Caveat Emptor

Before I dive into the meat of a post which I converted from hand written notes, a little background is necessary. I am deep in writing my final masters thesis for an MPhil in Theology from the University of Cambridge. A lot is at stake as my score will determine whether I get to continue on to a PhD and (likely) whether I receive any further funding for said PhD. My brain has been running through the writings of such varied geniuses (and madmen/people) as Friedrich Schleiermacher, John Henry Newman, Henri Meschonnic, Walter Benjamin, Rowan Williams, Ben Quash, Elaine Scarry, Janet Soskice, John Dryden, Augustine, Jerome, Eugene Nida, Stephen Tardif, Hans Urs von Balthasar and many others as well as through the translations of and the direct Hebrew of the Hebrew Bible. I am tired in two languages.

My dissertation is about translation theory and language as it relates to the Hebrew Bible specifically Robert Alter’s translation which was completed and published in 2019. After writing some 30K words (for a 15K word thesis limit) and 200-300 citations, I had the strong desire to simply go on a walkabout for the brain, a playing with language with no intent to use any other thinkers directly, though I might imitate some style and movements. In short, I wanted to let my brain play, and the afternoon was too beautiful, and the writing tablet I have (though not precisely as lovely to write on as ink and paper) felt lovely.

I sat outside, and though I sought to convey the sense of the beauteous weather and feelings of it, maybe in poetry, I could not and so gave up. Instead came to my mind a title “Absolute Presence,” which my hand dutifully wrote at the top of the page and thus began the following exploration which comes very lightly edited, and with the heavy caveat that it is not remotely for the faint of heart. That being said, I was delightfully encouraged in the process of writing it, and felt myself pulled along in a rather unique fashion which I will, someday perhaps, attempt to describe. Whatever the state of its product, I challenge you to have a sit down one day soon, and loose your mind to explore a path as it naturally reveals itself, and see where you might end up.

All my love, and thank you for reading.

–D.M. Jorgenson

Absolute Presence

There is nothing like the moment of erasure produced by the ringing of the bell. Everything outside of the ropes and pads of the ring drops away into nothingness and while I recall that narrowness of focus, the fog of it could quickly further collapse into a narrower, terrifying blindness accompanied by brutality confusion as an opponent beyond my skill and confidence battered me into oblivion.

—

In my first ever theatrical performance, I had a very strange out of body experience. I was delivering my lines in the King’s College Chapel, as I had countless times before in my dorm, my shower, on street walks and in music rooms for weeks. But I wasn’t in the performance, I was outside of it, watching as if suspended between the floor and the highest fan vaulted ceiling in the world. I was doing it but I was no longer in it.

—

Two days ago, for the first time in twelve years, I stepped into the boxing ring, headgear on, mouthguard in and took my stance before a larger and much younger opponent. I weigh 7/KG (157 lbs), and he was 81KG (~180 lbs). I’m 35, he’s early twenties. When told to box I wasn’t frightened and my stance and breathing settled me. Unlike literally hundreds of sparring sessions at the U.S. Air Force Academy, I felt truly present.

I laughed when I got hit, made silly video game noises (boop*) when throwing the jab and even managed to get my much better opponent on the ropes a couple times.

—

I have written before about the day I remembered my hands when learning to surf, and perhaps this was something like that, clarity of focal perception attuned to the joy of a series of delightfully difficult moments.

It got me thinking about presence.

How does one cultivate presence? Should one cultivate presence? What is presence?

Perhaps an apophatic approach could help. Though I must warn you that what follows is a dizzying side-quest not for the faint of heart.

Not-presence

What is not-presence? Not quite ‘what is absence’ for that may be too far a distance from the real question, but rather ‘what is not-presence’ in its totalizing or unified sense.

What does not-presence look like? In other words, what might negate presence?

Well presence in what sense? Spatial, Attentiveness, Intellectual, Spiritual, Emotional?

To be present spatially is to be at the table.

No definition or description can stand outside its relations. To be present at this table (physically) is to be absent from that table. But how would I negate my presence from this table? To leave is not to be absent from the table’s vantage, for it does not consider my departure at all, much less experience my departure as an absence.

I cannot be absent from an object only a subject. I cannot feel an absence except as a subject. None of this however negates presence, for indeed a subject experiencing an absence does so only in relation to some needling sense of presence; in memory, in thought, in desire, in spirit perhaps.

Absence cannot therefore be not-presence since for a subject a fragment of presence, even if imaginary or illusory, must be in place as a necessary condition of experiencing an absence, or if we think in terms of language, of naming an absence.

Therefore absence is not not-presence but a kind of partial presence felt in a desire for (or indeed an aversion to) the expansion of that partialness. An absence sensed is rooted in an affectional inclination toward pure presence or not-presence.

Not-presence, in this light, has almost nothing to do with spatial (or any other) proximity but with memory. Not-presence is either total ignorance or an absolute forgetting.

An absence may be the sense of a word stuck on “the tip of the tongue” where the acute frustration of absence is in an imperfect forgetting of what was once present to memory. In the sense of knowledge on absence might occur when some linkage between ideas or concepts or words beacons outward reminding of an incompleteness in understanding. This is not not-presence, for like the frustration of partial forgetting, it is the frustration of a partial knowing desiring to know more.

Ignorance, and by this I mean absolute ignorance, is of a completely different quality and cannot be experienced in any real sense for in its absoluteness it bears no relation whatever to anything available to a subject.

Often we use the term ignorance not quite in this way. We employ it pejoratively as an insult, but what is true ignorance cannot be morally or ethically culpable because true ignorance has not even the slightest connection to a subject and therefore, like an orphaned dot in a large dataset, it cannot hope to be connected to any other relation except by some external imposition which erases ignorance by the provision of a path, even if partial, to that knowledge which it could not have accessed (or been accessed by) before.

From there ignorance is immediately eradicated, for the not-presence of knowledge, i.e. ignorance, has been converted to a continuum of absence-presence, of known-unknown with an intervening bridge of relations.

This is revelation; the ultimate and irreversible erasure of ignorance by the provision of sense and senses, objects and subjects and varying degrees of presence-absence which forecloses forever the appeal to ignorance as what cannot be known to the foundation of a living question of what is and can be known submitted to a stream of time within which no man is excused to believe in absolute ignorance but must relate to all things on their temporal continuum absence-presence, known-unknown never again to speak of the ignorance of not-presence of knowledge.

Memory is then the only tool that remains to one who wishes for not-presence, or, rather, forgetting is all that remains. Only a trained and disciplined process of forgetting can return again to the (fallacious) bliss of ignorance. Only by forgetting the relations of presence-absence, known-unknown, can one make appeal to ignorance, that is to not-presence. Only forgetting can negate presence.

Any talk then of an absence, whether of revelation or of knowledge, places itself automatically in the absence-presence relation. No sense of absence is possible without some sense of presence (real, tangible, illusory, imaginative, spiritual, etc) The linguistic relation between absence-presence is as incontrovertible as the relation between mother and child. Whatever state it maintains (positive, loving, hateful, confused, clear, etc.) can never escape the invisible bond of their relation. The nature of that tie may shift, but it’s being cannot.

Only not-presence can negate presence. Absence can only reinforce the absence- presence continuum. Suppose, however, that a child is born and put up for adoption, never knowing their mother. Does their ignorance (here used in its most limited fashion) amount to not-presence? Say they even believe, without any shred of doubt, their adoptive mother is indeed their biological mother. Still we do not have not-presence, for a second subject exists, whose tie to the first is a matter of being, who registers the absence in memory of months of the intimately carried presence of pregnancy.

While the child may not experience absence, and in a limited sense be ‘ignorant,’ the relation of two subjects cannot collapse to not-presence without the not-presence of both parties.

The relation, being constituted by connection itself, not its quality or hopes or shape or any quantifiable measure, remains where either remembers.

Suppose the mother of the child is in an accident which causes amnesia. Have we reached not-presence? In a limited sense for the mother as well as the child perhaps we have. But we live in a world of more-than-dual relations. There are friends, family, co-workers all with relational ties of their own; both to the mother and the child. To reach not-presence, all subjects in this web of relation must forget. Including you who reads this and I the one who writes it, imagining the relations and interrelations.

But more we live in a world of pictures and notes and media of various kinds, of books and buildings and stories. Any one of these may bear witness to one forgotten and by the strange resurrection of memory make visible what was invisible, not because it was not-presence but because it had been hidden but never erased. All subjects forgetting then is not enough, either, for not-presence. All objects which bear any impression, even illusory or incomplete of their subjects and more of the relation must also be destroyed, and destroyed absolutely.

Yet our sciences improve. Our methods of drawing even from the dust the fragments of lost lives and civilizations, of finding and fabricating new relations, expand. Even what might have been once unknown returns to the known because it was ever, in an absolute sense, in its known-unknown relation. Absolute ignorance is omitted and not-presence thwarted.

Suppose then we erase all subjects but one, place him in a solitary chamber and inflict him with absolute amnesia. Have we achieved the negation of presence?

You may think that I will appeal now to God, but we do not yet need to do so. The very chamber in which our subject is placed becomes for him a relation even if he is not a relation to it. And its presence hints at the possibility of the presence of others.

That he cannot recall another doesn’t matter. The intimations of possibility of presence are likely to incite a reaction against the loneliness of absence even without any memory of the loneliness of presence (for as anyone who has struggled with loneliness can tell you it seems to have remarkably little to do with proximity to others).

Let us then take one further solipsistic step to test the limits of such an exploration.

What if I am indeed nothing but a brain in a vat fabricating all my surrounding relations? You already will see, I have argued that even illusory presence enforces the presence-absence continuum. A conscious mind is therefore unable to escape absence-presence and can never ultimately reach not-presence.

The Indestructibility of Relations

This state of affairs leads to the conclusion of the indestructibility of relations. Connections made between subjects and subjects, subjects and objects, subjects and themselves can never be absolutely annihilated in the realm of time, they can only be hidden or transformed.

There is, however, one notable exception although its requirement is nothing less than the remaking of the cosmos. God will “remember their sins no more.” (Hebrews 8:12) God, not being a subject, but the grounds for subjects and objects both, cannot be submitted to any rules or principles of subjects as we conceive them.

Still we may speak of a practice of subjectivity in God which human subjectivity approximates by some means upon which I will not seek to speculate.

In light of our discussion thus far, however, if the path to not-presence is forgetting then the indestructibility of bonds ties us to our sins and those we’ve sinned against. What is required then to reach the not-presence of sin required to enter the pure presence of the pure God? If not-presence is also resisted by the objects of existence which themselves perpetuate the indestructibility of bonds and keep sin in a state of absence-presence so that I must cry out with Paul “O wretched man that I am who will save me from this body of death,” (Romans 7:24) then the world and its objects too must be destroyed after a fashion so complete as to be beyond the skill or capability of any to restore, even God, who not being subject to any rule of subjects imposes a promise which fulfills a requirement of forgetting freely and completely.

But the annihilation of the bonds of sin requires more, it requires the annihilation of our memory of our sin as well as others’ memories of our sin as well as the annihilation, as I have said, of any objects which could possibly even intimate, illusory or otherwise, our sin. To annihilate the indestructible bond the whole of the previous cosmos in all its relations must be unmade and remade.

As long as the world in which the sin occurred in any fragment exists, and even the tiniest intimation of sin is seeded in our minds, and the God who made and upholds it all remembers – if any of these remain, the bond of sin remains and we are trapped in the absence-presence continuum of its relation to us and to those we have wronged, most of all God.

So it is necessary that we also remember not our sins in the world to come, and how could we? If God has forgotten and re-made the world to match the fulness of His remembering; we too will forget. For he says, “I will remember their sins no more.” (Hebrews 8:12) And What God forgets ceases to be for as the ground of being where he provides not for being it can indeed return to not-presence.

But what of our relations here and now? Will such bonds as we build survive this forgetting? Is not so much of my relation to you in my remembrance of how I have wronged you and you me? Yet, can we not trust the God who will re-make His creation to be with His people to re-make our bonds as well after such a fashion that sin is reduced to not-presence?

Certainly we can, and indeed we must. For a mere absence of Sin will not be enough, which traps us in the absence-presence continuum forever, but only its absolute not-presence.

And how great a hope do we have in so strange a thing, if one may call not-presence a thing, in the great hope of God’s forgetting, of our forgetting, and of a cosmos which might testify against us unmade and re-made in its entirety to annihilate even the barest intimation of sin. That is True Resurrection.