Theme: EMPTINESS

It was so empty that two strangers could feel they had a common bond simply because they were encircled by the same horizon.

- Jonathan Raban, Bad Land: An American Romance

Emptiness is deemed as a space to be filled, like a parking spot, or a glass. Void of content, the space is charged with potential to be claimed, owned, and filled or altered. At the scale of geography, the North American Prairie was settled with emptiness at its core. But this was merely a cultural perception.

In his book, Place and Placelessness, E. Relph describes Geography as an awareness of the world relative to one’s intentions. He suggests that geographical space “is not indifferent space that can be arranged or dismissed, but always has meaning in terms of some human task or lived-experience.” In the eyes of farmers, ranchers, and founders of all kinds, the prairie was unequivocally empty.

Armed with telescope, compass, and chain, the surveyors set out on a cardinal trajectory to divide and package empty space. Each parcel held the promise of an empty glass in a well stocked bar, a vessel for whatever libation fueled your vision. Richard Manning proposes that the survey was one of the greatest acts of democracy his nation ever saw, and that it was a lie. “The land was assumed to be democratic.” They cast a perfect grid of square sections, 640 acres each, reckoned both equal and empty. It was an unprecedented structuring of Tabula Rasa. In its Latin origin, Tabula Rasa means ‘scraped tablet’. The space is not only empty, but erased.

Persistently malleable and unfixed, the prairie is unable to shake the habit of falling empty into the hungry eyes of yet another enterprise. Failed land passes from hand to hand, towns grow into cities without edges, drills dig deeper and broader. A blank slate or empty space is a magnet for the homo fabrican: Man the Maker. But as Joe Truett suggests in his book Grass: In Search of Human Habitat, there may also be a deeper genetic draw to empty spaces, a survival instinct. The short grass of the prairie provides good visibility, a habitat that “would have let us eat more and be eaten less.”

Consider now a shift in the perception of emptiness, from that of a void, to that of a thick substance, fluid, and unknown. In her book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit reads into the title of a photograph taken from a common phrase.

The ‘leap into the void’ is sometimes read as a Buddhist phrase about enlightenment, about embracing the emptiness that is not lack as it seems to westerners, but letting go of the finite and material, embracing limitlessness, transcendence, freedom, enlightenment.

Emptiness in both terms is the promise of potential. The question is whether it is experienced as exclusive or inclusive.