by Ansuman Biswas
I quickly realized that Aristotle’s pithy aphorism that “Nature abhors a vacuum” holds just as true in art as it does in science. I was invisible and inactive. There was nothing to see. And yet I found that people flooded the nothingness with their own stories. Sometimes the less you do the more people see. Just as air rushes into a vacuum so people fill space with imagination. Many people perhaps imagined I would be found crumpled in a corner of the box when it was opened, an anguished skeleton. Others might have imagined I would flutter out on angelic wings with a beatific smile. Some told me that my incarceration threw into sharp relief the number of dinners they ate or TV shows they watched during that ten-day period in March, 1998. Even my own imagination played tricks on me.