I used to love the joke where you point to a blank sheet of paper and say it’s a picture of a polar bear in a snowstorm. I repeated that gag again and again, sometimes trying variations that had the bear stacking cubes of sugar or drinking a glass of milk. The uniform whiteness of an empty page could conceal any number of things—eggs, toothpaste, kitchen sinks—and it became a challenge to see how much I could cram into absence.
A cloud served on a white china plate.
A lamb dancing the tango with a snowman.
I’d heard stories of tormented artists, their smocks splattered, eyes wild, who had to face the dreaded “blank canvas.” I understood how emptiness upset them every time I told my joke. How dare anything just lay there and be nothing. Nothingness was an affront to stuff. Wasn’t it the artist’s duty to tease from the void something of substance, a vase or a clown or a snowcapped mountain?
In junior high, the margins of my notebook were dark with doodles. I’d felt the urge to cover every inch of white paper with shaded boxes and cones and spheres, checkerboards, labyrinths, and tightly wound spirals. When I ran out of things to draw, I painted the paper with solid blue ink, the strokes of my ballpoint pen frictionless and hypnotic. Instead of solving algebraic equations or completing a vocabulary quiz, several of my classmates were also busy drawing in their binders: sports cars, fashion models, staring eyes. We were like a collective embellishment machine that cranked out hundreds of images per hour, warding off boredom, leaving our marks, imprinting our wishes on bits of blank space.
On the other hand, embellishment could be oppressive, as I learned every time my mother sent me on an errand to our next-door neighbor’s. In the home of Maurice and Shirley Minsky, Persian rugs covered the dark wood floors and wallpapered rooms bloomed with flowers. The Minskys dressed in clashing stripes and checks. When they leaned close and offered me candy from a crystal dish, it was hard to look at the two of them without squinting. The odors of musty curtains, lilac airfreshener, and cabbagey foreign cooking would mingle with the candy’s sweetness, the ornament of their clothes and rooms invading every corner of my senses, and I tasted and smelled the patterns and the colors, and the glut of sensation made me claustrophobic.
One night, after visiting the Minskys, I lay in bed and tried to become completely blank. I closed my eyes, let out a breath, and made my arms and legs go limp. The experiment scared me half to death; what if I stayed that way forever? I needn’t have worried; within seconds I was sitting bolt-upright and gulping air. Sight dazzled my opened eyes. My thoughts beat the air like a flock of startled birds.
Given the persistence of sensation, I began to wonder if nothingness was possible. Lowered into the watery depths of a sensory-deprivation tank, scientists began to hallucinate, flail their arms, and babble to themselves after a few hours without stimulus. Blind and deaf and weightless in their wet suits, they imagined feasting on delicious meals while conversing with witty visitors or performing endless, backbreaking tasks. Deprivation was a busy place, or so they reported afterward.
Even at our local movie theater, when the music faded and the story was over and The End—so big and definitive!—rose on the screen, the darkness and hush were temporary. The aisles soon flooded with talking people, and ushers flung open the lobby doors to the rush and glare of a summer afternoon.
Plenty of people believe that not even death is absolute or empty, but chock-full of fleshy cherubim who dwell in a gauzy metropolis of clouds. White robes, golden harps, a halo encircling every head. As a boy, I’d seen enough oil paintings and religious pamphlets to suspect that the hereafter was as loud and crowded as Union Station, a place where one is reunited with deceased friends and relatives, former classmates and loyal pets; they gather around, unlost after all, winged and eager to greet you.
I don’t want to make too much of it, but as far as I’m concerned, the universe should flash a neon sign that says SORRY, NO VACANCY. Because there is none whatsoever. Or so I’d like to believe these days, especially given all that’s vanishing, all that’s gone—lovely places, dear friends, a slew of hopes and assurances, one’s susceptible vessel of flesh. And yet there’s no room for a speck of regret.