Anam Cara

Absence is something that I have thought about for a long time. It is a beautiful theme. There seems to be very little written on it, and the more I thought about it, the more I became aware of how many dimensions of our lives it actually touches. I would like to begin the lecture by trying to locate the first experience of absence in some primal kind of moment.

When each of us was born, we became present to the earth and we entered into an ancient narrative of presence that preceded us by hundreds and thousands of millions of years. I think that the first experience that the earth had of real absence was when the human mind first emerged. That must have been an amazing experience for the actual earth itself. It had, up to then, created incredible masterpieces. If you ever see a twilight, with the incredible nuance and depth of color that it has; if you look at the amazing choruses of waves that beat against a shoreline; if you look at the mystical shape of mountains, the voice of streams and rivers and the undomesticable wildness of certain wilderness places, you will know that the imagination of the earth had created great beauty.

ABSENCE AND LOSS

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.

I believe that the death of every animal and every person creates a kind of an invisible ruin in the world, and that, as the world gets older, it becomes more full with these invisible ruins of vanished presence. Emily Dickinson puts it beautifully when she says:

Absence disembodies—so does Death

hiding individuals from the Earth

It is exactly that act of hiding that causes absence. We are so vulnerable to absence because we desire presence so deeply.

PRESENCE

One of the deepest longings of the human heart is for real presence. Real presence is the goal of truth, the ideal of love and the intentionality of prayer here and in the beatific vision in the hereafter. Real presence is the heart of the incarnation and it is also the heart of the Eucharist. This is where imagination works so beautifully with the absences and emptiness of life. It always tries to find a shape of words or music or color or stone that will in some way incarnate new presence to fill the absence. I remember once in Venice, during an amazing music festival, I attended an outdoor concert in Piazza San Marco, with Stravinsky’s music and a ballet, and the moon was full and the sea was wild. There were certain moments in that concert when moon and ocean and dance and music and audience congealed into one pulse—an amazing experience of unity, and, in some strange way, a breakthrough to real presence. When we experience real presence, we break through to that which is latently in us, that is eternal, but which the normal daily round of life keeps distant from us.

ALIENATION

The social world is usually governed by a sophisticated and very intricate grammar of absence. You think of the work you do and the people you work with. You think of people who do work that you wouldn’t like, people who have to hit the one bolt every twenty seconds for a full day. There is no way that you could do that, unless, of course, you were a saint or a Zen mystic, with real intention. The only way you can do it is by somehow being in conditioned reflex and being actually absent and away elsewhere. That is what I think Karl Marx had in mind when he talked about alienation; in some sense there are certain kinds of functions which diminish and empty our own self-presence and make us absent to our own lives. To do these things continuously in this divided way brings us far away from who we are and from what we are called to do here. That is real alienation.

WELCOME ABSENCE

Of course, sometimes it is lovely to be absent from things. I am reminded of a writer who, in describing a character, said, “He has quite a good presence, but a perfectly delightful absence!” In other words, when he wasn’t around, happiness increased in some way. There’s a lovely Palestinian American poet that I like, called Naomi Shihab Nye, who has a wonderful poem called “The Art of Disappearing” that I would like to read.

When they say, “Don’t I know you?”

say “No.”

When they invite you to a party,

remember what parties are like

before answering.

Someone telling you in a loud voice

they once wrote a poem.

Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.

Then reply.

If they say, “We should get together,”

say, “Why?”

It’s not that you don’t love them anymore.

You’re trying to remember something

too important to forget.

Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.

Tell them you have a new project.

It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery

store,

nod briefly and become a cabbage.

When someone you haven’t seen in ten years

appears at the door,

don’t start singing him all your new songs.

You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.

Know you could tumble any second.

Then decide what to do with your time.

The art of disappearing certainly has its own kind of value. In a strange way, in modern society we seem to be inhabiting the world of absence more than presence through the whole world of technology and virtual reality. Very often it seems that the driven nature of contemporary society is turning us into the ultimate harvesters of absence, that is, ghosts in our own lives.

In post-modern culture, the mind is particularly homeless, haunted by a sense of absence that it can neither understand nor transfigure. Many of the traditional shelters have fallen down. Religion seems more and more, certainly in its official presentation, to speak in an idiom that is unable to converse with the modern spiritual hunger. Politics seems devoid of vision and is becoming more and more synonymous with economics. Consumerist culture worships accumulation and power, and creates, with incredible arrogance, its own hollow and gaudy hierarchies. In this country, in our admiration for the achievement and velocity of the Celtic Tiger, we are refusing to notice the paw-marks of its ravages and the unglamorous remains of its prey.

FALSE ABSENCE

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.

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

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

And finally, to come on to one of the great absences from the world, which everyone complains about, and that is the absence of God. Particularly in our century, with the Holocaust and the world wars, Yugoslavia and all the rest of it, there’s a great cry out against the absence of God. In the eighteenth century, Hegel said God was dead, and then in the nineteenth century, Nietzsche took that up; it is an old question. In the classical tradition, theologians were aware of the absence of God as well. There was the notion of the Deus absconditus, the absconded or vanished God. One of the points of absolute subversive realism of the Christian story is that Christ came out of the safety of the sky and stood in Calvary against the absolute silence of God and carried the suffering of the world. The Crucifixion is that bleak place where no certainty can ever settle, and the realism of that is incredibly truthful to the depth and power of absence that suffering and pain and oppression bring to the world. And that is what the Eucharist is about; in the Eucharist you have the most amazing symphony of complete presence based on the ultimate absence and the ultimate kind of emptiness. It is fascinating, too, that sometimes absence creates new possibility. When the carpenter rose from the dead, they wanted him to stay around, and he said no, that he must go, in order to let the Spirit come. So sometimes that which is absent allows something new to emerge.

DEATH

The final absence I want to deal with is the absence that none of us will be finally able to avoid—your own absence from the earth, and that will happen to us in death. Death is the ultimate absence. Part of the sadness of contemporary society that has lost its mystical and mythological webbing is that we can no longer converse with the dead, and we are no longer aware of them. The dead are notoriously absent from us. I think that you can characterize your life in different ways. One of the ways is the time before someone that is close to you dies, and the time afterwards. That happened for me when my uncle died. I would like to read this poem, called “November Questions,” where I tried to trawl the vacancy of his absence for some little glimpse or signal of who he was now, or where he was.

November Questions

Where did you go

when your eyes closed

and you were cloaked

in the ancient cold?

How did we seem,

huddled around

the hospital bed?

Did we loom as

figures do in dream?

As your skin drained,

became vellum,

a splinter of whitethorn

from your battle with a bush

in the Seangharraí

stood out in your thumb.

Did your new feet

take you beyond

to fields of Elysia

or did you come back

along Caherbeanna mountain

where every rock

knows your step?

Did you have to go

to a place unknown?

Were there friendly faces

to welcome you,

help you settle in?

Did you recognize anyone?

Did it take long

to lose

the web of scent,

the honey smell of old hay,

the whiff of wild mint

and the wet odor of the earth

you turned every spring?

Did sounds become

unlinked,

the bellow of cows

let into fresh winterage

the purr of a stray breeze

over the Coillín,

the ring of the galvanized bucket

that fed the hens,

the clink of limestone

loose over a scailp

in the Ciorcán?

Did you miss

the delight of your gaze

at the end of a day’s work

over a black garden,

a new wall

or a field cleared of rock?

Have you someone there

that you can talk to,

someone who is drawn

to the life you carry?

With your new eyes

can you see from within?

Is it we who seem

outside?

From Echoes of Memory

There is one force that pervades both presence and absence, cannot be located particularly anywhere, and can be subtracted from nowhere, and that force is spirit. We talk of absence and space, and absence and time, but we can never talk about the absence of spirit, because spirit, by nature and definition, can never be absent. So, all space is spiritual space, and in spiritual space there is no real distance. And this raises the question I would like to end with—a fascinating question: while we are here in the world, where is it that we are absent from?

For Absence

May you know that absence is alive within hidden

presence, that nothing is ever lost or forgotten.

May the absences in your life grow full of eternal echo.

May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere where the presences that have left you dwell.

May you be generous in your embrace of loss.

May the sore well of grief turn into a seamless flow of presence.

May your compassion reach out to the ones we never hear from.

May you have the courage to speak for the excluded ones.

May you become the gracious and passionate subject of your own life.

May you not disrespect your mystery through brittle words or false belonging.

May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and twilight are one.

May your longing inhabit its dreams within the Great Belonging.

From To Bless the Space Between Us