Beckett spoke about it: the inability to keep quiet. The inability to not say stories, to not make stories, to not find oneself shaped according to stories fitted to shifting forms. Beckett, with gallows irony, talked plenty about silences. He tried to reach silence, outline silence, through words. He amassed spools of verbiage in his quest to penetrate silence, to not say anything. I will say a lot in not saying anything, or, I will say nothing in many words saying nothing. Everyone dreams differently. Everyone dreams according to their own silences and motives, their own sphinxes and disciples. Whether or not you want them to, the stories go on. Inside me, they never stop. The narrative is ongoing. The narrative splinters into multiple narratives which splinter into more narratives, a hyper-exponential proliferation of narratives wrapped in recursion. In it, I see myself and lose myself and find myself and wonder about myself: the music of solipsism to the nth degree. We give voices to our silences because so much of us lives there unspoken. We long to birth the unspoken. We do this in words on pages. Marks on canvas. Notes in music. Abstractions hosted by masks. We supply ourselves with oxygen through ritual acts of creation. Beckett attempted to reach the end of language through language. His long sonata of the dead was the revival and impossible task he set for himself. Similar to that Einstein creed: You can’t use the same type of thinking that created your problem to solve your problem. Something different was needed. Beckett attempted to go beyond words by using words, tried to corral silence by making silence the domain of language. To not say anything, to ultimately embrace silence, would mean (gulp!) putting the pen down, and placing a moratorium on words. The only way Beckett imagined that would happen, could happen, would be through death. Death, flexing dominion, would have to pry the pen from Beckett’s cold stiff hand. Death would have to impose the gag order that Beckett could never attain by choice. From out of the silence comes words, only to immediately plunge back into the silence. Perhaps, a bit like catch-and-release fishing. The words, secured from the dark, from the silence, and briefest exposure to light, before descending back into the dark, the silence. We come out of silence only to return to silence. A lot of words and stories in between.