Anam Cara

Our time is often filled up with forced presence, every minute filled out with something, but every minute merely an instant, lacking the patience and mystery of continuity that awakens that which is eternal within time. Sometimes, when people in a society are unable to read or decipher the labyrinth of absence, their homeless minds revert to nostalgia. They see the present as a massive fall from a once glorious past, where perfect morality, pure faith and impeccable family values pertained, without critique or alternative or any smudge of complexity or unhappiness. All fundamentalism is based both on faulty perception and on unreal nostalgia. What is created is a fake absence in relation to the past. It is used to look away from the challenge and potential of the present and to create a future which is meant to resemble a past that never actually existed. It is very sad, sometimes, to see the way a grid of a certain kind of language can form over a person’s spirit and hold them completely trapped and transfixed in a very stiff ideological position. It happens an awful lot in religion. Sometimes, a grid of dead religious language blocks the natural pores of people’s spirit. Blind faith is meant to be ultimate sanctity, but it is merely an exercise in absence that keeps you away from that which is truly your own and keeps you outside the magic and playfulness and dangerous otherness of divinity.

As we journey onwards in our lives, we seem to accumulate more and more absences. This is very marked in relation to old people; their most intimate friends are usually in the unseen world among the dead. But any life that is vigorous and open to challenge and compassion and the real activity of thought knows that, as we journey, we create many tabernacles of absence within us.

MEMORY

Yet, there is a place where our vanished days secretly gather. Memory, as a kingdom, is full of the ruins of presence. It is fascinating that, in your memory, nothing is lost or ever finally forgotten. We all have had experience of this. Sometimes the needle of thought finds its way into a groove of memory and suddenly an old experience that you no longer remembered comes back almost pure and fresh and intact to you. So memory is the place where absence is transfigured and where our time in the world is secretly held for us. As we grow older, our bodies diminish, but our minds and our memories grow more intense. Yet our culture is very amnesiac. And amnesia is an incredible thing. Imagine if—God between us and all harm—you had an accident and you lost your memory completely. You wouldn’t know who you were, where you were or who you were with. So, in a certain sense, memory keeps presence alive and is always bringing out of what seemed to be absent new forms of presence.

THE UNKNOWN

There is another level of absence as well, and it is that which has not vanished, but that which has not yet arrived. We all live in a pathway in the middle of time, so there are lots of events, people, places, thoughts, experiences still ahead of us that have not actually arrived at the door of our hearts at all. This is the world of the unknown. Questions and thinking are ways of reaching into the unknown to find out what kind of treasures it actually holds. The question is the place where the unknown becomes articulate in us. A good question is something that has incredible grace and light and depth to it. A good question is something that always, in some way, plows the invisible furrows of absence to find the nourishment and the treasure that we actually need.

IMAGINATION

This is where the imagination plays a powerful role, because the imagination loves absence rather than presence. Absence is full of possibility and it always brings us back new reports from the unknown that is yet to come towards us. This is especially true in art. Music is the art form that most perfectly sculpts and draws out the poignance of the silence between the notes. Really good music has an incredible secret sculpture of silence in it. The wonderful conductor who died several months ago, Georg Solti, said that, towards the end of his life, he was becoming ever more fascinated with the secret presence of silence within music. If you listen to Mozart’s Requiem, or Wagner’s overture to Tristan and Isolde, you will know the beauty and poignance of absence as expressed in music. Then, if you want to go for something totally different, that amazing man Lou Reed recorded an incredible album a few years ago—an album of tormented hymns to two close friends of his who died. It is called Magic and Loss, and there you will see absence in an incredibly intense and powerful kind of way.