John Baca sent me this article about Holes from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Which was nice timing, cuz I’ve been thinking about holes a lot lately. I’ve been making these little landscapes with holes and depressions (these are process photos, yo):

And I’d just written a chapter called “Some things we call holes are really just depressions” for TheySaySmall the novel.

So, there was a lot of stuff in this article I didn’t understand, but which sound very beguiling so this is a note to self to look it all up:

• “the mereological sum”
• “Ockham’s razor”
• “sui generis”
• “Husserlian moments”
• “the ontology inherent in the common-sense picture of the world.”
• “some form of horror vacui—may lead a philosopher to favor ontological parsimony over naive realism about holes”

But, in essence I think the article is asking:

• is a hole *something*
• is a hole an *absence*
• is a hole an *absence in something*
• is a hole an absence in *something*

And since I am an essentialist in a relativist’s clothing

or

a sensitive new age guy carrying around a big modernist stick

I say: a hole is an *absence in something.* In other words, they are a feature of something, like a leg. Now I need to research what all that other stuff means & see if i still believe that (for holes are, in the end, about faith)