‘How to Represent Absence’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
Somewhere in John McPhee’s sprawling masterpiece Annals of the Former World, the author describes how, ultimately, it’s impossible for the human brain to conceive of geologic time. Much like the distances that define star systems and universes, geologic time cannot be accurately accounted for within human experience. Those who spend their lives working with rock that’s tens and hundreds of millions of years old, let along billions of years old, are said to sometimes develop a peculiar, out-of-body mindset.
I say all that because Albert Goldbarth’s essay, ‘How to Represent Absence: On Deep Time, Pre-History, and Loss,’ begins at the very edges of human history, with 32,000-year-old cave paintings. The subsequent work is as you’d expect, given the title: a meditation on placing the self within the impossible stretches of time and history, juxtaposed against the sudden death of a dear friend, a death choreographed from the very beginning of the piece that nonetheless lands with a great weight.
Regardless of where your spirituality is located (if anywhere), this sort of meditation is all but sure to nudge your sense of self off its axis, temporarily (or not). To flood the brain with timelines that have no everyday corollary is to attempt to unmoor yourself from the everyday. It’s dizzying, and it can be terrifying to reduce your existence to a dust speck, all on your own. It’s worth it, I promise.