Anam Cara

The bright moment in grief is when the sore of absence gradually changes into a well of presence. You become aware of the subtle companionship of the departed one. You know that when you are in trouble, you can turn to this presence beside you and draw on it for encouragement and blessing. The departed one is now no longer restricted to any one place and can be with you anyplace you are. It is good to know the blessings of this presence. An old woman whose husband had died thirty years earlier told me once that the last thing she did each night before sleep was to remember him. In her memory, she went over his face detail by detail until she could gather his countenance clearly in her mind’s eye. She had always done this since he died, because she never wanted him to fade into the forgetfulness of loss.

While it is heartbreaking to watch someone in the throes of grief, there is still a beauty in grief. Your grief shows that you have risked opening up your life and giving your heart to someone. Your heart is broken with grief, because you have loved. When you love, you always risk pain. The more deeply you love, the greater the risk that you will be hurt. Yet to live your life without loving is not to have lived at all. As deeply as you open to life, so deeply will life open up to you. So there is a lovely symmetry and proportion between grief and love. Conamara is a dark landscape full of lakes and framed with majestic mountains. If you ask any person here how deep a lake is, they say that they often heard the ancestors say that the lake is always as deep as the mountain near it is high. The invisible breakage of grief has the same symmetry. Meister Eckhart said, “Depth is height.” There is a haunting poem from the third century B.C. by Callimachus which imaginatively captures grief and the richness of absence as memory:

They told me, Heraclitus,

They told me you were dead.

They brought me bitter news to hear

And bitter tears to shed.

I wept as I remembered,

How often you and I

Had tired the sun with talking

And sent him down the sky.

But now that you are lying,

My dear old Carian guest,

A handful of grey ashes,

Long, long ago at rest.

Still are your gentle voices,

Your nightingales, awake—

For death he taketh all away

But these he cannot take.

Translated by William Cory

The Imagination and the Altars of Absence

In contrast to the discursive mind, the imagination seems more at home in its portraiture of absence and loss. This should not surprise, since the hallmark of the imagination is suggestion rather than description. The imagination offers you only the most minimal line in order to permit and encourage you to complete the picture for yourself. Consequently, the most enthralling part of a poem or a story is actually that which is omitted or absent. It is often at the very end of a short story that the threshold that would lead into the real story is reached. The writer has not cheated you but rather brought you to a door that you must open yourself. You are invited to people this absence with your own imagined presence. Your imagination begins to take you into a shape of experience that calls you beyond the familiar, the factual, and the predictable. By imaginatively acquainting you with places from which you have been absent, it enlarges and intensifies your presence. This often happens magically when you visit an art gallery. Art galleries are temples to colour. Art reminds one of what Keats said so memorably: “I am sure of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination.”

The imagination teaches us that absence is anything but empty. It also tries to mirror the complexity of the soul. In order to function, society always tries to reduce things to a common denominator or code. Politics, religion, and convention are usually committed to looking away from the raging complexity that dwells under the surface in every human heart.

The penumbral and paradoxical world of the soul is taken for all practical purposes as absent. The external world deals with the individual by first engaging in this act of subtraction. Consequently, we depend desperately on the imagination to trawl and retrieve our poignant and wounded complexity, which is forced to remain absent from the social surface. The imagination is the inspired and incautious priestess who against all the wishes of all systems and structures insists on celebrating the liturgy of presence at the banished altars of absence.