Still Life
Growing up With Death
A Visual Memoir
The terms absence and presence describe fundamental states of being. According to this definition, then, being is not inexplicable or transcendent but exists within a framework or state. Therefore the definitions of presence and absence explicitly rely upon the states within which they are found.
I spent a large part of my life recognizing the presence of my mother.
Not as a ghost-, but in the manner that she existed but on another level.
I didn't want to think about my mother because I didn't know her and because of that I was sad, and I didn’t want always to be sad. Also, I did know of her, which made me sad as well. I was trapped. The only memories I had of her or of our time together came to me like random pieces of torn photographs flying about my head, I could reach up and pull something down, but nothing made any sense.
The thing is, even though my mother was absent she was very much present. I was conjuring her up by admitting that she wasn't here (or present). Eventually, when I grew into my thoughts, and this existentialism made sense; her absence was my talisman. I realized that she was just as necessary as an absent being as she would have been as a present person.
In his book, Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre relates a story to emphasize the premise of absence (or as he referred to it as Nothingness) as a presence. In the story, Sartre was late for a lunch date and enters a café in hopes of locating his friend, Pierre. As he is searching the crowd, the café and the people there, he is struck by a feeling of “fullness of being.” What Sartre discovers is Pierre’s absence or what he referred to as his “nothingness” which becomes the only “thing he is intent on finding.”
In the scene, Sartre describes Pierre’s absence forms into an “existence,” therefore claiming that absence has a presence in the world, and it is as tangible and significant as its opposite (Sartre 42).
In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu explains the concept of absence or “that which is not” by perceiving it as a definite continuum. Every space, even voids, offers potential. To keep my mother with me, I must stay in the presence of loss or acknowledge that emptiness as being full. Tzu’s poem is expressed as:
The hub of the wheel is the space
to which the spokes connect.
The vessel or bowl is
essentially a space,
but it makes containment.
Similarly
a room gets its usefulness
from being empty.
When we [in the West] draw circles, we consider it to be zero, nothingness.
But in India and many other Asian countries, a circle means totality, wholeness. The meaning is the opposite. So,
“form is emptiness,
and emptiness is formed.
(qtd. in Thich Nhat Hanh The Fullness of Emptiness)
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness, Washington Square Press; Reprint edition. 1993.
Chapter 11 Tao Te Ching (Daodejing) Classic Book (Ching) about the Tao (Way, Nature, Pattern, Process) and Te (Virtue, Potency, Power, Integrity, Wise Person) By Lao Tzu (Laozi).
