Blank

Peggy had a thing for small notebooks. She always had one or two in her purse; tiny pages for big thoughts. When she died about 2 ½ years ago I found over a dozen of them in drawers and pockets. Most had phrases she had read, observations or fragments of overheard conversations but they filled only a few pages. The rest of the pads were empty.

I wonder about those blanks. They too were a presence; a white space for contemplation. The interval that made the music. The 4 minutes, 33 seconds of silence John Cage dared to present to make the audience create its own music.

A writer writes as a way of not speaking. (Marguerite Duras). There is a pregnant hush out of which an inner voice is sometimes made audible and shared. The extroversion of the spoken word is born and borne from a well of introversion. Peggy’s poems were the small exudate or nectar which the vast silence within her flower yielded.

In a comedy routine, when confronted in a hold-up with the demand, Your money or your life, Jack Benny famously answered, I’m thinking, I’m thinking, after 17 seconds of silence. That silence got one of the longest laughs ever noted in radio history. Humor aside, he was confronting an existential moment.

Nature abhors a vacuum and noise abhors silence. Noise is on the menu at every restaurant. If it's not chatter, it's loud music to show it is a happening place. 

Our heads are filled with the cacophony of our times and at high decibels as if to disallow conversation or, God forbid, introspection. Nobody can listen in to the imagination, the quiet night of the soul from where subversive ideas might spring.

War is failed diplomacy. The sentences that filled the sheet of paper were insufficient so barbed words became shrapnel and bodies blown to smithereens. War is hard noise until it raises a white flag surrendering to kinship.                                                                                              

The blank slate is how we come into this world. We scribble our improvised lives and gradually learn the margins, then risk overthrowing them. The white space gets ignored yet it is always there, like sky, a white canvas, an inscape where we meet ourselves.