On Emptiness
Winner: Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction
Selected by Dinty Moore Joyce DehliI pull back hard on the swing’s side chains, thrust my feet out and up, and begin—kick, pump, kick, pump. I rise high into sky, which holds me to the seat, envelops me, whistles past my ears, and through my hair. The grass below smells like summer, green and growing. My heart is thumping. My skin tingles.
Kick. Pump.
Thoughts evaporate. Sounds go silent, and for a moment I am sky.
I slip into a gap between sensation and thought: communion.
No childhood memory is more vivid than the moment on my backyard swing when I disappeared into open sky. Nothing could have been more real.
“If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills—then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory,” Virginia Woolf wrote in “A Sketch of the Past.” Her memory was of being a child half-asleep in bed in her nursery at St. Ives, listening to waves breaking and wind blowing a window blind, dragging its acorn across her floor, and “feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.” Mine was swinging in my backyard on Milwaukee’s southwest side and, in a tiny gap of time, losing all sense that I was
separate from the sky, grass, sun, trees, everything around me. It wasn’t ecstasy I experienced. I’ve called it communion, but it was more than that. I’ve never found the perfect word. But now, I’d say I experienced emptiness. Not emptiness, as in feeling despondent or bereft. I mean emptiness in the Buddhist sense—empty of self, empty of the sense that I was separate from everything else.
“Empty of a separate self means full of everything,” the late Vietnamese Buddhist monk and Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in his essay “The Heart Sutra: the Fullness of Emptiness.”
Full emptiness is a paradox not well-served by language. It’s a mystery. I didn’t know that as a child, nor would I have cared. But as life went on, I wanted to understand.
As a child, nothing excited me more than learning the names of things and how they fit into a bigger scheme: rocks labeled and glued to the inside of a shirt-box; leaves secured between sheets of wax paper with sticky labels; maps naming towns and nations; the periodic table; diagrams identifying every part inside the human body; and words gathered into stories.
Every thing had its word. But it wasn’t long before I saw the gap between an object and its name; they weren’t the same. Of the two, I loved words most. Words charged life into the stories my mother read to me and my three sisters, commanded chalkboards at school, bookshelves at home. They raised up prayers at night. Some nights, before prayers, my family went outside to look for stars in their constellations. I delighted in shouting their names—Orion! The Big Dipper! I didn’t notice the vast emptiness surrounding them, surrounding us all.
Years later, quantum physics would reveal that emptiness isn’t really empty. I wouldn’t have understood as a child. I barely
understand now. It turns out that empty space roils with what scientists call “virtual” particles. Physicist Jessica Esquivel calls them ghosts of actual particles—“there, but not really there.” They flit in and out of existence. They make a frenzied dance in the empty spaces surrounding true particles called muons.
Muons! I still love learning the names humans assign to things, trying to pin them down. Muons themselves live a brief, unstable life, just 2.2 millionths of a second. They transform, or “decay” as scientists say, into electrons and neutrinos. We have words— muons, ghost-particles, electrons, neutrinos, emptiness—yet much remains a mystery.
Physicists say this much is clear: no particle is ever alone, not even in the darkest reaches of outer space. Each one is surrounded by the dance.
I take solace in the emptiness that surrounds us. It fills every gap.
We rolled the car windows down to let the sky in, reached out to feel it on our skin, and inhaled. It was everywhere, invisible and blue, whishing giant sunflowers into sway, pulling tendrils of clouds from Great Grandpa’s cigar as he waved us into his gravel driveway. We all waved, my aunts, uncles, and cousins, too, with their picnic baskets and coolers in tow, all of us gathering under the open sky for another Saturday on the lake. But it was in the boathouse where our summer ritual really began.
The women always entered first and called their daughters to come along. A good push opened the side door. Sunlight rushed in. Specks of dust fluttered ahead. Shadows fell from two small boats, one with oars, the other with an engine. Fresh air mingled with scents of Prince Albert tobacco, motor oil, and the must of life jackets. Someone closed the door. Beneath it, the sky slid in.
In the dim light, my grandmother, mother, and aunts—efficient and modest women who covered their heads for Sunday Mass— lingered in laughter and conversation. Each woman found her spot and undressed. They tugged swimsuits over bellies, breasts, and scars. Soon enough, they hurried us, the little girls, into ours. Only then did we turn over the boathouse to the boys and men. We kids ran down the pier and leapt into the lake, again and again.
After we’d grown a little tired, Dad lifted his four daughters into the rowboat. My mother feared drowning, but came along. She trusted Dad to be careful. He tightened our lifejackets, set the oars in their locks, and rowed us out to a quiet spot. We listened to the lake lapping at our boat, rocking our cradle.
When the sun began to set, we trudged to the boathouse to pull damp suits from our sunburned flesh. The women, as always, began turning the day’s events into family memories, their words tumbling over each other. And I understood: a moment and its memory are not the same. When moments end, memories begin. A space lies between what happened and what we make of it.
I listened and laughed with the women. It’s what I wanted—to be one among them in sound and flesh, making stories. I wanted it like I wanted the hush of waves rocking my quiet family, alone together on an open lake. Moments and their memories. Both. I wanted both.
Defining emptiness is like trying to pin wind to ground. Emptiness is the cosmic vacuum, a place of absence or full presence, vast or narrow, a wordless place. A silence between notes. Stillness within motion. The gap between a moment and what we make of it. A mind freed from thought. It’s the electric space that separates—and binds—partners in dance. It’s the sky that holds us. It’s where we end.
When I was seven, a space opened inside me where nothing could intrude, not even words. I needed a place to hide. I see that now.
Around that age, I developed a habit of fainting at Sunday Mass. It went on for a year or two. It happened so often that my family sat in a pew near a door so my father could whisk me out without commotion. None of us knew why it happened. We only knew that, for a few moments, my mind went blank and my body, limp. Years later, I realized it was like the blankness I entered when my uncle locked the two of us in his room, when thoughts and senses fled.
Scientists say humans react to threats in four ways: they flee, fight, freeze, or faint. I only recently learned of the fainting response, also called “folding” and “feigning death.” Think of it as an internal collapse, says Dr. Daniel Siegel, a UCLA neuropsychiatrist.
I think of it as an escape.
The space inside me was a hallowed place, but lonely as hell. No communion there. I longed for what I had lost: unguarded moments under an open sky, freedom to be surprised. I could not put that longing into words.
Emptiness had become both refuge and prison.
“Surround your body with a circle of scarves,” Grace told us. “Think of it as your outer boundary.”
It was the late 1980s, and Grace was instructing twenty women gathered on the varnished wood floor of her dance studio. I followed along, reluctantly and skeptically, and only because thinking and talking had not helped me enough. Try Grace’s movement class, my therapist had urged. So, like the others, I
pulled long scarves from Grace’s box and wove them into a circle around me.
“Now, pair up and invite your neighbor to approach,” Grace said.
A tall, muscular woman stepped to the edge of my circle.
“She’ll ask if she can enter. How you respond is up to you,” Grace said.
The tall woman asked to come in. She waited sheepishly, hands in pockets, as if she had asked for a dance. I said no. She held still. Irked, I waved her in. I exhaled when she stepped out.
“Now,” Grace instructed, “your partner will try to enter, uninvited.”
The woman, suddenly bold, stepped into my circle. I stepped out. Immediately. Before thought or word, I left. I saw what I did. I understood that I’d done it before.
When the woman walked out, she left behind an open space. Mine. I wanted it back.
In my twenties, I tried Sufi whirling on a Taos mountainside; I felt self-conscious. I couldn’t let my mind go. But late-night dancing in hometown clubs, sweaty and wild, could transport me. Sex sometimes could, too—a rush from sensation to a wordless, borderless place. Beyond me.
In motion, I found silence. My mind’s clanging bells: stilled. How can I say this? It took silence and sound, stillness and motion to free me. It took words, talking with friends, therapists, and, eventually, family. It took memories, like those of a summer boathouse where women’s laughter mingled with the scent of Prince Albert tobacco. It took books of myth and science, poetry, true stories and made-up ones, and even my stories drawn from
a space between memory and imagination and scribbled into notebooks:
Once upon a time, as a mere child, I slipped into a crack, a canyon, and disappeared from level land, lost the horizon and the big orange ball rolling off its ledge each and every night, and I was so small, falling, but my calling grew strong, into song, for the somethings and someones above whom I loved, and simply for sound, which filled the gap between here and there, now and then, until the walls tumbled down.
On lunch breaks at my first real job, I often drove to a nearby cemetery to read poetry, especially T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. I sat on a marble bench amid headstones engraved with names of people whom I would never know, who left the world long ago. I did not feel alone. Trees, young and old, offered shade from the sun. Swans glided on a tranquil pond. In the quiet, I thought of Eliot’s still point “where past and future are gathered.”
For weeks, I puzzled over his lines: “Except for the point, the still / point, / There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” But it wasn’t a puzzle, nor a riddle to be solved. I came to understand that. His words pointed toward the paradox of time within timelessness, movement within stillness, but words could take me only so far. Not into the experience itself. Words are shabby and inadequate; Eliot said that. Still, his words entered me and stayed, and I knew something I hadn’t known before. Poems are like memories. Once absorbed, they live in you forever.
Thirty-five years later, we buried my father in that cemetery. The day was cold and the pond, rippled by rain, was empty.
For most of her career, the British sculptor Dame Rachel Whiteread has been drawn to emptiness, to what isn’t there.
In art, negative space is the emptiness around and between things. Whiteread gave form to negative space, made it material, drew attention to the forgotten spot beneath a bed, a bathtub’s yawn, the gap between a bookshelf and wall where wisdom might reside, the air beneath chairs, the cavity of a hot-water bottle, the interior of a condemned Victorian rowhouse in a sculpture called House. That London piece, one of Whiteread’s several largescale works, is among her most famous. Less well-known is The Gran Boathouse on the edge of a lake in Røykenviken, Norway. Whiteread cast the boathouse’s interior in concrete and removed the original structure.
“I have mummified the air inside the boathouse,” she said when it was unveiled.
What lingers in that mummified air?
From photographs, I can tell that the original Gran boathouse, like my great-grandparents’ boathouse, had wood planks at a diagonal on its doors, could fit at least two boats, and was simple, but well-made. Scandinavian hands built both boathouses; my great-grandparents left Denmark in the early 1900s to settle in a small Wisconsin lake town. What would they have thought of Whiteread’s boathouse?
A farmer who lives near The Gran Boathouse told an interviewer that Whiteread made him see the old boathouse in new ways. He said it’s as if Hans Christian Andersen had written a story about the boathouse: “He would make it speak to say what it has been through all these years, to show the memory and the mind of the building.”
A few years ago, I saw an exhibit of Whiteread’s work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. For an entire morning, I studied the hundred sculptures on display. I saw
emptiness that I hadn’t noticed before. As I stood before children’s hiding places—the gap beneath a bed, the insides of an empty wardrobe—something inside me clutched and released. When I arrived at Whiteread’s windows—translucent resin representations of air, free of frames—my skin tingled. I saw sky.
When I was fifty-one, in the aftermath of surgery and chemotherapy, terror sometimes overwhelmed me. I feared cancer still lurked inside and would kill me. I went into my bed one afternoon, curled on my side, and pulled a sheet over my head. I stayed there awake for hours, thinking about how I would suffer. My body shook until it could no longer move. My mind stopped, too, relinquishing all words and images, even sounds.
My chest relaxed and opened. A bloom rose from my abdomen into my throat and head, twirled as if in wind, then swelled through my body and beyond my skin. I sensed it, whatever it was, inside and outside of me, expanding. My body remained still.
In a moment, it was over. It will stay with me forever.
At twilight, day hesitates before conceding to night. In those liminal moments, light emanates from Earth as much as sky. How familiar it is, yet I’m always taken aback. If I’m in my study upstairs, I’ll go to the windows. Out back, my little lot is like that of every other rowhouse up and down D.C.’s urban blocks, except for one thing: our neighborhood is covered by towering trees. Behind my house, two massive trees, a locust and black walnut, are so close their branches nearly intermingle in a narrow, middle space. Squirrels jump from one to another. In late spring, robins,
crows, and jays fly high, perch to perch, while sparrows and indigo buntings flitter in the understory of dogwood, redbud, and hibiscus trees and forage amid the dazzle of azaleas, purple irises, and peonies. Something always stands out: a cardinal swooping low, soaring high.
As light recedes, I might play Arvo Pärt’s album Tabula Rasa. I listen for “Fratres” to emerge from silence, close my eyes for the opening bells of “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten.” A single bell rings, fades, rings, fades, and rings. I cannot hear the space between, but it’s there. The album’s namesake double concerto, “Tabula Rasa,” contains both still point and dance. Its second movement, “Silentium ” beckons listeners into silences embedded in a pattern of notes. The violinist Gidon Kremer called “Tabula Rasa” a declaration of silence. I return to it like a memory. Inevitably, thoughts and images will flit across my mind like ghosts in dim light, there but not really there. Memories will arise.
One walk often reappears: the morning I slipped into nearby woods before the day’s demands and news and ruminations could clutter my brain. The path was deliciously silent and solitary, with the rising sun and risen trees my only companions. Suddenly, a bird’s piercing call startled me.
“What’s that?” I asked out loud.
My full attention flew to the treetops, listening and searching for the unseen bird. What kind of bird? What do I call it? My need to know took over the moment. Afterward, my walk wasn’t the same, and I felt annoyed.
But thinking about it now, I wonder if my desire to name the bird was, at heart, a desire to cross the space between us. To connect. A name would separate it from the whole, making it distinct and knowable. But what could I know of a bird detached from trees and sky, from whistling wind or silent air, from everything, from its home?
From my study, I see birds flit from one tree to the next in aerial dances. How stunning they are, how distracting from the expanse of sky.
Some evenings I read about the universe and the huge gap between what is known and what is yet to be discovered. In recent years, scientists learned that our universe is not shrinking, as they had long believed, but is expanding at faster and faster rates. One theory posits that the universe’s expansion is propelled by a force arising from empty spaces. Imagine such emptiness.
Galaxies could fill the gap between the word emptiness and what it might be.
In 2020, the year my dad died, Dame Rachel Whiteread turned away from casting emptiness to focus on what holds things together: casings, containers, skin.
“I wanted to make the skeleton and the skin of something rather than the insides of it,” she told an interviewer.
I understood. Words are like cells. Sentences are skeletons. Poems and stories are skins, so permeable they breathe.
Whiteread, in a different article, described her new work as “the touch of material against air.”
I understood.
Once, long ago, I had wanted my voice to whistle like wind through brass chimes on my family’s front porch, leaving them clanging, startling all on a day that had promised to be still.
On the morning my dad died, my mother and I laid him flat in their bed and spread a fresh sheet over all but his head. We had piled pillows high during the night to hold him up and open his lungs. We, too, had held him up. I kneeled on the bed behind him, my sister held him on one side, my mother on his other. We took care to not press on his bones; cancer was everywhere and we saw his pain. His chest convulsed. He gulped at air as if it were not there, anywhere, as if my mother, sisters and I had breathed it all, leaving him gasping.
In the stillness that followed, I snipped silky white hairs from his head. Wisps as light as air. Some for me, my mother, and three sisters. We took turns with him alone. I held his hand. I didn’t want to leave.
Eventually, I went to the door, but I turned back to take a photo of my dad’s head resting on a rose-colored pillow. Already his skin was sallow, dark around his closed eyes. His hair had never shone so white.
I’d taken nothing he needed: curls of hair and a photograph, mementos of a life now past. I would put them in a box. I’m not sure why. They weren’t him. Maybe I didn’t want to let him go. I wanted more time. He was so still. Silent, as he’d often been. Gone. There on a bed not yet empty.
The cord pulls taut against my hands when the kite catches an ocean wind; tug, relax, tug, relax, and a hard pull back. One arm shoots up and wide to the side as my feet slide on sand and step back, this way and that; and always the pull of sky, my body one with the kite, its partner in dance, wind in its face and at my back, and now, as in childhood, I’m in the gap, a narrow and boundless space.
