Exile & Absence
(The Archaic Brother)
In Nihil, exile is the necessary precondition for beginning the work. Exile is the consequence of being outside the social order of things. This failure to belong results from a refusal to communicate deferentially to the implicit or explicit expectations and requirements of the social group. The language might well develop and deepen over time, but it doesn’t mean the social order perceives a need for it. The language of consensus is the language of obviousness. In Nihil, it’s understood that nothing obvious is worth saying but only obviousness can be widely discussed. In the social order, it’s the discussion — and the game of discussion — that matters more than the work. In Nihil, however, and in the exile that ensues, it’s precisely the opposite.
Exile begins at the point in which I give up hope of belonging or communicating. What for a while, on the far side of hope, is an experience of alienation, eventually makes real freedom possible. Freedom begins with the embrace of emptiness, which is also vastness. This is possible, in Nihil, by developing a relationship with place — in my case New Mexico — and shifting communication from a primarily social or public concern in the present to an intimate individual concern over a course of time extending beyond my own life. Concepts such as relevance no longer seem relevant to me. Once the impossibility of joining is finally accepted, I discover I was in exile all along. Most of us resist becoming aware of the falseness of belonging for as long as the situation allows, but the unavoidable stage of angst and heartbreak we attempt to avoid is only momentary in the scheme of things, so long as we prefer the experience of being with over the meaning of the story about. Exile is the beginning of freedom that follows from this loss of hope. To do the work of Nihil, the work must not seek to matter. It must become free.
In practice, Exile means a few things. First, I must leave the densely populated metropolis for the sparsely populated landscape. This landscape must begin as a stranger because all discoveries ought to be made with no greater sophistication than a child discovers the world beyond the home of her parents for the first time. I must not know where I am, nor be allowed to return to where I was. In time, place reveals itself as myself, both alien and familiar. All my life, I’ve awaited my arrival here without knowing. Exile transubstantiates into repatriation. The soul remembers the soul, arriving at last at axis mundi.
In exile, the eye is trained to notice absence as the most potent presence in the visual field. Absence is home to the Archaic Brother and the source of it. After all, the first stage of Exile began when I was a young boy, when my brother suddenly vanished. His trace was to be found everywhere and nowhere. This vanishing happened not once, but, rather, is always happening, to the memory, the body, the painting. As he vanishes to the outside world, little by little, year after year, he appears in the forgotten places of New Mexico. This is where the Archaic Brother is to be found: in the negative space between junipers, in the floors and ceilings of abandoned churches and schools, in the middle distance from where I sit to where the fires in the mountains rage. The Archaic Brother is the very archetype of absence. All matters of absence pertain to the Archaic Brother, and only out of absence can he be present. The presence felt in painting, for example, is to do with absence, with the epistolary substance between my exile and his.