Blank Spaces
essay by Peter Amos
My mind wanders in the shadow of the Chrysler Building, kicking gravel among gleaming rebar skeletons. I never thought I’d have an office job, but this one has charms others don’t. John Coltrane fills my headphones, largely uninterrupted. A mutt with bat’s ears and a tennis ball fixation rolls exuberantly in the musty carpet by my desk. I still wonder.
The gray of ballpoint pens and spreadsheets is universal, the setting nearly irrelevant. Pencil holders and scotch tape grip the mind in odd ways. Monotony makes plain the lost and effusive things. Thoughts, a beating heart or ticking second hand, the other side of the translucent dusty pane, all float in an ocean of copy toner. All choke under bundled pages.
The paper on the bookcase at home is bound and familiar. Spines yawn, thick with years, and crisp pages smell like the attic in my parents’ church; stale but sweet. Such books are filled with heavy paper. Others with thin, elegant, uniform slices that pack a dozen pages into the space of one. Books do justice to their contents. We don’t deal in paper like that.
I print stacks of fluttery bright stuff; shove it into folders, staple it in piles, scribble, crumple, toss, forget. Copy paper smushes easily in clenched knuckles and weighs too little to follow a proper arc through the air. It can’t support permanence. Endless curls, loops, and dots sit passively in rows. Percentages and numbers tangle on Excel trellises. I don’t print to remember. Figures cling only briefly to the present, then fade quietly into an anonymous forest of folders and tabs or disappear in the oblivion of the bin. I print stacks on Thursdays; arrange inviting charts and a list of bullet points, highlight strategically, make notes in the margins. Two hours later, they’re shredded into pulp or lost in a pile of forgotten statistics.
That flimsy printer sheet, dabbed with ink, is a universal truth of offices. Trading desks on Water Street, advert towers on Madison Avenue, publishers in the glittery boxes across the East River linked by perishability. I loathe copy paper. I imagine it in mountains on Staten Island. White collar tumbleweed drifts near the Goethals or smolders in incinerators floating downriver into the Jersey haze of methane, exhaust, and stink. Invoices and spreadsheets insulate the business of the thing from the thing itself. Vacuum cleaners, livestock futures, and baby formula arranged in bars between axes look identical. Graphs can’t transmit conversation, vibration, or elbow grease.
Everything dies. People, animals, momentum, batteries, chances, fire, ideas, and enthusiasm drift off into that good night. Wisps of smoke, air and emptiness, illusions, memories, and the spaces between light in the darkness are all matter of course. I know that life is fuzzy, smeared and smudged, but the disposability curdles on my tongue. Printing implies permanence. It’s an act of creation; deliberate and transformative. I arrange pixels and bring them into the solid physical world. From the void, I summon this credit memo! But I’ll never look at it again. Copy that receipt, file that sales report, duplicate those invoices.
Thrown away. Useless. Lost. The waste is staggering.
Of course the real outrage should be the physical waste. We devour how many virgin acres to fill a file cabinet? How many smokestacks belch rotten eggs into small town air to facilitate a sales meeting? But the waste is symbolic too. How much mental power drifts into the smog over Newark? Could I redirect the neural capacity I haul in bags to the dumpster? I waste hours on an illusion of permanence. Perhaps self-importance, and not waste, is the real crime. Absent the conviction that they’ll matter on some unspecified occasion in the distant future, I wouldn’t print the damn figures in the first place. The reams would gather dust in glossy packages.
But I manage a fondness for neon sticky notes. I keep seven or eight pads underneath the brushed chrome of my computer. Four or five little squares typically adorn the screen.
“Quotes for Japan”
“Photography for Lisa”
“RECEIVABLES!”
Some employ familiar dialects.
“RE: order status”
Others are written in code.
“#3111 color sample. Do you have it? Can you get it? Can I have it? Can I be done?”
Sticky notes have integrity. Their neon curl and flimsy adhesion brook no pretense. They fade and peel and drift, neon leaves in the eerie stillness of a low-pressure system. They never last, nor are they supposed to. Pebbles of hot pink and canary yellow pepper the recycling bin but don’t offend like the crumpled white in which they hide.
Paper is a revolution; a place where ideas live. The mathematicians of ancient Babylon and Mesoamerica tell me with the concept of zero that empty space changes everything. Creases and folds of a cortex or hemisphere are unspooled and rearranged in serifs and curls. A mental facsimile, every squiggle and smudge a thought made solid. Bright white sheets are shadows printed and displayed prominently, colorfully. They’ll never grace a bookshelf or open under the tangerine glow of a reading lamp. Dust collects and white fades to dull gray or sickly yellow under the harsh irrelevance of fluorescent light. They’ll never illuminate or elucidate.
I sit at the computer and exhale adjacent the overflowing bin. A stack beside me swells with sheets I can’t bring myself to crush in my fist and toss over my shoulder. Nothing lasts. I treat everything as though it will, but it’s all headed for the landfill. Sticky notes just come and go with no delusions of timelessness. After all, thoughts aren’t meant for preservation in the strictest sense.
The gray of ballpoint pens and spreadsheets is universal, the setting nearly irrelevant. Pencil holders and scotch tape grip the mind in odd ways. Monotony makes plain the lost and effusive things. Thoughts, a beating heart or ticking second hand, the other side of the translucent dusty pane, all float in an ocean of copy toner. All choke under bundled pages.
The paper on the bookcase at home is bound and familiar. Spines yawn, thick with years, and crisp pages smell like the attic in my parents’ church; stale but sweet. Such books are filled with heavy paper. Others with thin, elegant, uniform slices that pack a dozen pages into the space of one. Books do justice to their contents. We don’t deal in paper like that.
I print stacks of fluttery bright stuff; shove it into folders, staple it in piles, scribble, crumple, toss, forget. Copy paper smushes easily in clenched knuckles and weighs too little to follow a proper arc through the air. It can’t support permanence. Endless curls, loops, and dots sit passively in rows. Percentages and numbers tangle on Excel trellises. I don’t print to remember. Figures cling only briefly to the present, then fade quietly into an anonymous forest of folders and tabs or disappear in the oblivion of the bin. I print stacks on Thursdays; arrange inviting charts and a list of bullet points, highlight strategically, make notes in the margins. Two hours later, they’re shredded into pulp or lost in a pile of forgotten statistics.
That flimsy printer sheet, dabbed with ink, is a universal truth of offices. Trading desks on Water Street, advert towers on Madison Avenue, publishers in the glittery boxes across the East River linked by perishability. I loathe copy paper. I imagine it in mountains on Staten Island. White collar tumbleweed drifts near the Goethals or smolders in incinerators floating downriver into the Jersey haze of methane, exhaust, and stink. Invoices and spreadsheets insulate the business of the thing from the thing itself. Vacuum cleaners, livestock futures, and baby formula arranged in bars between axes look identical. Graphs can’t transmit conversation, vibration, or elbow grease.
Everything dies. People, animals, momentum, batteries, chances, fire, ideas, and enthusiasm drift off into that good night. Wisps of smoke, air and emptiness, illusions, memories, and the spaces between light in the darkness are all matter of course. I know that life is fuzzy, smeared and smudged, but the disposability curdles on my tongue. Printing implies permanence. It’s an act of creation; deliberate and transformative. I arrange pixels and bring them into the solid physical world. From the void, I summon this credit memo! But I’ll never look at it again. Copy that receipt, file that sales report, duplicate those invoices.
Thrown away. Useless. Lost. The waste is staggering.
Of course the real outrage should be the physical waste. We devour how many virgin acres to fill a file cabinet? How many smokestacks belch rotten eggs into small town air to facilitate a sales meeting? But the waste is symbolic too. How much mental power drifts into the smog over Newark? Could I redirect the neural capacity I haul in bags to the dumpster? I waste hours on an illusion of permanence. Perhaps self-importance, and not waste, is the real crime. Absent the conviction that they’ll matter on some unspecified occasion in the distant future, I wouldn’t print the damn figures in the first place. The reams would gather dust in glossy packages.
But I manage a fondness for neon sticky notes. I keep seven or eight pads underneath the brushed chrome of my computer. Four or five little squares typically adorn the screen.
“Quotes for Japan”
“Photography for Lisa”
“RECEIVABLES!”
Some employ familiar dialects.
“RE: order status”
Others are written in code.
“#3111 color sample. Do you have it? Can you get it? Can I have it? Can I be done?”
Sticky notes have integrity. Their neon curl and flimsy adhesion brook no pretense. They fade and peel and drift, neon leaves in the eerie stillness of a low-pressure system. They never last, nor are they supposed to. Pebbles of hot pink and canary yellow pepper the recycling bin but don’t offend like the crumpled white in which they hide.
Paper is a revolution; a place where ideas live. The mathematicians of ancient Babylon and Mesoamerica tell me with the concept of zero that empty space changes everything. Creases and folds of a cortex or hemisphere are unspooled and rearranged in serifs and curls. A mental facsimile, every squiggle and smudge a thought made solid. Bright white sheets are shadows printed and displayed prominently, colorfully. They’ll never grace a bookshelf or open under the tangerine glow of a reading lamp. Dust collects and white fades to dull gray or sickly yellow under the harsh irrelevance of fluorescent light. They’ll never illuminate or elucidate.
I sit at the computer and exhale adjacent the overflowing bin. A stack beside me swells with sheets I can’t bring myself to crush in my fist and toss over my shoulder. Nothing lasts. I treat everything as though it will, but it’s all headed for the landfill. Sticky notes just come and go with no delusions of timelessness. After all, thoughts aren’t meant for preservation in the strictest sense.
About the writer