ABSENCE

Emptiness. Air is “empty” – says the small child. With a bit of time, s/he knows that even empty space cannot be imagined as empty: there too, is material existence. There, where the God of earlier man lived, and where the audacious vision of 20th-century man was projected, Nothing. Formerly, then, immaterial existence, later non-existence.
There was a time when I often moved from flat to flat, though people who have gone beyond their youth generally reach an understanding, take possession of the part of the world coming to them. But I constantly found myself in the spaces of strangers: there was their trace, the colours they had chosen for the walls, the tiles, one or two ruined objects, the place of their bed, the place of pictures on the wall, grease stains on the stove. We lived together in the space, we were co-owners. They were also startled by me on the street: the bodies of former people left their imprint in space.  Their place is here, stacked upon each other. They permeate each other, across different periods of time. A mass of phantoms swarms around me, flits over me, and I cleave their skeletons in my wanderings. Who knows how many people I share that little spatial fragment with that my body fills.
What is it rather that there is? The wall or the window? Material or emptiness? Is it easier to comprehend the reality of the window – its immaterial existence and its non-existence, if it is filled by a wall of stacked heavy bricks? Hardly. On the contrary! Nevertheless: bricked-up windows hang in the air. They are so much there, that grass has even broken through their tops. Vegetation transforming absence into existence. And there, where walls usually stand in a reality absurd from here, there is likewise grass and oblivious cows.

(Margit Ács)