The Blank Spot Between Two Words.
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A case for the importance of the space, between our words.
Often we don’t need long passages to give us the gist of a story...it can be done in as little as just two words and that space, the space that exists around those words. That small little space can be filled with expectation, wonder, excitement, fear, love…that space is where we hold our breaths, or pause, but yet all it is, is blankness…an indefinable moment in time of pure intuition, guesswork and imagination. An expression in that given moment of time in reaction to the existence of nothing, or more confusingly, in the absence of something…the complexity of this space is vast and made up of outside influences…yet always able to hold it’s own purity.
A moment in the void or of positive emptiness, a lapse of thought, there is so many ways to describe it, but yet, apart from religious people, artists and musicians, who are known to also focus on the blank spaces in between things…in writing, this little single character of space, which can hold so much, goes by totally unnoticed, unspoken of, our eyes and minds have been trained to skip this space completely, on autopilot.
Let's take a moment to celebrate those tiny little spaces between two words, which can spark off the imagination, especially on a platform like this, that makes such use of words. Let's look closer and focus on 2-word combinations such as…Lovers Hugged. Dawn Came. Mission Launched. Game Over… The combinations are endless, but in those in-between spaces, someone like a painter recognises the opportunity that space could occupy and given their artistic license, it can be seen as a space for something unique, a space that can be filled with your heart's desire. And just like with those artforms, in writing too, the words that surround the space give that space energy, they taint it with a mood, a feeling, an idea!
And just like there is a contextual argument to be made for the all white, black or blue monochrome paintings in our history that made it into our history books, the experience is about the subtleties the work creates…and so there is an argument to be made for the spaces between words. This is an old idea, the search to break things down to their simplest of forms has existed for a long time, and artists to this day are finding ways to breathe new life…
