Yesterday, on the flight home, I was sitting by the window, as always. I like photographing the sky, the lines of fields dissolving below, the ragged edges of the coastline, the clouds seen first from underneath and then from above, that shift where landscape stops being a place and becomes a shape. My neighbour, amused, asked what I was looking for, turned as I was toward the emptiness.
I answered, a little clumsily, that I didn’t quite know, that it was perhaps the emptiness itself, precisely, that I was photographing, even though I have never thought of the sky as empty. Quite the opposite: between the variety of matter that makes it up, the whole range of light, clarity, darkness, density, weightlessness — there is nothing there that resembles absence.
That was enough to start a conversation. He told me about his work on the structure of the atom, and at one point, almost in passing, he mentioned the space between the nucleus and the electron, the gap we tend, wrongly, to picture as passive emptiness, an absence waiting to be filled. It isn’t energy, he reminded me, nor a force: it’s a structural feature of the atom, without which the atom simply wouldn’t exist in this form. Nothing fills it, and nothing could fill it without destroying the structure itself, no more, I thought, than the sky was empty just because no word had yet named it.
I found myself thinking, almost against my will, of something psychoanalysis has always tried to bring to light: that we don’t become ourselves by joining two halves that a void would otherwise keep apart, but because there is, from the very start, something that divides us before we even know how to say “I.” Lacan called this the division of the subject. And that lack is never pure nothingness: it has texture, presence, not unlike that sky which was never empty. Yet it’s often as emptiness that people describe it in session, in all sorts of different ways that come down to the same thing: wanting to fill that gap, treating it as a miscalculation, a flaw to be corrected.
We kept talking until landing, he about physics, I about psychoanalysis, never quite agreeing on what we were each looking at, he, a space no force can fill; I, a sky that was never empty and that, perhaps, more than any shared insight, is what stayed with me as we stepped off the plane.