I actually kept thinking about this question last night, after I got home. “Tabula rasa” has an etymology that doesn’t mean “blank page” — it sounds more like “erased table.” (I just looked it up, & it *is* “smoothed or erased tablet.”) And that makes sense in a very interesting way: centuries ago, we didn’t write on “pages” but on “tables” or “tablets” So when Hamlet says, “My tables!–Meet it is I set it down” (Act I, Scene 5) he’s really saying, ‘Oh! I have to jot that down in my notebook really fast.’ And his “tables” refer to a tablet of wax inside a wooden frame (or 2 such tablets that face each other, so the wax wouldn’t get scratched). People would scratch into the wax to write, then rub out (or *erase*) the writing so they could use the tablet again. The ultimate in recycling! (Whether Hamlet was referring to an actual wax tablet or some other material to write on doesn’t matter: the word “tables” contains this history. And we still talk about “writing tablets” or “tablet notebooks” like those composition books with the marbled covers…or, of course, any number of “tablet” e-readers!) So now the term “tabula rasa” sounds like not a complete blank slate, but rather a rubbed-out slate. A very different starting point, eh? It assumes that artists and writers are never producing in a vacuum…we’re “recycling” what has come before, & what we’ve witnessed. But then, we already knew that.

At the super fun symposium last night, the artist @[655391730:2048:Karen L Schiff] was in attendance and asked us why “tabula rasa” is always said in Latin. Why do we say Tabula Rasa when we just mean blank page or blank canvass? Karen, who is totally awesome by the way, also works with negative space, especially when you look at her Agnes Martin obituaries, where she’s leaving space where the words should go. The way I interpreted her “tabula rasa question” was that maybe we have to give a foreign phrase to the idea because it describes something empty and “blank page” or “blank canvass” or “empty screen” doesn’t quiet convey that emptiness. She’d probably be able to explain it better than me.

There is something beautiful about a blank canvas. Once an empty space is filled with art or text, the creator has made a statement and therefore set the parameters for discussion. Any subsequent statement or response is in reference to the first, and the endless possibility of a blank page has been lost. Ed Ruscha’s “Suspended Sheet Stained with Ivy” speaks to the beauty of the blank page. In this image, Ruscha depicts the page almost like a magic carpet- a vehicle prepared to take the viewer to the ends of his or her imagination. Only a tabula rasa presents such genuine possibility. (Rutgers University, MLIS program).