musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

How like a winter hath my absence been


‘A great part of every day is not lived consciously,’ wrote Virginia Woolf. ‘One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done… When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger.’ In her novel Mrs. Dalloway, she explains that the key to righting the ratio is in ‘the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.’

I suppose that analysis intrigued me for its recognition of absence in our daily lives; that we are able to live with something that is not there is almost as interesting as our ability to sense something that is absent. Woolf again: ‘The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it is pressed so close that you can feel nothing else.’

But, does a past -which isn’t there- exist in the same way as the future -which isn’t either? What is absence? Is it actually something?

Remember that poem ‘Antigonish’ by W. H. Mearns?

 Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…

I remember my father reading that to me when I was a very young child; I think it was around then when I became curious about absence (although I’m not sure I would have thought it was a thing). For that matter I’m still not sure what to think about nothing… no thing…

The concept of Ma comes to mind of late, though admittedly I knew nothing of it in my youth I’m afraid; indeed I still only have a tenuous grasp of its existence. Ma is a Japanese word that names the space between things; I remember writing about this a few years ago[i]. So, Ma  is a thing as well, I suppose, although apart from being where nothing is, it is still magical for its liminality, for its boundaries -if an empty space can have boundaries…

And then, of course, there is the hole in a doughnut. This lively topic occurred to me a few years ago and tempted me to tackle it in another essay: Holier than Them [ii]. I’m not sure I solved anything about absence in the flowering of my retirement either, but it gives one pause, don’t you think?

I suspect I am deflecting my wonder about absence with a digression, though… I meant to steer it to an essay I came across recently that didn’t treat non-existence as cavalierly.[iii] It tackled the idea of absence not as the lack of something, but more as the way we treat a zero in mathematics: functional.

Among other historical considerations of the validity of absence -of nothingness-  the author cites an interesting example of the reason why it once had trouble being accepted: ‘nothingness was deemed to be in direct opposition to godliness: if God had created the world out of nothing, it was self-evident that nothingness was to be avoided. St Augustine equated it with the devil.’ On the other hand, however, its acceptance was fundamental to the development of things like calculus. ‘Understanding, and using, zero requires a move away from the physical world into the abstract world of concepts.’

But from recent studies, it would seem that there is evidence of neurons in our brains that actually respond to nothingness: ‘the human brain’s representation of zero may share properties with a more fundamental ability to perceive ‘nothing’ itself.’ This perception of absences seems to develop later in childhood, compared with the perception of tangible features. And just like zero, our difficulties with perceiving absences don’t stop in adulthood. ‘When proofreading written work, people are much better at detecting when letters have features added than when they’re removed (‘ONCE’ written as ‘ONGE’ will be easily spotted, but ‘STRANGER’ written as ‘STRANCER’ might not) [iv] Still, there may actually be ‘absence neurons’ in our brains. ‘It seems clearer now that perceptions of absence are not mediated by a mere absence of neural activity. Instead, the brain may have unique mechanisms through which it represents these distinctive experiences [v].’

Perhaps there is something to that; I remember being in the local mall with a friend who shopped there frequently. I was looking for lightweight, waterproof hiking boots for a trip I was planning to take and she had recommended her favourite store. She seemed to know all about hiking boots and had apparently bought just the kind of boot I wanted there a month or so previously.

“There they are, G,” she whispered excitedly as she pointed to some sample boots arrayed on little shelves on the far wall . “I bought the one near the top,” she added, pointing at the wall.

I stared at the boots through the store window, but I couldn’t see anything even close to what I wanted. As far as I was concerned, she was looking at their absence.

“Let’s go see them,” she said, tugging me with her hand.

But even at closer range, the boots I had been describing still eluded me. “Where are they, Jan? I don’t see them…”

She stood on her tiptoes and stared at the boots. Then she shrugged and looked around. “It’s the same store, G -I remember seeing them here before…”

She shrugged, although whether in frustration or embarrassment I couldn’t tell. Janice did not like to be wrong about anything… “I saw them through the window just a moment ago too, G! We saw them…!” She nudged me with her elbow and then glanced at me to validate her claim; it seemed important to her for some reason.

I shrugged, but more benignly, more acceptingly than she had. “I… I didn’t see the boot we were looking for, Jan -but maybe it was just too far away for me to be sure… I mean I believe you…”

Her brow suddenly furrowed and she sighed. “I must be getting old, G: I saw them…”

“You are old, Jan; so am I. But so what? We’re just talking about boots, for goodness sakes.”

She stared at me, her spotlight eyes boring into my cheeks. “So, you saw nothing, and I saw something which was actually nothing…” She shook her head slowly. “Which one of us is squaring the circle, G?”

Suddenly she stared at the boots on the wall again. “There it is, G…!” she said, pointing at the very boot for which we had been searching… but low down on the wall. “Age draws yet another curtain on the world around us…”

I had to smile: Janice had never really retired; she was still an alumna professor at the university. And I…? I’d taken a road less travelled, and maybe that was why we we’re still the friends we are…

So yes, perhaps it is possible to see nothing -or at least to think we did…

[i] https://musingsonwomenshealth.com/2022/01/19/a-sorry-sight/

[ii] https://musingsonretirementblog.com/2019/03/03/holier-than-them/

[iii] https://aeon.co/essays/why-zero-could-unlock-how-the-brain-perceives-absence

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

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