I am disappointed with my use of the word something; I have noticed I use it much too much. Sometimes it appears two or three times, meaning two or three different things, within the same page or paragraph. Holding something, doing something, waiting for something, standing in for something that is so unknown it can only be referred to as something. There’s something lazy about this habit, but it’s also an attempt to get at an ineffability that’s destroyed by abstraction if you give in to articulacy call it an ineffability. A thing of nothing. Prospero’s thing of darknesse I acknowledge. On some pages, I feel I ring through changes on something, anything, nothing – along with somewhere, anywhere, nowhere, and someone, anyone, no-one.
I remember seeing a writer in a documentary; he had a card stuck to his computer with all the words he could no longer allow himself to use. However was there, and therefore, and obvious ones like actually and really.
It is better to be specific, says the writing advice, but sometimes we don’t know what we’re being specific about. We have the calipers but not the insane or criminal head that went between them; the subject has escaped before we could observe it/them. Something in the way. Should it be I am disappointed with or I am disappointed by? He was a great disappointment to himself for something he had once failed to do for someone. Isn’t that what opens the door on the abyss, fifty storeys down. Some somethings, the dust falls on them, and the cracks show up when they’re lit from the side.
Leigh’s just back from work. How is she? How was her day? My love.