Anam Cara

When you become an interfering observer in your own life, you cease to be a living participant. Much modern therapy trains people to be rigid observers of themselves. They never sleep on the job. Like heroic cowboys, they manage to sleep with one eye open. It is, then, extremely difficult to let yourself become a whole-hearted participant in your one beautiful, unrepeatable life. You are taught to police yourself. When you watch a policeman walk down a street, he does it differently. He is alert, his eyes are combing everything. He does not miss a thing. When you police yourself, you are on the beat alone, you are in such alert that the usual inner suspects inevitably surface and suddenly you are in your element, you can exercise your full authority. You will put them through the full process: identification, arrest, and conviction. You know how to “deal” with them. Such an approach to the self highlights the modern reduction of the “who” question to the functionalism of the “how.” We need a new psychology to encourage us and liberate us to become full participants in our lives; one that will replace self-watch with self-awakening. We need a rebirth of the self as the sacred temple of mystery and possibility; this demands a new language which is poetic, mystical, and impervious to the radiation of psychologese. We need to rediscover the wise graciousness of spontaneity. The absence of spontaneity unleashes us negatively on ourselves.

Certain cultures practise wholesome spontaneity; others are somewhat more rigid and considered in their behaviour. An Irish friend lived in Berlin for a while in the eighties; at this time punk culture was still strong. One day, he was walking down a street and there were two disciples of punk ahead of him. Each had an architecture of hair that must have taken months to perfect, a series of unbelievable shapes and colours. He walked faster and reached the pedestrian light first. It was still on red; he looked up and down the street, there was no traffic coming. Having a functional rather than sacred attitude to such objects, he crossed the forbidden street on red and continued along the other side. He looked over his shoulder to see how far behind him the punks were now. But he could not see them. When he looked farther back, he saw that they were still waiting on the other side for the green light. It struck him that the programming had penetrated far below the hairline. And these were the anarchists! When spontaneity is absent, longing and belonging rigidify. Yet who we are and what happens to us in the world occur spontaneously. Meister Eckhart says, “Deus non habet quare,” i.e., God does not have a why. There is huge spontaneity in the Divine which graces life. God is no functionalist Driven by the mechanics of agenda or programme. As our lives flow into the absence of the past, it is the spontaneity of memory we can neither control nor force which gathers and keeps that absence for us.

Memory Is Full of the Ruins of Presence

As we journey onwards in life, more and more spaces within us fill with absence. We begin to have more and more friends among the dead. Every person suffers the absence of their past. It is utterly astonishing how the force and fibre of each day unravel into the vacant air of yesterday. You look behind you and you see nothing of your days here. Our vanished days increase our experience of absence. Yet our past does not deconstruct as if it never was. Memory is the place where our vanished days secretly gather. Memory rescues experience from total disappearance. The kingdom of memory is full of the ruins of presence. It is astonishing how faithful experience actually is; how it never vanishes completely. Experience leaves deep traces in us. It is surprising that years after something has happened to you the needle of thought can hit some groove in the mind and the music of a long vanished event can rise in your soul as fresh and vital as the evening it happened. Memory provides such shelter and continuity of identity. Memory is also fascinating because it is an indirect and latent presence in one’s mind. The past seems to be gone and absent. Yet the grooves in the mind hold the traces and vestigia of everything that has ever happened to us. Nothing is ever lost or forgotten. In a culture addicted to the instant, there is a great amnesia. Yet it is only through the act of remembrance, literally re-membering, that we can come to poise, integrity, and courage. Amnesia clogs the inner compass and makes the mind homeless. Amnesia makes the sense of absence intense and haunted. We need to retrieve the activity of remembering, for it is here that we are rooted and gathered. Tradition is to the community what memory is to the individual. The absence of the past remains subtle yet near.

Ruins: Temples of Absence