On ‘On Reticence’ by Nicholas Jose

In HEAT Series 1, Number 5, there is a sublime essay by Nicholas Jose, On Reticence.

Although this work was written almost thirty years ago, stony reticence, as defined by Jose, still holds its ground today, since we live in an era where words are getting cheaper by the minute, and true beliefs, whether they are personal or not, become more and more costly. Jose believes in words beginning with re – such as:

reticent, where the prefix ‘re-’ suggests an ingrained resistance to prevailing currents. A quality of stone, not water.

Now, when AI has already made storytelling its own easy commodity and social media has thumbed us up or down, Jose reminds us that the coercion to speak is an aggression, a demand made by demagogues and torturers…and by the state as well. The Germans call it Staatsräson – for reasons of state, we have to be politically correct. He also points out the lack of imagination in losing the former art of close reading, wherein the first thing one distinguished was that life was not a story, and that a story about life was most likely told by an unreliable narrator, and that (by extension) writing is invention and not confession. The age of writing as confession is now evinced by the fact that there are more writers than readers, scribblers unable to keep reticent, acting in total cooperation with Zuckerberg and not with Gutenberg. With the help of Copilot and other distractions, current and future generations may also have lost all the skills and grammars of reticent creation offered by nature. As Jose lyrically writes:

The perfect banksia or ginger flower becomes an equivalence even in being itself: one of the endless ‘evasions of as’ that Nature unfolds.

The best we can do is to make an imperfect human correspondence to the flower, a matching experience that we force into metaphorical articulation if we read Nature well (or if we don’t, in current parlance, we employ the word ‘like’ – a jejune filler sucked like a jujube in place of an intended communication). It is an explanation Nature has no need of, in its existential reticence.

Silence, indeed, is golden reflection – within all the libraries of nature and mind.

RE:HEAT is a series in which recent contributors to HEAT reflect on writing from the magazine’s archive. Sign up to our newsletter to receive RE:HEAT in your inbox.