The Null Theory

At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago I had an instructor who, when exasperated, would rip the charcoal from my hand and with quick, bold strokes reduce my rendering to scribble. "Space is everything," he would shout. "Never forget that you are drawing on both sides of the line!" He meant, of course, that just as a figure is defined and shaped by its peripheral line, so is the space where the figure is not. In other words, what isn't there is as important to the whole as what is.

While his pedagogical methods may have rattled my confidence, they also alerted me to the concept of Null—a theory I constantly confirm by looking above, beside, and beyond what is obviously there.

The British do it well. Observing our boat's heavy mooring rope frayed to a thread, a friend from London once commented, "I say, old dear, your stern line is not what it once was!"

Every navigator recognizes "the null" as the exact position at which no radio signal is received. Every employee understands it is the work he does not do that gets the boss' attention. Every bird watcher appreciates the lack of fabric that makes for a three-star bikini.

As artist Andrew Wyeth once explained, "It's not what you put in but what you leave out that counts." How cacophonous "The Emperor Concerto" would be had not Beethoven included rests—the places without music. "Less is more" shaped the poetry of Robert Browning and later the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Centuries after Shakespeare crafted Much Ado About Nothing by selectively omitting certain words, Robert Frost recognized that "The Road Not Taken" had "made all the difference."

Isn't Michelangelo's David simply what was left once the rest of the marble was chiseled away? What is a moon crater but a place where something is not—an eclipse but an absence of light?

And what does the Null Theory have to do with me? Where I do not go determines where I am; what I opt not to eat shapes my body. Absence, I find, is the key to being a good mother-in-law, and in my own marriage, it is often what remains unsaid that keeps the peace.

As for writer's block—it's nothing more than the Null Theory gone amok. The lack of an acceptance letter from Glimmer Train, the missing second half of my novel, the dearth of ideas for a new short story, the blank screen in front of me all seem to verify the yawning void of my talent. At such times drawing on both sides of the line seems like a matter of life or death.