In the Presence of Absence

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On request of the family, Van Booy constructs a collection of observations on dying, acceptance, and after-life, from random notes scribbled by a dying author from his hospice bed. It is very philosophical in a light-hearted and almost conversational way. The protagonist both connects to, and engages with, the reader for the duration of the time taken to read the book, knowing that he is deceased while the reader lives, yet both are in their ‘present’: “I’m writing this in the present, and you’re reading it in the present. Except there is a gulf of time between us.” Antoon’s translation puts a greater emphasis on re-creating rhythm: “It rises and falls, an echo of an echo of a sky stripped of the howling of steel. As if hearing water dripping from a leaky tap. Or listening to footsteps approaching the door, but never arriving.” Would you like to visit In the Presence of Absence? Follow the routes that have been marked out in the museum. The galleries are large enough for you to move about freely. Please stay 6 feet away from other visitors in the exhibition spaces and follow the instructions of museum staff and volunteers when given Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, Sing like the Southerners Do, 2019, sound-drawing installation. Courtesy the artist. As a writer lies dying, he has one last story to a tale of faith and devotion, a meditation on what lies beyond this life, and a prayer of gratitude that may lead to rebirth. This is Simon Van Booy at his visionary best.

Our life is perpetuated by connection. Sometimes, I think about my fear of connection being linked to the dread I feel towards living. “When one dies, it is the living that suffer.” Mahmoud Darwish was laid to rest on a hill in the West Bank overlooking Jerusalem, his legacy transcendent and present in his homeland. In the end, this book about death advocates for life and how with life continuing after death - can death really exist? Is it really an end? I'm not sure, but this book made me consider it deeply and I'll be thinking about it for a very very long time.

Ewing, Jerry (March 30, 2020). "Kansas release trailer for new album The Absence of Presence". Prog . Retrieved June 19, 2020. Installation view In the Presence of Absence. Proposals for the museum collection. Gilleam Trapenberg, This surely must be paradise, 2020. Photo Peter Tijhuis. But as you look over your life now, like a mariner considering his own disappointment with the unfathomable secrets of the sea, you ask: Where is my port? You are uncertain how your heart returned safe and solid, like a quince still too hard to bite. Why did you cry, then, when the virgin by the tree was no longer a virgin because one of those who tame the wind had beaten you to her? And why did you cry again, when the second one did not open the door as you stood in the bitter cold shivering from humiliation, not from the cold that lit up your furnace? And why did you cry a third time when the third one departed without noticing that you were hugging a pillow, not a body of silk and ostrich feathers?

This was a beautiful and heartbreaking way to start the year. I wish I could remember who suggested this or how I found it.To call a writer prolific can be to damn them with faint praise, but Simon Van Booy is without a doubt prolific — prolific, though, in the positive sense of being marked by abundant inventiveness or productivity. There are so many brilliant reflections: “Dying has given me the luxury of time by taking it away.” He captures the hypersensitive sensations humans can experience when faced with death or life-threatening events. “Traumatic events can make you a stranger in your own life” where all the ordinary, banal, and mindless things we do daily suddenly become epic and vital.

What Sinan [Antoon] has done withIn the Presence of Absenceis a kind of miraculous work of dedication and love. Reading this volume is sheer enjoyment and sublimity.” As if electrocuted, you walk aimlessly, drifting with falling leaves. The storm and your emotions make you dizzy and you make them dizzy. You do not know if you are happy or sad, because the confusion you feel is the lightness of the earth and the victory of the heart over knowledge. You will later learn that love, your love, is only the beginning of love. In the beginning of love you are prepared, like a musical instrument, to compose according to the dictates of the air. Every breeze is a musical note and every silence a prayer of gratitude. Three woman who join together to rent a large space along the beach in Los Angeles for their stores—a gift shop, a bakery, and a bookstore—become fast friends as they each experience the highs, and lows, of love. In the Presence of Absence. Ahmet Öğüt, Bakunin’s Barricade, 2015–2020. With works from Else Berg, Timo Demollin, Marlene Dumas, Pieter Engels, Nan Goldin, Käthe Kollwitz, Jan Th. Kruseman, Kazimir Malevich and PINK de Thierry. Photo Peter Tijhuis. There are two maps of Palestine that politicians will never manage to forfeit: the one kept in the memories of Palestinian refugees, and that which is drawn by Darwish’s poetry. —Anton ShammasI asked you: Who is she? You said: She has so many selves that I myself do not know her. She and not she. She and her personae, when they come together in a love poem, that draws on many sources, search for the fulfillment of what cannot be fulfilled, are moved by a call that overwhelms us without our realizing that it has yet to arrive, and by a renewed thirst next to the spring. She and not she; she is present and absent, it is as if her presence holds my absence within her, and her absence carries the presence of details. But she moves with so many names it is impossible to know if she is she, or one of the women my imagination and mercurial desires have invented. But it seems that she is an invention, because I never confuse names. I never call another by her name, which I have forgotten because so rarely did I use it. In Simon Van Booy’s extraordinary novel, The Presence of Absence, each well-wrought sentence builds upon the next, taking us deeper into Max Little’s life with staggering lucidity. The first part of the story is constructed in descending numerical chapters that decline with a sense of fatalism as the narrator reconstructs his life’s highpoints interspersed with uncanny, existential observations on the business of life, death, and dying. Max confesses his mind’s innerworkings with adroit ease. “Do people ever walk around their homes, wondering which room they will die in? Whether it will be a Wednesday night or Saturday morning at the table with toast and coffee?” And “What would happen to things like knives and forks once I was gone. Would my wife keep them?” In conjunction with the exhibition In the Presence of Absence, several of the participating artists discuss various themes related to the exhibition in three online talkshow. The book opens with a self-referential prologue in which Van Booy positions himself as the Little fan chosen by the dead writer's widow, Hadley, to help arrange for the posthumous publication of the "small journal of his last days" that was "too fragmented in its original form" to make sense on its own. Instead, says Van Booy's fictional version of himself, he, Hadley, and the late Little's publisher Sipsworth House decided that Van Booy would incorporate those fragments "into a novel that I would write and publish under my own name with an introduction explaining the circumstances of our collaboration." In the Presence of Absence is an intimate autobiographical self-elegy, and as in much of Darwish’s earlier collections, the poetry here is rich with allusions to Arabic literature, history, culture, and art, especially as they interact with the Hebrew Bible, Christianity, pre-Islamic cultures, and colonialism. This twenty-chapter narrative is almost entirely a hybrid of nonfiction and poetic-prose with a few occasional poems serving as chapter epilogues. Sinan Antoon, the collection’s translator, includes an impressive appendix in which he thoroughly and accessibly explains Darwish’s references and allusions, allowing readers insight into both Darwish’s writing process as well as Antoon’s approach to translating his work.

What Sinan [Antoon] has done with In the Presence of Absence is a kind of miraculous work of dedication and love. Reading this volume is sheer enjoyment and sublimity.” This is how fights start in high schools. There was no time for it when there was a case to investigate. For instance, I’m writing this in the present, and you’re reading it in the present. Except there is a gulf of time between us. I might even be dead. Yet here I am.”Mahmoud Darwish is one of the greatest poets of our time. In his poetry Palestine becomes the map of the human soul. —Elias Khoury The book never forgets the author’s connection to real and imaginary Palestines. It is full of descriptions of Gaza and Deir Yassin and Sabra and Shatila. But it also has many personal moments, when Darwish faces his mortality. In Chapter 11, he recounts a meeting with a sculptor-friend: Language is a map leading to a place not on the map,” announces a young writer lying in a hospital bed at the beginning of The Presence of Absence . As he contemplates his impending physical disappearance and the impact on his beloved wife, he realizes, “Life doesn’t start when you’re born . . . it begins when you commit yourself to the eventual devastating loss that results from connecting to another person.” At the center of Max Little’s concern is his wife, Hadley, and the reader is taken to their first meeting even as Max shares his ruminations on how to best tell Hadley he is dying. Pondering his plight alone on a beach, he arrives at a profound spiritual truth, when he comes to consider himself in the third person. Max posits, “When you nurture the ability to witness your life in the third person, in extremis, or through prayer or meditation, there is an unavoidable shift in consciousness as you realize that who you are is not simply how you feel—but a presence beyond desire of any sort.”