Tag: nothing to say

On Sleep and Having Nothing to Say

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

It’s what you say when you have nothing to say, as we all know. There, I’ve said it.

The problem with maintaining a blog is that one really ought to post something on said blog. Well, I haven’t been able to think of anything to say. Yes, I know it’s Wednesday and that calls for a Wordless Wednesday post, but I don’t have any particular picture I wanted to post today, either.

But then, it’s been two years, really, since I’ve been doing much of any posting, quite aside from the year I “officially” took off. And in those two years I’ve accumulated a lot of pictures. So, how about, for the next while you’ll get some retro-pieces? Retro-thoughts, retro-pictures. And the thing is, when I first started blogging, more than ten years ago now, I did warn my esteemed readership that this wasn’t going to be a blog “about” anything in particular. Hence the tag line: “Life, the Universe, and a Few-Odd Other Things”.

It’s been two years… And we all know what those two years entailed. It’s sapped so much of my energy, of my ability to think and to create.

I’ve just re-hung my Burne-Jones “Sleeping Beauty” (“The Rose Bower”) on my wall – a piece that I got to see in real life at the Tate Britain in 2019.

As you’ll know, if you’ve followed this blog for a while (or know me in real life), “Sleeping Beauty” is one of my favourite fairy tales. I keep thinking about why that is, and why this story holds such fascination for us as a society that it’s one of the perennial favourites. I mean, it’s kind of boring, isn’t it? It’s literally about a girl who… sleeps. But I don’t find it boring, and neither do any of the other millions of people who keep enjoying this story.

Just to get something out of the way, no, it’s not because the story is about the prince’s heroic journey to rescue the girl. That’s a Disney addition. In the Grimms’ version, which is the one I love, the prince does nothing more exciting than walk up to the thorn-covered castle, which lets him in because he unwittingly happened to show up at the right time. No dragons, no sword fights, no baddies to battle. Only sleep, so powerful it even knocks out the flies on the wall and the cook in the middle of smacking the scullery boy.

It’s the sleep that’s the real antagonist in this tale – and its solution, the way it is defeated, is to let it run its course. Once the hundred years are up, a prince shows up and the princess wakes. The prince is nothing special (apart from being a prince, but in fairy tales, those are a dime a dozen); he’s not “the chosen one”, he’s not “destined to fall in love with the princess”, let alone her previous lover who actively seeks her out to rescue her (most film versions of the story go with the latter, but, sorry, that’s not actually in the folktale). The only thing he does, and does right, is to listen to the story an old man tells him about the enchanted princess in the thorn-covered castle that nobody can get to, and let his curiosity get the better of him.

And suddenly there are roses on the thorns, and they part to let the prince in just in time for the princess to wake up.

Maybe that’s what we need to hear today: The sleep will run its course. There is nothing to do but wait it out, but once it’s done, there are roses and kisses and, unfortunately for the scullery boy, a smack upside the head.

Perhaps I had something to say today, after all.

Life, the Universe, and Sleeping Beauty. The sleep ends when it’s run its course.

Wordy Wednesday

It seems time is just slipping through my grasp these days. Time, and the ability to generate words. It’s not that I don’t have things to say, but somehow, sitting down at the computer, opening a document, and putting those things into actual words and coherent sentences seems to not be happening.

There’s just been too much other stuff occupying my time and, more importantly, my headspace. For one, there’s a new project I’ve got in the offing which I will tell you about soon. [By the way, did you know that the word “offing” means “the horizon on a sea shore”? So if something is “in the offing”, it’s just showing up on the horizon and about to sail into harbour. I learned that from the annotations the last time I had to read Heart of Darkness in lit class. Anyway…] There’s stories to edit and get ready to publish – yes, they’re still coming. Soon! I promise! And then there’s ordinary life – you know, dust bunnies, family meals, laundry, emails… Between all of that, somehow, elaborate erudition on this blog has been elusive.

Hence the “Wordless Wednesday” posts; one picture being worth etc. etc. And it’s true – sometimes you can say so much with just an image. Why bother spoiling the impact with excessive verbiage? That’s even true for the writer’s craft: sometimes one single verbal image is worth more than pages of exposition (it’s what’s known as the “Show, don’t tell!” rule).

And even right here – I’ve run out of things to say that actually make sense. But I just didn’t want to leave you hanging in cyberspace, thinking that I’ve abandoned you all and gone off to party with the cyber fairies (they throw mean parties, those little critters). I hope that my thoughts will, soon, gel into sense again, so I can once more drop my pearls of wisdom (or witless waffling?) into your path.

Meanwhile, let me leave you with a picture worth of Wordy Wednesday – another act of random refrigerator poetry:

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And that, today, was Life, the Universe, and a Wordy Wednesday.