Imagine that you are a composer facing an empty sheet of manuscript/staff paper or a novelist looking at an empty screen on your computer. You are awaiting inspiration: “where is the muse when I most need her!” Instead, imagine that you are delivering a report on research findings at a major disciplinary conference. You are offering part of the report with your major professor delivering the other part of the report. You have finished your section and then your professor ties up with stage fright. He can’t speak and signals to you with his flaying hands that you must provide the second half of the report. This actually happened to me many years ago. I invite you to consider a third situation. Imagine being on a diving trip with your companion in shark-filled ocean waters. By mistake, your diving boat has left the two of you behind. Your partner has been hit by a shark, and you are left stranded with nothing but your limited supply of air. This has also actually occurred.
What is it like for the composer/novelist? What was it like for me or for the stranded diver. Obviously, it was a much more serious situation for the diver. Yet all three of us, for at least one moment, experienced a Void. The composer/novelist has chosen to confront the void. For me and the diver, the Void was foisted on us. For me, the Void and encounter with nothingness was present as a speech segment to be delivered without preparation or a manuscript to read. For the diver, it was a much more profound Void and experience of nothingness that was associated with a sense of hopelessness and prospects of non-existence (death). In both instances, a flurry of emotions, anticipations and actions were activated by the performance-based prospect of delivering the remainer of the speech and existential prospect of facing one’s death in a violent manner (shark attack) or a slow, prolonged manner (drowning).
Anxiety
As I noted in the first essay in this series (Bergquist, 2026b), a major source of anxiety comes from the confrontation with “non-being.” The remarkable theologian, Paul Tillich (2000), identified anxiety as the existential awareness of nothingness (non-being). Anxiety is often associated with helplessness and hopelessness (Seligman, 1992). By contrast, hopefulness and an existential (and theological) “courage to be” is based on an acknowledgement of one’s being and one’s becoming in the world. If human beings are minds, and not just brains, if they live in dynamic interaction with other people and events in their life, then they require a “courage to be.” Tillich believes that this courage is not embedded in a secular world. Rather courage is inherently spiritual in nature or at least there are spiritual demands being made on us as we are confronted with the dynamic universe in which we live.
