Anam Cara

Now, to relate this to the social level, absence works very powerfully here; in other words, media represent society—they are the mirror of society in a way; they have a powerful, coloring influence on the thin and rapid stream of public perception. And yet media are not straight or direct; they are always involved in the act of selectivity—who appears on the news, how is the news structured? And who are the people in our society that we never see? Who are the absent ones that we never hear from? There are many of them, and, when you start thinking about it, they are usually the poor and the vulnerable. We have no idea, those of us who are privileged, of the conditions in which so many poor and underprivileged people actually live. Because it is not our world, we don’t actually see it at all. So these people are absent and they are deliberately kept out, because their voices are awkward, they are uncomfortable, and they make us feel very uneasy.

ILLNESS

Another kind of absence in life that is very frightening is the sudden absence of health; when illness arrives. Your self-belonging can no longer be spontaneous and you are now invited, in serious illness, to live in a bleak world that you don’t know. You have to negotiate and work everything as if you are starting a new kind of life. Those who are mentally insane live in a jungle of symbols where there is only the smallest order, and sometimes, when there are clearings there, and when they see how haunted they are, there must be a feeling and an experience of such awful poignance.

IMPRISONMENT

Then there are those who are sentenced to be absent from their homes, and from their lives, and these are the prisoners. One of the fears that I always had—even as a child—was the fear that you could be arrested for something that you never did, but that you could never prove that you hadn’t actually done it. I have known friends of mine who went to jail for different things, and the force of anonymity that is brought down to unravel your presence and your identity is just unbelievable. There are people who have done awful things, and of course we have to put them away, but the actual experience of prisoners must be terrible. It must be terrible to be living thirty years of your life in Mountjoy jail. Your one life on the earth. Joseph Brodsky, who was in jail, said, “The awful thing about being a prisoner and being in jail is that you have very limited space, and unlimited time.” When you put those two things together, it is an incredible load on the mind.

EMIGRATION

The other aspect of absence that I’d like to mention in an Irish context is the absence of Irish people from their own country; the massive hemorrhage of emigration that has been happening over decades and over centuries. I remember working in America when I was about nineteen or twenty, meeting an old man from our village at home. He was about eighty-five years of age and had left when he was eighteen and had never gone back. Even though he was physically in America, in his mind he was still in north Clare. He could remember the names of fields, pathways, stones, trees in camera-precise detail. It must be a wrenching thing to have to be absent from your own place in a totally different kind of world. This raises all kinds of economic and political questions.

CONTEMPLATIVES

Then there are those who deliberately choose the way of absence. These are the contemplatives. They are amazing people; they leave behind the whole bustle of the world, and submit their vulnerable minds to the acidic solitude of the contemplative cell. They are called to face outside social absence and the labyrinths of inner absence, and who knows how they civilize and warm the bleak territories of loss and emptiness for the rest of us? I am sure that if you could read the actual soul or psychic arithmetic of the world, it is unknown what evil and destruction and darkness such contemplative prayer transfigures and keeps away from us. Noel Dermot O’Donoghue, the wonderful Carmelite mystic from the kingdom of Kerry, says that the contemplatives or the mystics are people who withdraw from the world to confront the monster in its lair. Maybe our tranquillity is an unknown gift from all those unglamorous absent ones who are called or forced to excavate the salt mines of absence. I also think that people who are ill, and who carry illness for decades in rooms that no one goes into—it is unknown the mystical creativity of the work that they actually do.

ABSENCE OF GOD