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Near my home is a large,empty field. A few tall weeds have broken through the dirt and probable tarmac beneath. It won’t be empty for long. I live on an island and, as a neighbor once told me: “God ain’t making any more land.” That is the manifest destiny for property developers – it’s there, no one’s using it and God ain’t making any more land.
How could I explain, and to who, that it comforts me to see this empty field?
That upon this empty canvas and on that empty stage is the possibility of imagination, of ideas, of entire worlds.
Economists have a term that I find engaging: Opportunity Cost. This cost applies to the road not taken, the offer turned down, the option that didn’t look as good. But it also applies to the inevitable losses we all incur as people when we must chose one thing over another. An example would be: I cannot train with the Royal Danish Ballet if I am also an unpaid intern at a start up in California. I cannot be, like the famous cat, both alive and dead at the same time. Whole movies, several in fact, have been made about alternate lives in simultaneous time frames and not. They always make me uncomfortable. I don’t want to see all my what ifs and what if I hadn’ts. I want to see new things, an empty space in a completely built-up place, an imperceptible breath that only a sere leaf on the sidewalk can feel.
Whatever the developing “they” put up on my field I won’t like it, not even if it’s an art center/museum/coffee bar/mediterranean restaurant/bookstore. Well, maybe then but that’s not what it will be. It won’t be for Art or art or even felafel. It will be something awful and I will miss my field very much.