Always look for what’s missing in the ordinary places, where emptiness fills the spaces under tables, inside lampshades, on shelves and the unused cabinets up too high in the kitchen. Nothing is there there, but it isn’t supposed to be. Negative spaces hold up the positive like an armature supports the sculpture from within. We have to have them. Still, I hate—no, I detest—the negative spaces, deep holes of loss where my feelings go, where my ability to feel goes. Under the table felt like privacy when I was a child, but now the pen rolls under, the bracelet, the slip of paper with an important quote, a positive one meant to bring things to light. Under a table is where they go missing. Into the negative spaces is where I go missing. So, how to find myself? How to reach between the cushions shoving my hand down for the paperclip of grief? I need something to hold me together. I need something to bridge the positive and negative spaces, the functional and laid flat by feelings. Perhaps feelings are not a place of being lost. Perhaps they are the armature of the life we see as a table: upright, stable, able to carry the tray where the pen, the hair-tie, and the bracelet sit, not lost at all but collected, cared for. Perhaps the positive requires negative space, covers it, protects it even. Perhaps being lost is only the shadow of being found, and they both exist together attached at the heel like Peter Pan and his shadow, the one that always tried to get away. Maybe my shadow just tries to get away. Maybe I need to chase after and insist it stay with me, securely tucked under the table where I can find it, when I need my shadow—in order to get lost within myself however much I hate to go missing. Karen Jessee Join the conversation: leave a comment. Also, please share Search and Know!
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4 Comments
Lisa Kale
10/26/2020 01:22:05 pm
Lovely Karen, always so lovely.
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Casey Gregg
10/26/2020 10:58:43 pm
Love it. The negative spaces are given value and meaning. And identity. Instead of Nothing they are now Something. Everything, positive and negative, has purpose.
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Steve
10/29/2020 09:11:04 am
It was night and we were walking under the stars he looked up and said ordinarily when we look to the sky and the stars we think of stars as objects far out and vast spaces between them. There is another way we can look at it.
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Sue G
11/5/2020 10:47:56 am
This piece feels like a abstract sculpture in which the empty spaces are just as or more important to the design. I can picture it. It’s beautiful!
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