Absence

How does one speak of absence? What does it mean to allow absence—or dislocation, emptiness, loss—a place in the discourse about spirituality? Often enough absence comes to occupy its own place in our consciousness, arriving without invitation or explanation, on the heels of an encounter with illness or depression or death. It is given to us to deal with whether we like it or not. Sometimes very little, if anything, can be said. No meaning can be attached to the experience. There is only the sense that something is missing or broken or lost, and that one must now begin moving through an uncertain and precarious terrain, without language or understanding.

When absence goes deep enough, it can grow to include even God. Prayer no longer seems possible. The language that once bridged the gap no longer does so. The image that offered consolation now appears opaque. Absence empties out into a kind of void.

Still, consciousness works to express even this. Language stretches or contracts in an attempt to say what cannot be said, at least not in ordinary language. Symbols and images—night, desert, emptiness—are employed to hold what cannot otherwise be held or conceived. Or the descriptive power of language is brought to bear to evoke the palpable and utterly singular character of this or that absence. Often the very shape of language must bend to accommodate such experience. Thus, for example, in Ellen Voigt's terrifying Kyrie, the sonnet form is reimagined to enable her to express something about the world-wide influenza epidemic of 1918–1919 that claimed twenty five million victims, many of whom—lungs completely saturated—died by drowning. No words can fully express this horror, or its cruel randomness, or the awful absence it left in its wake. But in the short, staccato rhythms of Voigt's sonnets, one comes to feel something of the harsh particularity of what consumed the victims of this epidemic:

deep in the lungs a cloudiness not clearing; vertigo, nausea, slowed heart, thick green catarrh, nosebleeds spewing blood across the room— as if it had conscripted all disease.

So too, one is reminded of the need—a deep moral need—to resist easy explanation:

Who said the worst was past, who knew such a thing? Someone writing history, someone looking down on us from the clouds.

Here absence takes form, in the naming of death's particular shape and texture, and in the fierce and often bitter resistance to filling in the absence with apparent meaning.

One senses something similar at work in W.G. Sebald's writing about the holocaust. Sebald practically invents a new literary form—synthesizing the sober, descriptive dispassion of documentary, the dense particularity of memoir, and the imaginative reach of the novel—to enable a more adequate and accurate expression of all that was lost, forever, during these years. Attending to absence is for Sebald a moral act of noticing and describing everything—from the ordinary character of the lives of those who disappeared to the huge weight of grief and despair that can suddenly descend, with unnerving ferocity, on those who have survived. In The Emigrants, the narrator recalls the devastating effect upon him of an encounter with Grünewald's Isenheim altarpiece in Colmar, a work of art whose very particular image of suffering suddenly and unexpectedly opens out onto a wider and deeper world. "The monstrosity of that suffering," he says, "which, emanating from the figures depicted, spread to cover the whole of Nature, only to flood back from the lifeless landscape to the humans marked by death, rose and ebbed within me like a tide." Here is a nearly debilitating moment of recognition that "beyond a certain point pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being experienced—consciousness. . . that mental suffering is effectively without end."

One could be forgiven for wanting to look away from such a terrible prospect. But the moral challenge presented here lay precisely in resisting the temptation to look away or to assign an explanation or a meaning to the experience that inevitably falls short of its full weight and...