Negative Space

Until about fifty years ago the guiding principle with purchasing magazine advertising space was to buy the space your budget suggested and then fill it, as you might a pair of pants, until it began to seem unsightly. But in the 60’s Volkswagen began buying big space and putting remarkably little in it. Thumbing through a magazine you’d recognize a VW ad even before you saw the copy — not so much by what it was as by what it wasn’t. Good exercise for the brain, and somehow reminiscent of the game Battleship where every incorrect guess provides very precise information about where something isn’t.

During the Space Age distance began to be measured in light years; sometimes thousands of them. Even one light year is, of course, impossible to imagine. I found it grounding to think of a light year as the length of time it would take an ant to walk to Argentina.

More recently the concept of black holes was introduced. Black holes aren’t particularly about distance, but getting your mind around a black hole is akin to considering how long it would take an ant to walk to Argentina if you first factor in the length of time required for an ant to realize that it has an interest in visiting Argentina.

And now we know that those black holes are not actually full of nothing, they’re full of mysterious dark matter — yet another concept that has me tripping on the threshold. I find it helpful to consider black holes as swirling vortexes into which all those old VW beetles were drawn.

Meanwhile I’ve become the embodiment of the Battleship game, confidently calling out my insurance agent coordinates only to hear an internal voice say “Nope.” Learning who I am by coming to terms with who I am not. It’s not all bad. Exciting things are brewing.