Anam Cara

The imagination is always fascinated by what is absent. The first time you read a short story, it is very frustrating, because the best story is the one that is not told at all. The short story will bring you to a threshold and leave you there, and you will be dying to know what happened to the character, or how did the story go further. It is not cheating you—it is bringing you to a threshold and inviting you to open the door for yourself, so that you can have a genuinely original and new experience. So the imagination always recognizes that the most enthralling aspect of presence is actually that which is omitted. The art of writing a really good poem is to know what to leave out. John McGahern said that, when he has finished a manuscript, he goes back over it and the first pieces that he starts doing surgery on are the pieces he likes best! He knows that these are the pieces that he can’t trust himself with. You gradually sculpt the thing back until you have a slender shape which has lots of holes in it, but in this absence, you give free play to the imagination to fill it out for itself. You respect the dignity and potential of the reader.

The imagination is incredibly important in this respect in contemporary society, because it mirrors the complexity of our souls. Society always reduces everything to a simple common denominator; religion does it, politics does it, the media does it as well. Only the imagination has the willingness to witness that which is really complex, dark, paradoxical, contradictory and awkward within us, that which doesn’t fit comfortably on the veneer of the social surface. So we depend on the imagination to trawl and retrieve our poignant and wounded complexity which has to remain absent from the social surface. The imagination is really the inspired and uncautious priestess who, against the wishes of all systems and structures, insists on celebrating the liturgy of presence at the banished altars of absence. So the imagination is faithful to the full home of the heart, and all its rooms.

Often in country places—probably in the city too—there was a haunted house, which no one would go into and people would pass with great care, especially late at night. I often think that there is, in every life, some haunted room that you never want to go into, and that you do your best to forget was there at all. You will never break in that door with your mind, or with your will. Only with the gentle coaxing of the imagination will that door be opened to you and will you be given the gift back again of a part of yourself that either you or someone else had forced you to drive away and reject.

If you look at the characters in literature, there are no saints, because saints, in terms of the imagination, are not interesting people. They are too good. The imagination is always interested in where things break down—failure, resentment, defeat, contradiction, bitterness, darkness, glory, light and possibility—the wild side of ourselves that society would rather forget was there at all. So the imagination mirrors and articulates also that constant companion dimension of the heart that, by definition and design, remains perennially absent—the subconscious. All we know of ourselves is just a certain little surface and there is a whole under-earth of complexity to us that, by definition, keeps out of our sight. It is actually absent to us. It comes through dreams. Sometimes it comes very powerfully through crises or through trauma, but the imagination is the presence within us that brings that hidden, netted grounding side of ourselves up to the surface, and can coax it into harmony with our daily self that we actually know. It is amazing how many of your needs and hungers and potential and gifts and blindness are actually rooted in the subconscious side of your life, and most of that great plantation of your subconscious seems to have actually happened in the playfields and innocence of childhood.

Childhood is an amazing forest of mystery. One of the sad things about contemporary society is the way that childhood has been shrunk back and children now only have a few years of natural innocence before the force and metallic and sophistication of the world is actually in on top of them. It frightens me sometimes to think of the effect this might have on them later on in their lives. One of the great things that keeps failure, resentment, defeat, contradiction, bitterness at bay is the great forest of your childhood that holds everything anchored there for you.

MEDIA ABSENCE