Is it possible to see blankness?
The description of blankness is a moment of great artifice.
A careful balance msut be maintained: with too much attention blankness literally vanishes before your eyes.
On the untouched surface of the paper appear a few tiny hairs. As long as we see the blankness these forms are
invisible.
Vision excludes. Everything we see involves not seeing something else.
The presence of these forms is a judgment of vision itself.
They witness the nature of the concealed which is always in front of us.
A separate world comes to light. Simple discovery is the illuminator. Attention provokes the search.
Attention itself is a kind of repetition. We reinforce the form by duplicating it in our mind. Now the figure resembles the original but is filtered into the mind through a history of similarity .
The figure is drawn in ink onto the piece of paper. Now the form is much less limited. lt has become visible from a greater distance. lt has been broken away from the fragility of an embodiment in a hair. lndependant, amplified, and alien it enters the environment. lt has become its own control.
'The Chinese tell how Dragon-faced four-eyed Ts'ang Chien invented the Chinese alphabet, He looked up and saw the pattern in the stars. He looked down and saw the marks on the back of the turtle. He saw in his garden the footprints of birds. From these patterns they say Ts'ang Chien made the strange characters the Chinese use in writing.'
'In India when the Hindu God Brahma decided to write down his readings there were no letters for him to use so he invented some. His patterns came mainly from the seams in the human skull. Brahma, they say traced the first Hindu characters with his fingers on leaves of gold.'
As they first appear from the paper these forms do not mean anything. They can acquire significance. They are dynamic in the sense absorbant: graphic equivalents of the blank piece of paper. Meaning is fluid. A familiar figure can acquire new meanings for its old forms. Here: old meanings invade the new forms.
The connection between those forms and the original small hairs loses its importance. They adopt a new (false) history – a range of associations which includes the history of all graphic forms. They have not closed their doors to either their adopted history or to the uses which might be made of them in the real future.
They are afloat in our mind.
Their options are stiII open.