Void, Vacuum, Silence, Blank

"She just made a mistake. Right?  Doesn't have the hang of how to format a blog.  There shouldn't be such a big space at the top of a post."

"Writing Poetry" class. I walk into the room. Someone has already arranged the chairs in a circle--and students are chatting with each other (since they aren't zombied out on devices). I arrange my books and papers for easy access, and sit down.  Smile when Mary Ellen says "good morning," but don't respond vocally. I lower my eyes to look at the floor--still able to see, peripherally. And then I say nothing for seven minutes.

Students stop talking with each other--they look at their books or papers, doodle. Mary Ellen does some leg exercises.  In time, Adam leaves, returns. Because I consider facial interactions as filling silence, I close my eyes for part of the time. There's the occasional sound of a page being turned, or the rub of denim as someone recrosses a leg.

"Scared, curious, anxious, agitated, relaxed" are some of the words students put to the experience of unexpected silence. If this had been a first class with all new students, the experiment would have been more authentic--since Graig has come to expected the unexpected from me.  But there it was--the void, vacuum, silence, blank.  I filled my space of silence by wondering what the students were experiencing, how long to sustain the experiment,  how it was a challenge for me to withdraw in this way. Some of those seven minutes I actually relaxed into internal silence.

What followed was two and a half hours of intense engagement--we forgot about taking a break, fell in love with one of Rilke's colons, listened to each other's poems. Several students told stories of family tragedies--we wept, we laughed, we revealed, we hid, we looked at each other.  Mary Ellen had brought a bottle of Martinelli's for us to celebrate a week of being media free--and, luckily, Nicole (since she's a bartender) had a church key to pop it open.

I believe that those seven minutes of blank was like pressing a ball under water--the deeper a ball is pushed down, the higher and faster it will geyser/gush/catapult into the air, when released.  That silence energized and inspired us in ways that I can only appreciate in retrospect.

Like my students, anxious in those seven minutes of silence, finding ways to fritter it away or flee--whenever I am faced with transitions--blanks small or large--I become afraid.  The ancients had a term for this: Horror vacui--the horror of emptiness--a term variously attributed to the ancient Greek physicist Parmenides and to Aristotle. Francois Rabelais wrote "Nature abhors a vacuum." In the Victorian era, horror vacui was a term for art that required all spaces to be cluttered in.

But spaces are an invitation to approach the place where all things become possible, if most terrifying--absolute nothingness.  It is the place to which most religions point--whether to the terror of seeing the face of the Judeo-Christian God, or the core of divine emptiness that is the gift of of Buddhist meditation or Sufi whirling. To enter this space is to "walk the plank" reminiscent of this 19th century image

As writers, let us create the necessary spaces for the new:  the empty page or screen, the unspoken-for ten minutes, solitude, the empty hand. It is scary--this not-knowing, this not "minding."  But let's remember another formulation: "The universe hates a vacuum."  Something will fill in. The plank in the image is called "Faith"--I interpret that in a secular way--to believe, to know, that crossing into the void zone will lead to the shining city--whether that's a new poem, play, essay, story, or...

We'll explore ways embrace emptiness in another blog.

For now, what is your experience with void/vacuum/silence/emptiness/blank?  How are you creating space for what matters most to you?

© 2014 Susanna Rich