In the Presence of Absence

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When recalled by words, those moments are impervious to the attempt to raise the body to the station of the soul. Who among us has not said to his woman: “I only exist in you,” and was truthful. We were truthful, as well, when we found our existence in a similar utterance in a different place. So do you know how to love? You cannot answer, perhaps because you did not notice the subtle atmospheric shifts when traveling from pole to pole: love and passion, rapture and infatuation, ardor and affection, fondness and devotion, blazing love and bewildering love, craving and caprice, dalliance and desire, longing and lust, admiration and attraction, and other desires in search of senses. In every station the body has a certain state, and for every state there is a station between death and life. So you never know where or how you are. Darwish was haunted by his own most successful performances. He feared they might harden into a canonical style, that he would be reduced to his legend. Robert Lowell, who also knew about early stardom and the pressures of reinvention, called this “the impoverished life of myth.” But how does one escape the expectations of critics and admirers? Midway through In the Presence of Absence, Darwish tells of meeting a sculptor in Paris who offers to make a small statue of him for a keepsake. Darwish demurs. A tombstone is all the memorial he wants. The other man presses him, “Why are you against the statue?” “Because I want to keep moving,” Darwish finally explains, “And I don’t want anyone to break me. I am the one who does that. A statue is incapable of self-criticism.” Throughout the book, there is a continual interplay of the real and the statue, memory and forgetfulness, sleep and waking, airports, ghosts and ghost limbs, and the act of writing itself. In "The Presence of Absence," his fifth novel for adults, the main character, Max Little, is also an author and also a prolific one, still relatively young, lying in a Manhattan hospital and dying of an incurable disease, realizing painfully that "everything I've written was child's play — actually, not as wise, because children know they're playing."

Darwish is the premier poetic voice of the Palestinian people… lyrical, imagistic, plaintive, haunting, always passionate, and elegant–and never anything less than free—what he would dream for all his people. —Naomi Shihab Nye In his elegant, thought-provoking prose, Simon Van Booy has created a beautiful gift to his fans; a fictional conversation of sorts between the author and his readers. Speaking through the mouth of Max Little, an author who learns that he will die within a year or so. As his terminal disease advances, he ends up spending his last days in a hospital bed, reflecting on his life, his beloved wife, and the future... even beyond his passing. Through it all, he carries on a conversation with the reader, an asynchronous dialog that is happening as he writes it, but also as the reader reads it. The book is sectioned into two parts, "In Vivo" or, within the body, and "Ex Vivo" or, outside the living body. As you might imagine, the first part is told while Max is still alive, and the latter part years later. In Simon Van Booy’s extraordinary novel, The Presence of Absence, each well-wrought sentence builds upon the next, taking us deeper into Max Little’s life with staggering lucidity. The first part of the story is constructed in descending numerical chapters that decline with a sense of fatalism as the narrator reconstructs his life’s highpoints interspersed with uncanny, existential observations on the business of life, death, and dying. Max confesses his mind’s innerworkings with adroit ease. “Do people ever walk around their homes, wondering which room they will die in? Whether it will be a Wednesday night or Saturday morning at the table with toast and coffee?” And “What would happen to things like knives and forks once I was gone. Would my wife keep them?” There are two maps of Palestine that politicians will never manage to forfeit: the one kept in the memories of Palestinian refugees, and that which is drawn by Darwish’s poetry.” You laugh, embarrassed by words that were so excessive in praising lust that they consumed it. A lust that starts with a pair of feet sculpted by a sliver ofsun, moving up two skillfully cast legs from where lightning flashes, and on to knees that were certified miracles. Higher still: the belly ebbs. Farther up: sunset gradually absorbs you with noble, bashful voraciousness. You approach and retreat, rise and fall, sweat, sigh, and drown in an enchanting night of sultry darkness. Her hands, or maybe yours, gather and carry you like an eagle swooning in a sky dripping with stars. You peek at her half-open eyes peeking at your half-closed eyes. Each of you wants to make sure that you are budding inside one another.There is a brilliant section on memory and afterlife: “Since becoming ill, I have often felt sad that my physical death would be accompanied by the complete loss of memory. All the previous things I had experienced would cease to exist. To think, all those places and people who had brought me such deep joy, gone forever.” I agree with the protagonist that this is the beauty of life, its transiency. He explores how the concept of an afterlife assumes a retention of memory in some form. He explains how people seek confirmation of an after-life or reincarnation as “The idea of living again mitigates the fear of impending nothingness.” I wholly identified with his acceptance that life is to be lived while alive, as an afterlife is unlikely, or at least in a such an unrecognizable form that it bears no connection to its former life.

Installation view In the Presence of Absence. Proposals for the museum collection. Ghita Skali, Ali Baba Express: Episode 2, 2020. Photo Peter Tijhuis. Mahmoud Darwish was laid to rest on a hill in the West Bank overlooking Jerusalem, his legacy transcendent and present in his homeland. Installation view In the Presence of Absence. Proposals for the museum collection. Remy Jungerman, PROMISE IV, 2018–2019 (left) and Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, Sing like the Southerners Do, 2019 (right). Photo Peter Tijhuis. The Proposals for Municipal Art Acquisitions is a series of biannual exhibitions organized with the financial support of the Municipality of Amsterdam. ScenographyPieter Paul Pothoven developed an installation with a spoken monologue. The monologue is broadcast every hour on FM 100.0 and can be heard in the museum at 11 am, 12 pm, 1 pm, 2 pm, 3 pm, 4 pm, and 5 pm. Online conversations and discussions I don’t know why I feel like I don’t know why I am here. I am not here for myself. That is something I have known for the majority of this short life I’ve - begrudgingly - lived so far. But, it is also the living that keep you alive. In the expiration of your body, you remain with those that have made a home for you in their memory. To those that love you, your absence will make itself known, making its presence known through various acts of remembrance. I think about how my mother is named after her late grandmothers, and how I am named after her. How I know about them, though I’ve never met them. They live in not being forgotten. Britte Sloothaak & Fadwa Naamna (on behalf of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), Cédric Fauq (curator and writer, Palais de Tokyo), Monika Szewczyk (director De Appel, Amsterdam), Prem Krishnamurthy (designer, curator, writer, Wrkshps and (co-) artistic director FRONT International 2021) and Zippora Elders (artistic director Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen and co-curator sonsbeek21-24)