Isle of Silence

“Words, Bernardo. There was a time when I believed in words…”

Such is the reply of the ascetic, Francesco Bernadoni, to his old friend who has returned, heartsick and disillusioned, from the Crusades in Franco Zefferelli’s film, “Brother Sun, Sister Moon.” This brief scene’ which takes place in the wintry desolation of the Appenines, resonates with a long tradition of the silent places that lie within, and yet beyond, the borders of this world. They are the Shangri-las and hidden valleys, stumbled upon by travelers weary of the world and of themselves in it. They are the out-of-the-way-places, unsuspected by the noisy, busy, self conscious inhabitants of the workaday world;
in other words, ourselves most of the time.

Like the Holy Isle of Avalon, enshrouded in sea mist, they are not to be found by the casual tourist, but by a kind of exile from one’s former position in life.

It is a common feature of these tales that the mysterious place thus stumbled upon, through the fury and confusion of a storm, can not be found again by any conscious effort. This suggests that what the ‘island’ really implies is an internal state of being not just an exotic location within the actual world. And just as its ways and purposes are not of the ordinary world, so the initiates acquired powers or prestige are of little or no use there. Odysseus’ subtle skills can not get him off Calypso’s Island. Osian’s warrior prowess will not show him the way back to Tir na Nog.

So it seems to be, as well, on that foreign ground within ourselves which connects us to some more ancient and universal current of existence than the one in which we normally find our identity. The strange, tranquil shores upon which the survivor of the tempest finds himself are, metaphorically, the empty land between the destruction of one state of existence (death) and entrance into an expanded sense of reality. (rebirth) Islands imply, in symbolic language, separation from the usual order of things. They are cocoons where the broken spirited are reshaped in silence by inscrutable powers to emerge again into the everyday world as stronger, wiser beings.