Jan Toorop:
Image Design for a Poster, Wagenaar’s Cantata ‘The Shipwreck’ (1899)

"Ceasing's relatively easy. Desisting's inevitably difficult and often impossible."

Unscrolling belongs to a rather unique class of objectives, the Negative Space ones. Each features the character of nonexistence as its premise. They never aspire to attain or acquire, but to rid themselves of something. What might precisely replace that unwanted element never gets mentioned in its title. These provide no hint, not the barest clue of what might do as a replacement for the unwanted element, just that its purpose extends no further than elimination of that space presently containing that unwanted item. In our case, through this series, I’ve labeled our negative space objective “Unscrolling.” Notice how it declares only what it doesn’t want. It wants to undo scrolling, whatever that might entail.

The most curious property of every negative space objective might be its apparent, even obvious simplicity. What could possibly be more straightforward than eliminating something? One must simply, as countless court injunctions have insisted, cease and Desist. This pair initially seems more redundant than they prove to be in practice, for ceasing turns out to entail one thing, while Desisting includes considerably more. Ceasing merely involves stopping, while Desisting insists upon persisting that stopping ad infinitum, that is, to not merely cease, but to continue ceasing into and beyond the foreseeable future. Ceasing seems more like holding breath, while Desisting tends to feel more like a death, a permanent condition rather than a temporary cessation. Desisting turns out to more closely resemble a permanent condition.

Permanence requires some sort of sustenance, something to maintain its state of, in this case, absence. It seems when proposing some negative space objective that success should prove nothing if not straightforward. How much simpler could accomplishing a simple suspension prove to be? It’s not as if anyone has to actually do anything to achieve success, except that it always turns out to be trickier to do one of these enjoined nothings than it usually seems to require to satisfy a similar injunction to do anything tangible. At least the ‘do something’ injunction proposes an action that might serve to replace the unwanted one. The absence of a definite replacement action turns out to be the rub, as Shakespeare might have said. That replacement requires definition and, often, agreement. It generally requires exponentially more effort to achieve any negative space Desisting than it ever does to accomplish even the most complicated one-time ceasing. Ceasing’s easier than persisting into any future.

It’s not the smoking that’s missed, but the surrounding habits, when someone “quits.” Subtle anchors to their existence disappear in an instant, but leave behind persistent markers. That pocket so used to holding that packet of smokes might get slapped dozens of times each day as the recently ex-smoker preconsciously checks to make certain he hasn’t forgotten his smokes. My nipple nearly bruised under the punishment. My hand became the very personification of the devil’s playground. Fidgeting became my initial replacement habit. My leg jiggled in meetings. I became ants-in-my-pants animated at the mere prospect of sitting through any meeting. I became more practiced at pacing, often calling one-on-one meetings by proposing a walk through an adjacent park, where we could “talk in private.” I was not so much seeking privacy in that park, but some adequate replacement for my sanity, which proved to be the first casualty of my negative space, stopping my once-dominant smoking habit.

One need not have been addicted to anything to find themself struggling with the sudden and sustaining cessation of any routine, and, believe me, anything, when Desisting proves to have been a routine adequate to leave a divot needing filling. The oddest things qualify and defy quiet mastery. Any of us might manage to sustain any negative space objective, but the effort should rightly prove to be memorable. We might even manage to move beyond the former behavior, but some vestigial memory of it will very likely live on and linger in long-term memory, rarely fondly. Constructing a replacement for a previously very likely preconscious behavior might be the most difficult kind of effort anyone ever attempts. The string of failures trailing behind such efforts serves as an adequate reminder why it’s better to state an objective in some positive, tangible terms. No future features freely-floating absences. Features must necessarily contain presences, tangible replacements for whatever came before. Until the tangible manifests and becomes more or less self-sustaining, the objective of undoing whatever preceded that future continues haunting. Ceasing’s relatively easy. Desisting’s inevitably difficult and often impossible.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz