Here, in Mona’s psyche, we see a Void—a nothingness—related to the “mysterious” (unacknowledged) death/absence of her grandmother. Throughout the book, we see this archetype of the Void/Absence pulling many characters and events into Mona’s psyche. It is often the paintings and sculptures that Mona and her grandfather view that trigger the framing and organization of her grandmother’s absence.
As Schlesser notes, the Void is slowly disassembled in our life as we grow older. The wounds associated with the Void are brought to light as we grow older. This is a “grueling” and “traumatizing” process—as are all “individuation” processes identified by Carl Jung. In some ways, we would prefer to remain oblivious to the content contained (and protected) in the Void. Non-being might be a source of existential anxiety; however, it might also be serving as a barrier that allows us to remain childlike in our ignorance of death and finality.
We might also conjecture that the artwork viewed by Mona precipitated many other images in Mona’s psyche. Much like the pebbles tossed into Pribram’s pan of water, the paintings and sculptures could radiate (ripple) through Mona’s holographic psyche. One of these ripples could be Mona’s experience of the archetypal Void as represented in the mysterious death and immediately acknowledged absence of her grandmother.
The Big Bang
In search of nothingness, I now leap backwards to the origins of our university. A vast, infinite amount of nothingness was suddenly exploring into something. Quite a something it was!! The entire universe was created in a moment. What a big bang it must have caused—actually not a bang at all given that there was nothing in the universe to carry the sound of creation and no one (or nothing) to “hear” the bang even if it did exist. Therefore, we might reframe this moment of creation as the big silence or, more accurately, a great wave of cosmic expansion. Today, we can detect a faint glow throughout the universe (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation) that might be considered a remnant of the heat produced by this vast expansion. Perhaps, what occurred should be called the Big Heat . . .
Before the Bang: whatever this event of creation is called, it offers a dramatic example of nothingness suddenly becoming something. In confronting the matter of nothingness, we will inevitably finally ask: what came before the Big Bang? Don Howard (2025, p. 24) offers several versions of how this nothingness before the Big Bang might be described:
“. . . when physicist Lawrence Krauss titled his book A Universe from Nothing, he described a state that lacks matter and energy, but not the laws of quantum mechanics. His “nothing” includes a vacuum structure, governed by fluctuations in underlying fields. These fields exist, even if what we normally think of as “stuff” does not. They are something-low-activity; rule-bound, silently simmering, but something none-the-less. Philosopher David Albert has sharply critiqued this usage, noting that it retains physical structure under the label “nothing.”
In similar fashion, Stephen Hawking and James Hartle proposed a “no-boundary” condition in quantum cosmology, in which time itself behaves like a spatial dimension at the earliest moments of the universe. This eliminates a hard “beginning,” but does not eliminate structure. Their version of nothing still requires a mathematical framework that defines how time, energy, and curvature behave.”
