Still Listening

Watching Alan Harris’s How My Light Is Spent, you enter a world where disappearance begins almost imperceptibly.

There is a moment when a room seems to lose its certainty, when the people remain where they are and the light continues to fall across the floor, yet something has quietly withdrawn from the world.

You might not notice at first.

A hand is missing, perhaps, though nobody seems sufficiently alarmed. A body begins to thin into the spaces between things, while voices continue around it, carrying on with the ordinary business of the living. Somewhere there is a telephone, somewhere a voice at the other end, and between them the fragile interval in which one person waits to know whether another is still there.

Perhaps disappearance is not an event but a gradual alteration in the way the world receives you.

The mirrors seem almost cruel in this respect. They offer the promise of a body returned to itself, a familiar outline held safely within glass, but the more you look the less certain the reflection becomes. What does it mean to see yourself when seeing is no longer proof of presence, when the surface gives back an image but cannot tell you whether anyone is truly looking?

There is something deeply tender in the attention that remains after usefulness has gone.

The hands that worked, the body that occupied a chair, the man who once had a place within the small arrangements of employment and family and desire, all begin to loosen, and yet the voice persists. Someone listens to it without needing to restore anything. The minutes pass. The distance between two unseen people becomes, strangely, a place in which something can exist.

You begin to wonder whether this is what remains when all the usual evidence of a life has been taken away.

Not achievement, nor possession, nor the reassuring weight of a body in a room, but the quiet fact that someone has noticed your absence and is still listening for you.

The play leaves you there, somewhere between laughter and mourning, with the peculiar sensation that a man has disappeared and yet has never been more present.

Outside, the ordinary world waits with its lights and windows and passing cars.

Inside, for a little longer, someone is still listening in the dark.

And perhaps that is why the disappearance feels less like an ending than a strange form of illumination, as though the less there is to see, the more carefully you are asked to look.

Notitia — attending to what appears, what disappears, and what remains.