Presence of la femme: The semiotic silence

DOI 10.1515/sem-2013-0015 Semiotica 2013; 193: 289 – 308

Aarne RubenPresence of la femme: The semiotic silence

Abstract: This paper is concentrated on the phenomenon of silence in a situation, which lacks an actual signifier: silence is renderable, although not accessible for every hearer. Different strata of silence are represented and thoroughly depicted. The author observes several historical appearances of the phenomenon of quiet-ness: pictorial, radio silence, conventional (arbitrary) silence. Silence is never perfect, it is only a harmony of accidental noises. Silence in the Hell-mouth tradition in folklore plays the role of semiotic relaxation time. There were devils in the seventeenth century Estonian witchcraft tradition. In cases when witches would not be quiet and revealed some parts of their identity to their enemies, e.g, through their magic spells, Satan could immediately run with them to a remota loca. Through the stages of civilization’s formation, silence cast the following roles: discursive or memorial gaps, memory traumas. The sym-bols of local memory traumas are codes for the magical operators in the mouth of Hell: you should never disclose your name to the non-identity.

Keywords: silence; witchcraft; phantasms; semiotic borders; remote place; Lotman’s theory

Aarne Ruben: University of Tallinn. E-mail: [email protected]

Silence is a perceptual trick because where there is no silence neither are there human beings. In science fiction films, a terrifying image of silence exists – space. This is a place with actual silence; in outer space it really exists but there are no living witnesses to enjoy it. Quietness most likely exists inside black holes but we refer to this kind of phenomenon more semiotically as a loss of information.

What is the loss of information in the world of silence? This analysis is more a debate about the positions of different silencers than the position of silence itself.

In the medieval and early modern eras, silence was a special code used to relate with the underworld and supernatural forces. The present article offers a semiotic approach in the field of studying silence as witchcraft and other phe-nomena. Silence exists on a large scale between the silence in space and little ordinary silences in the everyday human routine, in empty gaps in music and literature. This article approaches silence as a philosopheme.

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What is silence after all? Eco et al. (2000: 9) answer by analyzing Aquinas’ semiotic study: silence is non vocalis and with the distinction mark non significa-tiva. Silence is never perfect, it is only a harmony of accidental noises. And as we will see below, silence in the Hell-mouth tradition in folklore plays the role of se-miotic relaxation time.

Magic spells in the Old World are a common and convenient subject in cul-tural semiotics. A black magic spell is a speech act that ends the domination of a named or often nameless Evil, grasping the victim into a hellish world.

Being silent was a last chance for a sortilegia / witch that constantly kept in touch with evil forces. There were many forms of silence in medieval and early modern eras – the silence of libraries and monasteries, the silence of the demon-ic world or graves, the silence of nature or the sea, the silence during the prayer of vulgus, waiting for the end of a drought. Silence in a dark situation, face-to-face with unpure forces, enables a witch to maintain his personal identity. Although according to the old legend a spell frees bewitched knights from a curse (Paton 1970: 90–92), magic scenes also tolerate silence as a medium, which is necessary in creating contact with the underworld.

1 The no-words-back principle

A strange story happened in 1623 in a small Estonian place Karjaküla (less than twenty kilometers from Tallinn, in Keila parish). From a housemaid of the manor, Mall, a baby was stolen and she was lost for two hours. Although Mall found her child, she accused a certain company of local peasants: a farm’s owner Tammeke Wolk and a certain girl Marret. Mall’s accusation was quite serious: alliance with Devil himself, serving him, and bringing him pleasure. Consequently, kidnap-ping Mall’s baby was perhaps intended as a bribe to Him, although there was no evidence about this kind of sacrifice.

According to the accusation, Marret established contact with the evil world, bringing the altar bread from the mass every Sunday to a field far away and spit-ting it out under an aspen tree. On the third Sunday, a spume appeared on the bread and a small black man came out of the earth. Marret said nothing to this person and silently agreed with everything. Silence ruled the place and any vocal expression was absent. Marret’s last session with Devil was on St. Mary’s Night (in the Estonian tradition, it was in March 25th, the most poetic night of the year); afterwards, she went to drink with Wolk’s brother, Hindrich. That night, the other members of the company accused Hindrich of buying drinks without having any money to pay for them. Hindrich asked Marret to use her witchcraft to obtain



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some money to pay. Then Marret raised her hands, put them on her breasts and said: “God gave me this cross and I have to carry the cross” (Beiträgen 1939: 329).

Silence generally seems to be a common phone for supernatural acts. Since Burchard, the bishop of Worms gave his decretalia in 1025, it has been understood that persons that have devoted their souls to Satan could frequently find each other in quietae noctis silentio (Quellen 1901: 40). According to Burchard’s classi-cal opinion, quietas noctis silentio is needed for a witch to rise to heaven, even in the imaginative closures of the air, clausis in aëram (Quellen 1901: 40). Burchard’s vision reflects a purely monastic viewpoint. Even Burchard realized that nothing could exist without voices, even mari (a form of incubus, the horrible nightmares) limp noisily at night on their three legs, as the medieval belief stated (Lecoteux 1987: 13). The Christian faith in general is a noisy thing – and the trumpets of angels are the proof of belief.

As in sagas and fairy tales, the silence ritual played an important role in rep-resenting ceremonies among Native Americans in the eighteenth century. These quite strange welcomings were noticed by early English colonists among Algon-quian speakers in Chesapeake Bay: “When a stranger comes to their house, the chiefe man in it desires the stranger to sit down; within a little while, he rises and toucheth the stranger with his hand, saying‚ ‘You are come’; after him, all the rest of the house doe the same. None speaketh to him, or asketh him any questions, till he think fit to speak first” (Pargellis 1959: 241). Information is so expensive that no tribesman could spend it before the stranger’s message level is exceeded.

A semiotic observation of human relationships with the Unholde leads us from Saussurian methods to zero semiotic units. There are two main possible schemes of the ways of a sender in magic situations (Figure 1).

When an addresser cannot use silence as her weapon, she will leave without her identity, and the Devil takes over. But let us examine this “general” silence, which ruled over a remota loca in Karjaküla on a Sunday in 1623.

It is not easy to determine the semiotic part of silence. We can forget a word, but not supersede it totally from our mind. Robert Godel called the silences in speech discursive or reminder gaps (lacune discoursif ou mémoriel; Godel 1967: 31). According to Godel, in the case of general silence during a conversation, the signified of a potential message remains the same, only the signifiers correspond-ing to them are latent and do not allow the signifieds to appear as themselves. The zero sign is not an absence of a sign, the signified only releases a discursive or reminder gap in the sign and the signifier does not reach into phonic realization (Godel 1967: 31). This means that unspoken words still exist, they are either sim-ply forgotten (replaced with reminder gaps) or unwanted (replaced with discur-sive gaps). What may cause the zeroness of sign in Godel’s theory?



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A zero structure in semiotics can appear as a formless lump among very structured units. A snowflake is a good example. There are a myriad of differently structured snowflakes, but if one snowflake has broken dendrites, it could be a unit that maintains some signifying knowledge, as we know that all the others still have fast pattern building.

In this case, Marret was ordered to be silent, her silence was an access code, not especially an entrance code. Entering into another world was for her completely unhealthy, so she used a secure route and did not act performatively toward a hole that leads to the underworld. Stealing the messages means stealing the identity.

Unlike real history, the voice and silence in fairy-tales are always linked with promises, prohibitions, and rule-breaking. While silence in witchcraft was a way to hold identity, silencing in fairy-tale plots is a duty to keep oneself from the worst (Russian tales Tsar-ptitsa and “Baba-Yaga and the Elf” are good examples). Marret’s silencing as she confronts strong powers does not seem to be a single episode; it appears as a part of much larger puzzle, an element of the Western phonocentric scope of ideas. Touching the Unholde means accepting the common principle of the relation with supernatural forces, the no-words-back principle.

In the second book of “King Arthur’s Death” this principle is very clear:

Then Sir Galahad came unto a mountain where he found an old chapel, and found there nobody, for all, all was desolate; and there he kneeled to-fore the altar, and besought God of

Fig. 1: Semiotic relationship between the woman and the Devil




wholesome counsel. So as he prayed he heard a voice that said: Go thou now, thou adven-turous knight, to the Castle of Maidens, and there do thou away the wicked customs. When Sir Galahad heard this he thanked God and took his horse. (Malory 1909–1914: 14)

As we are reminded of Sir Galahad’s castle acts, the no-words-back principle is very active. Sir Galahad was addressed by God, while Marret spoke with Devil. Unlike God, the Devil is a deceiver. (Decipiator in Latin, which contains phoneti-cally but not semantically close stem “decipher.” Analogues include водитель in Russian folklore and vidäjä in Finnish-Estonian, which refer to a demonic per-son that misleads wanderers and is also a decipiator in his inner substance.) A decipiator-vidäjä gives us wrong, cheating signals, which we could not mirror back. In a fairy tale, we need a magic agent to repel those signals.

Medieval and early modern European man stood before a dilemma: to choose a positive world picture or negative forces. An access code for the former would be an open phrase, while inner words were needed for the latter. The people of the freshly newborn modern era even organized symbolic white and black proces-sions with the presence of a witch, who was punished in the same evening. In a witch trial in Lédec (Hungary) a mass of people all wore white or black clothes. These “witch troops” marched on the night of Epiphany (sixth of January), prob-ably in AD 1722. All of them bore the same contrasting flags, the world was either white or black, there are no middle variants (Pócks 1999: 41). The enlightenment era had already begun, but the world still held a simplified, bipolar, human gestalt-like view. It was useless to fight with this gestaltic vision; it was deeply rooted in the souls of the masses. We will see below that the access codes for the supernatural were sophisticated both historically and semiotically.

2 Silence as a codeThe story of the priest Urbain Grandier is a story about inquisition in the Diocese of Poitiers at the beginning of the seventeenth century (in 1634). He reportedly broke his vow of priestly celibacy and a group of nuns from the local Ursuline convent accused him of having bewitched them. The judges, after torturing the priest, introduced documents purportedly signed by Grandier and several de-mons as evidence that he had made a diabolical pact. One of the pacts was writ-ten in Latin and appeared to be signed by Grandier; another looked almost illeg-ible (but was in fact written backwards with Latin abbreviations – and has been published and translated in a number of books about witchcraft), had many strange symbols, and was “signed” by several demons with their seals, as well as by Satan himself (a signature clearly readable as Satan-as).



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Silence was also a relation instrument in this case. Satan answers to Jeanne des Anges, the prioress of the Ursuline monastery and the main accuser of père Grandier:

When asked: Qui es tu, mendax, pater mendacii? Quod est nomen tuum? [Who are you, liar, father of lies? What is your name?] the demon said, after a long silence: “I forgot my name. I can’t find it . . . ” And commanded once more to say his name, he said: “I lost my name in the wash.” (Certeau 2000: 44)

“Lost in the wash” means the same silence and it breaks the chain of phantasmata- sending, which is displayed by Italian semiotician Roberto Pellerey (Pellerey 1989: 94):

res (sender) → phantasm (message) → agent intellect (receiver and operator) → phantasm (message) → possible intellect (destination)

While the demon’s name is forgotten and lost in the wash, he still uses the method of silencing. I can’t find it – the agent intellect (the operator) does not recognize the content of message and sends it back to the res with a question: among which res (things) could I finally find my name? In generally, naming was important and typical medieval practice: in Dante’s Vita nuova Beatrice’s name “is Love,” while Guido Cavalcanti’s is mentioned in the same book as Primavera (Spring). “Frailty, thy name is woman” in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is even clearer. The persons baptized with such names taken from nature also bear a strong meta-phorization in their dispositions and in this certain case the nameless demon was simply unmetaphorized, a poor creature without the possibility of establishing himself on a path of meanings.

Moreover, perhaps this “lost in wash” along with silence was a simple memo-rial gap in Jeanne’s inner world, formed around a local memory trauma?

In most cases, there is no habit of “saying nothing” in face-to-face encounters with the Devil, as Marret of Karjaküla did. Other court records from Estonia in 1687 speak about a peasant that used the words said to one devil as an entrance key to the other world, but not said (silenced) to the other people of Hell – a mouse and a little hutted man. In this very year, the Land Court of Tartu decided to punish two local peasants, Luuka Tõnu and Oosa Mikk, with the full arm of the law. A certain Peter Ronimus (which means “roundworm of the fish” in old Esto-nian) complained that one of the poor peasants bewitched him and caused him Sausewind (e.g., disturbing) moods. After torture, Oosa Mikk confessed that he met regularly a man from a mouse hole dressed in red. And there was another little man and a little mouse who were both silent. Unlike them, the red man




introduced himself and promised to give the whole world to Mikk. Oosa Mikk bowed into the hole and told him he would not bewitch Ronimus’ little horse any more. Unlike Marret’s silencing, it was a concrete answer to the Unholde Welt – an opening code for sesame. According to Maritain, the magic sign “not only makes men know, it makes things be; it is an efficient cause in itself” (Maritain 1957: 96). It opens sesame. This unpure world always forces one to bow – it is a symmetrical response of bowing and kneeling in God’s world. “Silence and bow” – this was a nobleman’s everyday command to his serving peasant and the last one used to bow often. This was a part of their everyday practice.

Mikk’s open-sesame words act like a dechiphering of the underworld. The promises of the underworld were here quite concrete: “Wenn er kommt mit mir zuraus . . . ist viel . . . der gantzen Welt ihm können geben” (EAA: 5; kann ihm geben would be more correct, but we do not know the context as a whole, because the central part of the sentence is deleted. However, the meaning is understood).

As we have seen, the key figures of this story were also silent. In all of these cases, silence is not simple silence, it is a promise to say something. Oosa Mikk went through a secure route in relation with the second man and the hellish mouse (Satan’s equivalent), but he went through an insecure route with the red man. It is important to emphasize that stories with the presence of “satanic” silence are fake and fabricated. You can never hear that which is silenced and unsaid. Oosa Mikk narrated this only under conditions of supposedly unbearable torture. Silence is the signified without signifier. When Satan (decipiator) is silent, the Sausewind moods appear.

The mouse-hole as a cultural phenomenon has its special place in Estonian folklore. Animal holes (urruaugud) were some of the few exits of the traditional Estonian barn-dwelling, which were small and rich with smoke at that time. So an Estonian man in the seventeenth century also believed mouse holes in forest to be urruauk of the inhabited (souls) land. The mouse was wise and clever for the ancient Estonian because he was truly capable of liquidating harvests one by one.

Oosa Mikk’s story gives us a chance to make important conclusions about silence as a magical process. A scene in front of the mouse’s hole, the equivalent of Hell, was semiotically noisy, totally loaded with information. There were voices that bravely uttered and there were also such voices that dared to speak nothing. This Faustian mess puts us under the question that points toward a demonologi-cal solution to the problem: Why would the Devil allows such messy and chaotic scenes? Why would he favor giving the information in such a chaotic code?

Who is the Devil? The interrogation of Jeanne des Anges gives us a strict an-swer: the Devil is not only a liar, he is also the father of all liars. Therefore, he can cheat the company of smaller liars. Every word you say can be used against you and can penetrate your identity. And silence in witchcraft episodes is a unit of



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information, sent by addressers from both sides – from the hellish and human “camps.” Only the signified exists in the silent “signal”; the signifier is purely imaginary, although every witch in the scene knows the point. You cannot bewitch without strong knowledge about the connotations.

3 Access and entrance codesThe access code for Marret was silence and for Mikk it was a choice between different hellish persons. It is important to notice that the approaching unit to the hell hole was a mission, especially for Marret. The relationship with unpure forces was cyclical. There were presence missions in front of the hole and we con-sider that the bowers’ access codes were different, but there were no entrance codes. The world’s folkloristic tradition repeats the story of the prohibition from Hell for some persons: “The Devil, upset at the trick Jack played on him, refused to let him into Hell.” Access codes are for those whom the Devil trusts, the real entrance codes are for no one.

This leads us to the consequence that codes for the magical operators in the mouth of Hell have a certain relaxation time. The term comes from popular me-chanics, where it signifies a state’s transition, a time during which a device’s state turns into another. Only tricksters can avoid those long relaxation times. Who can endure a hellish hole? Only those persons that have magic rings, unbreakable from the inside and outside. Only they can wait in this tense situation.

We must also consider the historical context where those testimonies were given. In Oosa Mikk’s case, Mikk might have indeed been a trickster, but in severe and official court situations, nobody was aware of that. Mikk’s acting like a witch and a trickster were simply humorous phenomena.

Silence in magic situations arose from a temporary lack of an expressive sig-nifier. In the European context, there were centuries when silences were read-able. American people’s meetings with devils were noisier, in some cases, differ-ent devils even introduced themselves (Boyer and Nissenbaum 1977: 56); cats, books, and pinches became the natural attributes of the unforgettable meeting.

The devil’s scene in both European and American contexts is a traumatic phenomenon, full of purposeful forgettings. It was an unusual and extreme situ-ation for the modern and premodern people and folktales carry only the sweetest part of this to the present. Only through viewing and studying the sources of variation in the semiotic process we can state that the meaning and the context of interpersonal relations have thoroughly changed over the last 500 years. “Satanic” silence with the access codes described above remained only until the seventeenth century and never returned after the end of the absolutist era.




4 The glosseme of silenceIn radio messaging, silences are always preceded and succeeded by very strong semiotical boundary markers. Silence is an uncertain state and needs euphe-misms to describe its depressing power. On May 7, 1954, a four-engine transport plane started from a Frankfurt military airport with two important passengers on board. They were the British MI 2 spies Hans Toomla, whose agent name was Artur (Art), and Kaljo Kukk, pseudonym Karl, both Estonians (Ruben 2007).

By that time the Estonian Republic had been occupied for fourteen years, first by the Soviets, then by the Nazis, and then by Soviet powers again. Estonia had gone through two agonizing deportations, more than 25,000 Estonian citizens were to be forced exile into Siberia, lots of them into concentration camps where half of them would not survive. Estonia had lost one quarter of its population. The challenges against the ruling political regime were strictly forbidden and harshly punished. Despite of all this, the citizens of the newly established Estonian SSR hoped for a new beginning on the other side of iron curtain.

That same night, the reconnaissance plane reached above the Estonian terri-tory and both agents were dropped down at Pärnumaa, in a place full of extreme-ly large, thick, primeval forest. They landed secretly with their parachutes, hav-ing a very powerful radio transmitter with the capacity to reach all over the Europe. They also had two Walther P38 army pistols, two pen-shaped pistols with tear gas, and cyanide capsules hidden under their collars. Hans Toomla had doc-uments on the name Karl Peterson in his pocket, Kaljo Kukk owned a pair of false documents for the non-existent persons Ilmar Taluots and Endel Sutt. Their dan-gerous incognito life inside Soviet society had begun and lasted for three months.

Toomla’s radio messages to the West were encrypted, but the encryption was quite weak. After buying a Moskvitch car, Toomla forwarded important things to British intelligence. The following message was sent by him from Vändra forest; it was in Estonian and in Morse Code – their senders were true specialists in both:

We bought a car. Art, I repeat, Art – his relatives are in good error. I have not contacted my relatives. Give me three necessary addresses. The addresses you have given are inexact, omit either the street names or house numbers. Listen to me on the day, marked with a cross. Art, I repeat, Art. Karl, I repeat, Karl. Sad woman, sad woman, sad woman! The end, the end, the end! (quoted in Ruben 2007, my translation)

Some parts of their code make us think. Those were the emergency exits from the “randomly put character language” messages: cabix (“all our weapons are lost”) and qrt (means “the enemy is close, I must end”). This qrt (dash-dash-dot-dash dot-dash-dot dash) sounds very similar to the Estonian word kurat (a devil),



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however, it is not a linguistic sign. Let us re-emphasize that the exit code of the message about buying the car was “sad woman.” Semantically, it is a specially stressed marker for the irrefutable fact that a silence will follow all the signals, the last one included. It should have been only a very strong, underlined semiotic unit: for example “sad woman.” Yuri Lotman has written that semiotic processes that happen on the borders are more intense. Toomla had to choose a very special code unit to mark the border between the message and the following silence; he chose “sad woman” because both men did not relate with any woman in Estonia during their short visit to the dearest places of their homeland. The expression “sad woman” repeated three times was the height of absurdity and marked the beginning of radio silence until the next transmission. Psychoanalysts could per-haps notice the relation between Toomla’s expression and Melanie Klein’s little patient Rita, who, in her Oedipal stage, murmured aside, shredding a picture of woman: “Dead woman, dead woman, dead woman . . .” (Frank 2009: 131). The main point is that the spies associated with no women in Estonia and at the end of this story the KGB shot both of them. In sending his messages, Toomla pro-ceeded from typical human logic: after the message, silence always follows. Ac-cording to Yuri Lotman, the track marker, signifying the border of his message, should evaluate the inner and outer condition of its world – the message. Toomla knew that you can give a strong impulse to end the radio transmission. And it was a paradoxal ending: let’s talk about women as ordinary men do – women, who never revealed themselves to Toomla and Kukk until the end of their days. It was a strongest signal to end the transmission – and the spies used it.

The conclusion: silence is silence only when strongly separated by its edges. Silence always hides a question of boundaries in itself.

If we forbear to metaphorize the term “silence” and approach it by consider-ing it as something very real, we are certainly bounding against Ernesto Laclau’s theory of the concept. In his Emancipation(s), Laclau theorizes about village people living beside a powerful waterfall. On a beautiful day, the falls stop and dry up. “But if for any reason the fall of the water suddenly stops one day, they will start hearing that which, strictly speaking, cannot be heard: silence” (Laclau 1996: 94). It is the lack of something that so far acquired full presence. In this newly born silence now randomly and alternately appear different noises. Some of the inhabitants may have even known about its presence before, when the sound of the waterfall overshadowed everything. They all now experience a com-munitarian lack, the unconscious longing for something, which was in reality a disorder, a hole in the societal continuity.

Let it be imagined, for instance, that, instead of “sad woman,” Toomla and Kukk had ended their transmission with words “that’s all, there is no more to say,” repeated three times. Those words would not have been a strong, boldly




marked line to end the silence and would not have sounded good together with the qrt (a devil). After all, they would be boring and non-mystic. Use extremely cryptic words with an indirect semantic field that connotes women and the pos-sible interceptor of your cryptic message will be afraid of you!

It is very likely that frequently mentioning ladies in intelligence language and coded messages is a result of hegemonic exclusion described by Laclau. The British-Argentinian philosopher often emphasized that language especially mirrors borders and oppositions, which are always antagonistic. What frightens the enemy most? A woman. Friedrich Firsof’s book The Secret Codes of Comintern in 1919–1943 cites the following sequence, which describes the instructions given to a Comintern’s spy for a meeting with his contact person:

He has a brown portfolio and wears a brown suit. Your man must read the same journal as you and hold in his mouth a pipe that he does not smoke. Your man should ask you a match-box and get a lighter that contains no petrol. Then you should ask: which film runs in the cinema and get the answer: La Femme. (Firsov 2007: 417)

Contemplating the subject from this point of view, we reach to the important hypothesis about the position of silence in cultural semiotics and more broadly, in history. Perhaps the quietness of wise kings disciplines bothersome chatter-boxes? Jesus, the King of Heavens, never answered the question of what the truth is. He could avoid a mass of further stupid questions with his act of silence. An enfant terrible can always be obstinate and continue to bomb the target with in-formation units, often invalid ones. The information flow would be unlimited. A Voltairesque Estonian proverb says that a fool can ask more than ten wise men can answer. A wise man thinks more than the masses. Every real king prefers to be silent rather than answering many questions. In the nineteenth century,

Fig. 2: The cryptic intelligence information in the case of Toomla and Kukk. Source (the intelligence center in Frankfurt) elaborates the code of messages and the expression “sad woman” is simultaneously a marker of the ending of a particular message and also the unwanted loss of information



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Thomas de Quincey wrote that Jesus’s silence was a false gloss for Pilate, because the Roman governor intended to use this knowledge in his ruling practice, but in vain (De Quincey 2008: 43) – just like the devil could not use the silence of Marret of Karjaküla. But De Quincey was right in the semiotic aspect – silence is a gloss and has a structure similar to a real gloss.

5 The harmless non-silencersAre the borders between silence and non-silence and then silence again bilingual and translatable?

The world of radio interval signals of the Central Radio of USSR is familiar to those who were children during Soviet times. The signifying markers of the radio station Mayak were two signals of the “Moscow Nights” tune1 (composed by Vassily Soloviov-Sedoi), and an interval signal of the number one Soviet Central Radio program was Широка страна моя родная (“Wide is My Homeland”2) by Isaac Dunayevsky. The information from the All-Union broadcaster Mayak spread across a wider area; theoretically it has been listened to from the statue of Immanuel Kant in Kaliningrad to the deerbreeders in Chukotka, from Arctic expe-ditions to the border of China.

“Moscow is speaking! All the TV and radio broadcasts of Soviet Union are open!” A surprising paradox was expressed in this statement because Soviet society in general was not open at all, it was totally non-informative and closed. Every former Soviet citizen who lived during the period feels the memories come flooding back, because they remember “Moscow Nights” in the mornings. “Moscow Nights” aired through the night-like morning was also half mystical; it has reappeared in some of my dreams. The tune consisted of two monotonic sig-nals with a gap between them; the gap that lasted two seconds in 1972 and almost five seconds in 1982. Consequently, the silence dividing two signals increased at a rate of 0.3 seconds per year. A normal dream lasts far more. But even two seconds is enough to remember it persistently. It might be a language unit, equal to two quick breaths and therefore fitted to the action of human organism – we can cite Umberto Eco: “A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams” (Eco 2004: 438).

The dreamy voices were being formed in a far away childhood. The boundary between a signal and a gap was strict, but open in both directions.

1 http://www.radioscanner.ru/uploader/2007/radio_maak.mp32 http://www.sovmusic.ru/m32/radio.mp3




The border of semiotic space is the most important functional and structural position, giv-ing substance to its semiotic mechanism. The border is a bilingual mechanism, translating external communications into the internal language of the semiosphere and vice versa. Thus, only with the help of the boundary is the semiosphere able to establish contact with non-semiotic and extra-semiotic spaces. As soon as we move into the realm of semantics, we have to appeal to an extrasemiotic reality. However, let us not forget, that this reality becomes for a given semiosphere “a reality in itself” only insofar as it has been translated into the language of the semiosphere. (Lotman 2005: 210)

We can easily find that periods of the signals are translated into the language of the gaps of silence, the information of the voice mirrors the structure of silence in the meantime. When a signal has sounded, we can imagine the sound of it once more during the long pause. Psychologists call this phenomenon perceptual masking (Toch 1956), human eyes’ jumping to the new visual figure, which is always jammed by metacontrast – a noise, which bears in itself the lines of the former object (retroactivity). We are turning our sight, but nevertheless seeing the same object (although Toch’s experiment involved lights, which are not quite eye-friendly objects). Semioticians would see it as setting out the neutral term be-tween two different evidences of sign. Certainly, this is one of the basics of sight and sound of witchcraft, which I described in the past sections. Why are the inter-val signal’s pauses so inspiring? They often appear in dreams, because they were awakening scenarios of the early hours of childhood. The signals contain follow-ing connotations:

1. You should wake up and jump out from your bed (an order).1a. But this is not difficult (a negative contingent postulate).1b. Because this is not alarm, but a radio (an argumentation).1c. And signals are soft (a contingent postulate).2. Then you should start your morning exercises as your radio commands (an

order).2a. You should raise and lower your hands as ordered (two orders).2b. But this is also very easy (a contingent postulate).3. So you can expect a nice day (a preposition).4. But as you are awakened in such secure way, you can remember sunshine,

the sunny valleys, and other attributes of a dream based on childhood memories (a promise).

There is a temptation to agree that interval signals are typical code-bearing units that can simplify a human’s life. The signals and the gaps are heavily loaded with connotations and therefore bilingual, translatable. We can analyze the signals themselves, if we have sufficient epistemons about the intermedium gaps. Why



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did the gaps increase over ten years? Because the interval signals were planned to be the voices and silences of the state. In 1972, the state was young and hurried with its signals. In 1982, the state was old and had far more extra time to represent itself. The older the state, the more solemn the style.

It was the game of the 1980s. The radio silence, especially among the signals of the correct time or musical signals could mean a certain warning. The possible meanings: maybe something is happened to “our” steadfast state? May this delay be caused by an unexpectedly started nuclear war, dangerous to all of civiliza-tion? Unusually long-lasting silence between the typical signals always means a remarkable danger and the human mind is in some way programmed to recognize it. It is a communitarian lack, too.

6 The possible universal meaning of silence

The Universe around us is empty of any messages. Potential friends’ silence in the vast deepness of distances do not reach us. Getting closer to the famous boxer paradox of Ludwig Wittgenstein, we can formulate rational reasons why.

They are too proud and do not want to talk with imbecile civilizations (usual argument).

They are small and beginners and are waiting until they grow enough to make contact, so that they can learn from us so far (argument of a fool).

Our language conforms to theirs; their language is non-formal to us (like the doorkeeper and Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial). For example, if they handle random noise as pointed information (argument of unfitting patterns).

They already attempted to contact but we did not notice it or despised them. Or otherwise we did not notice our attempt to establish contact in the past and forwarded them something wrong (argument of the unmemorized past).

They cannot contact, because they know about a danger threatening us and they want to accelerate it (argument of two comrades).

They know that a cosmic letter is not a cosmic attachment and the last one may have the opposite meaning (argument of a letter).

There is a certain order by which civilizations can contact each other and they do it in strict order. Probably we do not know the order, but probably we know it very well and even more – we established it (argument of the stuck consciousness).

Or – silence is not at all common information in space. It is the Miranda warn-ing before the opposition with other witnesses and before the verdict (“You have the right to remain silent”).




Or – they do not contact us not because we are pretty primitive but, just the opposite, because we are highly developed. Their lack of contact has one reason – we live in incorrectly compressed timespace. Only losses of information in black holes are correct things for them.

If silence is a discursive gap of information like the zero sign with its latent signifiers (Godel 1967: 31), then it should also contain different layers. The layers shall be: a state before silencing, the warning, and then oppressive silence itself. The human way of packing data looks like data compression in computer science. When the compression level is weak, we may minimize the size of our file by de-leting unnecessary characters, especially those that consist of parts of other char-acters (e.g., š). When the compression level is powerful and we must compress a large .jpg file to .rar format (the abbreviation for a Roshal Archive), our power uses formulas and equations to achieve this. But if we use an equation for data compression, we must consider that all information would not be packed. How-ever, in such case, the results are better. Besides achieving far better results, superfluous patterns exist and when we start to uncompress, the noise will mess up our bright general picture.

The whole process is quite different in nature. The systems described above are typical to human thinking – using formulas to jump over odd information clusters. Nature solves the problem in different ways. When in the human world an equation exactly preserves the correct placement of the gaps, on the surface of a black hole all of the borders have ceased to be bilingual, therefore it is not a semiosystem.

A human observer can destroy the event horizon only in the case when the black hole evaporates (Smolin and Oppenheim 2006). By the way, if you want to understand silence, you should deconstruct it.

Our reader can now see what causes incorrect human vision, transporting imaginative demons and creating a demonological situation. It is the same ele-ment that silence has: the construction of a recently seen/heard object onto a new one. I call this the retroactivity of the motion of eyeballs. In the context of silence this fact has a special meaning.

7 Silence in cultural semioticsThe language of heraldic signs shows us in unprecedented ways how the phe-nomenon of silence has been understood in the past. Yuri Dolgoruki (1099–1157), the founder of Moscow ordered the New Gate of Yaroslavl city to be built. But Dolgoruki (“the Long Hand”) was politically influenced by the Mokshas, people of Fenno-Ugric origin that came from the North. Even his father Vladimir (or



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Valdemarr) Monomakh (1053–1125; “He Who Fights Alone”, the metonymy also used for the gladiators in Greek cultural space) strongly considered the Mokshas and switched their famous bear-faced goddess Mokoshtsha to the pantheon of Kiev Rus’ – although for the Christian layman she was a demon with some powers and for the pious monks – the female Devil.

The point was in fastening the coat of arms of the female bear (медведица) to the New Gate of the ancient town of Yaroslavl in the 1130s or 1140s . So these were the Fenno-Ugric tribes Moksha, Merya, and Murom that the city of Moscow city its name; according to one of many hypotheses it means Maa-skava in the Murom language (“Mother of Bears”). Christian rulers of the Kiev Rus’ used the whole legend to their aims and claimed that Yaroslavl’s coat of arms was inherited from Yaroslav the Wise (Ярослав Мудрый, Jarizleifr; 978–1054) who won a fight with a spiteful bear exactly in Medveditsa on the left bank of Kotorosli river near the Kreml of Yaroslavl.

Throughout history, the bear bearing a hellebard is always depicted with her mouth closed on all coats of arms of Yaroslavl city (Revo 1978: 69). In the Euro-pean heraldry tradition, all the heraldic predators furiously open their mouths (e.g., in the coats of arms of all old European monarchies). Lions, falcons, eagles, bulls, deer, gryphs, and even horses all hold their mouths open, anticipating a possible attack. The bear on West-European coats of arms is also threatening. Even pope Benedict XVI has a bear on his coat of arms, mentioning his heritance from Bavaria.

The medveds, their Russian colleagues, differ from Western heraldic tradition by their closed mouths. Why then?

The possibility exists that story about the coat of arms of Yaroslav the Wise and the history of the city of Yaroslavl gives us half of the answer. The bear’s un-opened mouth may not be caused by her underlining of the values of silence. She is standing anyway and therefore does not need to appear more threatening. She is frightful enough. Thus, the bear is not only the personification of the legend, it is the echo of the medieval abysses of the tradition of sustainability: Epictetus said anexou kai apexou (sustain and abstine) and St. Benedict translated it sus-tine et abstine, whereafter it became English heraldic motto “Bear and forebear!” It is known that the bear is a very patient animal, and if the huntsmen’s spears are quite blunt, the mother-bear can bear their strikes for hours on winter nights. Silencing coats-of-arms are the representatives of the quietness and also the sym-bols of the magic remota loca, as we will see below.

Most probably, the Russian bears with closed mouths are remembrances of an old belief: there is silence in erä or weihs. In the Finnish language, erä denoted an inhabited area, and in Old Germanic, the protonym weihs marked the same thing. Erä and weihs were far away from the village (Anttonen 1996: 216), which




was separated with eräpyhä for the Finnish and hiis (a holy forest) for the Esto-nians. Eräpyhä and hiis were the historical bilingual border markers and the commune knew what was behind the boundaries of this holy forest – it was the silence. It is not only on occasion that in the oldest layers of Estonian folk-songs only the most silent objects wanted to marry with Salme, the mythological girl, despising the wooing of the Star, the Moon, and the Sun. “The Wooing of Salme” (“Star-Bride Salme”) is considered to be one of the oldest parts of the Estonian national epos Kalevipoeg (“Kalev’s son”; 1857) and the modal equivalent of Salme’s wooing is songs 24–26 of the Finnish epos Kalevala. These motives date back to the pre-Christian era, the later Bronze Age (to the seventh century in the region) is mentioned (Kalevipoeg 1961: 442) – when it could have been.

Once upon a time in remota loca (a remote place) lived three sisters: a gentle maiden Salme, a secretive maiden Linda, and their abandoned sister, called Crow. Sixty young men proposed marriage to Salme, among them was the Moon, a celestial wooer. As strict tradition in those days demanded that a potential young bride be in the barn until the stranger conducts the negotiation about her fate, Salme answered from the barn: “Ei mina, kuld lähe kuule, hõbe, ei ööde val-guselle!” (No! I won’t marry the Moon, I won’t wed that night light; Kreutzwald 2007: 26).3

Salme’s motivation to reject the Moon’s wooing is caused by his habit of ris-ing during and after short summer nights, when in day-time hard-working girls want to sleep. Then the Moon goes away, sadly silencing. It comes out, he ap-peased, not only silenced. The next wooer is the Sun, whom Salme understands, but he also cannot be the best man for her: the Sun causes droughts and is there-fore harmful. As he goes away defeated, the Sun puffs and punishes in this man-ner all living on the earth with his blaze. Salme accepts the Star’s proposal in the end and comes out from her hiding place. At this moment, she gives an order to offer the Star a place of honor at the dinner table because he is most silent, only a blinking celestial body. After these positive changes, the Star turns wilder, he lit-erally outflows of his flames. It is a freeing of sexual energy, similar to the ancient fecundity rite, in fact, with marker attributes of the Christian culture. At the same time, Salme’s “secretive and enigmatic” sister Linda, the mythical foremother of all Estonians has been simply following the events, not preferring any of those silenced persons herself. The guests are silent and for this reason foreigners. The fact is, the silenced persons are the messengers of the pre-Creation world, as the world created from a bird’s egg. Having the coat of arms bears be silent is the

3 Despite the good rhythm of the translation, the metaphors in translation are incorrect. Better is: “Golden me won’t marry the Moon, silvery me won’t wed that night light.”



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same as considering celestial wooers: it is sacred, taboo. Silence was a sacred phenomenon. It is a faraway echo of the pulsations of the Creation. Even more, a bear does not belong to society, she is totally outside of it and therefore sacred. As Veikko Anttonen puts it: “The bear is nameless, because the name is a sign of community only” (Anttonen 1996: 138).

Being in remota loca, as the heroes of Kalevipoeg having been, a person should consider with different, namely, derived logic. Émile Benveniste analyzed the linguistic formation of the subjects/references “I”, “we,” and so-called third person. If you want to create “you,” a subject must begin from the monotomy “I” and proceed from the dichotomy “we.” “He” is deprived of its subjective reference and does not demand pointing (Benveniste 2008: 253). You could establish several “He”s in the relation situation, therefore Benveniste argued that “He” is determined only by the communicators and hereby faceless. A message-sender itself can choose which predicate he/she prefers and how they can designate the subject place of “He”/third person – either the respectful “His Majesty” or pejora-tive “a Smith entered.” In both constructions, “He” occupies the central place and speech goes about some third person (Benveniste 2008).

According to Benveniste, the fourth person derived from the second one in near-prehistoric times, together with other linguistic signifiers of the subject- object relation. In this situation, every object called “She” is in unknown places, e.g., barns and if He turns to She, He first communicates to She’s father, which is still believed to be a larger and deeper generalization of She. After all, in a remote place all the huge Egos and Cogitos change to be little parts of Una Sumus’s. A Sami hunter in the sledge of his dogsled sings in lonely snowy places because of being afraid to lose the correct orientation about himself. It is a self-establishing, avoiding the silent backgrounds (Beach 2001: 121–122).

It can be concluded that, for the ancient nations, silence is a subspecies of Creation things. The ending of this status quo denotes the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the modern era, the imaginative (and in some occasions just real) border. In Lotman’s style, the boundaries are translating, transgressing, and sequelizing units and so is the silence.

Let’s conclude in summary. Silence could be a menace or the zeroness of values. For instance, Voltaire’s famous phrase “Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value – zero” (1729, at the time when Arouet happened to be in England, motherland of the money exchange) is a bow towards zeroness. The demon’s silence in the case of Jeanne d’Anges (before the phrase “I forgot my name”) was a covered threat.

The semiotic field of silence is uncertain, relative, and bending. And a psychological masking with metacontrasting elements is always part of human silence.




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BionoteAarne Ruben (b. 1971) is a PhD candidate at the University of Tallinn ⟨[email protected]⟩. His research interests include semiotics and literature.



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Presence of la femme: The semiotic silence

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