Nothing

Nothing is a full-bodied word, like zero, which holds within its 0-shaped belly the sense of everything and nothing. Sifr, like the world itself, is an orange-shaped anamoly and is also that much-touted word, a paradox. And all these deliciously curling words that twist the tongue and make the mouth pucker up in a round pout, ‘nothing’is wonderfully full.

So to a casual, ‘How are you?’, the desultory reply ‘Nothing’, might mean just that or imply the hint of some life-altering existential angst. Compulsive literariness compels me to remember Beckett, the guru of ‘nothing’, exploring the very absurdity of this nothingness which pervades modern human existence.

Interestingly, a status message on Facebook stating ‘I am doing nothing, and loving it’, gets more thumbs up and comments than something urgent and macabre like, say, ‘My life is ending’! Evidence of the enduring appeal of nothing!

I am fascinated by the endless potential the literary device of litote throws up, and thus ‘nothing’ fetches in its toe, the desire and yearning for its other half, everything and the intermediate, something. Sketching a lazy trajectory of a person’s ‘life’ from birth to death, it is interesting to wonder if it is a move from nothing through something to everything?

Well, then why the nothingness associated with death, and if the zero be recalled, what of the promise of a circle come to its completion when the curved line joins itself while running always at an exact distance from the centre. The perfection of the circle remains the unattainable zephyr that all vie for and never achieve, yet death is understood commonsensically as an end, not a much-desired, much-awaited closing of a circle to encompass the everything and nothing life has been. Lest I be mistaken as championing the cause of morbid quietus over free-breathing life, a clarification -- it is the fullness of life that death celebrates, an ever-interesting, ever-perplexing Rubik’s cube; much like ‘thingness’ arises out of the heady mix of the one and the other,of nothing and everything, or as in literature, the concept of one can be explained by the opposite of its negative.

wanderer: Silence

wanderer: Silence

Silence

If a word were to be described by stating the negative of its opposite, then silence would be known as absence of speech.

All those blessed with this virtue, know that the absence of speech is often more expressive than words could be. They are moreover, content, not handicapped by the compulsive desire to speak requiring the crutch of ever-available speech. They are the calmest people I have ever known.

Perhaps, like some ancient form learnt only through a long arduous discipline, speech and silence maybe practiced too. But paradoxically, words are required to tell of silence.

An Ode to Silence

Bereft of calm

On torrid eves

We seek solace in words,

Writing a mask

For a silence

Which tells of our hollow faces.

But true silence,

Is a word

Which speaks itself

By saying

Nothing at all.

Not a riddle to

Puzzle the hours away,

But a teller of a calm ecstasy,

Not in need

Of an orgasm of words.

Sometimes

She talks

To hide,

To shatter

The silence

Too cold

Too cutting.

Words are the masks

She writes.

But a wise one counsels,

Silence is a call

To speak

Without words

Overheard by no

‘Eves’-dropping

Snake in Eden.

A beauty

Grown

In cloister.

EXPECTATION

How cruel is expectation,

Holding desires captive to another’s will.

Hung in a lacunae

In between a nascent possibility

And a nihilistic impossibility.