Horror Vacui
For every thing in the world there is one person who is afraid of that thing. Fears grow from several sources (insecurity provides the most prominent root-system) and each one of us seems to carry around a small blossom or bouquet of our own, whether hidden or exposed. Some are frightening (xenophobia) while others seem laughable from most safe distances (allodoxaphobia - the fear of opinions). To the nephophobic, each new dawn - that for the rest of the population is a thing to praise - becomes a reason to hang one's head and hide beneath the sand of one's blanketting inner-self. Imagine being afraid of something as unstoppable as the clouds, now also add onto that fear the fact that every single person you come in contact with will never, ever understand you.
One can just as easily define one's self based on their fears, real or imagined, in the same way most people define themselves based on the sum-total of all of their interests. "I am a smart person because I read a lot of books. I am an interesting person because I have a knack for collecting used bus tickets. I am a fun person because I am known to laugh at social blunders performed by strangers and half-strangers. I am a witty person because I do not watch television." And it goes on, a trite list of self-imposed parts that add together to form a nearsighted portrait of a person. Aren't we all just bags filled with poking and protruding interests that seem to fill up jaggedly until eventually enough things get crammed in that the entire image appears to be a complete puzzle with each piece fitting into the next. All one must do is simply pile in separate parts until the space is filled.
Cenophobia is a favorite of mine: The fear of empty rooms.
Let us invent a Person. Let us call this Person by the initial F. Let us place F inside an empty room and watch as his anxieties grip him by the insides and carry him off into a turbulent and frightening fit. Since childhood F had developed the strange and persistent ability to, in his own mind, pack the emptiness of any room with object upon imagined object all until his insecurity was satisfied. Being ignorant of his history, we are not psychoanalysts, let us simply follow F today, now, as he is in this empty room at the moment. We can even call this empty room "Now", the moment of newness that has not yet expired and has not yet become. In this room F begins to wince, noting that the bare walls, floor and ceiling are all closing in around him (his clithrophobic inclinations are now cropping upward from his belly, into his lungs, strangling his chest like a second set of ever-tightening ribs, all until the reach the backsides of each of F's eyeballs.) Instantly, in order to stop the oppressing feeling of dread, F imagines a chair in one corner. The walls stop pressing together for a moment. F sees himself seated in the chair, one leg lumped atop the other, and as he imagines this his chest eases slightly the fear of being enclosed releases its grip on him. How one makes up for one's fears, by employing a cunning imagined scene, is equally as important to a Person's definition of themselves as their fears are and F's way of piling his empty room with things reveals layer after layer of his most hidden self. He places the chair because he wants rest, he places the chair because he needs rest, he places the chair because a chair receives a person and if a chair receives a person then F is not alone in his room. To the wall F applies a painting, one he had been dreaming about for nights on end, one that is several colors wide and many shapes tall. And what is this painting, for F and his insecurity? Simple: a thing to appreciate. Above his head F adds a stunning chandelier which drips here and now there with all kinds of cut diamonds and rubies, shining prisms of exploding light in each direction from every faceted face: a gift he happily gives to himself in an effort to fight off his irrational nyctophobia (fear of dark). Now, with a lit room, with a chair to sit, with a painting to watch, F begins to feel a bit more secure in the empty room, no matter that the things are not there in real life because, after all, the room itself does not in fact contain an actual trace of fear - for fear is an organic and invisible thing born inside the human himself. Similar to the way that blood is actually being blue in color - one can only ever see the vague traces of this fact in the veins under the semi-transcluscent skin of one's wrist yet the second that blood leaves the body and oxygenation sets in instantaneously the liquid is red, red, red. All fears are, after all, easily traced to their source: a person fearful of being a person - or - a person fearful of not being a person. Why then must we all cope in such a way as to humanize the situations which disrupt our insecurities? F's chair makes his room more human, as does the light and the painting. As will the blank page which he sets in front of himself to ponder before placing it into the invisible typewriter which will soon tap tap tap tap letters, sentences and paragraphs to the face of the page thus filling it as he has filled the room itself. Life, rooms, a page: things which we clutter with our being as a way of convincing ourselves of our being a being.
And what, now, of Horror Vacui, after hastily committing to this portrait of the fake F? A parallel is instantly drawn from the one fear to the next: Horror Vacui is the metaphysical cousin to cenophobia because it remains in the person's interior whereas the latter relates to the person's exterior. But, are not the two linked, as opposites generally are, by some bond of commonality such as "empty space"? Yes. For the one, a person is afraid of a room and busily begins to fill it mentally with things while the other one is simply afraid of the emptiness (be it a room, a piece of paper, or a one's own future coffin).
Adolf Wolfli exhibits one of the first instances of Horror Vacui in his art. Without launching into a daunting biography (and by sadly summing up far too many delicious details into one bitesized "piece") it can be safely said that Wolfli was a troubled soul, inhabited by many fears and spirits of fears, until his death. He was institutionalized from an early age and, though he died in 1930, was able to finish several books of verse, countless musical scores, as well as thousands of drawings and paintings which he would make using the simple tools of newsprint, color pencil, and ink. His images contained the hauntings of his head: angels, masked faces, imagined animals, and mathematics. Like Henry Darger, later in life, Wolfli gave his entire time to the filling of emptiness and poured into the blankness of his day a shining mixture of color and form which dazzles and delights the viewer to no end. Serpentine shapes surround the page, enclosing it in a frame of sorts, while inside words of his gospel are repeated and intertwined among the bars of symphonic sound, the rows and columns of mathematical figures, and all peeking out from between are beautiful winged bird/angle creatures. Afraid of the blank space, for one reason or another, he sought out covering it entirely with every fragment of his self that he could muster. Having no job to be responsible for, no family to dote over him, no love to squander with physical embraces, he was able to fill it until it was entirely covered in a huge and beautiful and mesmerizing grid of wonder.
One wonders how much Wolfli might be inside us. I know I am afraid of plenty of things, and emptiness is indeed one of the fears that crowns my laundry list of phobias. I have never been asked before why I had ever participated in something as wrong as vandalism, and though my answer might be accused of somehow rationalizing wrongly something that is inherently bad, I would simply cite Wolfli as a source, and my own F as a source, and I would point out the fact that for some people the most harmful thing in the world to them is emptiness and by filling that emptiness with something, anything, an imagined chair of a few letters on a wall, it is a way of dramatically exclaiming into the stupid world "I am here, I will blot out this blankness with a bit of humanity". Yes, it is a childish and naive point, but that is only because it is being attached to something that by all means is a criminal act (when applied to something like Writing or Imagining it begins to take on a much more heroic glimmer), and I am not ignorant enough to understand that my own humanity will in fact infringe on the humanity of another person (of almost all people, in fact), yet still I circle back to the fact that this exact thing is what makes one an individual instead of an everyone. Our insecurities drive us to do incredibly irrational things, and the need to fill a void is one of the most basic fears that we collectively share.
