Lately, with these articles, I’ve been feeling like I am taking someone for a walk in the moonlight— the way the light is soft and diffused and shapes are not fully defined. Even though this content has been brought into my daylight through experience, I realize by trying to talk about it I am only able to offer the reflective light of the moon. I also get it that soft forms in the moonlight are much more vulnerable to projection and interpretation (the way a burl on a tree can look like a person leaning there) but this ambiguity is necessary to the process of any individual bringing what they need into the light of their own sun.
Painting of the Moon. Maria Clara Eimmart. 17th century German astronomer.
I open with this because now seems like a good time to sit back and casually ponder the super amorphous concepts of void and meaning. Obviously, I’m not about to tackle what is the meaning of life? or anything (I haven’t even figured that out for myself) but I’d like to carve out a little chunk of ground to refer back to after we get into the next chapters.
For what I want to say, the term void seems totally off. I want to talk about infinite possibility but a void brings to mind devoid, empty, barren, lack, bereft, invalid, meaningless…you get the point. As I’ve done before, I am about to invite in some Eastern thought while acknowledging that I do so through my Western thought lens— so I’m hooking up the two.
Here is a story from the Taoist tradition that I often share with my classes:
Once upon a time in ancient China, there was a young man who was so awestruck about the emptiness of existence, he could not stop talking about it. He told anyone who would listen: “when you get to the bottom of it all, you realize nothing has any intrinsic meaning.”
One day, a sage heard him discussing this topic with his friends. “Everything is meaningless,” he insisted. He challenged them to refute his statement, but his reasoning seemed so strong that no one could do it.
The sage joined them and asked the young man: “Why do you suppose that is? Why is everything meaningless?”
The young man said, “Why ask why? Reason is also meaningless. Perhaps there is no reason at all.”
“There is always a reason,” the sage said. “Everything is meaningless because that is exactly how it should be. It has to be that way because its void is what frees you to create your own meaning. The emptiness of a vessel is what gives it usefulness. Existence is a blank slate that invites your creative contribution.”
The Milky Way. Source unknown.
To consider this emptiness of existence, I’d like to take a stroll in some quantum science for a moment. According to Ervin Laszlo, a philosopher and systems scientist who has been twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize:
“In quantum physics, observations and calculations reveal that at the ultrasmall dimension, space is not empty and smooth. It is grainy, filled with waves and vibrations. When physicists descend to the ultrasmall dimension, they do not find anything that could be called matter. What they find are waves and clusters of standing or propagating vibrations.”
[…]
“Previously, scientists assumed that it is matter that vibrates.” (Except that) “…there is no ground substance. The world is a set of variously integrated clusters of vibration, and matter is just the way vibrations appear to observers.”
I don’t know about you but my next question is what the heck is vibrating if there is no matter? This has not been pinned down but Laszlo proposes that “it could be space.” So long as space is understood as “not empty and passive; it is filled and dynamic. Dynamically filled space could vibrate.”
Apparently, it is now thought that what physicists call the quantum vacuum “is not a vacuum at all; it is not empty space. It is a plenum, a space filled with vibrations and forces of various kinds some known such as electromagnetic, gravitational, and nuclear fields, and others yet to be defined, including fields and forces associated with dark energy and matter.”
What I dimly gather from all of this is that what we call the universe and existence is an incomprehensible realm of dynamic ever-changing forces and infinite potential. This is kinda freaky but as the above sage said, “Everything is meaningless because that is exactly how it should be. It has to be that way because its void is what frees you to create your own meaning.” When I think about it this way I feel super relieved from the pressure of getting it right. Makin’ up meaning or being okay without meaning seems simple enough but I have definitely felt very confused about it.
History and individual experience tell us that the search for meaning can lead to great personal transformation/expansion and cause quite a bit of trouble. I have found that the origin and timing of personal meaning are very important.
Meaning is a funny thing when it feels like it’s been made for you—like when someone dishes you up plate with all sorts of things you find gross and there’s way too much and they tell you you have to finish it all to be a good person. As children, we may be willing to sit at the table all night rather than eat some revolting peas but as we get older we force ourselves into polite discomfort and then ask, “why did I eat all that, I didn’t even like it?”
Kira having her life essence drained by the dark crystal in Jim Henson’s and Frank Oz’s 1982 film The Dark Crystal.
Like Jim Henson’s ‘Dark Crystal’, I let my education leech the life essence out of many of the things I loved. I used to adore storytelling and playing with words until I was told I was wrong about them (I still get the ‘tone’ of a poem wrong). Then I chased hard after the meanings I was dished to think about while keeping my feelings out of it. No wonder I often ended up living with clichés, superficiality, heartless pursuits—trying to relate through someone else’s meaning-filter is a robot’s game. Perhaps I’m being a bit dramatic and there are plenty of wonderful meanings I have adopted from existing sources. But the world is a quagmire of meanings that we’re submerged in on a daily basis and it can be like trying to live in someone else’s idea of living. Creating our own meaning will likely involve serious inventory clearing. It seems there is always unlearning to be done. Art and creativity is a way to ease into this.
By David Shrigley.
When I re-approached art, I decided to just forget about any meaning. Once I felt I had really begun to create from my own depths, I didn’t know what I was making. Making things actually helped me acquire a void. I still can’t tell what any of it means early on. It’s as if I am walking backwards into the future—always facing back and searching for clues in what I made then to make sense of my now. It’s not until I’ve allowed enough time and space to zoom out and take a bird’s eye view that I recognize any meaning; it won’t emerge until I see enough all together and this has an unforeseen timing (it seems to work the same when I look at my life as a whole).
The little chunk of ground I set out to carve here is feeling a bit like a hack job. Meaning plays a big part in the field of creativity and I guess I just want to point out that it might get in the way. When it does, it may help to give up any meaning (that includes anything I’ve written here). Or perhaps consider: there is the meaning we get to create (with borrowing) through our unique perception within the mysterious current of life. There will be meanings we can’t make sense of and there will be meanings left behind (the void is “never stained by what it contains”; no idea or thing is permanent). And sometimes, there is just meaninglessness. As Uncle Iroh said in Avatar: The Last Airbender, “Life happens wherever you are, whether you make it or not.”
The universe looks more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine.
SIR JAMES JEANS
[Title image: A Claude Glass. Source unknown]
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