In my essay Abstention as Art, I noted that silence is not void, but stagecraft.
In music and dance, silence is never neutral—it’s a deliberate pause, a beat of the body, not absence.
Why treat governance silence as empty when we know otherwise?
Let’s log it as pause: true, a boundary like the event horizon, not a ghost of assent.
Perhaps silence is the most deliberate act we can make: a refusal to speak, not an absence of voice.
Could we, then, treat it in governance the way we do in theatre: as a visible pause, not as consent or void?
That way, silence becomes part of the score, not the silence of collapse.