Writing nothing is easy; one sits and blanks one’s mind, responding to the familiarity of one’s keyboard (or moleskine) and lets loose a stream of calamitous utterances directed at some half-imagined sentient being sitting not too far away. Sometimes the avatar takes the form of a vile enemy, at others it is a lover, imaginary, unrequited or otherwise, but mostly it is what one imagines is oneself, guiltily dressed in one’s favourite clothes, that one might or might not own. Then one conjures up catharsis in the chronological recounting of one’s day, frequently breaking up into rants and impressionistic phrases thrown together and garnished with expletives and onomatopoeic wails, and borrowed emoticons as a final flourish. Occasionally, when one is smitten or harried, it becomes violent, or wet, or jittery, and so on, and so forth.
Writing for a reason, however, is probably easier. One sits, galvanised by some life-changing cause or another, hopeful and eager to shout to the world your very message of change, hope, and perhaps revolution, or worse, salvation. Or you want to uncover some (inexplicably) hitherto hidden truth about our existence, truth or some other absolute construct that you discovered over coffee while sleepily memorising Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Or you just want to be heard, so that you feel somewhat important, for a moment. In a darkly undefined mix of the above and a (foolish) love for the sound of my own voice, I continue to write, here. All the words I cannot say, all the ideas I cannot have, all here, in a sickly miasma of references and weak intertextuality, right at home in the internet. Except, of course, that I’m always too lazy to do hyperlinks and graphics, and I’d rather be glib than precise, and I’m already halfway to my next drink, so it’s always unfinished and incomplete, exactly the way I am.
Being (hardly) anonymous allows me some freedom. I can declare trivial loves; I love it how Vanity Fair sends me overflowing magazines even though I cannot afford a subscription, I love it how my brother has slipped away to Oxford and is now two hundred years in the past, huddled in a small room held together by faith and duct tape, etc. I can ignore reality and pretend that tomorrow, I am flying to New York to have poppy-seed bagels with cream cheese and chives for breakfast, and that my days are driven with idealism and youthful passion, hoping for everything and wanting for nothing, even if the candle spits and sputters and rats scurry in the rafters. And I can declare secret, half-known desires, pretend or otherwise; the universal desire for freedom, emancipation, vicarious existence in the idolised lives of others, or others that strike closer to home, like coffee that isn’t sour or tepid, or someone to talk to that won’t become a stranger. Somehow they all do.
Ironically, it is reality, truth and facts that are forbidden. I can mention no names, no events, except those that revolve solely around me, and make only references to ideas, concepts and thoughts not rooted in familiar time or space. Like a marvelous game of Taboo, I greedily pounce on every morsel I can play with, which has regrettably become a habit. I teach a natural science, as fact, unchanging in the timeframes we are allowed to grasp, but in every aspect of what I know and seek to know, I see only uncertainty and a depth and range of possibility that calls me. Depth is what I seek first! To immerse and forget myself in an ocean of ideas. Perhaps I am selfish; I seek only to know, an end unto itself, which I might, in my weaker moments, pretend to disavow. Even if I am all too familiar with the power of familiarity and routine to numb emotions and desire, the hunger remains. And one important element of this hunger is dialogue. Not with you, faceless, nameless, alien reader, but with my doppelgänger, here beside me. Hello.