the choice (you construed as your right) to break.

If only you could live in a diamond—

*Meta-expressivism

As Schopenhauer points out, noise not only interrupts but disperses our thoughts, unfocuses the faceted lattice of our concentration, scatters the strength of an army of micropenises (Just as I type this a loud motorcycle asserts itself.). But so does silence. It makes you think of something different, as if that difference might shatter all, might be some lasting contribution. (If I try to capture the moment, my look is agog at them as my thought is penetrated by their noise, their look is demands recognition for their miniscule girth before the blessed aperture of my own silence devours it; then in my delusion believe that if I could look at him longer he would misperceive it as erotic, after the personal, the social, racial and national had been castrated by the love of silence).

It's important to remember that 'noise' in the broadest problematic sense is any disruption to conscious experiences; the difficulty (see that!) is just that one person's exercise of 'freedom of expression' entails such noise; so that one could define either silence as the default right (won’t that cause an accident?), or think about it as arising out of the minimal curtailments of personal expression needed to ensure that that both parties (the one might have road rage) still satisfy the continuity of their own respective conscious experiences. 

Here I’m telling a kind of just-so story whose moral is that silence has the most intellectually sensuous contours when we view it as a default right, enshrined within (gasp) divine command theory, or (less gasp) theism. Let’s say we did want to go the route of compromise and, holding that the value of all conscious experiences is on a par, perform the vast and unnecessary calculation needed to precisely characterize ‘minimal curtailment of personal expression’. Where there is a complete imbalance it is obvious, you literally have to stop everything you are doing because a motorcycle roars by (intentionally I had in the above paragraph illustrated this, i.e. your own conscious experiences were interrupted by my parenthetical mirrors of the experience). But then what of lesser imbalances, and still lesser? 

Eventually a point is reached that it seems resolvable only by a personality dispute: clashing attitudes, differing sensibilities; and the metaethicist within you observes, then, that silence cannot be normative, let alone a ‘right’ in the objective sense of the term, because it can only be viewed in terms of the attitudes towards it, not its goodness, but: how does it make you feel, what awe, what joy, what majesty (though they aren’t normative either)?

Yet something has gone wrong, as silence most certainly is a right! (You see the trouble I get into by feeling that the normative is objective). And if you don’t agree, it moves no one, not the least of which is anyone who rationally disagrees (!).

*Micropenises¹⁰

When I talk about silence as a default right, it should probably be understood against the background idea that the only rationale for the value of 'personal expression' stems from its relation to the micropenis's own conscious experiences, which he has a right to no more than others do.

People always tend to this back-and-forth which says 'you like silence, well, i like noise', so that they come to see silence itself as a disruption of their noise. But of course if they think it's valuable to not have such a disruption occur it's only because they've been allotted those nice, quiet moments in which to reflect on the importance of their own personal expression. That’s assuming they think at all, which they don’t, at least if Schopenhauer is correct in his assertion that those not averse to noise don’t think. Ah, but maybe they do, maybe they are in their own rough leather jacket way exquisitely sensitive. They think, but they have learned to ‘tune out’ the noise, even if it is coming from their own tailpipes.