Anam Cara

The Imagination and the Altars of Absence

In contrast to the discursive mind, the imagination seems more at home in its portraiture of absence and loss. This should not surprise, since the hallmark of the imagination is suggestion rather than description. The imagination offers you only the most minimal line in order to permit and encourage you to complete the picture for yourself. Consequently, the most enthralling part of a poem or a story is actually that which is omitted or absent. It is often at the very end of a short story that the threshold that would lead into the real story is reached. The writer has not cheated you but rather brought you to a door that you must open yourself. You are invited to people this absence with your own imagined presence. Your imagination begins to take you into a shape of experience that calls you beyond the familiar, the factual, and the predictable. By imaginatively acquainting you with places from which you have been absent, it enlarges and intensifies your presence. This often happens magically when you visit an art gallery. Art galleries are temples to colour. Art reminds one of what Keats said so memorably: “I am sure of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination.”

The imagination teaches us that absence is anything but empty. It also tries to mirror the complexity of the soul. In order to function, society always tries to reduce things to a common denominator or code. Politics, religion, and convention are usually committed to looking away from the raging complexity that dwells under the surface in every human heart.

The penumbral and paradoxical world of the soul is taken for all practical purposes as absent. The external world deals with the individual by first engaging in this act of subtraction. Consequently, we depend desperately on the imagination to trawl and retrieve our poignant and wounded complexity, which is forced to remain absent from the social surface. The imagination is the inspired and incautious priestess who against all the wishes of all systems and structures insists on celebrating the liturgy of presence at the banished altars of absence.

In this sense, the imagination is faithful and hospitable to everything that lives in the house of the heart. It is willing to explore every room. Here the imagination shows courage and grace. Literature’s most fascinating and memorable characters are not saints or cautious figures who never risked anything. They are characters who embody great passion and dangerous paradoxical energy. In this way, the imagination mirrors and articulates that constant companion dimension of the heart that by definition and design remains perenially absent, namely, the subconscious.

Absence is such a powerful theme and presence precisely because such a vast quantity of our identity lies out of reach in this unknown and largely unknowable region. Though predominantly absent from our awareness, the rootage of the subconscious accounts for so much of what happens above in the days of our lives. Because the imagination is the priestess of the threshold, she brings the two inner territories together. The imagination unifies the inner presence and the inner absence of our lives—the daylight outside self by which we are known and the inner night-time self whose dimensions remain unknown even to ourselves. The artist is the one who is committed to the life of the imagination.