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. You laugh, embarrassed by words that were so excessive in praising lust that they consumed it. A lust that starts with a pair of feet sculpted by a sliver ofsun, moving up two skillfully cast legs from where lightning flashes, and on to knees that were certified miracles. Higher still: the belly ebbs. Farther up: sunset gradually absorbs you with noble, bashful voraciousness. You approach and retreat, rise and fall, sweat, sigh, and drown in an enchanting night of sultry darkness. Her hands, or maybe yours, gather and carry you like an eagle swooning in a sky dripping with stars. You peek at her half-open eyes peeking at your half-closed eyes. Each of you wants to make sure that you are budding inside one another. Not so much a review but some reflections. It very well may read like a glorified journal entry, so feel free to skip. The Muncy/Velasco story took up far less of the hour than I expected, but I was grateful. Right now, Muncy's reactions are childish and unbecoming of an SVU detective. But no one makes a peak his abode. You both slip together from the highest heaven into a dewy drowsiness. You both whisper in the shared silence and say nothing, but it is more lucid than anything. You dream together, and separately, that this embrace might last forever, until you realize that “forever” has a very short life span, and that eternity does not heed anyone. It often circulates and shifts from one minute to another and from one state to another.

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”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.” 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.” Framing: A fictionalized Van Booy receives the journals of a dying writer, Max Little, and puts them together to create a novel under his own name at the behest of Little’s wife Hadley.

You, who only know love when in love, do not ask what it is, nor do you look for it. But when a woman once asked you if you were in love with love itself, you were evasive and escaped by answering: I love you. She persisted: Do you not love love? You said: I love you, because of you. She left you, because you could not be trusted with her absence. Love is not an idea. It is an emotion that can cool down or heat up. It comes and goes. It is an embodied feeling and has five, or more, senses. Sometimes it appears as an angel withdelicate wings that can uproot us from the earth. Sometimes it charges at us like a bull, hurls us to the ground, and walks away. At other times it is a storm we only recognize in its devastating aftermath. Sometimes it falls upon us like the night dew when a magical hand milks a wandering cloud. Max Little is dying and wants to leave behind something of his life. A young writer of novels, novellas, and short stories, Max grew up in Wales, is of Pakistani descent, and now reclines in a New York hospital bed, in full acceptance of his terminal illness. Kansas: The Absence of Presence" (in Finnish). Musiikkituottajat – IFPI Finland. Retrieved August 2, 2020. 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. Throughout the book, there is a continual interplay of the real and the statue, memory and forgetfulness, sleep and waking, airports, ghosts and ghost limbs, and the act of writing itself.

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Tras una juventud dentro de la Palestina ocupada, años salpicados por numerosos arestos, se trasladó a Egipto y después al Líbano para realizar su sueño de renovación poética. Será en su exilio en Paris, tras tener que abandonar forzosamente el Líbano, donde logre su madurez poético y logre un reconocimiento ante los ojos occidentales. 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.” 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.” 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 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 Shammas Installation view In the Presence of Absence. Proposals for the museum collection. Gilleam Trapenberg, This surely must be paradise, 2020. Photo Peter Tijhuis. Love, like meaning, is out on the open road, but like poetry, it is difficult. It requires talent, endurance, and skillful formulation, because of its many stations. It is not enough to love, for that is one of nature’s magical acts, like rainfall and thunder. It takes you out of yourself into the other’s orbit and then you have to fend for yourself. It is not enough to love, you have to know how to love. Do you know how? You cannot answer, because you cannot relive the ecstasies that shook you and scattered you all over the lilac’s escapade, electrified you and tortured you with the scorching taste of honey. You cannot recall the liveliest and sweetest modes of death; when your “I” left you for your woman, and you encountered your self, fresh as a ripe fruit, in her. If infatuation subsides, love drifts, little by little, toward the daylight of friendship. You say to her: How beautiful is our friendship, to age together and lean on each other and feel compassion for each other in an old people’s home when we lose our memory. But I would rather lean on my cane, and not on you. I do not want to see Romeo and Juliet, or Qays and Layla grow old before me. Love has an expiration date, just like life, canned food, and medicine. But I would prefer love to collapse from a cardiac arrest at its peak of desire and infatuation, like a horse falling off a mountain into an abyss. Offiziellecharts.de – Kansas – The Absence of Presence" (in German). GfK Entertainment Charts. Retrieved July 24, 2020.Darwish is to be read with urgency, in the night, when nothing else moves but his lines.”–The Village Voice By one of the most transcendent poets of this generation, a remarkable collection of prose poems that explores themes of love, pain, isolation, and connection. In this self-eulogy written in the final years of Mahmoud Darwish’s life, Palestine becomes a metaphor for the injustice and pain of our contemporary moment. Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was one of the most acclaimed poets in the Arab world. His poetry collections include Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? and A River Dies of Thirst (Archipelago Books). In 2001 Darwish was awarded the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish – eBook Details