Anam Cara

This absence also works at the social level. Society is coming more and more to mirror the media, yet the media are no innocent surface or screen on which anything and everything is welcome to appear. No. The media work with a powerful selectivity. They construct their world around carefully chosen, repetitive, and loud chronicles. Yet there are so many people we never hear from. We never read of them in the papers. We never hear of them in the news. A whole range of people are absent. They are usually the poor, the vulnerable, the ill, and prisoners. Their voices would be slow and direct and would gnaw at our comfort and endanger our complacency. Most of us who are privileged live quite protected lives and are distant from and blind to what the poor endure. Out of sight, out of mind. What is absent from our view does not concern us.

Addiction: Obsessed Longing

One of the terrible metaphors of post-modern society is the drug. The addiction to drugs is arguably one of the greatest problems facing Western society. When drugs hook you, they make your longing captive. The depth and complexity of your life telescopes into one absolute need. Regardless of the presence of others who love you, the gifts that you have, the life that you could have, your life now has only one need, the drug. The longing of the addict is a craving for which he will sacrifice all other belonging. It is astounding how the inner world of the human heart has a capacity for such absolute single-mindedness. Addiction is longing that is utterly obsessed. There is no distance anymore between the longing and the drug. The longing determines the life. The drug has the power of a sinister God; it awakens absolute passion and demands absolute obedience.

A drug is an anonymous and unattractive piece of matter. For the addict, however, this banal stuff shines like the most glorious diamond imaginable. When the eye sees it, the longing is already travelling in the direction of pure joy; no wonder they choose names for drugs like “Ecstasy.” The addict has no memory. All time is now; either the now of joy or the tortured now of longing for the fix. Far away from the dingy streets where the addict moves, probably out in the most scenic and beautiful area of the city, live the suppliers. They make their wealth from the misery of those poor demented ones for whom the city streets are an underworld. The suppliers work international routes which are the same as the international routes for arms. At a broader cultural level, drug addiction is a profound metaphor for contemporary society. The marginalized addicts are the scapegoats for the collective addiction in contemporary society. The obsessive nature of our culture comes to expression in the addict. The addict is visible, tangible, and vulnerable. The addict is always on the margins of belonging.

Another group who have to endure absence through losing or giving up belonging are those who are emigrants.

The Emigrants

Contemporary society is deeply unsettled. Everywhere a new diaspora is emerging because of hunger and poverty. The subjects of this diaspora are the emigrants. Exile is difficult and disconcerting. You are uprooted. Something within us loves the continuity, shelter, and familiarity of our home place. Among your own people, you can trust the instinctive compass of your words and actions. You move in a natural rhythm that you never notice until you are away. Exile is difficult because you find yourself among strangers. And it is slow work to find a door into the house of their memory.

While at university, I worked a summer on the buildings in America. I met an old man from our village in the West of Ireland. He was over eighty and had left home at eighteen and never returned. He talked so wistfully of home. He could remember the name of every field and well. As he intoned the litany of Gaelic place-names, his eyes kindled in the warmth of belonging. Even though he had lived in exile all his adult life, there was a part of his heart which never left home. I imagine that he withdrew into this private sanctuary of memory when times were raw and lonely. Those in exile understand each other. You’d see it in the way they meet and talk. What they can presume about each other. How easily they slip into the rhythm of companionship. You’d see it in the Irish in a Kilburn pub, a group of Turkish people sitting by a river at the weekend in a German town, or the Filipina girls who gather near a bridge in Hong Kong every Sunday to talk of home. When you emigrate, you fracture your belonging to the language of your homeland.

Language and Belonging