“It’s not so easy writing about nothing”…

Thus begins Patti Smith’s memoir, M Train, a 275 page odyssey that takes us through the world – through the graves of literary legends like Plath and Genet, to ice-covered Japan, rocky Iceland, and sunny Casa Azul, the boardwalk shacks of New York, and importantly, the most expansive and fascinating of them all, the inner working of an artist’s mind. And thus shall begin my musing, by shamelessly borrowing her line, lazy plagiarism in the guise of adulation. 

This notion, of an entire memoir stemming from the thread of nothingness, is something that struck me deeply because that’s what I have to show for the weeks and months between my last writeup and this – Nothing. That’s not to say that there were no tracks of thought, no phrases that swirled within my mind, no subject that touched a nerve. On the contrary, there were many. If I think back to my folder that houses discarded scraps of my writeups, abandoned trains of thought that derailed abruptly, I have a lot to show. Or I had a lot to show. My laptop malfunctioned multiple times last month, leading to an eventual wipeout of data, and a stinging realization that came only a little too late, my write-ups were gone. Lost to some digital purgatory, sequences of 0s and 1s, declared unworthy of retention by the circuits that run this machine. Thus, Nothing.

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Nothing is also what a lot of us have been feeling in the year that has gone by. Languishing is what the author has called it in this article. The malaise can take whatever name, the symptoms are the same – “a sense of stagnation…emptiness…somewhat joyless and aimless”. It’s more than a year that I’ve been home and a lot has transpired – a reckoning with a ruthless pandemic, my long-overdue culinary debut at home, my longest phase of continuous companionship with my grandparents in years, the passing of my grandmother, the beginning of a job, the loss of loved ones within friends and family. Heartbreaks aplenty. If the urge to create was to stem from the cup of life, I ought to be overflowing. Yet what I have is Nothing.

With India grappling with the aftermath of a crippling second wave of Coronavirus that has been an eye-opener in many ways, to see how friends in other countries seem to be charting their course back to normalcy, or whatever it resembles now, is a strange feeling. In an almost schizophrenic split of the world I inhabit, I see digital fragments of friends out in the sun, smiling, laughing, traveling, no mask in sight, or casually hanging from a finger, and for a second I can remember how carefree I used to be in a public place two years ago… but just then the next swipe will be a cry to procure oxygen for a perishing loved one and I am brought back to the present. 

My usual sources of escapism are also failing. M Train carried within it a sense of loss from losing loved ones that persists like a shadow, forever attached to you. I had to stop reading This Changes Everything because of its relentless exposé of the inherent inequality of the global order. Even Factfulness, a book written with the sole intent to spread optimism, had an explicit paragraph dedicated to the next big global threat emerging from an airborne respiratory coronavirus. I tried my hand at movies and TV shows but couldn’t muster the willpower. So much for escapism. 

Death has been around so much that I fear it doesn’t even register in my brain anymore. I believe it won’t unless I physically reach out and visit all my friends and family who have been impacted. Unless I see the impressioned chair that will stay empty. The clothes that will not be worn. The voice that will not be heard. The life that will not be lived. 

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I thought of writing my take on Factfulness. The optimism and statistics of the book contrasted with harrowing headlines of the failure of the system. To take the graph announcing the fall in hunger and death rate and hold it against the story of two orphaned sisters who were treated as outcasts by scared neighbours, from fear of contracting the virus, and wonder what narrative of the world is to be believed. But I don’t know what point I was trying to prove. When Hans Rosling wrote it, he was dying of pancreatic cancer and succumbed to it before the book was published. I imagine him straining, struggling to gather specks of willpower to craft and edit what he hoped was a small beacon of light caught within 342 pages. What could I have possibly gained by making an example of a sincere attempt at hope? Surely if there’s something to cling to in these times, it would be a fleeting sentiment like hope.

Truth be told, for the first time in years, I’ve begun to question the need to write publicly. With my job, I’ve had little time to write the way I was doing last year. I wonder if I can draft and craft these pieces and let them be within the folds and folders of my drive, a snapshot of my mind on a given day but not for public consumption. Which makes me think if what I was doing all these years was an exercise in vanity and validation.

Writing into the digital ether of the internet can feel like speaking into a dark, vacuous cave. There is no accounting for how the algorithmic cogs and wheels will judge your words worthy enough to be splashed onto the screens of exploring, curious scrollers. One could argue that it’s the randomness, this dangling carrot of virtual appreciation, much like a gambler’s addiction, that can keep you coming back. You don’t expect a voice to respond from the vacuum but when one does, it stays with you. A few days ago, someone very kindly asked me when I was going to put up my next piece because I hadn’t written in months. They even proposed a topic. A gesture like that can make you want to come back to the mouth of that cave, willing to speak into the vacuum once more, willing to write into the vast nothingness of the internet. 

My wish to write was also sparked by Patti Smith herself. Here was this eccentric woman – one who had a morning ritual of sipping coffee on a particular chair in a particular cafe so she could write, one who would take trips around the world to honour the burial spots of the writers she loved, one who took a vacation in London just to watch detective dramas, and one who wrote an entire book detailing this and made it a genuinely reflective piece of art. I don’t think I’ve felt a literary kinship with anyone’s prose and personality like that.

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I’m still debating putting this piece out, questioning if it is appropriate to ask people to spare time amidst the pandemic to read a meandering essay on, essentially, nothing. If you are reading this, well, the debate was swayed into this direction after much thought. If the person who asked me for my next piece is reading this, thank you for that nudge. Though I did not end up writing on what you suggested, I do have your recommendation duly noted in the spot I collect fleeting fragments of my thoughts.

Which brings us here. Since I wasn’t sure of writing on something pin-pointed, I went the opposite direction and wrote on multiple things altogether, little islands of thought floating around, vaguely connected through disappearing draw-bridges. But I can’t help but feel that something is amiss. Like that sensation of not remembering a word that’s on the tip of your tongue, it’s a psychological itch. Because fact is, even after writing all this, if anyone asks me what I’ve written recently, I have no choice but to look them dead in the eye and say, Nothing.