Anam Cara

I think that absence is the sister of presence; the opposite of presence is not absence, but vacancy. Vacancy is a neutral, indifferent, inane, blank kind of space, whereas absence has real energy; it has vitality in it, and it is infused with longing. Sometimes a great way to come to know a word is to go back to its roots. If you go back to the roots of the word “absence,” you find that it is rooted in Latin, ab esse—to be elsewhere. To be absent is to be away from a person, or a place; it is an act of departure from your expected and natural belonging. So all absence holds the echo of some fractured intimacy, but the intimacy came first, and then, when it was broken, the absence filled the heart. The most common experience of absence is when you lose a friend who is close to you. This indicates the regions of absence that people every human life. When you open yourself to the activity and sacrament of friendship with someone, you create a unique and particular kind of space with them; a special space that you share in the same way with no one else. And when the friend departs—when a relationship breaks or when you lose someone in that final severance that we call death—absence haunts your heart and makes your belonging sore and painful. In some way, there is still within you some kind of innocence that is either unable or unwilling to accept that the person has finally gone and forever. So absence is never clear-cut. Everyone that leaves your life leaves a subtle trail of connection with you; and when you think of them, and miss them and desire them, your heart journeys out again along that trail towards them in the elsewhere that they now find themselves.

Physically considered, we are all objects; we are physical, bodily objects. But considered in terms of affection, effectively, there are myriad secret pathways that go out from every heart. They go out to the earth, they go out to intimate places, they go out to the past. And they go out particularly towards the friends that are really close to us.

MIDHIR AND ÉTAÍN

When I was preparing this talk, I was looking back along the old tradition to see if there were any ancient Irish stories about absence, and I came upon the beautiful legend of Midhir and Étaín. The fairy prince Midhir fell in love with Étaín, and Midhir’s wife, Fuamnach, was very jealous, so, with the help of a druid, she changed Étaín into a butterfly, and then, to add more fury, she set a terrible storm going, which blew Étaín all through the country for seven years, until she finally landed at the palace of Aengus, the god of love. He recognized her even though she was a butterfly, took her in, built invisible walls around her, and gave her a beautiful garden. During the night, she came back to the form of a woman, and during the day she was a butterfly. But Fuamnach found out about it and chased her again with a storm, until she landed again in another palace and fell into the goblet of the queen as she was drinking wine. The queen drank her down, and she was reborn nine months later as a beautiful child, whom they, unknowingly, called Étaín again. All the time, the lover Midhir longed for her, searched every corner of the country, and could not find her. Then she grew up to be a beautiful woman, and the king of Tara, the High King of Ireland, took her as his wife.

One day, at the great gathering—the great assembly in Tara—Midhir recognized her as the one his heart had so hungered for and whose absence had haunted him. He invited her to go back to him, but she did not recognize him because her last metamorphosis had erased her memory completely. He then played the king in a game of chess and he won. He asked that, for his winning, he be allowed to receive one kiss from Étaín. He met her, and when she heard that—the king didn’t let him kiss her for a long time!—some knowing within her was kindled again, and she began to dream of her former life. Little by little, she began to recall all that she had forgotten and, as she did, her love for Midhir returned totally. When he came back to kiss her, the king had an army around not to let him in, but magically he appeared in the middle of the assembly hall and embraced her. The king came to attack them and they weren’t there. When the king’s men went outside, they looked up and there were two white swans circling in the starry heavens above the palace.

It is a beautiful story to show how, when love or friendship happens, a distinctively unique tone is struck, a unique space is created, and the loss of this is a haunting absence. The faithfulness of the absence kept Midhir on the quest until he eventually rediscovered her, awoke the absence in her again, and then the two of them became present as swans, ironically in the air element that had created the distance and had created the torture for her.