Pity for the void

This is my kind of late (read: posting it on Monday's class) take on Frederick Turner's visit on Friday. The thought that crept into my head while he was talking was a sort of pity for the void. Nothing is important, because it is full of possibilities. However, as people we sometimes fear these possibilities. Because of this fear, we cannot simply accept the emptiness of nothingness. Out of our pity for the void, we fill the void, all too often negative.

Take for instance, king leer. When he is confronted with "nothing"' he fears that his daughter does not love him. While she means that she has nothing to add, the king fills the nothingness with his fear that he is not loved by his daughter.

Why might we fear nothingness? I think it comes back to some of the things that Turner discussed in his diagram. We associate nothingness with the unknown, chaos, unfamiliar. As people, we aim to make order out of chaos, try to conquer the unfamiliar. In this sense, the void is something that must be overtaken, must be made into something. Once it is made into something, it can be understood. We pity the void because it is unknown and we wish to know it. Though in order to know the void, the nothingness, we must change it into something else, that is change it into something. Thus, the void remains fearful. It remains unknown, because we have fundamentally changed it.

I am wondering though what this does with the boundary between pretty and beautiful. If nothing exists on the border between what is known and what is unknown (or rather, it begins the border) and we change it, are we pushing back the boundaries between what is known and what is unknown, or do we simply incorporate more into the known world without doing anything to the chasm? Are we appreciating the nothingness, or are we simply changing things for our own comfort.