In Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, a set of interviews with the American artist Robert Irwin, Irwin describes at length how he sees the process of making art.  One of them involves, as the title of the book implies, beginning to paint without any memory of what one has done before.  Or to look at a blank canvas, then cover it with white paint and say that it is speaking more than it ever did before.

    Both points bear thinking about.  In large part, memory drives what we do as human beings.  So what would it be like to move forward without any memory of the past?  Would we be creating a blank slate?  Or would a blank slate be creating us?

    Similarly, although white as applied to a life makes it seem entirely opaque and of limited potential, it may really be doing the opposite:  we just need to look harder.

    And that's Irwin's point.  It's also the point of life in a material world infused with transcendent possibility.  Even if memory vanishes, and even if everything is white, it is for this very reason that transcendence exists.  It reminds us of what, shorn of all rational limits, life really can be.