Prick of the Spindle: Nonfiction: Morris: Nothing in Particular

Nothing in Particular
by Scott Morris

A witty remark proves nothing.

—Voltaire

As I hope you already inferred from the title, this essay is about nothing in particular. While discussing nothing I want to talk about how sometimes when I am tired and I want to say something in class—something witty and educated, something that will show the teacher and the other students that I read all of the assignment, that I have applicable past experience, which I will so expertly bring into the class discussion—nothing comes out of my mouth, and instead I forget all the vocabulary of the English language, while words jumble around in my mind. I also want to talk about how I barely escaped Ashton, Idaho, a few weeks ago. I’m going to say a few things that I think I learned from my mom. I would like to say everything about how much I like squirrels, but I won’t, because if I brought them up they could take over the whole essay. Besides, they have nothing to do with this essay.

I should also admit that I realize nothing is a hopeless word. We all learned in first grade writing, if not in preschool, that thing is not an acceptable word to use in a paper. It tells your readers nothing about what you are trying to say. Use something more specific, was always the teachers’ advice. If you mean peach, say peach. If you mean the quadratic formula, say quadratic formula. The word nothing itself reminds me, every time I write it: “No thing! Don’t use it!” And if thing is a no go, then nothing is a double negative, which I think is second grade grammar.

A few weekends ago some friends (Tim, Andy, Jessie, and Jake) and I visited Tim’s grandparents’ farm in Ashton, Idaho. It had been snowing since we arrived late Friday night, but it was coming down particularly hard on Sunday. When we got out of church there were another three or four inches of snow on the car, and the flakes were getting bigger. We drove back to the farm house slowly. There was no almost visibility; we might as well have been driving through a white void as we went out to the farm house. The picture is one I took from the side window. I hope you notice the disappearance of the sky and ground. Nothing to see but flakes of snow. We arrived safe, though, since we discovered the road was marked on both sides by small posts which were not quite snowed over yet. Later that night, Tim’s grandparents, and his aunt and uncle decided to go out again, and they got stuck on their way back.

“If we’re not back by 6:30, call the sheriff,” Tim’s grandfather said, mostly in jest. At around 6:45 we got a call from a neighbor. Tim’s grandparents had stopped by and, according to the neighbor, should have been home by now. We tried to call them on their cell phone. No answer. We were sure that they were fine. Around 7:30, when we were actually thinking about calling the sheriff, they finally called us. They got stuck in the snow not far away; could Tim drive the truck out to them? Tim, Jessie, and Andy, natives to cold weather and smart enough to bring snow clothes into the negative 20 degree weather and blizzard, put on their gear and charged into the night. I had nothing to offer, except that I lent Andy my gloves—the only warm items I brought—because in his haste he couldn’t find his. I watched as they got the truck, and then later when they resorted to the tractor with the snow blower attached. I watched from the farm house window, thinking how lame it was that I was doing nothing, that I could do nothing. I tried to justify that I was a Southern California boy, used to paradisiacal San Diego weather, not Idaho blizzards. But surely there was something I could do. It didn’t help that earlier in the day Tim’s grandfather had said how all ten of their children were raised on the farm, and they knew how to work. My dad taught me to work, I was thinking. I helped him file, keep accounts, assemble mass mailings. And my mom, she had me vacuuming every Saturday before I could even think about cartoons.

Eventually I got up the courage and put on my one coat—a nice leather thing, perfect for those bone-chilling 57 degree San Diego nights—and my tennis shoes. I went outside and started walking to where the snow blower was working. Andy came up the snow-covered driveway and told me to go back inside. “There’s nothing you can do,” he said, handing back my gloves. “I was just standing there myself.” So we both went inside, and when the whole family was back inside and warm we had hot chocolate and wassail to celebrate the safe return.

Thinking more about the word itself, and how it is used, I think it is ironic that nothing should be a noun. A noun, the colloquial definition goes, is a person, place, or thing. Nothing certainly is not a person or a place. It is definitively not a thing, and yet this is how it is used grammatically. Really it’s just an idea. Which means it doesn’t exist, or rather exists only in our heads and on paper so that we have a notion of it. The early Babylonians did not have a notion of it. They had no way of using zero as we understand it. Instead they left a space where we would now put a zero, nothing to represent nothing. But that isn’t good enough for modern thinkers. Maybe it is a sign of advanced thinking that nothing—absence—can so certainly be something—substance. There is nothing here, we say. Poets love such ambiguities. Is equals existence. Nothing equals zip, zilch, nil, null, zero, empty. And yet “There is nothing” still makes sense whether it is nothing to hear, see, do, read, watch, eat. We put something where nothing exists. I recognize that it is a good thing to differentiate between 1 or 10 or 100, especially on my paycheck, but outside of mathematics, why the obsession?

It may be because pure nothing does not exist, and recognizing that, we are forced to emphasize that something does exist where nothing is evident. The closest thing to nothing that I can think of is absolute zero, the point at which all energy is gone from a system and no matter is moving. But even this is just a theory, and has never been seen. It may not exist, but it has been given a name anyhow, so that when it is discovered it will already be known and placed neatly in our minds. Space closely approaches absolute zero at about 4°K, with the Boomerang Nebula being the coldest known place in the universe at a record 1°K. Almost nothing, but not quite—an honorable mention for the attempt though.

Vacuum also draws images of nothingness. The ideal vacuum means nothingness, but real world vacuums aren’t nothing, they are just less. Significantly less pressure, less matter. Not no pressure or no matter. Space is also called a vacuum, suggesting that it is emptiness, but who can look at the stars and say that there is nothing in space? Is it because the stars are farther apart than we are used to? How close do objects have to be before the space between stops having nothing and suddenly contains both objects?

The truth is that there is something to eat, watch, read, do, see, hear; it just might not be what we want it to be. My mother taught me this lesson well enough:

“Mom, there’s nothing to eat.”

“Have an apple.”

“There’s nothing on TV.”

“Read a book.”

“I have nothing to write about.”

I feel like I should mention, before I ramble too far, that there is a difference between “nothing to do” and “boredom.” I learned this lesson early. I am rather fond of having nothing to do. I think all too frequently people have far too much to do, and do they really get anything accomplished? I am not sure, maybe, but I like to think not, because their frantic nothing justifies my undisguised nothing. When I was a kid and would lie around the house in the most comfortable couch and the book I was reading, either finished or grown dull, would drop to the floor, I would just stare at the ceiling. My mom would then ask, “Are you bored? I can find something [meaning chores] for you to do.”

“No.” was always the response. Nothing trumps something every time. Society, however, does not share my personal opinion. For example, you run into an old friend you haven’t seen in a while. After the normal pleasantries they ask:

“So what are you doing these days?”

“Nothing much,” you reply. (Or at least, this is how I reply). You (I) politely ask what they are doing.

“I am so busy…” and then they list the societies they belong to, the home and family improvement projects, the calendars they are juggling, their job, their classes, their dog, and onward. Who wins the conversation? All judges point to the busy one. While I politely give my condolences that they can’t seem to find time for themselves, it is understood that they are the superior being. Still, I always leave thinking I am in the better situation, the condolences polite and heartfelt. I like having time to do nothing.

Maybe the busy bee wins because everyone knows I lied. I say there is nothing, and yet there is something. Reading is something. Writing essays is certainly something. Reading a good book and then just staring at the ceiling while you think about it is something. I remember the first time that staring at the ceiling after reading a book wasn’t just something, it was absolutely necessary. I was in eighth grade and I had just read The Giver. The ending baffled me; I was mad and delighted at the same time. I put the book down and stared at it first, and then at the ceiling and back at the book. It may have looked like I was doing nothing, but there was something going on inside me. The book was changing how I thought about good literature. Even though I was already someone who read all the time, this was my first glimpse at how good reading is for the soul, how moving and complicated books can be.

But still, we say there is nothing when really there is always something. Maybe it’s something we don’t want to repeat. Maybe it’s something we don’t care to mention because it is dull or uninteresting in present conversation with present company.

“What did you do at work today?”

“Nothing.”

“What did you just say?”

“Nothing.”

“What is your essay about?”

“Nothing.”

(This area intentionally left blank. )

The theory of abiogenesis, now commonly called spontaneous generation, was a common misconception that held sway from at least the time of Aristotle until the 1700s. Spontaneous generation holds that some complicated organic life forms are generated by the decomposition of other organic matter. Aristotle noted that aphids came from dew; maggots were generated by rotting meat; mice came from the old hay; and crocodiles were spawned by fallen logs in swamps. Essentially, it was a something-from-nothing approach to life.

When the first scientists began challenging these “vulgar errors,” others lashed back. “To question [spontaneous generation] is to question reason,” Alexander Ross wrote. The textbook experiment (and this was in my middle school, high school, and college biology books) shows a flask with meat in it. When the flask is left uncovered, maggots appear on the meat. When the flask is covered completely, nothing happens. When the flask is covered with a semi-permeable covering (meaning that air was still passing through it) maggots appeared on the covering, but not in the meat. Through these means Francesco Redi determined that maggots did not come from rotting meat, but rather omne vivum ex ovo; “Every living thing from an egg.” Or, as Rodgers and Hammerstein lyricized:

Nothing comes from nothing,
Nothing ever could.

I like that zero is the shape it is. 0. Just a line containing nothing, as though by encircling it in a line of something, anything, we might understand it. We know exactly what isn’t there in the center. I also like that in tarot cards the No. 0 card is the Fool and that the Fool is the one who experiences the brunt of the tarot story. The Fool is the cosmic adventurer, the perfect anthropomorphizing of existentialism, a symbol that the seeker needs to remove everything else from himself and start at the beginning again, to look at himself from his very core, with nothing else to distract him.

But I would hesitate to say that there is nothing at the core.

Common phraseology has it that, “In the beginning was the void,” or “In the beginning there was nothing.” But that isn’t true. Genesis says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” There was God, and immediately a place for him to live and a place for us. Even secular science says there was something there; the Big Bang was an explosion of condensed matter. It may have been the only speck of matter in all of existence, but it was there tainting the nothingness of space with its inherent somethingness. Which was the superior, space or that condensed matter? Is it Nothing ruined by Something, or Something surrounded by Nothing? They Might Be Giants puts the question like this:

Particle Man, Particle Man,
…Is he a dot, or is he a speck?
When he’s underwater does he get wet?
Or does the water get him instead?
Nobody knows, Particle Man.

They also say that nobody knows the answer, so maybe I should give up now. But even if I can’t answer the question, I still want to know which was more potent, the nothing or the something, and how the something had the audacity to BANG so that something permeates everything and nothing can be found nowhere.

I still haven’t talked about wanting to say something when nothing is coming out. On the tip of the tongue, the expression goes, but tumbling around in the mind might be a better description. Tumbling isn’t the right word either, because when rocks or jelly beans are put through tumblers they come out polished. When my words flee and play hide and seek in my mind I look foolish, not shiny. This morning I had the experience twice during the course of a single class. It was my research class. We were giving group presentations, spontaneously thrust upon us. I looked up the information in the textbook and took detailed notes, but when I got to the front of the class I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to talk about. I looked at my notes; I had forgotten to write down the word I was supposed to be defining. I had all the specifications of what it entailed, what one should do to accomplish it successfully, but I had no word for the thing itself. I stammered. Nothing came to mind; I just stared at the spot on my notes where I should have written something. The word, my group mate whispered to me, was method. I was supposed to describe the word method.

Later in the class I raised my hand to say something funny in response to what scientists do when their research doesn’t go the way they want it to. The teacher called on me, and the words wouldn’t come out. They lay flat in my mind and the whole class was silent while I tried to speak. I had indicated I had something to say and once that first something is articulated, something more is expected. To give nothing at that point is unacceptable. But there was truly nothing there, and the joke fell flat like week-old soda. Eventually I eked out that they put suggestions for further study in their Evaluation section. It didn’t even come out funny.

I have nothing else to say. I hope you see the lie in that. I could go on for pages, really. On and on. I could talk about nothing ad nauseum, but I won’t, because, while there might be something left to say, I’m done.

Scott Morris is a native of San Diego, and is currently a senior at Brigham Young University. His fiction and poetry has previously appeared in Inscape. Scott enjoyes gardening, and is a squirrel enthusiast.