We can only be within ourselves when we know the place others posses within us. We can never be free of the burdens imposed, permanently or temporarily, by the boundaries of power or relationships.
Each day I try to unravel the interwoven influences that place, people and objects impose on my search for emptiness.
Why do I search for emptiness?
It is a place of clarity.
It is a place that reveals what I need to leave alone and that which I need to embrace.
It is a place that, as Nietzsche advocates, “overruns all values” for values are imposed by the boundaries we choose to erect around our own superimposed personal typologies.
Emptiness is divested of all theory; and reality. It is a place that allows us to explore who we want to be and not who we are supposed to be. I find solace in Wittgenstein’s quote “Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical (meaning deprived of sense).” He follows this with “A thought is a proposition with a sense.”
For me emptiness is nonsensical. It is a place where I can sketch without remembering why. Where I can draw without asking who will care? Where I can paint to discover not reveal. Alain Badiou states so well in his book Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, “…it is this ontological construction that we ought to situate Wittgenstein’s radical effort to render possible the sovereignty of the mystical element.”
My profession, architecture, is about fulfillment; about filling voids. I am now leaving this continual effort to fill space with ideas manifest as building. I want to find emptiness which will enable (and teach) me how to fulfill my mystical expressions.
