In the Presence of Absence

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This is how fights start in high schools. There was no time for it when there was a case to investigate. In his elegant, thought-provoking prose, Simon Van Booy has created a beautiful gift to his fans; a fictional conversation of sorts between the author and his readers. Speaking through the mouth of Max Little, an author who learns that he will die within a year or so. As his terminal disease advances, he ends up spending his last days in a hospital bed, reflecting on his life, his beloved wife, and the future... even beyond his passing. Through it all, he carries on a conversation with the reader, an asynchronous dialog that is happening as he writes it, but also as the reader reads it. The book is sectioned into two parts, "In Vivo" or, within the body, and "Ex Vivo" or, outside the living body. As you might imagine, the first part is told while Max is still alive, and the latter part years later. Life doesn’t start when you’re born- it begins when you commit yourself to the eventual devastating loss that results from connecting to a person […] it’s in the eyes. That’s where you can tell. And.. by how- long after they’ve disappeared from your life- you somehow go on. Loving them.” I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that isolation is a side effect of depression or su*cidal ideation. Isolation is an injurious thing. After all, what is not being known if not just another form of not existing at all?

This unusual and relentlessly self-reflexive approach allows Van Booy to tell not only the story of the doomed Little, but also to tell the bigger story of how stories are told — their inherently incomplete yet collaborative nature. As Little explains, "Through the act of reading this novel, it's actually you telling the story" because "when you see words, what's imagined comes from your experience of life, not mine." When recalled by words, those moments are impervious to the attempt to raise the body to the station of the soul. Who among us has not said to his woman: “I only exist in you,” and was truthful. We were truthful, as well, when we found our existence in a similar utterance in a different place. So do you know how to love? You cannot answer, perhaps because you did not notice the subtle atmospheric shifts when traveling from pole to pole: love and passion, rapture and infatuation, ardor and affection, fondness and devotion, blazing love and bewildering love, craving and caprice, dalliance and desire, longing and lust, admiration and attraction, and other desires in search of senses. In every station the body has a certain state, and for every state there is a station between death and life. So you never know where or how you are. 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. I think about death often. If I die tomorrow, I will be alive still. This version of me at least, the one writing this in the present that will soon, in a matter of seconds, become the past. That person (myself) will live there, here.

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I don’t know why I feel like I don’t know why I am here. I am not here for myself. That is something I have known for the majority of this short life I’ve - begrudgingly - lived so far.

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.” Darwish was haunted by his own most successful performances. He feared they might harden into a canonical style, that he would be reduced to his legend. Robert Lowell, who also knew about early stardom and the pressures of reinvention, called this “the impoverished life of myth.” But how does one escape the expectations of critics and admirers? Midway through In the Presence of Absence, Darwish tells of meeting a sculptor in Paris who offers to make a small statue of him for a keepsake. Darwish demurs. A tombstone is all the memorial he wants. The other man presses him, “Why are you against the statue?” “Because I want to keep moving,” Darwish finally explains, “And I don’t want anyone to break me. I am the one who does that. A statue is incapable of self-criticism.” Ewing, Jerry (March 30, 2020). "Kansas release trailer for new album The Absence of Presence". Prog . Retrieved June 19, 2020.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: It was as though I had been a bystander, a voyeur who contributes ideas but who has no real hand in governance… Ironic how the fleeting nature of time compels us to act, yet is indifferent to our chronic inaction” Installation view In the Presence of Absence. Proposals for the museum collection. Jennifer Tee, Tampan the Collected Bodies and Tampan Ship of Souls #2, 2020. Photo Peter Tijhuis. Installation view In the Presence of Absence. Proposals for the museum collection. DOMINIQUE, Sama Ite Wele Telu, 2020. Photo Peter Tijhuis.

Installation view In the Presence of Absence. Proposals for the museum collection. Remy Jungerman, PROMISE IV, 2018–2019 (left) and Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, Sing like the Southerners Do, 2019 (right). Photo Peter Tijhuis.

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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.” 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." 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.” 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. Installation view In the Presence of Absence. Proposals for the museum collection. Ghita Skali, Ali Baba Express: Episode 2, 2020. Photo Peter Tijhuis.