guff

Nothing Redux

I’ve gone and done it: having covered the subject once before, and really not all that long ago, still I find it again necessary to write about nothing. I could have composed a comedic song parody, or challenged one of the many assumptions I have about frozen peas, but instead I return to previously trodden ground. I guess I can’t help myself, nothing being one of my favorite sublime topics of rumination.

Some study the universe; in other words, the totality of existence. When they do, there’s an outcome planned for their troubles, some new or additional piece of knowledge is hoped for from the act. I, however, prefer the benefit of examining its opposite. There is no real expectation on returns, because the intellectual acrobats involved in thinking about nothing are utterly unprepared to bear fruit for ones labors. Such is rarely repeated in other pursuits of the mind. Philosophers of Everything are expected to publish, or at the very least work for their supper. Philosophers of Nothing are left to their own devices and seldom expected to generate dividends, even when duly covered by a modest investment.

I’m a fan of zero (0), it being the de facto symbol for nothing. There is no number smaller than zero, making it the final stop on a countdown chain, even if it often is replaced by a false equivalent, such as “launch” or “fire” or “Happy New Year.” There is the arithmetical notion of negative numbers, but this is a mere abstraction, a thinker’s contrivance, a calculated wrangle. In nature there is no such thing as a negative amount of anything — whereas you can have a total lack of the same. For zero, 0, the mathematical nul, the inherent simplicity is fairly evident. Yet zero is also of such complexity that it took a very, very long time before it could make a contributory impact upon the science of math. Or any science for that matter. Such is the personality of nothing.

Nothing is, in a very strange and amusingly ironic way, two sides of the same non-existent coin. It makes up the ground surrounding loss and gain. It stands in for the impossible, and the potential. It represents the initial prefix for any project yet to start, and the past tense of its ultimate completion. What came before the Big Bang and what we can expect beyond that final Universal day (whether it’s a long drawn out heat death, or creation turned on it’s head in the Big Crunch), nothing is the only concept we have that can begin to embody it. Nothing is not just a placeholder, but a dust jacket for infinity. Nothing is the book ends for absolutely everything.

Nothing is so many things. I might even put forth the idea that nothing is not a lack of everything, but is in fact everything. Or should I rephrase that to say that everything includes nothing, and so nothing is a part of everything? Or maybe I should just stop writing on this topic.