Folds

Being forgetful, I am forever seeking what is hidden from remembrance. Something in nothing–something obscured, abstracted, or purposefully omitted that leaves a part of its origins in what appears to be a blank space. A nothingness points to an emptiness, but Gilles Deleuze’s theories of folds in space and time (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque) suggest there is something more in what appears to be less. A fold is a plane that bends and shares space with a hole; every spot which appears to be a hole is just the interior of a fold within a fold. The fold is the opposite of Zizek’s empty spot, with room to contain something, nothing, and everything. Traces are found in spaces that appear at first glance to be empty–the residue of something in nothing, the excluded parts, the missing pieces–that can be scrutinized for meaning even as these traces are fading away.