Images of “Nothing” ― what it means to you, and how to show it

[paulr]

Another thought ... the human or psychological implications of "nothing" are highly variable. To the Buddhists (and arguably, maybe, to Stevens' snow man) Nothing has a positive connotation; a state of potential and an absence of artifice. To the Romantics, it's all emotional: woah be to my loneliness! To the many modernists the connotations are existential or metaphysical; you can generally equate emptiness with nihilism. To the postmodernists, it's a concept to be questioned, played with, subverted. Cage's 4:33 and many paintings by the monochromists are essentially postmodern investigations.

Rauschenberg, speaking both literally and figuratively, said that an empty canvas is never empty.

[Mango Reinhardt]

Interestingly enough, the only thing here to me that I have seen as "nothing" is blackness. From a film perspective, over exposed film would create a black negative, and a white positive, am I right (maybe not in literal practice, but in theory).

In the truest sense then, wouldn't "nothing" be an all white, blank print? Because... a black print has *something* on it... light.


Maybe I'm thinking too hard.

-Rk

[Heroique]

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

A fine poem from a great poet. Snow is a common English-language trope for nothing; if I were a comparative language scholar, I suspect I’d find it’s also a trans-lingual one, across temperate zones, perhaps less so in tropical or arctic places.

After all, to see snow come and go – go and come – is to experience it as a convincing, visual symbol of nothing. The fact that it’s cold and pale, like death or absence, greatly adds to its poetic power.

The stanza above reminds one of Dylan, who grew up in snowy Minnesota, and writes often about nothingness:

The winter time is coming
The windows are filled with frost
I went to tell everybody
But I could not get across

(From “It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry,” 1965.)

-----
Keep in mind the irony of this topic – we’ve seen how the opposites of snow & whiteness (desert & blackness) are common tropes for nothing, too.