Investing On The Empty Side
I want to build a bank. Not the regular kind, we’ve got plenty of those and they don’t work that well, at least not for me - what I want to see is an empty bank. The banks we have now, they’re all about form, money and stuff, there’s never enough: stack it in bills, track it in columns, pack it up in portfolios. And then you have to invest what you have to make even more, to provide for the future, to pay for the past, to support all your present needs.
But an empty bank isn’t stuck on form, it’s more informal than the normal kind, it helps you find a way to connect and combine with the empty side. Because here’s the thing: form is only emptiness and emptiness is only form. Which just goes to show if you want to have form (and you know that you do), you should probably pick up on emptiness too, invest in it even to make sure your holdings will grow and mature from the inside empty side out. Makes a lot of sense when you don’t think about it. I mean where does form originate from and where does it go when it finally subsides? The empty side, wherever that is, you’ve heard the rumors already I’m sure, those Buddhist guys have been yakking for years, though they never tell you where emptiness is except that it isn’t anywhere here.
So. If emptiness isn’t anywhere here, we could use an empty bank to connect us to wherever it isn’t. Now a bank like that has unusual stuff. First thing to build is an empty vault, with thick vault walls and a massive door with a big clocking time lock. Of course you’ll be able to look right inside, no secrets here, the walls of the vault may be thick and strong but the form of its space is mostly gone - just energy lines and various vector traces. You can see from the slides of previous work I won’t use much in the way of stuff - just staples and string and candles and such, shapes in the shadows, just enough to help us see the intimacy we’ve recently lost but not quite forgotten.
The vault will contain safe deposit boxes. Three big units, maybe less, maybe more, each with dozens of sliding drawers for investors to put things inside. The drawers of course won’t have solid sides, or bottoms or tops, just 1 x 1 strap wood with string tacked between. And everyone will easily see how everything is and how it is changing. The form inside each separate box subsiding away into emptiness. Emptiness letting new form arise, it’s hard to describe but the main thing to see is that all the things in the safe deposit will be constantly changing their form and their meaning. How does this happen? It’s hard to say, but from day to day each investor’s investment renews itself as an empty interest begins to accrue. Kind of what happens to the people too if we only could see.
And you never can tell, If things go well, the empty bank could become the place where all its investors’ essential shapes reside collectively. That should be a sight to see, all those seemingly separate investments, side by side inside their boxes, yet each a part of the changing form that makes up the larger shape of the safe deposit unit whole. And that’s not all! There’s sure to be other odd banking things: an empty safe, a tellers cage, an empty investment consulting room where bankers can show off portfolios of mutually empty funds. Don’t know what all such a bank could be, but give me some form in the form of money and I’ll invest it for you on the empty side. Who knows what emptiness might arise or how it might be? Not me, not now, but I’ll certainly give it a try and see.