The above poem by Edwin Muir would be reason enough for me to remember this writer for the rest of my life. Like F.T. Prince, Muir is an underrated lyric poet of tremendous fragrant delicacy as well as hard-nosed existentialism. The sense of the Classics seems to stand behind both, a bit, that Ancient Roman literary tendency towards the lapidary line. Yet he has a greater claim to fame.
Muir and his partner, Willa, constituted the first set of thorough, comprehensive translators of Kafka’s works, both the stories and novels, into English. Some have criticized and improved on their choices since, but for the full scope of Kafka in print today, at least in the creative works, I think they remain the unrivaled kings and queens for all things Kafkaesque. That they did so, and so early on, with such dedication for decades, is a permanent miracle of translation as well as critical devotion.
“The ever-present that in their absence are with us…” writes Muir. So what about absence?
I am 41. Both of my parents are dead. My brother lives out on the streets unhoused in Florida. I reside in Brooklyn, New York, in my most favorite city, though Paris and Mexico City are close rivals. I write from Brooklyn during a US-backed Israeli genocide of Palestinians. I work inside the largest police-prison state in history. Within a bloated empire that—among other things—through its devices and technologies, its cultural assemblies, basically fucks with in real time the entire planet.
Whatever spiritualism I share is written in the face of that.
I love poetry. I have since I was young. I think of Robert Frost’s line “I have been one acquainted with the night” and rewrite it as I have been one acquainted with absence. I believe everyone, of course, has a profound relationship to it. Through the course of my own existence, especially with a sick brother, and then later, among the dissolutions of friends and lovers, time’s handiwork, most notably the death of someone I was in love with at college, I’ve taken on a very pronounced and reverent relationship towards absence.
Someone I’ve cared deeply for the last year or so is no longer in my life.
Whatever spirituality I do have, and yes I have one, comes from my love of such negativity. That is, the formal, lived aspect of negation (I don’t mean Debbie Downer outlooks.) This changed in 2020 when the whole world paused. I got sober for some four plus years. As I did so, my weirdo faith booted back online. I’ve come to feel the weight of absent things. One of the reasons why I turn to psychoanalysis as I once turned for decades to poetry is that not just Eros but absence is taken very seriously in that framework.