I don’t come here to express myself. I come here to un-express myself.
There ought to be places…like store-fronts with signs that say “NOTHING”, where you can go and buy a few minutes of nothing. I look around and see a lot of people who seem to need a little nothing.
I went into the mall last week. I was looking for a pair of socks, orange perhaps. Suddenly I felt as if the air was draining out of my head. I couldn’t remember what I was there for. There was too much of everything, everywhere…and every shop and every window was competing, barking and snarling for attention. It was like a runaway commercial for prosperity. O.K. I thought, there must be other places to buy socks, orange perhaps. Indeed there are. These days you can buy socks at the grocery store…another place where there’s too much of everything. The hardware store sells socks…supposedly for the working man since they’re heavy, grey and wooly.
It’s not that people don’t need things…I know that. I also know that there are people who have nothing…who have nothing in a most terrible way. Somehow the overwhelming tonnage of things that stuff our stores and finally, our lives, is more of an insult to the soul (whatever that is) . “Souls” whatever they are. must be buried under all this stuff. I feel a little embarrassed for not noticing this before now. Well…actually I suppose that I did. I suppose that most of us did. I think that most of us choose to ignore it. Because having all this stuff around all the time makes us think that everything is O.K.. Makes us think we’re doing fine…even when we’re not.
Seeing a homeless person standing outside a shopping mall should make us angry…sick…embarrassed
There would be no homeless people in the “nothing” store.They already have more of that than they need.
I’m not proposing that the nothing store should be educational or therapeutic…no. It should be more a respite, a refuge. Once when I was broke and depressed I went looking. I wasn’t sure for what. I went to a big park in Toronto but it was busy and kids were laughing and shrieking…people were walking with intent and I could hear them thinking of nothing significant. I wandered over to the cathedral and I was surprised to find the doors locked. Nice big doors too…locked. There was a painted sign on one of the nice big doors listing the hours of opening…when the doors would be unlocked to let in the flock…to be sheared surely. There were several “hours” listed…and I chose one that I thought would be of the least interest to the flock. I had very little fleece at the time and being sheared didn’t seem like a good idea.
Still a cathedral is a large place…and if they keep the doors locked most of the time…they must have a lot of peacefulness locked inside and I wanted some of that…with maybe a whiff of incense lingering to trigger childhood memories. I went back at my chosen hour and the big doors were indeed unlocked and sure enough the flock had chosen another hour and I was practically alone. And sure enough there was peacefulness and the ubiquitous whiff of incense along with furniture polish. There were dust motes dancing in light beams of colour from the stained glass windows. It was quiet rather than silent…tiny creaks from wooden pews…slightly louder cracks echoing from ceiling beams…old wood easing and stretching in the heat of morning.
It was the biggest nothing store I could find and I didn’t even know that I was looking for it. I sat down and absorbed it. I went back several times over about a year and almost never encountered the flock, sheared or un-sheared and never once met the “nothing salesmen” that I knew were there somewhere. That was a good thing too because I didn’t want to buy any of their brand of nothingness. I used to think about those nice big locked doors and wonder if they’re still locked. Of course I’m sure they are. When you have a large supply of nothing…you don’t want it to escape.
In Toronto there used to be a place that had a sign that was just a large ear. I don’t recall whether it was a restaurant or a store that sold noise but I loved that sign. It was the idea of a place where you could just go and talk or make a sound… and it would be heard. It’s amazingly rare these days, to find a place where your voice can be heard. There was another sign on Yonge Street that was a giant nose…I didn’t even want to guess. I love signs. In cities and towns all over the world signs have become a universal language. A neon sign that says “food” or “drugs”or “beer” is understood in almost any language. I don’t know what I’d put on the nothing store.
Maybe a large zero.
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