The Blank
Page
Only emptiness makes creativity
possible. For music, silence. For dance, stillness. For sculpture, space.
For writing, the yinsanity of the blank page.
It looks empty, because it
contains everything. White sums all wavelengths. Black is also blank, the
absence of all wavelengths. Sum or absence, both extremes achieve a metaphysical
limit: sameness.
This fullness of either sum
or absence, the ancient world called pleroma.
Fog, snowfields, sun blindness,
cave dark. We know sameness. Empty pages and blank screens are a special
kind of sameness, found only in the manufactured world. This is a space
designed for modern minds. On the empty page, the mental, the inside, becomes
external. The purely psychic becomes material. The building block of civilization.
Sameness is a boundary. Between
nothing and something. Soon as we write anything at all on a blank page,
we cross that boundary. Infinite possibilities collapse to existence as
finite text. And the not-self
disappears into the unique presence of a mind.
If we see the blank page as
pleroma, ultimate fullness, Infinity, then whatever appears there is effective.
Even if it's just random marks, the effect is Chaos. Language we don't know
is Secret. Readable text
imparts the effectiveness of the Writer.
So, approach the blank page
as you would Nature's rival. For that's exactly what you face with Infinity.
Whether you violate the pleroma with a paintbrush or a writing pen, the
sameness always breaks into
your uniqueness. The whole organic mess of life bobs onto the page, a flotsam
of accidental entanglements.
Many writers make that their
art, creatively arranging existential debris. Others approach Infinity with
different intent.
In the pleroma is everything.
Everything comes in opposites. Opposites attract and fit together so perfectly
their balanced powers cancel each other. And that's why the page is blank.
It's all there.
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