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| Yeah, yeah, pontoons and suits are things. The vacancy is in his head |
Or we can write about nothing. Split that word and we get no thing, a biblical-sounding phrase intended to invoke a void. But there are more than things out there. Breathing in and breathing out are not things, they're events. Reading is a process as is living. Being dead? Hardly a thing.
And before you dispute the definition of thing - arguing that its very vagueness allows it to cover all experienciable and imaginable phenomena - try Googling "Thing, meaning". Never have I been so ashamed of dictionary compilers as a tribe. Most are overpowered by the difficulty and resort to puerile examples.
Were I still a versifier (I resigned the day before yesterday) I'd relish standing on an eminence and viewing nothing. Not a Rich Tea biscuit, nor a Rembrandt nor a TV remote in sight.
Not-I wandered, lonely as an un-thing
That floats - oh, somewhere - over various non-existing geographical features.
The Bard of Rydal could do better.
Mind you the view from that hill, tump or excrescence might be surprising. War might be ensuing (for war is an event) but the good news would be that nobody would be armed, for weapons are things. Nor would anyone care about the war since none of us would have smartphones on which to goggle at it.
Meanwhile I’ll continue to wrestle with the idea that nothing is something to write about.
Have you ever tried to clear your mind completely and think of nothing, usually to promote sleep when the mind has been uncontrollably rampaging ?
ReplyDeleteOk, I've probably missed the point again, but I'm still here posting,and making comments hopefully, slightly less banal than the unqualified compliment.
I have occasionally sat at the computer to write a post with no matter in mind, then a first sentence seems to come from nowhere, and eventually the piece has developed, from nothing, into a thing.
Sir Hugh: Often there is no point to be missed; I'm more concerned with the way the post is written than with what it contains. The originality - if any exists - may be to do with style rather than the subject.
ReplyDeleteAs to those 3 am moments I had one recently that was so neat, so well-formed that I wasn't sure whether I'd been awake or asleep. I found myself in a crowd of about fifty and realised I was there for a singing audition. That I had no score with me and would therefore be unable to provide any musical aid for the pianist accompanist. Not only would I have to sing a capella but do it from memory, quite difficult given the complexity of the stuff I tackle these days.
I got up as usual at 6.25 and found an email from V, my music teacher, re-scheduling the lesson. I acknowledged the change and said I had urgent need of tuition on two points - one to do with musical timing, another with voice production. Both failings I had identified during the 3 am dream - IF IT WAS A DREAM.
I am surprised that you have sat at the computer with nothing much in mind. Most of the stuff you write tends to be reportage rather than speculation. The fact that you eventually responded to a complete sentence suggests you had a fair idea of what you wanted to say anyway. Response to a single word would have been more remarkable.
Posts are opportunities for using imagination as well as recording concrete memories. Or a mixture of both.
Now why did Larkin immediately come to mind, RR?
ReplyDelete'You look as though you wished the place in Hell,'
My friend said, 'judging from your face.' 'Oh well,
I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said.
'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'
Avus: It seems I've arrived late on the scene. Others have trammeled the same ground:
ReplyDeleteTo do nothing is the way to be nothing. Hawthorne
I love to talk about nothing. It's the only thing I know anything about. Wilde
I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing. Plato
We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom. Tolstoy
Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss. Freud
And your Larkin is, as you hint, a descant (or to be more upmarket, part of a fugue) on the same theme. But in my own defence, and merely on the basis of these quotes, I appear to be the only one who has played with nothing, diddled with it like an imaginary yo-yo. Coming up with a "nothing" aphorism would have been another option:
Eat the bun bit of a doughnut and you're left with....
News without taint of personality, packaged in unvarying locutions. Ladies and gentlemen I give you Huw Edwards.
Let me be quite clear: my policies are strong and stable, proof I'm getting on with the job. As your rapidly diminishing leader I offer you...
But I find I can't improve on the mock Wordsworth.
I disapprove of this throwing-over of poetry! And I think the content of this post might neatly fit into a clever (and you are nothing if not clever!) sonnet.
ReplyDeleteMarly: I know it's accidental on your part but I live in a country where "clever" can be employed as an insult. "Too clever by half" was said of a Tory cabinet minister decades ago, further down the social scale we have "Oh, he's a right clever clogs.". Elsewhere we have another shade of meaning in "He's not really intelligent, just clever." Cleverness is the quality abroad when Ponzi schemes are devised, or politicians announce a policy in which taking is disguised as giving.
ReplyDeleteYes, I know you didn't mean it in this way but the adjective has provided the trigger for a post I've been mulling for some 48 hours and which - due to the differing time zones in which we both live - may get posted before you arise today. Alas, it will suffer a condign fate ("full of sound and fury, etc, etc,"). Many of my best (cleverest?) ideas are born on Friday and nobody reads blogs over the weekend.
BTW I didn't necessarily rule out doggerel:
His sins included shouting down a well,
A metaphor for rank futility,
For well's a staging post to inner Hell,
A clue to future imbecility.
The compliment I yearn most for is: if only he didn't misuse his talent.
You realise all this is persiflage, don't you? Space yawns and must be filled.