"Est et non: Presence and Absence," an essay by Ricardo Nirenberg

1.

Animals in general must be able to distinguish absence from presence, for they would not be able to survive if they could not readily react to the presence of danger, of predators, and of pasture or prey.  Humans, as far as I know, are the only animals who are able to make absence pass for presence and conversely, to pretend that presence is actually absence.  This extraordinary capacity may be connected to the human awareness of our own mortality, or to our possession of language, but I won’t frame hypotheses; my intention here is only to set some examples before my absent yet dearly present reader.

First thing I do when I wake up is trying to recapture my dreams, but dreams, as you well know, are exceedingly slippery: in a couple of seconds they are forever gone, unless you succeed in catching one by a tail hair, something I often succeeded in doing when I was young.  Back then, I would jump out of bed immediately upon awakening, and would start writing down whatever episode I remembered: it worked like magic, like the pulling of yarn out of a ball until the whole ball, the entire dream, was accounted for.  Lately, however, I lack the necessary energy to rescue those parts of myself, the most truly mine, from the bottomless gullet of not-Being.

Still in bed, next thing: I turn my laptop to the obituaries and the in memoriams in the local paper.  Quite often I run into rhymed assertions such as, “Goodbyes are not forever, goodbyes are not the end; they simply mean we miss you, until we meet again,” or, “Those we love don’t go away, they walk beside us every day, unseen, unheard but always near, still loved, still missed, and very dear.”  Since admittedly unverifiable by the senses — unseen, unheard, untouchable —, this can only be a profession of faith, faith in the presence of someone who is actually absent.  Even though the dead have often appeared in my dreams, I see no traces of that faith when I examine myself in the wakeful state.  I must admit that I insist on lighting a candle on the anniversary of the death of each of my parents, but I do this as a token of filial piety and not because I believe that they are present somewhere, somehow.

Most in memoriams I read ask the dear deceased to watch from their perch up in heaven over the surviving authors, or they send the deceased birthday greetings — not death day, mind you — and assume they are blessed and pleased to have their birthday cake and eat it too.  There seems to be a tendency to imagine that life somewhere over the rainbow, way up high, proceeds in pretty much the same way as it does here on earth.

Vulgar?  Hmm...  Even the greatest expert ever on the afterlife, Dante Alighieri, has Brunetto Latini, in Canto XV of the Inferno, say that if he stopped walking under the rain of fire for just a moment, he would be forced, as a penalty, to abstain from protecting his head with his hands for a hundred years.  So there are solar years in Hell, and hands, and numbers, just as here on Earth!  And Dante can be called “vulgar” only in the sense that he composed the Commedia in his vulgar tongue, Tuscan, rather than in Latin. 

Things have become simpler in our day, to trust my local paper.  Dante had to account for three realms, Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven: now there’s only one, since everyone who dies is supposed to go to Heaven directly, to the point where the faithful neglect to pray for the salvation of their dear ones’ souls.  It’s automatic, no prayers needed, no questions asked: Heaven is the place where all absence becomes presence.  The remarkable thing is that other than Muslim males hankering for houris, no one else has framed an attractive image of Heaven, an image that makes mortals wish to die.  Nevertheless, despite all the imaginative insufficiency of those who want to keep their faith in the eternal presence of the dead, that type of faith became a cardinal virtue in many human cultures. 

Finally, a truly vulgar form of that type of faith.  Eva Perón died in 1952.  The Peronist masses in Argentina, the country where I was born and raised, often chanted after her death, “Se siente, se siente, Evita está presente” (We feel it, we feel it, Evita is present here).  They didn’t mean that they felt her presence with any of their five usual physiological senses; they meant rather that they perceived her presence through their wild enthusiasm or through some mystical, extrasensory sense, and nobody minded the incongruity: it was one more proof of their faith in an uninterrupted Peronist future.

Of the many ancient myths involving a katabasis or descent (to the Underworld) followed by an anabasis or ascent (back to the World), those of Orpheus are particularly complex in regard to questions of faith in the presence of the dead.  The day of Orpheus’ wedding, Eurydice, the bride, is playing with the Naiads on the flowery plain, when a viper bites her in the heel: she collapses and dies.  So starts the narrative in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book X.  Orpheus is desperate.  “Che farò senza Euridice”, he heartbreakingly intones in Gluck’s opera, “che farò senza il mio bene”.  He decides to go down to Hades and look for his dead beloved.  Somehow, he knew the way: through a cave.  Which of a hundred caves has been the subject of caviling; the likeliest candidate seems to be the cave in Cape Tainaron, the Southernmost point of Mainland Greece, where Heracles had descended before.

There is agreement on the remainder of the story.  With his divine music (song and lyre), Orpheus enchants every soul in Hades, from Cerberus the hound all the way to Persephone the queen, who, in tears, grants to Orpheus the return of his beloved to the lightsome world, on the condition that while Eurydice’s shade is following him, he will not look at her.  A short distance from the gates, Orpheus turns to check if Eurydice is actually following him, sending her back to be trapped in the Underworld forever.  For us to mull over what might have moved the hero to such catastrophic climax.

Perhaps, his accurate ears not detecting her shady footsteps, Orpheus has a fatal lapse in faith, a growth of disbelief in the presence of the hitherto absent beloved.  In a well-known painting, however, Corot depicts the hero holding his bride by an arm.  Well then, perhaps he suddenly felt that an absent beloved was preferable to, more truly loved than, a present one, as it was felt by the Occitan troubadours with their amor de lohn, by Beethoven and the German Romantiker with their ferne Geliebte, or perhaps by Brahms with Clara Schumann.  Christianity, too, highly valued belief bereft of the testimony of the senses; in the Gospel of John, 20:29 we read: “Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

Is it truly a question of belief? is it a question of love?  Or does the Orphic myth raise a rather different and more fundamental type of question, such as, is there a limit to how much presence we humans can bear or how much the world can hold?  If so, must catastrophic absence necessarily follow, the destruction of an excess of presence?  The kabbalist rabbi Isaac Luria (1534 - 1572) conceived the idea that God was a plenum and that He had to undergo a contraction, in Hebrew a tzimtzum, to make room for His creation.  God’s tzimtzum was the first in time: from then on, the alternation presence-absence-presence appears to be like a cosmic deep breathing.

We choose an example that shows Rabbi Luria in a bright prophetic light.  The beginning of the seventeenth century — let’s say the first fifteen years of the century — saw Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, Cervantes’ First Part of Don Quixote in 1605 and the Second in 1615; Monteverdi’s music, including his opera L’Orfeo (1607).  The tenebrous Caravaggio and his numerous cut heads make us wonder if perhaps a lost painting of his depicted Orpheus’ head floating with his lyre in the river Evros.  It saw Galileo refuting, with his inclined plane experiment of 1604, the Aristotelian tenet that bodies fall with constant velocity, and concluding that, instead, they fall with constant acceleration.  A conclusion that opened the door to the new physics and made obvious the need for what we call “derivatives” and “integrals,” which were invented later in the century.  To cut to the chase, Johannes Kepler in his Astronomia nova of 1609 established the laws of planetary motion.  As if such prodigious production called for an equally prodigious destruction, the Thirty Years’ War, perhaps the most destructive war thitherto, started in 1618.

 

2.

In the previous section we proposed, or suggested, that presence, the very bulk of being, cannot grow beyond certain limits.  In 1921, after another terrible war, Paul Valéry was writing L’Âme et la danse:

Hélas ! depuis la chute du jour que nous sommes en proie à ce qu’il y a de meilleur au monde, ce terrible meilleur, multiplié par la durée, inflige une insupportable présence...
(Alas!  Since sunset we are the prey of that which is best in this world; this terrible best, multiplied by duration, inflicts an unbearable presence...)

 

Now the question naturally arises, what about absence? are there bounds to absence too?  In hoarily established fashion, we start from Aristotle.  Aristotle’s Physics IV 8 opens with the assertion that the vacuum or void (Greek to kenon) does not exist.  Among the reasons adduced here’s a remarkable one: a body moving in a vacuum would find no resistance from other bodies, and so would move from place to place in no time (or, as we would say, with infinite velocity).  Those Aristotelian pseudo-reasons were rejected by Leucippus and the other Greek atomists, for whom all matter was constituted by atoms moving in a void.

But Aristotle’s opinions predominated in the Latin Middle Ages; to grasp to what extent, it is useful, I think, to quote Dante’s Inferno, Canto 4, lines131-3:

Vidi ’l maestro di color che sanno
 seder tra filosofica famiglia.
Tutti lo miran, tutti onor li fanno...
(I saw the master of those who know / sitting with a group of philosophers. / All admire him and by all he’s honored...”).

Some of the admiring philosophers in the group are identified by name — Plato, Socrates, Democritus, Heraclitus, et al.  Aristotle is not.  There is no need, since he is the master of them all.  We have to wait until the Renaissance to see Aristotle and Plato held in equal regard as in Raphael’s famous painting in the Vatican.

And so the Latin expression horror vacui, or abhorrence of emptiness, was taken to be an indubitable law of nature.  It means, in our terms, that no portion of space can be completely devoid of being, which was equivalent to saying that no portion of space can be completely devoid of matter.  Total absence, in other words, was impossible.

Thus the question stood until soon after the Peace of Westphalia put an end to the calamitous Thirty Years’ War in 1648: two years later Otto von Guericke built the first vacuum pump, and four years after that he conducted his famous Magdeburg hemispheres experiment, showing that two teams of eight horses each could not separate two copper hemispheres from which the air had been evacuated.  The engraving showing the experiment belongs to the protohistory of my visual memory.  Everybody there holds a stick, either to spank the horses with, or as a walking stick, or just for the pleasure of it.  I had no idea, as a young boy, that a Jesuit priest, Gaspar Schott, had engraved the scene; I was seduced, above all, by the schematic figures representing the hemispheres, their valves, and the rims, floating on top, in the clouds, as if inhabiting a separate, Platonic heaven of ideas.  Seduced by Plato, even though I hadn’t heard yet about Plato and his ideas.

It’s hard to imagine a more spectacular support for the existence of a vacuum than the Magdeburg horse pull, the more so after Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke improved on the air pump.  Seven years before that, however, in 1643, Galileo’s disciple Evangelista Torricelli had already argued convincingly for the existence of a vacuum.  Here’s what he did: after filling a four-feet-long tube closed at one end with quick-silver (mercury), he covered the open end with a finger, inverted the tube, and placed it vertically in a mercury dish.  He observed that the mercury inside the tube only descended down to a point, where the pressure of the ambient air on the mercury in the dish and the pressure from the mercury in the tube were equalized: Torricelli had invented the barometer!  (Using water instead of mercury would have required a very long tube).

He also wrote a persuasive argument that the visually vacant space at the top of the tube was a vacuum.  In 1647 Pascal published a brief volume, Expériences nouvelles touchant le vide, in which he described a repetition of Torricelli’s experiment using a combination of fluids.  About the same time, however, scientists like Pierre Gassendi and Robert Boyle were re-introducing the idea that matter consists of tiny, invisible particles (molecules), after which how could anyone be sure that the upper, visibly empty portion of the barometer tube wasn’t teeming with mercury (or other) molecules?

The situation became much more complicated in the nineteenth century, when the cosmic bulk of being was augmented by the discovery of radiations other than visible light.  It was easy to insulate a portion of space from visible light, but not so easy to insulate from other radiations: apparently, we would need a vessel made of concrete lined with lead and submerged in deep water, and to pretend that it is a vacuum, it should have been previously void of molecules.  No mean task, and likely insufficient to reach a total absence of all cosmic being: today we know that neutrinos are everywhere.  This is enough to suggest that there’s a limit to how much absence we can afford while still alive.  A similar suggestion, from a poet’s point of view, I find in Paul Valéry, Cours de poétique, Tome 1, p. 85:

Un « temps vide », un « espace vide » constituent des états instables.
(An empty time, an empty space, are unstable states.)

 

3.

Along with the creation and perfection of other tools, we have developed signs and sign systems to a degree unparalleled by other earthly creatures: our crowning achievement are the many human languages.  They may be and have been viewed as methods for making absence become presence, and they attain their highest point with Orpheus and his songs that conquer the abode of absence.

Which may help us to interpret what Rilke meant in the enigmatic final tercet of his last Sonnet to Orpheus:

Und wenn dich das Irdische vergaß,
zu der stillen Erde sag: Ich rinne.
Zu dem raschen Wasser sprich: Ich bin.
(And if what is earthly leaves you behind, / to the still earth say: I flow. / To the running water speak: I am.)

The two verbs, sagen and sprechen (to say and to speak), serve in both cases to bring to presence that which is absent, adding flowing to stillness and stillness to flowing, thus completing the earthly plenum.  Thanks to Orpheus and to Rilke, Heraclitus and Parmenides become allies.

The earliest Greek philosophical discussion about language, however, had to wait until Plato.  His dialogue Cratylus has three characters: Cratylus, who maintains that names must meet certain standards to be considered correct, Hermogenes, who argues that names are arbitrary and conventional (which is the modern, Saussurean stand); and thirdly, of course, Socrates, who meanders and gets off so many tangents, I’m not surprised that David Meißner, in his SEoPh entry on the Cratylus says that it is often considered one of Plato’s most vexing works.  Aristotle in his De Interpretatione offers a compromise between Cratylus’ and Hermogenes’ opinions based on his correspondence theory of truth; I’ll be arrogant enough to offer a different compromise.  In my view, both positions, Cratylus’ and Hermogenes’, are correct, but only partly.  Certainly, in the case Socrates chooses — hippô denotes a horse and anthropos denotes a human being — historical contingencies and conventions play a most important part, and with the names of horses and men it could well have been the other way around; but in other cases there are obvious ways in which a name may be right or wrong.

In the language of chemistry, for example, some names like potassium are the product of historical contingencies, but other names are not, like sulfur dioxide which is right when applied to SO2 (so long as di still means 2 and tri means 3) but would be wrong if applied to the substance whose formula is SO3.  In mathematics, for another example, any contradiction is deadly wrong, and its occurrence would demolish the whole edifice, whereas in the demotic of many cultures it is perfectly normal to call a fat guy, ironically, “Slim.”

But enough about the ancients.  The Middle Ages saw a long contention between realists and nominalists.  The realists were Platonists; for them ideas are eminently real (since eternal) and their proper nouns call them to mind.  Mallarmé said it better in Crise de vers:

« Á quoi bon la merveille de transposer un fait de nature en sa presque disparition vibratoire selon le jeu de la parole, cependant ; si ce n’est pour qu’en émane, sans la gêne d’un proche ou concret rappel, la notion pure. »
(What use is the marvel of transposing a fact of nature in its almost vibratory vanishing playing the game of language, however, if it is not to extract from it, without the trouble of a near or concrete recall, the pure idea.)

Nominalists, on the contrary, believed that only particulars located in space and time have full reality, whereas “universals” like beauty, or faith, whose being is spread among many, have only a pale, post rem reality: they are but names, words, and a word is nothing but a soft wind from the mouth, a flatus vocis.  This doctrine and its name emerged from debates in medieval philosophy, more precisely with Roscellinus, who lived from about 1050 to about 1121.  It is a remarkable doctrine.  The first thing that comes to mind is, are all words nothing but flatus vocis, or only some?  If only some, how can we distinguish those who are from those who are not?  If beauty is a universal, hence just a flatus, how come when I add her to it —her beauty — it suddenly becomes a particular and by no means a flatus?  Can two flatus add up to produce something fully real?

And if all words are flatus, what happens then to promises, vows, and blasphemies?  Are they no more binding than farts?  And what of the Mosaic commandment, Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain?  I wonder how Roscellinus’ followers avoided the stake.

But enough about the Middle Ages: it’s time to return to the present.  Enrique Santos Discépolo, the greatest tango lyricist ever, deftly combined a universal with a most down-to-earth particular in his tango “Yira, yira” (1929):

Cuando no tengas ni fe
ni yerba de ayer
secándose al sol ...
(When you’re left with neither faith / nor yesterday’s yerba / drying under the sun...)

That is the depth of desperation.  Most believe they know what the universal faith means; as for yerba, it is a plant (Ilex paraguariensis) used to make an infusion called maté or cimarrón in Spanish, and chimarrão in Brazilian Portuguese.  The crushed yerba leaves and stems are used only once: to use them again produces an almost insipid, washed-out beverage.  To be unable to procure a cup of fresh yerba is already to have reached the wastes of neediness.

1929, however, is almost a century ago.  My great-granddaughter Alma is to me, right now –July 2024–, immediately present: her smiles, her imitations of gestures effortlessly seasoned with glee, her first trials with signs and languages.  Her beauty is most definitely not a flatus vocis. She doesn’t yet pronounce any words, except for a couple sounding like dada and mama, but she understands quite a lot.  If you ask her — Where’s the cat? or ¿Dónde está el gato? — she points at the feline with a gesture with her extended arm and index finger that seems choreographed by Terpsichore.  Her parents asked me how I wanted Alma to call me, and I chose the Italianate nono (easier to pronounce than nonno).  The other day they asked Alma — Where’s Nono? — and she pointed at me, me drooling old josser shaking from happiness.  Orpheus truly sings!