THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS NOTHING

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS NOTHING

ZERO AND OTHER TRUE STORIES ABOUT NOTHING

BY CRICHTON ATKINSON

There is no such thing as nothing, or if there is a nothing, it is certainly hard to find. The search for nothing, for an absence, a void, has been a question in the human imagination for centuries. What was here before we showed up, what created us? There is a reason there is no Roman numeral for zero, when the astronomers needed to fill the gap mathematically they switched systems and used the Babylonian numbers in cuneiform where a space indicated zero, they used this presence of absence to calculate our universe. There was and remains to this day something uncomfortable about nothingness. Part of the discomfort is that annihilation of the universe means a destruction of the most epic and interesting aspect of being a human, the idea of zero is terrifying. It is in our nature to desire survival and there is an intuitive understanding that we are part of a larger ecosystem that extends beyond the laws that govern our planet. Another aspect of nothing is that it is very difficult to comprehend or imagine, the human did not evolve with a regularized awareness of quantum physics, and adjusting our ontology to an inverse of existence is brutal to say the least. But the universe is not here to be pleasant, quite the opposite, we are remarkable for being alive and conscious.

The Greeks personified the laws of nature and human behavior with their gods, out of Chaos was born Cosmos, out of the void was birthed the stuff of the universe. The early mythology of the Greeks have us creating order out of disorder, but was there a something that ordered itself into our universe? Creatio ex materia, creation out of materials, was transformed by the Catholic origin story intocreatio ex deo, creation out of God. In the Hebrew Bible the term tohu appears twenty times meaning ‘vain’ or ’waste’, bohu appears only three times in Gen. 1:2, Isa 34:11, and Jer 4:23 and it always appears with tohu, together they mean great confusion and a void.

‘Now the Earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters’ Gen. 1:2

Looking for a first cause has always grounded our sense of logic. We can trace our human story in the fossils of the earth and we can track our material foundations in the stuff of space, yet the question of nonbeing remains. Creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing, is one potential for our coming into being, or are we causa sui, something that was generated within itself? Some astronomers postulate that the universe was born out of itself, like a tree branch looping back around to form a trunk. Others believe that our universe is just one in a series of universes. Background radiation from the Big Bang has brought us closer than ever to our origin story but the question still remains if there is a potential to not have any space or time at all, if the laws of physics are still at play then there is still something, if nothingness has a form or a time, a topography, than it is still not nothing, finding the existence of nothing by the nature of its property as nothing is incredibly difficult.

We do know that our universe is expanding, that both pressure and energy have a gravity but the gravitational repulsion of pressure causes the spreading out of space and time. We do not know what is outside the boundaries of the universe, or what was here before, in a sense we are trapped inside our story of existence. Most of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy and we keep searching for the boundaries in the infinitesimal and inexhaustible, in a way we are finding everything by trying to find nothing. Hypothetically nothing can exist but we are incapable of knowing it at this time or potentially ever.

Part of the issue on the subject of nothing is language itself, that to name something, or know something, gives it a presence—acknowledgement is the human orientation toward available information. In this way nothing can exist as something in the form of a sign, a model in our mind for a potential in our surroundings. Once again zero comes into play. While teaching children to count we start at one and count up, or we count down to zero. Zero turns out to be both basic and conceivable yet extremely difficult to comprehend. This double standard of acknowledgement without comprehension is applied to extreme absence and extreme presence.Nothing is as difficult to understand as infinity, we can conceptualize it without actually grasping the practical nature of its extreme reality. Zero and infinity are basically the same thing, the basic definition of infinity is a set of stuff that you can take away from and it is still the same size, which sounds a lot like zero, or nothing.

While a quantum vacuum state might be responsible for the creation of the universe, nothing has always had a personal place in our sense of humanity as well. Buddhism seeks to eliminate desire and the sense of self to achieve a state of nothingness in the form of Nirvana, you have nothing to fear but fear itself. Sartre raises the question if it is possible to be a Non-Being interdependent of Being, that the creation of the Self started with a non-personal consciousness and the Self can never in any final sense be possessed. In Buddhism we can eliminate desire to reach an ideal beyond the limitations of the body/mind, or with Sartre we can use desire as a value to discover an evolutionary ‘self’ through the attachment to objects by which consciousness relates itself. Either way desire is used to reveal our nothingness.

These introspective values remind us that we are ‘ghosts in the machine’, the mind does not know itself, our impulses and relationship to reality are both subjective and unconscious, though we are cognizant of existing and of the world. There is a void in human knowledge that an all seeing, all knowing, perspective would be able to untangle. In the meantime humanity keeps integrating inventive tools with our perceptive faculties to unravel the mystery of what is actually happening.

The phenomenological gap between the objective and the subjective is where art comes into the picture, grappling with the mind and its relationship to a logical truth. Beauty is the body trying to balance with perception. The universe was not made to be pleasurable or cathartic, and art allows the mind access to the fact that reality is not always as simple as the taxonomy we try to constrain it with. Balance, or justice, has always been at the heart of art, depicting ideals, finding an ordered state where the mind and body are given the privacy of comprehension and contemplation. In this way the false reality of art is used to extradite the emotional relationship to intuition that often has more information about survival than direct logic.

The stage has always been a realm of the real colliding with the false. Acting is the most ephemeral art form, and the stage seeks to be what Wagner called the Gesamtkunstwerk where all the arts unite. Similar to the Catholic God, or the Platonic Ideal, the material of the stage is an abstract combination created out of sight, sound, language, and action but not contingent on any one variable alone. When people in the opera or the theater talk about the stage they mention the sacred universe created by the belief of the actors and the audience. According to Aristotle the stage is where the audience experiences catharsis to purify or cleans their emotions, to renew and restore themselves, experiencing extremes to return to emptiness. Nothingness in this case is emotional simplicity, comprehension as neutrality, Zen, zero. We use the theater as a mise-en-scene of reality, because that is all the mind was anyway, a play within a play, the story trapped inside the larger tale.

Why is it that we believe in stories? All language is a lie that we agree upon, and yet this ideology of thought is a solid basis of our logic and our choices. Similar to the actor who develops the ailments they portray on stage, the written word, clothing, body positions, or performance constructs each of us from the outside in.

In 1971 the Stanford Prison experiment was conducted by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo who assigned twenty-four young men randomly to either the roles of inmate or guard as he staged a prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Zimbardo himself played the role of superintendent and the experiment was intended to disorient, depersonalize, and deindividualize the prisoners. The costumes and performances were taken to such a degree that the aggression of those in power escalated and the isolation and extreme discomfort of the abused got out of control. This was a false situation that ended up creating very real results of humiliation and dominance.

Blatte, Markow, Budin, and Elizabeth walk a similar theatrical line between the reality and falsity, presence and absence, the real making the fake making the real. This is the place of becoming where something is transitioning between states in a liminal existence.

Hayley Blatte’s Every Woman is slightly perverted, slightly sexual, and slightly confusing. But is the character confused herself—is she in control of her sexuality or being objectified for the pleasures of others without her consent or power? The mask that the woman wears says it all, what is femininity and what does the image of the woman, any woman, say about the perceived state or wardrobe of femininity vis-a-vis femininity outside of social role-play? Why is it that a man becomes a woman in drag when he puts on make-up and starts to perform certain gestures? What does role-play have to do with sexuality, and why does the sex worker put on an act to turn on the person they want to gain money from? The performance creates an availability for the viewer to participate by transforming the unclaimable body of others into an act of display. This distance between persona and identity creates an absence, a void, the presence of spaciousness, a nondescript description or a suggestion.

The thing we truly desire is a lack of fulfillment, we desire the state of desiring, which by its nature cannot gain the object of its gaze. The relationship between dominance and performance is ripe for interpretation. The woman in this image does not stand on her own, to complete her performance she needs to be watched, her lace, ribbons, and breasts give you everything while still reminding the viewer of the tease associated with femininity as a game. There is no such thing as a blank encounter, we live in a world that is ideologically smeared with fantasy. This gives us what Zizek called the labor of our freedom, the unreal returns us to our seclusion, we encounter the unknown with a cognitive map that places desire in the void left by the subject’s inherent distance.

Like the ‘guards’ and ‘inmates’ in the Stanford Prison Experiment, the role of objectifier or objectified, power and submission, translates the teaser into the form of desirability, abstracting agency into that of passive control. She lures the one desiring, and the chase is on, she is both determining the path and acting under the assumption of what would be desirable to cause the chase at all.

It is interesting that so many sex shops are set-up around the idea of performance. For some the costume really does enhance their experience of sex, as though they need something other than themselves to commit to the most basic animalistic behavior. Sex, eating, shitting—we are trained to feel shame around private matters involving the body as though moral behavior must be socially performative or else selfishly indulgent. The clothing we wear is an extension of the codes and conducts of social behavior, and many traditions of these costumes have a direct relationship to some kind of tease. They signify where and how we are competent as social agents, in business, for friends, to attract lovers, etc. We adorn ourselves with these flags of wardrobe to signal the borders of our territories to others

Wealth allows the utilitarian nature of clothing to leave the realm of practicality and cross into that of performance. This transformation through decoration, be it an individualized mental shift or a social spectacle, is ancient to humanity. Clothing is like architecture in that it distorts our relationship to nature, it is a social language, it serves a purpose and its propaganda speaks to unique and flamboyant ends.

But when is a person really seen, and what does it mean to not wear the proverbial mask? Every Woman seems to desire itself, either in the liberty to have power or to be overpowered, she is both there and not. She gives us her tits and ass, her healthy abs and fro, but with evil nails and a ribbon being pulled from her anus. She looks at the viewer as though to mock them, or challenge them, or submit, it is hard to tell with her face hidden behind the shocking neutral white. She is blank, her physical position is bold but the woman within is not clear, she is either an aggressor, or subject to the imprint of anyone who encounters her.

What does a man love more than life?

Hate more than death or mortal strife?

That which contented men desire,

The poor have, the rich require,

The miser spends, the spendthrift saves,

And all men carry to their graves?

(Leemings, 1953, 201)

The answer—nothing.

Life is the greatest joke there is, it is where all of our laughing comes from. We laugh at death, we are amused by the unexpected, and comedy is the art of the unknown. We associate laughter as well as tears with the emotional signals of humans as opposed to other animals, and layers of comedy and tragedy can be found in Steven Markow’s Earth Day Life. He gives us the stifled anxiety common to the suburbs or the provincial life where ambition drives individuals to escape the suffocation and stagnation in the culturally absent outskirts of town. Markow is like The Clash in an age of YouTube watching Reality TV drinking Slurpees with a half-assed pushback against preventative class issues demanding a subdued life. The weight of youth’s liberty is locked in battle with the lack of self-determination when you have nothing for yourself at the gateway of adulthood. Markow comically ‘dies’ at the end next to a sign for New Brunswick, he just can’t seem to get out of town. There is a gravity to locations, the artist can muster the energy to get to the edge but nothing more. On the cusp of a potential escape Markow does a clownishly depressive face-first plunge into the grass where he remains for an abnormal period of time, a gesture deserving of a Wes Anderson character.

Abnormality is at the root of the issue. Markow makes puppets of his friends, the famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and the Russian Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, the first leader of the Red Army. Together this gang of comedians gears up to perform in a suburban living room, discussing their production over bowls of cereal. The funny thing about the living room and pre-fab food is that many great gestures of humanity have been created in thanks to the simplicity of their disposability. The suburbs were created as a platform for other things, it accomplishes by being the least obtrusive, most neutrally viable way to accomplish a baseline goal. But when does comfort create the freedom to act and when does it become a social restraint or a trap? Without the right modes of production, the analyst, the revolutionary, and the artist are returned to their humanity outside of social effect. Trotsky, Freud, and metaphorically speaking Markow, become paper printouts on stuffed trash bags, trails of what has already become, existing as a commentary on the numbed ease of the middle class in the hands of a potentially grand observer.

Their heroic achievements become comedic in the context of extreme privatized living. The men are printed on a material that can be repeated and has little authority as an object. Their stupid faces on poles are crudely stuffed and set-up at the kitchen table and in front of the fireplace. The comedy of failure, or the inability of the abnormal to perform its role as genius, is the mirror in which Markow points his stinky finger at himself to say ‘ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha’ one too many times as though through a glass darkly transforming his sadness into comedy. The blurring of a diary with a hilariously weirdo comical narration gives a haunted depression and anxiety to the levity of a very funny video. This homemade movie style of comedy is reflexive of our hyper media age where even secluded and private subjects can be broadcast.

On October 30, 1938 Orson Welles performed a Halloween episode of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds (1898) as a radio broadcast. The ruse that aliens had actually landed in Grover’s Mill New Jersey gave credit to the power of suggestion as well as to the lack of fact checking in a secluded area. If aliens had attacked New York City it would have been easier to figure out the trick, but Grover’s Mill, who knows, or cares, or is watching, or even noting the suburbs of New Jersey? Grover’s Mill is only thirty minutes by car to the location of Earth Day Life on the edge of New Brunswick, leaving us to question the suggested realities capable in the geography of ‘nowhere’.

Fooling the audience was adopted by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez for the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project. The narrators pretend to be real student filmmakers who go into the Black Hills near Burkittsville, Maryland in 1994 to make a movie but instead documented their encounter with paranormal activity. The clumsy documentary aesthetic gives an authority to storytelling’s ability to make false things seem real in an absent reality. The nothingness of film and performance creates a dream of waking life. Markow says that if he can’t create he can at least be honest, but nothing about film is honest, narration adapts the moving image of life into a perspectival lens. The sensational works because nothing is more horrifying or hilarious than believing that something is real.

Similar to Blair Witch, Markow runs around his basement with a shaky camera after the failure of his comedy troupe terrified of his life and the seemingly inevitable trap of suburban failure. Is narrative, that of one’s life path or film, cowardice, is there inventiveness in doubt? Nothing like a new direction to present something funny. His poised sense of timing and charming absurdity create a low-fi comedy about the mundane. Similar to Becket’s Waiting for Godot, Markow’s humor is about the absence inside averageness and waiting for the salvation that might never come.

Markow and Budin both make a comedy out of expectation and a renunciation of follow-through. Musical Theatre Number (Outline) gives the audience three lines of a score, an abstract of the production, and a to-do list of what it will take to make the show happen. These potentials create a comedy about the heaviness of what the final productions suggest without any of the actions taken to actually get there. For a moment let’s imagine Musical Theatre Number as a real production—the emotional gravity of the two lovers due to the power and provocation of estrangement. The authority of love and its return through nostalgia, the desire for the past and hysteria about the present that allows the fantasy of love to reign. It is a common trope in the escapades of storytelling that the lovers’ trajectory is cut off by some outside force preserving the ecstasy fulfilled in a first encounter but making it forever unattainable. This engagement of erotic lust is usually the product of a distance filled in by the mental caulking of desire.

The true tragedy is reality, if the lovers had remained and their stories had unfolded into the mundane routine of existence, the powerful lament would have been traded for faded typicality. Perhaps they would have had the stabilizing kind of love, or maybe it would have ended in tortured emotions resulting in suicide. Desire by its principle is never able to satisfy itself, and as long as the other creates itself it is always elusive.

The weight of the play’s universe never comes into existence—once again the trope of failure and negation. We don’t get the drama, the tears, either those on stage or in the audience. We never sit on the edge of our seat stunned and stricken with grief or laughing with amusement. Instead we are handed a note, like a childhood friend passing us something in class, casually scrawled, giving none of the pomp and circumstance of a good show. The title itself, Musical Theater Number (Outline), is outrageously banal, it signifies next to nothing! This is the same as using the indefinite article “a” rather than the definite article “the.” “The” originated from the word “that” which is used to specify the location of an object as opposed to “a” which means one of a many possibilities and is derived from the word “one”. Musical Theater Number gives us the impression that it could be any musical, any number—the style, plot, setting, the circumstance of the situation are totally left out of the title. At least we have an idea of the genre, we are given a little, and nothing more.

The theme of only giving half is brought up in Oklahoma! when Will Parker proclaims to Annie Carnes that he will not take an ‘in between,’ she has to give him her whole self or nothing at all:

With me it’s all er nuthin’.

Is it all er nuthin’ with you?

It cain’t be “in between”

It cain’t be “now and then”

No half and half romance will do!

Unfortunately unlike Will, the audience for Budin has to be satisfied with next to nothing. In George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, not having anything is referenced as the ultimate freedom supplied by poverty:

De folks wid plenty o’ plenty

Got a lock on de door

‘Fraid somebody’s a-goin’ to rob ‘em

While dey’s out a-makin’ more

What for

I got no lock on de door

Dat’s no way to be

Dey kin steal de rug from de floor

Dat’s okeh wid me

‘Cause de things dat I prize

Like de stars in de skies

All are free

{Refrain}

Oh, I got plenty o’ nuttin’

And nuttin’s plenty for me

The having of not having in Musical Theater Number (Outline) is the show itself. There is nothing there, or what is there is barely specific. It is as if the audience piles into the theater, take their seats, and the theater goes dark. There is the anticipatory sound of papers rustling and the shuffling of bodies adjusting in their chairs, the orchestra begins the overture, and we hear the themes introduced in quick succession. The stage lights come on and shine brightly on the bold red velvet curtains, the music mounts, the golden chords start to gather the heavy fabric pulling it apart to reveal the glory of the stage beyond and… there’s a single mouse nervous and stranded, it scampers off stage left. The curtains close! A voice, perhaps Porky Pig, perhaps the manager of the theater, some young lad with a weak stuttering tone comes over the loud speaker ‘that’s all folks’. And that is it. The show is over. You can leave now. The end. We are left in our seats wondering where was the show, what happened to it, where did it go, and why didn’t it come? Slowly it dawns on us that the show was expectation itself. Now the audience is Waiting for Godot, we demand salvation, and not even the stage, not even art, not even love, not even anything can give us a point of reference that guarantees meaning. There is no such thing as art without the expectation that you will find it. At the end of the day there is no delivery from the slogging reality that behind the curtain is a mouse, that the theater was your application of belief and requirement—your desire to manifest something worthy of looking forward to, there was never anything more.

Looking for something in nothing has been the lament or the reveal of so many endeavors. How many times has expectation been more exciting than the conclusion, or been the only realized part of what it is you desire at all? There are so many things that we never obtain, we only gather them in our longing, in our looking, in our trying to uncover that which was never intended to be ours. We are all living halfway in the realm of potentials, and we are so much more and stronger than the outer shells of our natures describe us as being.

Something in Nothing is the title of Cara Elizabeth’s video where her body is both there and not. She is a shadow that beams images of consciousness in either light or pattern. Reality is the stage where we perform our part for ourselves and for each other. She unzips her uniform, or her skin, to let the light pour out of her body. Inside of everyone exists a library, shinning bright, the faces of our innumerable characters, some aspects distorted, others graceful. The light hugs the darkness, she is a yin and yang, a balancing act. We teach everyone the knowledge of ourselves with every action, every gesture, every mood, or tone, or word. And the source of our reaching, of our extension of the so-called body, from the body but not knowable as a body, reaches into the lives of so many and possesses them into becoming what they never knew they would be. Que sera, sera, as the old song by Doris Day goes, the future is unknown, it is unknowable. To say that what is to come is a mystery is to acknowledge that the body and the personality that governs the form are also elusive. There is no self, there are only the interactions between agents, between materials adjusting and reclaiming an ever-changing identity.

Religion has always turned to light for its visions of hope, or the great beyond. Many materials of the body are unable to be directly seen, all the waves we are projecting, the energy, the Alpha Waves of our brain aligning with other people. The body is a battery, giving energy and collecting it. Its source is the food we eat, the activities we do, the people we digest and engage with, the process of mind, the challenges we face and the focus of our attention.

Living is a performance, there is no such thing as neutrality, as nothing, the self is the something of ever becoming, riding existence at the event horizon of definition—description about to execute itself. The narrative coded by the body as self is something that is projected by the processes of the human form encountering all that is beyond its reach. The self desires to become the other, and it is all the other, we allow it to devise terms of existence. It is the discrepancy of a pattern collecting an intangible knot known as experience. There is no such thing as nothing, there is only the becoming of a thing into it’s being. The self slips itself onto the form of a mechanical animalia and rides the wave of behavior. The new is always the now because there is never a return. There is no staying put, the Earth is spinning, atoms are bouncing around, time is progressing our lives. The straight line is a utopia but so is the self, it is a ‘has yet to be’ or a ‘wish I were’, or a ‘I think I was’. We think therefore we do things, we become the now, structure the ‘was’ into the ‘something’ in the nothingness of memory. Nostalgia is a ‘has been’, a tool to twist our thoughts into narratives, to place ourselves as something important inside the broader story where we mean nothing. To nature we are meaningless, that is until we weave at the loom of thought, constructing tapestries to decorate our attics, dream truths to exchange like coins with our own self and others. We add value, constructing intention and purpose. We are all on a hero’s journey, one that will never end until we do, like all life, falling first out of material form, then slowly seeping away from the actions and objects we constructed for others that hold our imprint of mind in the minds eye. Lastly we fade in memory.

Walter Benjamin talks about history and it’s backward gaze, there is a geography of the moment and of looking back. We are the location of everything we have been, like a traveler collecting pebbles to create a giant stone, amassing all the fragments into a rolling spree disposing and collecting our universe, creatio ex materia. Round and round we go, and everywhere we go, there we are. We will always be holding our dreams on the fine edge of the present, constructing it’s abbreviation to fit the censorship of thinking, the topography of our discovery unearthed with the shovel of curiosity. I thought therefore I became.

The art of exchange and transmutation is the agency of all creation. To exchange the world as it is for what it is not. Art makes it all up—it is clever because it never tried to be correct. Beauty is the world done wrong made right, it is our forming an order and feeling how the weight or levity of a subject aligns. Our moral value is derived from the body, we feel to know what is right or wrong. Often what we feel to be good corrupts truth, we need the lie, we crave it like our life long mother, slipping into its arms to drift into calm. Ideology is our parent figure, it is the narration we can’t help but manifest. All of us are angels, messengers in the classical sense, Hermes with wings on our feet, ushering this into that as we try desperately and loyally to make a grand nothing out of the ever present.