Void

- Page 1 -

I read something in the newspaper recently. It said, "The past is significant in that it is no longer there." I have no idea who said this. I'm bad with sources. I can tell you it wasn't me.

Anyway, what this particular quote seemed to be suggesting was that our relentless obsession with the past stems from the fact that it's all that we have to compare things to – holding up our current state against the blank slate of the future is somewhat pointless, so we look to our known and charted past to compare it to what we're doing now. It's a reference point in an otherwise murky wilderness – like navigating by landmarks.

I thought it was an interesting idea. Here's what else I thought. I thought that if the past is significant because it is no longer there, then the allure of the void is what might be in it.

Void. Just the very word makes you want to lean in closer, with a firm grip on some immovable object, for safety, and take a peek. See what's in there. Intoxicating absence. Void.

George Mallory said that his reason for trying to climb Everest was, "because it's there." It was a good quote. People have been ripping it off ever since. The thing is, I don't think that that's why Mallory launched his doomed attempt. Mallory didn't go to Everest because it was there – he went because of what wasn't there. He went because it hadn't been climbed, because we didn't know what exactly lurked up there in the ether, because we didn't know if it could be done, didn't know if it could be survived. George Mallory went not to Everest but to that great empty space which surrounded it.

And he found the void he was looking for, and he didn't come back.

But you have to admit, it was worth trying.

Of course, it's easy to assume that the allure of the void is just for mountaineers and other fans of life-threatening recreational sports. No sir. Void, sceptical nomads, is for everyone. Void is for you and me. Here's another often quoted saying. I don't know who said it first either, but it gets lobbed around a lot.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Cliché, hmm? Maybe. Probably. But there's an important grain of truth tucked in there - those things always turn up in the most unexpected places. Here's the grain. Absence does make the heart grow fonder. And absence is void. Void that pains us, tears at our seams until we fill it with idealized memories of that which is no longer there but which continues to pollute us with its actuality. Its otherness. This is why short term relationships with people that we hardly know, can light us on fire and scatter our glowing ashes to the four corners of the earth when they end. Not because of what we actually lost, but what we think we lost. The ideal built to fill the gaps caused by the fact that we didn't really know them that well at all.

When the void is in your infrastructure, you need to be careful of what you put in it.

When the void is in your infrastructure, you need to be careful of what you put in it.

So. We're both attracted to and repelled by absence. Car wrecks on your hazy, morning commute are gaping holes in the inglorious drudges of working life. Everyone slows down to look – to peer into those aching puncture wounds in the skin of daily life and glimpse the worrisome darkness beyond. Peer in in the hope that it isn't empty.

Take science. Science is about the pursuit of the unknown – an attempt to shed light on the dark corners and determine what, if anything is really in them. When the first atomic bomb tests were conducted, the scientists weren't actually sure that the fission reaction, once started, would ever stop. They considered it a possibility that the reaction would just keep going until it devoured all of the universe in a blazing, atomic supernova. Did that stop them from setting off the bombs? Of course not. It was deemed an acceptable risk. The spectre of not knowing outweighed the possibility of ending all life. Of course, at the time we were also afraid of Nazis, but that wasn't the whole story. In recent years, superconducting supercolliders have been started up at research facilities to probe the mysteries of the subatomic world, even though they also came with a calculated probability of potentially setting off a reaction that would destroy the world. This is the terrible duality of the void – potential and menace.

And we can't stand to not know. We'd rather be dead than not know.

This is probably why people can be found everywhere that we can reach - no matter what lengths we have to go to to get there, while other potentially ambitious life forms, like lions, stick to limited ranges. To be human is to need to know. To be unable to stand the presence of emptiness.

Of course, not absolutely everyone is comfortable with us looking into those great, cold vacuums. When mathematicians first discovered the number zero, the Catholic Church, ever adapting to the times, banned it. Banned it because zero implied void. Banned it because void meant the absence of God and they just weren't comfortable with that. Didn't even want it discussed. People died over it.

But people were willing to die over it, and so eventually, zero was accepted and mathematics and a slew of other related fields were able to progress onwards. Progress was made possible because, no matter what the implications or risks, we had to know. We had to look into that void, even if what we saw set our souls on fire, because we just couldn't bear the pain of not knowing.

I'm not a big fan of human nature, but this, I think, is one of its best qualities.