The structure of this story is fascinating in what it reveals about the longing that lingers so potently at the heart of absence. When they fall in love, they create a unique space with each other, a special echo in each other’s hearts. The intensity of this claim on each other sets the whole direction of the story from this point on. Once she is changed into a butterfly and driven away, Midhir is haunted by her absence. His life becomes one long search for her, who awakened his heart and then vanished. Her metamorphosis as a new child of the king erases her memory of him. But the longing at the heart of the absence he feels ensures that his power of recognition stays alert and patient. He finds her in a totally unexpected place and in the most extreme form of otherness, namely, in the form of a completely different person. Yet he still recognizes her. After the initial encounter, her absent former life begins to return in dream. This becomes an intense and exclusive longing. Transformed finally into swan shape, they are now united as graceful artists of the air; the sweet irony here is that this was precisely the element which had so tortured Etain and ensured her demented absence and separation from her lover. Now air is the element of their escape and unification.
The Longing for Real Presence
The deeper the intimacy and belonging, the more acute the sense of absence will be. It seems that real intimacy brings us in from the bleakness of exile. Intimacy is belonging. We come in from the distance and grow warm at the hearth of the friend’s soul. Now there are places within us that are no longer simply our own. Rather they are inhabited with the taste and colour of the friend’s presence. When the friend departs, the inner house of belonging falls to ruins; this is why absence holds such acute presence and poignancy. True belonging alters and re-creates your identity. When that belonging is fractured or lost, something of our deepest self departs. To open yourself is to risk losing yourself. Emily Dickinson says:
Absence disembodies
so does Death
hiding individuals from the Earth.
Absence hides the one you love. You desire to be with the beloved, to see her, hear her, rest in her presence. But she is hidden from your eyes though not hidden from your heart. Letters and photographs are no longer objects of joy to raise your heart; now they are filled with pathos. You find yourself in places you were together, and your heart is seared with absence.
We are vulnerable to absence because we so deeply desire presence. Some writer, referring to another, said, “He has quite a delightful presence but a perfect absence.” Obviously, happiness increased when the other was absent! The mind separates us, makes us absent from the earth. The privilege of the mind is its capacity for presence. There seems to be nothing else in Nature that can focus in such conscious presence. The deepest longing of the mind is for real presence. Real presence is the ideal of truth, love, and communication. Real presence is the ideal of prayer here and the beatific vision in the hereafter. Somewhere deep in the soul, our longing knows that we break through to the eternal when we are gathered in the shelter of presence. These are the moments of our deepest belonging. For a while, the restlessness and hunger within the heart grows still. The sense of being an outsider, a stranger here, ceases. For a while, we are home. This is such a satisfying and refreshing experience; it nourishes us to the roots.
Yet the experience of presence always remains fleeting and temporary. Not often do hunger, readiness, and grace conspire to bring our souls home; and when they do, the visit is inevitably short. The mind and time are doomed to move relentlessly onwards. All we achieve is the glimpse, the taste; we are not allowed to linger. We plunge forth again into the ever-diverse fields of new experience. Presence becomes broken, scattered, and fragmentary. We endeavour to be real. Yet so much of our presence is diminished by our role and its functions. Behind our many intricate and necessary social masks, we often secretly wonder who we are and daydream of letting everything derivative and secondhand fall away and living the life we love. We dream of leaving the daily round in which absence, rather than presence, seems to control and determine things. Most of our social world is governed by a sophisticated and subtle grammar of absence. In post-modern culture, we tend more and more to inhabit virtual reality rather than actual reality. More and more time is spent in the shadowlands of the computer world; this is a world which is all foreground but has no background. Many people have to earn their living in the world of function. Imagine someone in a factory assembly line who has to hit the same bolt every twenty seconds for the rest of his working life. You could not stay present in that kind of work unless you were a saint or a Zen mystic. In your heart you would have to be elsewhere. This work makes you absent. This is the absence that Karl Marx referred to as alienation. Much of modern life is lived in the territory of externality; if we succumb completely to the external, we will lose all sense of inner and personal presence. We will become the ultimate harvesters of absence, namely, ghosts in our own lives.
The Homeless Mind
In post-modern culture, the human mind seems particularly homeless. The traditional shelters no longer offer any shelter. Religion often seems discredited. Its language and authority structures seem to speak in the idiom of the distant past and seem powerless to converse with our modern hunger. Politics seems devoid of vision and is becoming ever more synonymous with economics. Consumerist culture worships accumulation and power; it establishes its own gaudy hierarchies. In admiring the achievement and velocity of these tiger economies, we refuse to notice the paw marks of its ravages and the unglamorous remains of its prey. All these factors contribute to the dissolution of real presence. The homeless mind is haunted by a sense of absence that it can neither understand nor transfigure. Indeed, in its desperation, it endeavours to fill every moment with some kind of forced presence. Our poor times suffer from unprecedented visual aggression and cacophony.
There is a great story about the loss of belonging in Gershom Scholem’s book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. In the eighteenth century, there arose in Eastern Europe a remarkable mystical movement called Hassidism. Its founder was known as the Baal Shem Tov, and he was a religious genius and pioneer. One day, a calamity threatened the community in which he lived, and so he called his chief disciple and said, “Come, let us go out into the woods.”
And they went to a certain very special spot that the master seemed to know about, and he built a very special kind of fire, and then he offered a special prayer. He said, “Oh, God, Thy people are in dire need. Please help us in this moment of distress, etc.” Then to his disciple, he said, “It is all right now. Everything will be all right.”