A Throw of the Dice through Space — Katherine Everitt

[The referenced Rothko paintings are displayed at the end of the essay.]

Where does place end? 

Have you been there? To where your head pokes out beyond all that is known, beyond all that is placed? Have you been beyond place itself?

(“RIEN,” Mallarmé writes, “N’AURA EU LIEU QUE LE LIEU.”) [Note 1]

I ask you again: where does place end?

The answer is simple. Place ends at the horizon. After the horizon, we call that the beyond. And what’s there? Constellations of stars that dance? The purest figurations of beauty? The future entwined with the past?

(“EXCEPTÉ PEUT-ÊTRE,” Mallarmé writes, “UNE CONSTELLATION.”) [Note 2]

What could there be without place? Could we describe placelessness itself? Could we think being without placing it?

(“Sein, reines Sein,” Hegel writes.) [Note 3]

These questions, too, point toward a simple answer. What is beyond place? Nothing but space. Pure, empty, unadulterated, disorienting space.

Beyond what is known, what is named, what is placed, where our equations end, after the last pages of the history book, after the last known acquaintance, before the earliest relative’s name inscribed in the genealogical tree, where language ends, between the mapped fall of atoms, in the uncharted depths of the ocean blue, following the newest invention, after the last bird, before the first breath, after the last star, before the first dwelling, without art, without poems, without you, without me… what lies beyond place?

Space. Pure, empty space.

I. Anguish

(No. 2 by Mark Rothko (1964). A grey box sits in the center of the painting. Around it lies a darker grey. The painting is itself an enframing of emptiness. But it is not just emptiness – the painting enframes a redoubled emptiness.)

Without place, there is only space.

Can you imagine? Pure space? Empty space? The void? Emptiness itself? Can you? Just for a moment, if at all. It is nearly unimaginable. A pure nothingness. 

Imagine: nothing. Careful! Not: “Don’t think.” Imagine nothingness itself. Space itself. The organization of nothingness. The sidebysideness of nothingness.

Try! Come on. Try again for me. How can we maintain the integrity of pure, unspoiled space without filling it in, boxing it up, enframing it? How can we do away with the frame? How can we think nothingness without naming it? Without placing it? How can we think beyond place?

Does thinking nothingness mean not thinking? Let’s try that, then. Let’s try it here. Now. Don’t think! …Well, were you aware of it? Or did it disappear into the blank space between consciousness?

Tell me: when you thought of nothing, when you didn’t think, what was that? Can we name that nothingness?

(“L’angoisse n’est pas sans objet,” Lacan tells his students.) [Note 4]

Did you become anxious in this little thought experiment? Anxiety – angst – confronts the nothingness itself. Anxiety looks into the void. Nothingness slips through its fingers. A rush, a wash of nothingness. There is no up or down. There is no exit sign.

What if this nothingness were to burrow a hole into itself? What if the nothingness redoubled? An emptiness beyond emptiness.

You sit down and write in your diary. You’re missing something. And you know its name. Love.

You want so desperately to be loved, don’t you? An emptiness you’ve named that has emptied itself out once again.

Have you had it before, love?

Ah, you have. But our love, between you and me, that has not yet happened, is entirely unknown to you.

Without love, what is there? Without us? Some promise just out of reach that may never be made. This is not anxiety you feel. You’re not just trapped in the void; the void has wrapped itself around you. The void has constricted your breath. You are yourself emptied out against the void.

Anguish.

Anguish twists the nothingness around you until you’ve been squeezed out. Anguish suffocates you.

The outline of anguish shifts under your fingers. It is an outline of emptiness that denies your caress. How can you know what you haven’t had? How can you feel what you haven’t held? You call her: miss. And you miss her. She’s someone you’ve never met. 

II. Falling

(Untitled (Three Black Squares) by Mark Rothko (1969). Three black boxes are painted on paper. Rothko didn’t often paint on paper – usually it was canvas. The three black boxes lay atop a streaky brownish purple background, creating the illusion of wood. The artificial organicity offsets the pitch black boxes. Which is more despairing? The total darkness or a contrived warmth? It is easy to lose oneself in the darkness that dominates the painting. One can fall into each black box. Staring at one of the boxes, it seems to grow in size. One must look away, or else the darkness takes over the entire frame. Stare long enough and the darkness extends beyond the frame itself.)

You’ve given shape to the nothingness. It has swallowed you whole. And now: you are falling.

(The free-floating, disconnected astronaut summersaults through space. He tumbles – not into the infinite, but – into the indeterminate, per Kubrick. We don’t know where the astronaut goes.) [Note 5]

You’re falling – or are you ascending? – in space. A shortness of breath overcomes you. There is only nothingness and you. You’ve lost all points of orientation. Language has come apart at its seams. Nothing adds on to nothing. Nothing. Nothing. More nothing. The sidebysideness of nothing envelops you. You could never keep track of how much space you’ve pierced. 

Lost in space. Disoriented. No up. No down. Moving, yet still. Beyond movement, really. No North Star. No signage to pass by. Just you and the void.

This must be the space beyond place.

III. Pulling

(Black on Maroon by Mark Rothko (1959). This time it’s a maroon painting with a black box that seems to lay over the maroon. But, this black box is itself cut open, with a rectangle of maroon just off-center on the right-hand side of the black box. The black box is situated in the center-left of the painting, and the cut out sits dead-center in the painting. The background of maroon outlines the entire piece, with a thicker strip framing the right side of the painting. The effect creates two strips of maroon and two strips of black. But neither are really strips; each is a box contiguous with itself and framing the other. The maroon encapsulates the black, so that it appears as if the black contains a hole within itself. The two boxes may be intertwined, may be pushing apart from each other, or may be pulled together. We are looking at the pull of incompletion itself.)

Even the indifference of the void collapses. The nothingness is, afterall, beside itself. You, too, are beside it. Cutting into emptiness. You’ve torn the fabric of space.

When the ancient atomists first imagined an atom in space, they disentangled an entangled world. They imagined atoms falling through space, until: a swerve. Until: one collides with another. 

(“Quod nisi declinare solerent, omnia deorsum, imbris uti guttae, caderent per inane profundum,” Lucretius writes.) [Note 6]

They imagined irreducible atoms and irreducible chance. That which was intimately entwined was divorced, given two separate places. In the footsteps of language itself, they named being and its absence. And that absence, that they named “space,” pulled the atom into its grasp, proving the power of chance. Chance forced the newly named atom to veer off course. Emptiness gave space for the atom to stand beside itself, and veer into its own shadow. And this imperfection, this determination that exceeds determination, the ancients identified as being itself.

You see: the ancient paradox of the atom and the void is not a paradox of being and non-being. It’s a paradox of a being that isn’t (the equally irreducible and excessive atom) and a non-being that is (the named emptiness of space).

You redirect your gaze from the unbound emptiness around you, toward your own self. Here you are. Now, you are not only falling, you are being pulled outside of yourself. You, who were so recently indistinguishable from the emptiness of space, now you draw a line between yourself and space, a shoddily drawn line but a line nonetheless. 

IV. Chance

(Untitled (Black on Grey) by Mark Rothko (1969). Total blackness imperiously dominates the top half of the painting, while a rough and dynamic grey sinks into the bottom half. The grey is denser as it settles toward the bottom, lighter as it crests toward the darkness that looms above. This could be a horizon. The gradations of grey cut into the void. Is it such a damning darkness? The truth is: anything could fall from overhead.)

When Mallarmé throws his dice, it is their suspension in space that transforms them into the symbol of chance itself. This is the space of chance before place.

Space is always a space of potential. Potentiality, afterall, is the promise that nothing is certain. Potentiality is the promise of chance. 

Space is the house of chance.

(Rosencrantz and Guildenstern flip a coin. “Heads. … Heads. Again. Heads. Again. Heads. Again,” Stoppard writes.) [Note 7]

Chance is always unplaced. Once the coin lands on earth, and we hover over this symbol of symbols, once we say “heads,” we give a place to emptiness itself. We inscribe points into emptiness. Heads, tails, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are just as empty as chance, but now we’ve placed emptiness in a particular place. 

Where are you now? You’re still tumbling through space. You, with that funny grin, you are chance itself. Pure potential. Bursting forth.

(“Purpos'd I / know not whither — yet ever full of faith,” Whitman writes.) [Note 8]

You throw a pair of dice into the air. What will it be? Chance transforms into luck: you’ve won. You catch them on your flattened hand. They land snake eyes. Two marks against the void. A placement of emptiness against emptiness. 

Lucretius tells us that “nil posse creari / de nilo.” [Note 9] What if he meant that nothingness itself multiplies? A new nothing emerges.

(“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the new nothing,” Beckett writes.) [Note 10]

The snake eyes look back at you. And you look back at the void. You call it: space. All of that out there, all that is empty, you call: one. 

You place the void itself.

(“A l’unicité selon la différence est ici substituée l’irrémédiable unicité de l’in-différence,” Badiou writes.) [Note 11]

The empty snake eyes become two.

(”Das Umschlagen des Nichts durch seine Bestimmtheit... in ein Affirmatives erscheint dem Bewußtsein, das in der Verstandesabstraktion feststeht, als das Paradoxeste,” Hegel writes.) [Note 12]

The edges of nothingness harden. Chance actualizes. Pure nothing, pure being, become. 

V. Place

(No. 5/No. 2 by Mark Rothko (1950). A canary yellow background peaks out to frame the painting. The top half features a streaky yellow mustard box, itself topped with a sunflower yellow horizontal rectangle, resembling masking tape, as if holding up the yellow mustard box like a painting in its own right. Just below the middle, a crude coral red horizontal rectangle interrupts the yellows. The red seems to orient the whole painting around itself. A stake in the ground. Below it, a streaky orange box seems to simply indicate “below” and nothing more. The red dominates the painting. But even this marker contains the trace of something unnameable, something that structures placemaking itself, a few yellow lines that crest like a mountain top, holding a place for the indeterminate background amidst the red center.)

From empty, open space to a particular place, chance transforms into actuality. We transform it. We place it. In its constriction, in its localization, we separate the once entwined branches of being and non-being.

From space, anything is possible. This is why, if something is really going to happen, if Neils Bohr is to deliver his paper on uncertainty, if Van Gogh is to paint his self-portrait, if the Parisian peasants are to storm the Bastille, if you and I are to fall in love, then we must bring the complete openness of chance back down to earth. We must place space. We must transform the open space of chance into a particular, evental place.

(“Qu’entendons-nous ici par : « avoir lieu » ? Que le transcendantal, en tant même qu’il refuse toute métaphysique dogmatique, est indissociable de la notion de point de vue,” Meillassoux writes.) [Note 13]

You’re traversing the impossible, or rather, all possibility compounded. The emptiness is dense with chance. Everything is impossible and possible all at once.

What you need is a contingency. And that’s exactly what I am. An outline appears on the horizon, shaped in such a way that could be any way, but it is this way, this shape, my shape. And, to you, it is the perfect shape.

(What makes a perfect stranger… perfect? Wong Kar-wai asks again and again.) [Note 14]

We hurdle toward each other. A star appears beneath us. The perfect triangulation: you, me, and the star beneath our feet. This is what we need: a star to drive our stake into the ground.

Don’t miss it.

VI. Force

(Blue Divided by Blue by Mark Rothko (1966). Reminiscent of a water color, blue bleeds into itself in this painting. The enframing background oscillates between light teal and white, revealing faint brush strokes. It is two dark blue teal boxes that dominate the top and bottom of the painting, and between them, a medium-hued teal rectangle divides the boxes as well as the painting. Every stroke cries into its adjacent territory. The two big teal boxes are drawn together, and yet, they seem to be unable to meet. Perhaps they need the mediating rectangle. Perhaps meeting is impossible. The painting is no doubt melancholic, but it may just show us the best of an impossible situation.)

What draws us together? Our own weights. Gravity shows us that our center is not inside ourselves.

(“Corpora cum deorsum recturm per inane feruntur, / ponderibus propriis incerto tempore ferme / incertisque loci spatiis decellere paulum” Lucretius writes.) [Note 15]

Before place, there is force. The atom is drawn into space itself. You and I are drawn together. Can we think force without placing it?

(“La force est impure, parce qu’elle est toujours placée,” Badiou writes.) [Note 16]

Force draws chance toward place. 

Force shrinks possibilities just before all coalesces. Force pulls us together, and we will spend a lifetime wondering why.

You and I move toward the star. Will we land on it?

VII. Freedom

(Yellow, Cherry, Orange by Mark Rothko (1947). An early Rothko piece. He’s experimenting with form here. Nothing is neatly organized in this canvas. The orange rectangle in the top third both hovers above and bleeds into its own orange background. White-grey lines cut up the painting. A cherry red box dominates the bottom two thirds, itself overlaid with one orange-red and one white vertical rectangle. To the left of the white rectangle is a vertical white brush stroke revealing the cherry red beneath it. A yellow line snakes along the bottom. Which way is up in this painting? It is totally disorienting. It is serious in its reconsideration of its own space. It opens Rothko’s work up toward a new horizon, one that we can retroactively trace toward his boxier, organized, oriented tableaus. Here, for a moment, he is truly free.)

Is our meeting determined simply by atoms moving in space? A contingency, that only once we meet, only once our fingers intertwine, only once we breathe lip to lip, only once we say yes, only then can we look back and say that accident was necessary? That we may confuse it with fate?

(“Quamquam vis extera multos pellat et invitos cogat procedere saepe praecipitesque rapi, tamen esse in pectore nostro quiddam quod contra pugnare obstareque possit?,” Lucretius asks.) [Note 17]

Force and chance originate before place. And freedom? Does it not need space to roam? Against constriction, against confinement, wind in your hair.

Before place, before the openness of it all, before being and non-being, before mediation, there is the unmediated impulse that places the stars in the sky, that places you and me in touch with this star, as you direct your swerve upon its surface.

Freedom is the opening of space. Freedom is the creation of a new place. 

When you look at me, across the indeterminacy of space, you have the chance to be free. To say yes. To open a new world. To designate a new place. To arrange a new world together.

VIII. Yes

(Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red by Mark Rothko (1949). This might be the most beautiful of all the Rothko’s. A light yellow background enframes the subject matter. A rectangle is split into a red-violet that I might wear on my lips, a dividing black line, and below orange streaks lay over bright yellow. A translucent white is painted around the rectangle, and on the top right and left, outside the rectangle, are two bright red vertical lines, holding the whole piece together. Two lines looking at each other, pressing the world between them, saying “yes.” All is possible between them. The black line keeps the world centered, but the two red lines hold the world between them.)

You land on the star. Can it be the place? You suspect it has a good view. Will you say “yes”? To love? Will you reorient your whole world? Will you open a new world?

(“Θαλής, που, όταν, αστρονοµώντας χαι κοιτάζοντας προς τα πάνω, έπεσε σε πηγάδι,” Plato writes.) [Note 18]

What a good choice you make. You do say “yes.”  You close your eyes and let gravity take you in. Feet plant into the ground. There we go. Now you have an up. Space takes its rightful place – in relation to the star and to all that there is. All can again be placed. Possibilities collapse decisively. There is up. There is down.

And now, you can get down to the hard work of it. Organization. Reorganization. All these stars above need names! And what will you call the one you’ve landed on? How will you name yourself? Charts, graphs, equations abound. There is logic to your organization. But there is always more to do! More to name. More to sweep this way or that.

You do it out of love. Name all the places. Always more beyond. Always more below. Always more space. Your new world is open to you.

“This is the meeting place,” you say. “This is where we planted the star’s first tree into the coffee brown earth. This is north. This is the place your chesnut hair fell across your face as the wind from the southeast blew over your red-violet lips.”

You and I, together, watch one star move toward our new horizon. The sky explodes in color. The space overhead lights up with the promise of what’s to come.

IX. Promise

(A series of untitled paintings (five black canvases and three black canvas triptychs) by Mark Rothko (1964-1967) line the octagonal room of the Rothko Chapel. Here, we have a place. This place is marked by delimitations of the void. Black paintings look at each other, inviting the audience to lose themselves as they turn outward toward the void, away from the anchoring center. The space contains a promise. There is potentiality, there is emptiness, but here, you stand upon a ground. Will you affirm the ground, or will you wander, reorient, and plant your feet firmer in some new place?)

Beyond place, there is something in between being and non-being. Something waiting to be born. Something between life and death. Something that may never be born. Some promise that hangs in the air. Full of everything. Full of nothing. A nothing of everything.

The half-empty glass may well be the optimist’s glass. What will fill it? It holds the promise of promise itself.

(“Dans ce vase, il y a tout. Le vase, ça suffit, le rapport de l'homme à l'objet et au désir est là tout entier, sensible et survivant,” Lacan tells us his students.) [Note 19]

Why are promises always empty? It is their emptiness that defines them. Each promise a particular shape of emptiness. We hold the emptiness in our hand, press it against our hearts, and breathe into it, “I promise.” A promise is an intimate nothingness. Between being and non-being, it is an empty space that prepares a place for what could come. Between freedom and determination, it is a determination of freedom, to fill an empty space with concrete points arranged in such a way to render the promise and the space fulfilled.

“I promise,” you say with big eyes, “to love you forever.” These words could not be emptier, and they could not be fuller. A promise of pure possibility crosses your lips, that no matter what happens, your love will remain. You’ve taken all that is possible into your palm, the open possibility of possibility itself, pressed the openness between both hands, and molded this emptiness into a particular shape. A promise is a commitment to a particular enframement of possibility. A promise shapes the chaos of chance. A promise shapes empty space.

Beyond place, there is pure potentiality.

Note 1 “NOTHING WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE BUT THE PLACE.” Mallarmé, Stéphane (1897) “Un coup de dès jamais n’abolira le hasard.” Republished in 1914 by La Nouvelle Revue Française. 

2  “EXCEPT PERHAPS A CONSTELLATION.” Ibid. 

3  “Being, pure being.” Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1817) Wissenschaft der Logik. Republished in 1986 by Suhrkamp Verlag. p. 82.

4 “Anxiety is not without object.” Jacques, Lacan (1963) Séminaire X: L’Angoisse. Seuil. p. 187.

5 Kubrick, Stanley (1968) 2001: A Space Odyssey. Warner Bros.

6 “Unless inclined to swerve, all things would fall, right through the deep abyss like drops of rain.” Translated by A. E. Stallings. In Lucretius (1st Century BC) The Nature of Things. Republished by Penguin Classics in 2007. Lines 220-221; the Latin is quoted in (1864) Titi Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex. Edited by H. A. J. Munro. Volume 1. Republished by Cambridge University Press in 2009. Lines 221-222.

7 Stoppard, Tom (1967) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Faber and Faber. p. 1-2.

8 Whitman, Walt (1892) “In Cabin’d Ships at Sea.” Leaves of Grass: The Complete Deathbed Edition. Republished in 2012 by CreateSpace. p. 2.

9 “Nothing can be made from nothing.” Lucretius. Translated by A. E. Stallings. Line 155; Latin from Titi Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex. Edited by H. A. J. Munro. Lines 155-156.

10  Beckett, Samuel (1938) Murphy. Republished in 1973 by Pan Books Limited. p. 5. 

11 “An irremediable unicity based on in-difference is herein substituted for unicity based on difference.” Translated by Oliver Feltham in the 2007 republication of Being and Event by Bloomsbury. p. 82; Badiou, Alain (1988) L'être et l'événement. Seuil. p. 82.

12 “The overturning of nothing through its determinateness… into an affirmative appears to consciousness as the greatest paradox, thus establishing the abstraction of understanding.” Translation my own. Hegel. Wissenschaft der Logik. p. 108.

13  “What do we mean by ‘taking place’? We mean that the transcendental, insofar as it refuses all metaphysical dogmatism, remains indissociable from the notion of a point of view.” Meillassoux, Quentin. Translated by Ray Brassier in (2006) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Republished by Continuum in 2011. p. 24; From Meillassoux (2006) Après la finitude: Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence. Second ed. Seuil. p. 45.

14  Perhaps this is best exemplified in his 1994 film, Chungking Express. Criterion.

15  “When bodies fall through empty space / Straight down, under their own weight, at a random time and place, / They swerve a little.” Lucretius. Translated by A. E. Stallings. Lines 217-219; Latin from Titi Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex. Edited by H. A. J. Munro. Lines 217-219.

16  “Force is impure, because it is always placed.” Badiou, Alain (1982) Theorie du sujet. Éditions du Seuil. p. 56.

17  “Even though a force outside them may propel / A crowd, sometimes stampeding them against their will, pell-mell, / Yet there is something in our chest can fight back and can stand.” Lucretius. Translated by A. E. Stallings. Lines 278-280. She notably drops the question mark from the original text; Latin from Titi Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex. Edited by H. A. J. Munro. Lines 276-280.

18  “Thales, who, while stargazing and looking up, fell into a well.” Πλάτων (4th Century BC) Θεαίτητος. Republished by Κάκτος in 1992. p. 167.

19  “In the vase, there is everything. The vase suffices. The relation between man to the object and desire is entirely there, sensible and surviving. ” Lacan Séminaire X: L’Angoisse. p. 217.

***

Katherine Everitt is a philosopher, writer, poet, and artist residing in Brooklyn. She is primarily a scholar of Hegel. Her research centers around the ontology of space-itself, that is, around the paradox of emptiness and its immanent calling-forth of difference. You can follow her on Twitter @katherineveritt, and you can check out her work on linktr.ee/katherineveritt.