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.