VOID
Improving Upon the Silence
"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.
Art is knowing which ones to keep."
- Scott Adams
Buddhism teaches that the most valuable part of a cup is the empty space. The most valuable part of a doorway is the cavity. The hole in a pin makes it a needle and gives it new purpose.
All life requires empty space. Without space, life cannot exist.
Nothingness is beautiful, like all other life-sustaining elements—water, light, soil, air. We drink, we sunbathe and eat. But even more often than we breathe, we enjoy the privilege of borrowing Void—just by sitting there. As humanity increasingly dominates Earth, empty untamed spaces will exponentially increase in value.
The first criteria for whether your art is worth taking home is whether it substantially improves upon the nothingness that was there before. Your art takes up space. It consumes nothingness, and therefore consumes life, just as surely as hunters or rainforest raiders. Art also changes the feel of the nothingness all around it. Your art costs something, just by existing.
It costs space. And it costs attention.
ATTENTION
Silence of the mind is a type of Void. Silence of the mind is a rarity these days. Your art demands attention, so is it a substantial improvement upon the peace of mind your viewer had before you interrupted?
Billboards are arguably the worst art in the world. They violate both space and attention.
I used to work as a wilderness trail guide for at-risk youth. I took angsty, rebellious teens into the Arizona deserts, taught them primitive survival skills, and hiked with them through barren landscapes. This was my job and identity for two years.
Each work shift, I spent eight days in nature, then came back to civilization for six days off. One week coming off the trail, I remember driving down the highway and feeling assaulted by the non-stop signs and billboards plastered everywhere. I realized that for eight days, I hadn't read anything. Driving down the road, I read everything so fast that even when trying to ignore it and look away, I could hear a voice narrating everything in my mind. I felt violated by the ads prying their way into my unconsenting mind.
In the wilderness, half our hiking time was silent. During night watch each night, I sat alone by the popping fire among forests of shadowy cacti. Before this job, silence made me uncomfortable. I used to feed my mind nonstop stimulation in the form of fantasy books, internet, messaging friends, scrolling mindlessly through social media feeds, binging shows I didn't even like.
In the desert, two-thirds of my time was spent in total silence. Not just sound silence, but mind-silence. Those billboards—shitty graphic design, shitty mottos, shitty logos, all promoting shitty products—they grated on me. Billboards stole my mind-silence even when I tried to ignore them. That's what art does, too. It sits on a shelf, self-important, expecting a fraction of attention every time someone passes by. And it gets it, too.
Is your art worth the silence it stole?
Art can be and frequently is worth that silence.
One night as I sat with my youth by the fire, cooking dinner, one of the therapists visited us and wanted to hang out. She brought a guitar.
Her voice wasn't extraordinary but it was clear. Her guitar was cheap but properly tuned. And the funny thing is, although I've heard better music, few songs ever hit me as hard as hers, when she interrupted our desert silence with her humble yet worthy gift. Metal strings resonated clear, echoed far, and hit a primal part of my mind. For a moment, I understood the power wandering bards had from the time of Homer until the invention of the phonograph.
Void—both physical space and silence—amplifies the value of art. And the more Void we allow, the more we are elevated by its opposite.
