Playing to an Empty Hall
on starting to write in public
“You will end up on a bed of straw! You will be a beggar, and you will have the pleasure of seeing your old father, who has sacrificed everything for you, die of grief and starvation. The world does not care about your talent; it only cares about how you can be used.”
Leopold Mozart to his son, February 26,1778
The Lonely Stage
In the recent television drama series Amadeus, Mozart stands alone in a vast opera house, hearing in his head the full force of a symphony that he has not yet written. Rows of empty seats stretch away from him. There is no pre-opening bustle, no whispered voices, and no clandestine clearing of throats before the performance begins. Only one face is visible. Leopold Mozart, his father, standing in splendid clothes, clapping slowly, not to praise but in judgment.
The hall is not empty. It is saturated with scorn. The slow clapping is Mozart’s worst emotional nightmare.
Fathers and sons
Leopold Mozart, for all his devotion to and nurturing of his son’s talent, was cruel enough for the modern era to have initiated a multi-agency safeguarding meeting involving the school, social services and family therapists. In the Amadeus scene, Leopold does not merely criticise Wolfgang’s work; he questions the legitimacy of his very being. In a dinner scene when Leopold first meets Mozart’s wife Constanza, she watches the father-son interaction. An outsider can often clearly see the layered contours of emotional conflicts that are hidden from those engaged in it. Constanza tells Mozart that she agrees with Leopold on certain matters; Mozart risks squandering his talent and losing his family along the way. In response, Mozart sets fire to his early compositions and the pianoforte on which he played them.
In contemporary language, one might say that Mozart has “daddy issues”.
Is the hall ever empty?
As most men know, fathers never disappear, even when they die. The hall is never empty. Your father watches, judges, and may send you reminders of what you failed to become. Your father’s judgment doesn’t eliminate you entirely; it lives to see that you did not meet what he expected and needed from you.
Long after my father was gone, his voice remained in my head. I have tried to make my peace with him, apologising internally for the ways I failed him, by not marrying according to his wishes, not following his faith, not settling down close enough to be his support in his fading years. But there is one central failing for which I cannot be forgiven and never will be. I cut my hair. Every other aspect of my being is negated by his fundamental conviction that a Sikh must not cut his hair. When I imagine him applauding me amongst the audience after one of my lectures, I have to visualise myself in a turban. Even in a fantasy I cannot face him without a turban, underneath which are my unshorn hair.
The Power of Judgement
My father is gone; his judgement remains. I am torn between our two opposing ideas of authenticity.
My father was extremely devout, so I spent my youth being a devout atheist. My wife and I, from different religious traditions, have allowed our children to let their spiritual imaginations flourish in their own unique ways. My son will one day defy me. He will seek his identity by not being me. I hope though that if my son ever practices in an empty hall, I he will not imagine me slow-clapping.
As a clinical academic, our research outputs are subject to peer review. Peer review by expert sceptics is one of the great strengths of scientific advance. But each negative peer review can feel like a piercing dagger. You spend years testing a hypothesis and presenting the results in the best possible way. An anonymous reviewer can demolish your work by sometimes finding genuinely serious flaws in your work, but occasionally by asking only partially relevant questions or minimising what you found and maximising what you missed. There is an asymmetry here, for a fool can ask a question that the wisest person may not be able to answer. A hatchet in the hands of a hostile reviewer can destroy a career.
Who Shows Up, and Who Does Not
Every creative act seems to involve this triangle: an urge to make, the hope of being received, and the dread of being not good enough.
As I began writing for Substack, I imagined the gaze of the vast world outside and the terror within, trepidation and excitement in equal measure. When I launched the blog, I did what most of us I assume do. I wrote to friends, colleagues, and family, announcing this new venture with a mixture of excitement and quiet pleading. I assumed, without quite admitting it to myself, that those who knew me best would naturally be the first to come along.
What followed was strangely tender and oddly painful. For the first week of starting at Substack, I witnessed my inner emotions to the responses of others. Some people I love never replied. Others, whom I barely knew from distant and forgotten corners of my life subscribed, wrote long emails, and told me what I had written had powerfully resonated with them. Each new subscriber brought a small lift of pride. Each silence where I had hoped for warmth landed as a small narcissistic bruise. My self-esteem began to rise and fall on a tiny measure of numbers and notifications. I was left unsure which was more emotionally potent: the absence of approval from those I had expected, or the warmth of distant acquaintances and some complete strangers.
The Stoics warned about this two thousand years ago. Epictetus wrote that if you place your happiness in what is not in your control, you will always be at the mercy of others. Every like and dislike on social media can become another link in the chain of craving.
At some point I had to ask myself an uncomfortable question. Was I writing because I wanted approval, or because I felt something wanted to be written through me? And if it was the latter, was that simply another way of insisting that I mattered?
Create and release
After my first few blogs, I noticed that the deepest pleasure was not in the response but in the act of writing itself. I asked myself: would I write if no one ever read it? To my own surprise the inner answer was a resounding YES. The process of writing is a marvel. An idea arrives, as if received rather than invented, as if something is thinking through me. I watch it give birth to other ideas. I shape them into sentences, fact-checking dates, correcting spelling mistakes, googling for additional information, silently building arguments against the harshest critics whose admiration I most desire; letting something fluid slowly become solid enough to carry its own weight
The finished pieces don’t feel like a trophy I have made. It is more a process I have only participated in. As the Tao Te Ching puts it, “The sage does not act, yet nothing remains undone.” I am no sage, but I know when an article is complete when an involuntary sigh of relief escapes me. Nothing remains undone.
Rangoli at a doorstep
In Indian households one often sees rangoli during certain festival seasons, an intricate pattern made of coloured powders at a doorstep. Someone has knelt there at dawn, patiently shaping beauty out of dust. If passers-by admire it, that is a gift. If no one notices, the act is still complete. The making itself is the offering.
This is how I am beginning to think of Substack writing. Not as performance, but as practice. Not as a plea for applause, but as a small act of devotion.
Perhaps it is like lighting a candle in a quiet church. Not to be seen. Not to be admired. But because something in you wishes to honour the sacred.
An Offering, not a Performance
I will never be an objective judge of my own work. I am still learning to loosen my grip on numbers and validation. But I am beginning to trust something quieter: that bringing something into the world, carefully and honestly, is enough.
The hall may be empty.
The father’s voice may echo.
But the music will still come.
Beautifully written. A thoughtful reminder that creation is not a plea for applause than an act of faith, best carried out before the inner Leopold finds out.
Very insightful Swaran. My two bits (being in the midst of pressing, yet mundane work): I think over a dragging period of time, most rebellious sons and daughters begin to acknowledge their fathers even as they continue to question them. The tipping point occurs when they realize that their father was (or is) rather imperfect, and can be judged from a distance, just as anyone else could. Secondly, there is a large part of India (the South) where the woman of the house makes a mono-colour white rangoli called "kollam" outside the threshold every single morning, along with her daily prayers. The ritual is an act of communion with the divine, and hence with herself. The daily ritual signals to her neighbours (and hence to herself), a sense of continuity and normality. We do communicate with ourselves in so many ways, often to reassure ourselves that if not today, at least tomorrow will be better. You could keep writing for that reason too.