A prose poem about nothing

A Russian Stamp Showing al-Khwarizmi

1,0




Bless you, al-Khwārizmī, for the zero, the beginning of modernity, even though others had considered naught. The Chinese had a word for nothing but did not use cipher numerically. The Babylonians tried to figure around zero. The Incas in their quipus tied no knot in the space where the zero would have appeared. The Greeks, philosophically, could not call the void anything, for they found no way to honor nothing. The Romans, more practical, called it nulla or nihil but had no symbol for emptiness. But once we received 0 connected with the Arabic-Indian numerals, we loved nothing, worked nothing in, and did great things with nothing, so we could more accurately figure not only mathematically, but also chemically—the periodic table, astronomically—light years, physically—electricity, atomically—fission and fusion, athletically—nil and love, biologically—DNA, and electronically—binary systems. Where would we be without nothing? I would neither be keying this into a computer, nor taking digital photographs, nor listening to digital music, nor viewing digital television or movies, nor understanding the world better through its interconnected Web. Without it, naught would be possible in this information age, in which you have brought us everything through nothing.



3/12-17/11

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