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.