Hindustan Times
Temporary shutdown
The issue: Turning my back
The soundtrack: The big empty
As some of you may have noticed if your attention was not taken up by an attention-seeking gnat, I didn’t write last week’s edition of my blog. This absence — a keen one that I felt in my desultory life of checking commas and inverted commas and writing sentences with the word ‘desultory’ in them — was felt by me pretty much the whole of last week. I didn’t write mainly because I became insanely caught up with something that was deemed (by people that included myself) to be non-negotiably important and something I had left, as usual, to the last moment.
But that’s no excuse. And that’s why the guilt.
On a different scale, however, I must admit that even in the super-interactive zone where readers can (almost) immediately pass on comments about write-ups on blogs, things have been mighty quiet on my blog. Which gives me the luxury of doing what Pink Floyd once did in Pompeii: perform in front of empty stands. In a world where to get a response is everything and more, this may strike as going AWOL. But the fact is, as I had let out a few months ago on this blog, there’s a different kind of pleasure (short-lived, to be honest) to write to ‘The Big Empty‘ where no one responds because no one can see the thing one usually can respond to.
Welcome to my home page: the world narrow web
While theologians may put a spin to this — “We are never alone in this hyper-media world” — this writing in ether is a lovely antodote to the brickbats- and bouquets-throwing readers that my tribe are usually used to.
To put this in a sonic context, all this Winter 2009 world-weariness reminds me of the Stone Temple Pilots’ wind-blowing-through-your-beard song, ‘Big empty‘, that fullsome, wholesome number about feeling the strange joy of facing utter emptiness. When Scott Weiland sings, “Driving faster in my car/Falling farther from just what we are/Smoke a cigarette and lie some more/These conversations kill/Falling faster in my car“, my desire is to stay under the covers close my eyes. And when that becomes monotonous, stay under the covers and keep my eyes open. As the cowering girl with the light and the torch says in the scene in The Blair Witch Project: “I’m too scared to close my eyes. I’m too scared to open them.” In my case, replace the simpering girl with a lazy boy and the word ’scared’ with ‘bored’ and you’ll get my picture.
So apologies for skipping last week’s blog. And apologies for not writing back to your comments. It seems that I need to engage with the world after all. They say that’s one of the prime functions of a journalist.
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