The right to remain silent

Sometimes we say it best when we say nothing at all. An update.

“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”.

My grandad would often say.  Hardly original, I know,  but he embodied that. A perfect foil to my grandma’s Chatty Cathy. She could talk for England and he rarely got a word in edgeways!

But I would amend this sentiment further and remove the ‘nice’ part.

After all, why say something ‘nice’ if it’s hollow drivel?

It’s worth remembering that saying nothing IS a statement in itself.

It conveys you have no comment you feel is WORTH making.

Modern life has become too sleazy a speakeasy. It’s Open Mic every night of the week, and not just for the budding Bob Dylans.

Soap boxes are dirty from the weight of the same tired opinions, stacked like Pringles in identical shapes of reconstituted apathy and faux concern. If had a pound for every time I heard;  “Didn’t have that on my bingo card” or “When Mercury comes out of retrograde”, I’d be Venus with a penis in furs.

Say what?

Say absolute BOLLOCKS, that’s what!

It’s okay to say nothing. To keep schtum.

Because sometimes, people genuinely have nothing to offer.

The last few weeks have felt that way for me. As the world has turned, I’ve felt like a thrush without song.

And I’ve told myself, that’s alright.

Thoughts tumbled past me like the twister scene in ‘Wizard of Oz’. Dust coated, on rocking chairs and in cackles. Before I’ve had chance to gather, decipher or name them, another has arrived.

And no-one ‘gathers’ thoughts anymore do they? Feels like a quaint pastime of another era.

Everyone wants a ‘hot take’. “What do you think of X or Y?” but before you have chance to digest X or Y,  Z is here.

The US election for example. How could I say anything fresh when the situation feels so stale to me?

Some were devastated, others elevated.

I sat there like a predictive text ready to launch into the usual “two sides of the same coin”, “follow the money” blah blah, only to bore myself rigid.

I put the brakes firmly on.

Did I really want to say that? What did it bring to the table? Absolutely fuck all. Who did it help?

Those on the so-called left and right would cart on believing what they wanted believe, whilst those who thought similar to me, would have nothing but my endorsement of their feelings.

Creativity wise, I’ve felt frozen too.

For a couple of weeks, we had dense cloud that smothered like a wicked mother.  As it tented the valley I live in, it rented my soul, the grey cotton wool pleat wadding my head with thick thuds of screaming numb.

So often I look to the sky for inspiration. To sunrises, stars and rainbows. It’s a conversation of sorts, dialogue.

When the sky stops talking to you, you stop wanting to talk back.

I stopped writing on here. Even on ‘notes’. Blinded by the dazzle of dull, full on my bloat of empty. That sounds like a contradiction I know, but maybe you’ve felt it too? You eat the world like a shitty buffet instead of a banquet. Consume the salt-sweet contradictions that blur you with their bland.

During periods we do not write, perform, create or do whatever it is we think we ‘should’ be doing, it’s natural to ask ourselves whether ‘that’s it’.

Has whatever gift we thought we had, gone? Been used up? “Dance ballerina, dance” we may tell the twirly girl in our inner jewellery box, but we are not obedient mechanical figures. Cannot be switched on. Our melody is sun and moon, unearthly tune.

I remind myself that this time of the year is the time when most creatures are going within themselves. Retreating. That it’s normal to have ‘downtime’. That before I am a writer or any other role assigned to me, I am a person. Our human weave is porous. It holds our weather like a sponge sometimes.

Collecting, collecting, collecting.

Last week or so, the sky began to chat to me again.

Flashes me that blue velvet like she’s never been away and I admit, I’m still a little sulky with her.

But a couple days of ago we took a walk together, that sky and I, and we kinda got along. Bounced off each other.

Mother Nature offered up frozen puddles. They wore bone smiles like monochrome ghost clowns inviting me to play.

I played.

With glee I smashed into the glassy patches with my boot. My mouth was in my foot, biting and crunching on the diamonds of true presence.  The ice made satisfying noises as it teased and cracked.

So often we talk about taking time to ‘smell the roses’ but let me tell you jumping on ice is seriously underrated! I crouched and studied the way light looped each jagged peak. The glints and gleams, a sacred geometry, a miniature of glittering caves I may never meet.

I peered up as flattened murmurs of cloud dreamed of moor whilst twitching moorland reeds reciprocated and dreamt of cloud. They moved in bristling sync and I too, was of the world, not merely watching it.

I felt five and alive.

So, back to where I started, how do you get out of the bind of having nothing to say? How to break the cycle?

It must surely begin with feeling.

As I felt the seesaw of robust fragility beneath my feet the other day, I remembered that my primary purpose here on this planet, is to experience. Words start with thought and thought starts with feeling.

If not, what are we documenting, exactly? Reiterations? Old commentaries surface and resurface like fly vomit on windows.

I refuse to succumb to offering up cheap word Mcmeals. I’m not in this for the money, so why shit out fat ‘shoulds’ that smack of beige obligation and smell of the fear of being forgotten?

I endeavour to taste the world as a new apple. Have its sharp, sweet fizz skewer my tongue. To convey this to you. Or alternatively, to place cold morgues in your mouths. Or stir sizzling anger in bellies. Just something palpable rather than pulp nothing.

If I can’t, I’d rather stay silent.

And so should you.

Silence, has its own power.