`What Is Not is Also Reality'

Variations on a theme, secular and religious, respectively. First, J.V. Cunningham, writing in 1966:

“Illusion and delusion are that real
We segregate from real reality;
But cause and consequence locate the real:
What is not is also reality.”

And from R.S. Thomas’ “The Absence” (Frequencies, 1978):

“It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter

“from which someone has just
gone, the vestibule for the arrival
of one who has not yet come.”

While Cunningham’s “What is not” is not identical to Thomas’ “great absence,” both remind us of the sway exerted on our lives and thoughts by the absent, hidden, disguised, delusional, hallucinatory, imaginary, wish-fulfilling, fictional, misplaced, evaporated, quiescent, moribund and dead. No one, not even Richard Dawkins, is immune. The mind is amenable to many ambiguous and contradictory species of “reality” (which Nabokov said should always be accompanied by quotation marks).

These thoughts were stimulated by an amusing incident in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Everyman’s Library has published in a single volume Boswell’s travel book and Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. The passage in question occurs on Aug. 16, 1773, just two days into their journey. Boswell and Johnson are touring the former’s native city, Edinburgh, and dine with some of its eminent citizens. Dinner conversation includes this exchange:

“We talked of the Ouran-Outang, and of Lord Monboddo’s thinking that he might be taught to speak. Dr. Johnson treated this with ridicule. Mr. Crosbie said, that Lord Monboddo believed the existence of every thing possible; in short, that all which is in posse might be found in esse. Johnson: "But, Sir, it is as possible that the Ouran-Outang does not speak, as that he speaks. However, I shall not contest the point. I should have thought it not possible to find a Monboddo; yet he exists.”

This is typical Johnson, witty, dismissive of cant and other foolishness, and reminiscent of his refutation of Bishop Berkeley. The same day’s entry in Boswell’s book, by the way, includes the Johnson observation that contributed to the naming of Anecdotal Evidence:

“I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.”