Noticing the Absence, Seeing the Unseen

"I am going to try speaking some reckless words, and I want you to try to listen recklessly." ~ Chuang Tzu

One day during my freshman year in college I was sitting in my dorm room when all of a sudden my attention became fixated on an alarm clock on the windowsill. I didn’t know why I was looking at it. I checked my watch. The time on the clock was correct.

Then I realized why I was frowning like it had just done something unexpected. It had. It had just stopped ticking.

The ability to notice what’s missing, to sense what’s not there, or to know the very thing the addition of which would make something perfect, or the ability to feel the gradual shift of a loss over time and to wrap one’s feelings and recollections around that absence and know what happened… these, it seems, are higher faculties, and very important ones.

We spend a lot of time looking at things, thinking about things, considering things. Things, things, things. We spend less time considering absences. They can be harder to see. People tend to focus on and talk about them less. And, as the alarm clock example suggests, sometimes responding to an absence can be confusing. We may not even know what part of ourselves is responding.

We may not be fully present in the part of ourselves that senses an absence.

As an editor, the ability to really feel into a piece of writing and understand what is missing in it came to me slowly over many years. It’s much easier to look at what’s there on the page than it is to consider what isn’t there, but might be. The one data set is finite, the other, infinite.

Honestly, there are probably quite a few pieces of argumentation missing in this very piece of writing. As I look at the preceding paragraphs, I can see that I’m assuming quite a few understandings.  Perhaps some additional examples will help. The best cooks can taste a dish that’s “meh” and know just what to add to make it taste great. The best decorators know just the lamp, or rug, or shift in floor plan that will make the space feel “right”. Feeling the presence of an absence can help us find the thing that serves best.

In regards to what’s missing in this writing, I guess I’m hoping my readers can make the necessary leaps. In fact, it’s quite likely that I’m structuring this writing to require those leaps. Maybe what’s missing in the text will draw forth a new kind of presence in you.

The common phrase “You don’t know what you’re missing” is a pretty big statement.

Again, it’s simply harder to see what’s missing because we’re so accustomed to looking at, hearing, sensing, and feeling what’s there for us, what seems obvious. Like a hypnotist’s spinning watch, “what’s there” mesmerizes us and holds our attention. However, just as the cessation of a signal can itself become a signal (as the Jimmy Buffet song goes: “If the phone doesn’t ring, it’s me”) so too can these absences speak to us if we learn to listen to them. What people do not talk about, cannot talk about, or cease to talk about says as much about who they are as what they are actively expressing.

More broadly, what a society is unwilling or unable to talk about can both indicate and shape what members of that society on the whole are willing and able to see. Yes, what we are able to see. The contours of such silences can translate into the contours of allowable experience, and what is permissible, even to ourselves, to notice. Things like emperors and their clothes. Things like needs that are present as needs but that are absent in our vocabulary or in our capacity to articulate.

Because this group dynamic and the collective blind spots it tends to produce are unavoidable, healthy societies will formalize a corrective function that helps bring the invisible into view, a “job,” to use the current term. These include, for starters, the artist, scientist, journalist, historian, poet, shaman, priest. The idea is to help society to avoid unnecessary and potentially destructive collisions with the collective unseen, the things surrounding and beyond the spinning watch of our social mesmerization. These “jobs,” which are seen as completely distinct from one another in our society, share this common feature: they grapple with unknowns and unseens of many different kinds. In traditional societies, my understanding is that many of these specializations often devolve onto single individuals: shaman, priest, botanist, geographer, artist, musician, historian, storyteller, philosopher and more… all rolled into one person.

I’m now looking very closely at how such functions are being framed and managed in our own society.  For example, if art is reduced to mere decoration, to a business, or to entertainment, and if poetry or essays like this to mere words on a page or screen, if journalism is corralled and tamed for the riding pleasure of kings, and if science is commandeered and pronounced upon rather than freely engaged in and debated, then it’s quite likely we have a problem. Not only will we fail to avoid many preventable collisions, conditions like these allow collisions to be engineered.

And if this is the case, if the seeing eyes of society as a whole are effectively blinkered (and once again, this itself is one of the things that may be unseen or difficult to see) then this invites us to consider what we may do to gather the vision and sensibilities needed to illuminate our own paths and navigate as individuals and groups.

The clock is ticking… until it isn’t anymore. What can such silences teach us? How can paying attention on the edges of what is visible inform and strengthen our vision? Can we feel our way forward?