{"id":297920,"date":"2025-07-07T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2025-07-07T11:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=297920"},"modified":"2025-07-04T07:15:00","modified_gmt":"2025-07-04T06:15:00","slug":"nothing-to-say-ma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/07\/nothing-to-say-ma\/","title":{"rendered":"Nothing to Say, Ma"},"content":{"rendered":"

2 Jul 2025 –\u00a0As a result of recent conversations, my life-long closest friend Diego wrote the following. If you\u2019re lucky as we are, you have such a friend whose interests and thoughts match yours so closely that it seems that you were separated at birth in a dream. We both felt from the days of our youth when chance brought us together that, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, it was not he, she, them, or it that we belonged to, or that we would ever gargle in the rat race choir for those who make the rules to terrorize humanity.<\/em><\/p>\n

********************************************<\/p>\n

By Diego Sandoval<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cDoes anybody ever say anything?\u201d<\/em>
\n\u201cNot really. Everybody talks all his life, and many write for many years, but nobody really says anything. It\u2019s all right, though.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2013 William Saroyan, Not Dying: A Memoir<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Because I have nothing to say, I am writing this. It\u2019s all right. I have nothing to say because I am disgusted by all the words I have written for deaf ears and by the news that just repeats itself like an endless Greek tragedy to the chorus of commentators of all persuasions echoing each other as if their words made a difference in the butcher\u2019s bench world of ruthless actors with their motto: acta non verba<\/em>. I\u2019m just sighing, Ma, like another man of many words, Bob Dylan:<\/p>\n

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
\nThey\u2019d probably put my head in a guillotine
\nBut it\u2019s alright, Ma, it\u2019s life, and life only<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Life? Yes, Dylan is right: \u201cIf you\u2019re not busy being born you\u2019re busy dying.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what difference can words make? I don\u2019t know. Qu\u00e9n sabe?<\/p>\n

William Saroyan<\/a> was a witty man, a Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award winner, very famous in his day, and he didn\u2019t know either. He claimed he wrote to ward off death and said he expected an exception to death would be made in his case. He was a man hiding in a house of words, always ready to bolt when death came knocking. But he never grasped the contradictory meanings of bolting, a common neurosis and a necrophiliac\u2019s dilemma. He wanted to escape death\u2019s clutches but wasn\u2019t sure whether to run or hide. To bolt or bolt, that is the question he couldn\u2019t answer unequivocally. He decided to obsessively accumulate stuff to barricade the entrance to his soul while writing the opposite. His monitory words insinuated the ineluctable nature of his rat packing.<\/p>\n

I have spent my life shedding possessions \u2013 call it rat unpacking \u2013 having seen too many people possessed by them, and the nothingness of death that they represent. I always sensed that nothing is more real than nothing. Having grown up in Mexico \u2013 the country that Octavio Paz referred to as the land of the labyrinth of solitude, the country where death lays heavy on every heart, faithful or doubting, I became a poet, writer, and singer to somehow create a language that would lead me into the realm of silence where true language lives and death is exorcised. I took the stage name Mr. Z \u00a0to honor my heroes, Zapata and Zarathustra. Perhaps you\u2019ve heard of me. Few who come to hear me perform know my name\u2019s origins and I never explain. Explain to whom? Why?<\/p>\n

I was drawn to William Saroyan\u2019s writing at an early age, probably because of his early efforts to write musically and exorcise the death-themed experiences of his childhood with Armenian immigrant parents, his father being a preacher who died when William was three years-old and he was sent to an orphanage along with his sister and brother. When I was about seventeen years-old I read his first book, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze<\/em>,<\/a> and was mesmerized, especially by his story, \u201c1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8\u201d \u2013 its free form musicality with its gaps of silence that tore out my heart. I identified with the story\u2019s protagonist, who was lonely Saroyan at 19 years of age, and how a few chords in a piece of music, even bad music, transported him into ecstatic reveries, even during moments of silence when he wasn\u2019t listening to the record. I memorized this sentence: \u201cHe stood over his phonograph, thinking of its silence, and his own silence, the fear in himself to make a noise, to declare his existence.\u201d And then a string of few words came to me \u2013 \u201cthe music of forgetting\u201d \u2013 which have haunted me ever since.<\/p>\n

I too hear some secret music and don\u2019t know why I am writing this.\u00a0 I\u2019m only sighing as I move to the music of forgetting.<\/p>\n

For his part, Saroyan, in his abodes of death, eventually wrote many millions of words in maybe seventy-five published and unpublished books, saying nothing about something for someone. It was all right, though, I guess he too was only sighing. A kind of sighing that was a haunting.<\/p>\n

Aren\u2019t we all sighing? Isn\u2019t the world news enough to haunt anyone with a heart?<\/p>\n

Then he died in 1982 at the age of seventy-two. No exception was made for Billy Boy. He either was or wasn\u2019t surprised, depending on what happens when one dies. He said that in everyone\u2019s secret religion \u201cthe idea is to keep death at a distance by means of junk of all kinds, and this junk makes a shambles.\u201d Money, possessions in general, the more junk one can surround oneself with the safer one feels, so that death will have a tough time getting through the clutter to reach you, and in a writer\u2019s case, his most treasured junk \u2013 his writing \u2013 may be useful in buying death off. This Saroyan said.<\/p>\n

When he died, he left two houses in Fresno, California stuffed with shambles. Possessions so junky that they rattle the mind: envelopes of his old mustache clippings, pebbles, rocks, used typewriter ribbons, broken clocks, boxes of junk mail, every piece of ephemera that passed through his grasping hands. He let go of nothing while writing words warning of its futility despite its seeming necessity. He created a foundation in his own name, devoted to the study of himself, to which he left all his junk and to which he bequeathed all future earnings, despite having two children. He thought he was immortalizing himself under the illusion that his shambling rambling words and ratty belongings would free him from the labyrinth of solitude he was leaving. It was not a fit ending for a man who was once the daring young man on the flying trapeze.<\/p>\n

Without faith, daring ends in desperate measures. I think Saroyan lost faith in the living.<\/p>\n

He forgot his own wise words in the preface to the first edition of his first book:<\/p>\n

If you will remember that living people are as good as dead, you will be able to perceive much that is very funny in their conduct that you perhaps might never have thought of perceiving if you did not believe that they were as good as dead.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Isn\u2019t it funny that he left a shambles at home?<\/p>\n

Madre, I\u2019m running out of words. Please take my sighs and make them prayers of resistance to the ruthless actors who make this earth our home a bloody shambles.<\/p>\n