Writing about nothing
Someone keeps passing my window, back and forth. What are they doing?
Don't they know it's Saturday, crisp frost on the ground, sunshine laser sharp on the dusty windows?
Ah, I see, someone has parked in my parking space and they're carrying this and that. I suppose it is 9.30am and folks have things to do.
People ask me what I do. I've settled on saying, "I'm a writer". It's much easier than the old titles where, even though I had done the same job for ten years, I ran through the mental Rolodex of possible answers every time. Sometimes I just said, "Oh, I work in an office, nothing special," if I didn't have the energy to explain.
Yes. I'm a writer.
But it comes with its own hidden quagmires:
"What do you write?" or its cousin, "what do you write about?"
Nothing. I write about nothing, the quiet inconsequentialities of every day.
I'm like Prufrock:
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
That's the first time I've giggled at those lines, written when Eliot was only twenty-two. I heard the original deadpan solemn reading of the poem, delivering its mundane anxieties with the gravity of a sermon. It was supposed to highlight the underlying humour and transform it into a tragicomedy. That was lost on me, I only wondered how he had enough breath to take so long reading a phrase.
Am an attendant lord, one that will do ... Almost, at times, the Fool.
I think that about sums it up.
It's a bit of a show-stopper, though, "I write about nothing". Tends to bring the conversation to a dead halt and I'm looked at speculatively as if possibly I'm not quite right in the head and may at any moment launch into the Can Can on the pub tables. But then they remember, "She's from London, isn't she?" and having safely categorised me as Down from London, I get a free pass.
Although it's not true. I was born here.
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
And, like Prufrock, would it make any difference,
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”
I hold my peace and gaze out the window at the sunshine. Perhaps best to hold my peace, be regarded affectionately as the slightly eccentric woman from another place, hugged and welcomed as I make my way to the knitting group with another unidentifiable item, this time in garter stitch, which never seem to arrive at a wearable garment.
But does it matter when you've seen the waxing crescent moon so sharp in the clear sky, exactly like the illustration on the cover of the book of fairy tales you read a thousand times on every holiday to the seaside, or crunched the frost in your sturdy boots, scarf wound round your nose and ears against the cold, and felt the blistering wind from the sea, scouring your cheeks and forehead, salting your hair to a silvery tangle?
Quotes from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, (1915), T S Eliot
Image:Pegwell Bay, Ramsgate, Kent, England | Monday 14 April 2025 17:39 BST