Right now — with many of us running around trying to decide which particular thing would actually make a difference in someone’s life as opposed to just adding to a mountain of stuff really beside the point — seems like a good time to consider how far apart, or close together, nothing and something are. What we find here could come in handy.
Opposites, you say? Not so fast. Sure, who could argue with Julie Andrews (or, just the other night, Carrie Underwood) when she sang these lines under the moonlight in the arms of Christopher Plummer (or Stephen Moyer, if anyone cares)? “Nothing comes from nothing/ Nothing ever could/ So somewhere in my youth or childhood/ I must have done something good.”
Fine as it may be to pat themselves on their collective backs for long ago good deeds that paid off, the fact is that their good fortune may have arrived out of practically nowhere, nothing, nada. If a whole universe could appear this way, as scientists would have us believe, then why not a true love once in a while?
Maybe you heard about the lecture by the physicist Lawrence Krauss that exploded on YouTube. The guy became such a star (pun intended) from it that he had to write a whole book called A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing. Perhaps he is a bit repetitive in person too, but judging by the number of other books he’s written to bring physics to us common people, he’s probably also plenty smart. And, as it so happens, not shy about expressing his view that – contrary to what the world’s major religions espouse – belief in a creator or a divine intelligence is really not necessary; science can do very well on its own:
The answers that have been obtained – from staggeringly beautiful experimental observations, as well as from the theories that underline much of modern physics – all suggest that getting something from nothing is not a problem. Indeed, something from nothing may have been required for the universe to come into being. (from the Preface)
Now that most of us accept that the Big Bang happened more than 13 billion years ago, kind of like we accept that the sun rises and sets each day, we can get accustomed to the idea that nothing-ness and something-ness are not so much distant relatives as they are siblings born some months apart who may at first look completely different but actually have a lot in common.
So far so good, but does this actually help to alleviate the pressure to shop?
Let’s leave the world of science for a moment and head on over to the world of rap. It just so happens that there is a whole documentary called Something from Nothing which features rappers talking about their craft. It includes a guy named “KRS-One” demonstrating the importance of going right in to your rhymes, dispensing with any set-up. Take a minute to listen here. Persuasive, isn’t it? But maybe this is more like advocating skipping the rapping/wrapping paper and just handing over the goods on Christmas morning; or working up some kind of performance, anything coming directly from the heart and soul, instead of buying some silly thing with lots of packaging. So be it.
Then there’s always Shakespeare, or more precisely, King Lear. Remember this powerful exchange in Act One, Scene Four?
Fool: Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?
Lear: Why, no boy; nothing can be made out of nothing.
Stripped of just about everything he had ever deemed important before, trying to hold onto his mind and losing that
too, Lear soon will have to come to grips with the reality of nothing, and the true nature of love.
The current comic strip writer Patrick McDonnell has carried this theme along to our time; he wrote a wonderful little book called The Gift of Nothing. In it, a cat named Mooch tries to figure out what kind of present to get for his best friend Earl, a dog who has everything. In a moment of brilliance, he decides that giving him a big empty box is just right; after Earl opens it, they recognize that what they have is each other, and the whole beautiful landscape outside. “So Mooch and Earl just stayed still and enjoyed nothing…and everything.”
Sometimes when the culture tells us to focus on new things that we don’t have and must surely need, things that are already in our midst — maybe sitting over there quietly in the corner — jump out at us as being really powerful things. And this, in turn, gets us wondering which stuff is worth what, and why.
The other day I was trying to protect the furniture on our screened porch from the snow, and I re-discovered our totem pole. We got it some years back from the annual elementary school auction in our previous town, and it came along with us to a new house. Where exactly it should go is never clear. A little fuzzy on the details of how it was created in the first place, I asked my almost 15 year old son to remind me last week. He did so in writing:
This was in third grade. We split up into groups and my group was Malcolm, Aidan, Anna and me. We each put in an animal that we wanted. I wanted the bird. Malcolm wanted the bear, Aidan wanted the turtle, and Anna wanted the rabbit. We were given only BZ’s recycling, and paper mache. We took the cans and covered each one with paper mache. Then we glued the cans together. Then we painted each can with eyes and ears so everything was covered. I think the rabbit has added on ears.
This about knocks me right out. The darn totem pole stands there silently with all its colors, telling a whole story about friends at a certain age, working together to make something out of practically nothing. I think I’ll just have it watch over me as I do whatever else really needs doing in these remaining days before Christmas.