Micro: Can Something arise out of Nothing?
Human: Something doesn’t arise. It’s always there. There is no discontinuity.
Micro: Wait, what?
Human: It would be rather silly to have all potential and no manifestation. Something and Nothing always accompany each other.
Micro: I see your point now. Nothing would get seriously bored without Something.
Human: You’re still thinking two concepts. They’re not really separate. Nothing IS Something.
Micro: Ok, So if Nothing is Something, Something is also Nothing. Is this relationship symmetrical?
Human: Are you going somewhere with this?
Micro: Yes, I certainly am. Taking your explanation of the unity of Something and Nothing a bit further, it shows that if my kibble bowl is full, it’s also empty. So no matter how much kibble you keep putting in my food bowl to make it full, it’s also always empty.
Human: Just because it looks empty doesn’t mean it’s actually empty. I have the physicists on my side. They say that if you probe vacuum, even that has properties.
Micro: Do they mean that there’s a lot of kibble popping in and out of empty space? Now you’re just playing with words to deny me kibble.
Human: Is this a clever ploy to justify infinitely full kibble bowl?
Micro: Well, it’s the only way to combat infinitely empty kibble bowl.
Human: …
There’s a lot of puzzlement among the humans regarding why cats think the kibble bowl is empty, when there is actually kibble in there bunched up against the sides. They have three prevailing theories: 1) Our whiskers can be sensitive, so we stay away from the side of the bowl, 2) In spite of being crackerjack hunters, we have poor vision for this kind of right-in-front-of-our-eyes thing, and 3) We’re hoarding the kibble for later as the humans can be terribly unreliable. As usual, let’s keep the humans guessing. As inveterate kibble pessimists, cats believe half empty kibble bowl is fully empty, and half full kibble bowl is also fully empty.
The American artist Robert Rauschenberg came up with a clever way to paint emptiness. At first he drew a picture, and then he erased it. That didn’t quite do the trick—no one really cared. Rauschenberg realized that he had to erase someone else’s work; more specifically, he had to erase a work of a great, successful artist. As part of this project, he asked the great artist Willem de Kooning to part with one of his works of art so that he could then erase it. Kooning agreed and handed him a painting that he liked and that would also be really hard to erase. Rauschenberg then spent a month erasing Kooning’s probably awesome painting and titled it, “Erased de Kooning Drawing.” Rauschenberg called this erasure "poetry," but I would call it atrocity. We don’t know what Rauschenberg’s cat thought about this erased painting (assuming he did have a cat), but it reminds me too much of an empty kibble bowl. I can say with certainty that there was something in the bowl in the past, but now it’s just an empty bowl. Rauschenberg’s erased painting is a poignant reminder that the kibble bowl was once completely full before I erased ("ate") the kibble in purrson.
Sources
- Robert Krulwich. Two Ways to Think About Nothing. NPR, March 13, 2002.
