Framing Presence and Absence

October 18, Good Morning

Midway in Mark C. Taylor’s The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey & the Ends of Representation, the dialectical wonder around presence and absence lightens shadows and complicates the clear. Might we draw closer to God, the Great Unknowable, as these phenomena happen? Again, the ever-present longing: Love, beauty, freedom, justice, truth. Perhaps we only have dissolving frames, another way of imaging. Taylor explores the artistic erasure of the picture: Is God more present in the admission of absence?

Before I press the shutter, I’m less moved to erase frames. To wonder and wander into depths of “reality,” perhaps the telephone pole belongs (possible reminder of a cross), the bumper of my 15-year-old car belongs in the edging of today’s glorious sunrise, including the glass and screen in the window allows the reflection of my partner in the pre-dawn display of autumn leaves. 

We’ve contemplated long on the life task of containing opposites. The yes and no. Life and death. Light and dark. Presence and absence.

God forbids making images, idols… Yet we’re said to be made in God’s image…and advised to know oneself is to know one’s Lord. There might also be comfort in considering God’s anger at idol-makers and in dealing with our feelings concerning the violence and craziness in living today…

“ A jealous God authorizes no delegates and sanctions neither representatives nor representations. ‘The uniqueness and unicity of God,’ as Peggy Kamuf observes, ‘must forever prevent His appearance through any kind of substitute, any doubling of the eternal One and the Same. God, who is unique and uniquely the one who is, cannot tolerate a double, a replacement, a representative.’ Always beyond reason as well as the imagination, the jealous God cannot be figured.” [p. 71 in Taylor; quoting Kamuf from A Derrida Reader, xxiii.]

Thus humbled and leaning thru sight and blindness…