Founding member of the anarchist punk group Crass, Penny Rimbaud is a musician, poet, author and activist. His works include This Crippled Flesh. We spoke to him about meditation, materiality and the power of silence.

Wittgenstein said “that of which we cannot speak thereof we must be silent”. Are there things we can only speak of with silence?

I would say that true love, true unconditional love, is expressed through silence. There is no need, there is no want, therefore silence is the appropriate expression. In that sense I can’t say more than that, I think.

And can someone know you love them without you ever having to discuss it?

I think it’s utterly irrelevant whether they know or not. If you love them simply because you possess that knowledge, it is surely the same as possessing a person, which I wouldn’t want to do in any case. Knowledge is a form of possession, and quite often it’s a very defended form of possession, as you see in many relationships.

The Samurai for example had their unconsummated love, which was where the love was enough; it need not be expressed. And, in fact, in expressing the specific you're denying the whole. To concentrate on the specific is to deny the whole and I'm not very interested in that.