The nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

This is quite an appropriate poem by Wallace Stevens, given the date is January 9th, 2007, and this is the first day since late November that snow is falling in my part of Ontario. I think the most interesting line is the one he concludes with. This seems to be quite a task, at present, to behold the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. To me, this is the place where stories emerge, the ambiguous and murky place that is both outside and inside ourselves, demanding to find expression through words. At the same time, however, it is a nothing zone that cannot ever really be quantified, which is good. Terms like alpha state, seratonin, baggage and reference have little power when they are compared to what Stevens is asking.

There is a line in Robert Bringhurst's new book The Tree of Meaning in which he states the old star maps of Babylon and Alexandria are full of stories, with stars that sometimes overlap and sometimes have gaps between, to which he says, "They are full of fictions, full of stories, but the sweet wind of reality blows through them." These stories change, however, when astronomers sought to arrange star maps in order, accounting not for the richness in the stories of the stars, but in a celestial reasoning that brought us to our current understanding of the night sky. I can only hope that whenever this change happened that it occured at about the same time a more important question was being asked, and that is, "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

The overlapping of ideas, experiences and voices can quickly lead us to stories of great cacophony, the kind of stories with 18 hour shelf lives in the newsroom that by their very nature must have further negative contribution to breathe more life in them. Resolution in these stories is bittersweet. There is no sweet wind of reality, and there is a definitive something that leads us away from the nothing that is not and the nothing that is. In this world, only 1 angel is on the head of a pin.

I believe the overlapping of waves, snow and time provides a foundation for the best stories to stand on. They survive in the recesses of the people who best know what time is, and what time is not.