lt happens in an instant: the filter screen passes through the plane which is the surface of the water and at that instant creates a new plane which is a sheet of paper.
This paper is a fresh new surface. It is also an image of the barrier that the filter screen passed through in order to create it. A barrier, a gate: an image of each and, simultaneously, a space in which a new universe (or an image of an old one) can find a base.
The interface between water and air is a most important threshold. Although water in small amounts is transparent and can even magnify, in larger quantities it often hides what is beneath its surface. This is the realm of the invisible: the too small or too dark or too deep.
Sometimes when we use the word 'water' the connotation seems to be surface rather than substance. If we say 'under the water' it is in a very different sense from when we say 'under the bridge'. When we say submarine we don't mean under the ocean, but within it. The name is beside itself: the substance seems not to be our real concern.
We anchor our civilization onto the earth. We 'know' the earth, which is much less mysterious than the ocean. In fact, as little as a hundred years ago when the first British ship set sail to explore and to map the oceans very little was known of anything beneath their surface. 'There was a curious popular notion in which I well remember sharing when I was a boy', wrote Charles Wyville-Thomson, the chief scientist on that voyage, 'that, in going down, the sea water became gradually under the pressure heavier and heavier, and that all the loose things in the sea floated at different levels, according to their specific weight: skeletons of men, anchors and shot and cannon, and last of all the broad gold pieces wrecked in the loss of many a galleon on the Spanish Main, the whole forming a kind of 'false bottom' to the ocean, beneath which there lay all the depth of clear still water, which was heavier than molten gold.'
The children outside are playing tag. Most of the game is about fleeing danger and running to safety. Base is a safe place. 'Metal is base!' one child will shout and all the children will start running. Sometimes, though rarely, the game is more dangerous: 'There is no base!' they scream, 'There is no base!'
Water freezes. Glass is like solid, clear, manmade water. Out of glass we've made lenses to extend the reach of what we can see. The probing of the invisible is central to our era. We get hints and images of what is too small, too far away, too big. After the microscope and telescope were invented we discovered that our very existence is held suspended in an interval between two almost identical spheres. We function in the threshold between atoms and stars. To understand anything we bring our distant observations and informations to the surface ('down to earth') where distance is minimized, scale is adjusted, and projections are anchored in a cutaneous world. Whether by projection or abstraction, our understanding is always on the surface. Though undeniably 'superficial' this is also a great achievement. Paper, we begin to see, has an ideal role to play in this phenomenon.
Papermaking is a decisive act of separation. Before a sheet of paper is formed, its pulp exists as a chaotic blend of microscopic cellulose fibers suspended in water. A filter screen is dipped into the water and slowly brought to the surface. The water falls back as the filter lifts a thin layer of paper into the air. This sheet consists of many small fibers interlocked in a selfstructuring surface. After becoming a sheet of paper the small fibers have far stronger bonds with each other than they did before. They need no external force to keep them together. Each fiber holds and in turn is held in place by its neighboring fibers. Separated from their former unity, and without coercion, the fibers unify themselves anew. With the appearance of a second sheet of paper there is a second relational event. There is reunion as the two are placed together, and the individual papers interact. This is more than a contrast between where one sheet now is in relation to where it has been: All papers share that. Relation exists in position. The original separarion is at least partially overcome.
Division controls the very heart of the process. Through division the individual instance appears, bringing a general sympathy for the total unity of its earlier fluid state. Paper is a medium of, as it were, a material reincarnation; keeping, as it does, a memory of the vat. Its immediate past is one of paper's potentials. Caught between fragile memory and abundant potentials there is also something quite surprising to perceive: a blank sheet of paper is a very beautiful object.
There are two conventional ideas of blankness: the tabula rasa, the carte blanche. Differently each implies an openness to the world – a willingness to be impressed. The power of this blankness is elemental: its strength comes from a source other than willful power. lt has power because it can be filled, because space is available. Thus its strength comes from what it does not have.
When we make a sheet of paper we find in our hands a totally new space emerging from the water, and there, for an instant, the possibilities of the world expand. By making new paper we share in its potential. In the repetition of the action we find ourselves witness to a primitive condition of matter. As the paper rises from the water, the freshness of a new surface plane appears. This is not a space left by something that has disappeared. lt is not a surface whited over. lt is an absence that has no memory of a fuller state.
A first sheet of paper is made, then another, and another. Each sheet resembles any one of the others. Although not images or pictures of each other, they do involve a mutual reference. What is it that can be repeated? We say that an image is multiplied, but how does one multiply blankness? Can object and image coincide? Perhaps blankness is not an image to multiply. Perhaps each piece is the continuation of a unity in extension – a generating reality fragmented into totality, and usefulness, in place.
The useful becomes invisible. We read beyond it. Paper, so common in our society, takes on a functional invisibility. Although we have seen empty paper in one form or another nearly every day, one day we might suddenly 'see' it function differently. A sheet of paper can take on any scale as an abstraction of space. lt absorbs a place, signifies any area of our activity. We have watched it become so many things we think it could become anything.
Paper has been so useful and pervasive over the past thousand years that this age might eventually be known, like the Bronze Age or Stone Age, as the age of paper. Whether a typewriter or a satellite, all the manufactured products in the world begin with a few drawn lines on a piece of paper. We have built our civilization on paper because this privileged plane has a special function: it is a support for a layer of thought.
1.
Blankness may be the absence of the expected. But in the presence of regret or desire, blankness is not just empty but full of pain or provocation. The potential remains, but now a tension accompanies this potential. There is an imbalance, a reactive force which provokes action. A sense of the void activates us. lt is like a compulsion, we either join it or destroy it. We move. Our decisions are decisions made of uneasiness. We shift our positions. We hit it head on.
Several years ago the Museum of Modem Art in Oxford, England held an exhibition of early Jo Baer paintings. A woman wearing red lipstick kissed one of the paintings in its blank centre. 'I kissed it' she said 'because it seemed so lonely.' This is an unusual form of vandalism. The woman's discomfort was intense. In her compulsion she made no choice. She had no freedom of action, but she had the possibility to move.
2.
An assumption of blankness prefaces much activity. lt is a prerequisite for the imposition of will onto the material world. The assumption of blankness liberates as it enslaves us – it renders us intelligent and stupid at the same time. Human progress itself concerns people who deal with the world as blank spaces to be filled up. This is how America was seen in the 17th century: not just as a place to plunder raw materials but also as a fresh space in which to play out noble and grand ideas. As long as there were unexplored or 'white' areas on the map of the world a manifest human destiny compelled us to explore and exploit them. These grand, dangerous attitudes might well follow us as we leave an aging world behind to explore into outer space.
3
From first light the day accepts the imposition of our gestures and thoughts, and darkens towards evening. lt becomes thick with the history it endures. The more inert and saturated the day becomes, the more pressing and urgent is the need for renewal. Unrefreshed, we become opaque, our radiant blankness disappears. We develop a nostalgia for the frontier, for a fresh day, for the promise of potential.
The same world which to us is familiar and cluttered is new and brightly exciting to an infant. Where is the source of darkness? Sometimes it seems like the original substance; sometimes it is caused by the extra ink that darkens the page.
The desire to drop our baggage, I suspect, is natural, the desire to drop all thoughts of maintenance and just flow. We get glimpses of such a state but it soon fades. We can admit to blankness like any other 'form' of the unknowable, but we cannot expect a reciprocal response. Blankness is a fragile state. There is no guarantee that it will be there the next time we look. We begin to doubt that anything can be repeated.