Disappearance

Disappearance is such a powerful word. Complete absence; cease to exist - to vanish. Leaving only a memory, just the incorporeal trace. In Hiding, Mark C Taylor argues that it is the very disappearance of the body which makes it real - only its astonishing absence can inscribe the importance of its (now past) presence. But the past is as corporeal as the present for those who cannot detach themselves from it. Perhaps more so, because its influence is felt, a deadweight, inescapable and unchallengable because of its very, dead, certainty. Whereas the present projects into the future, it is unrealised, unactualised and only to be resolved. The past's shadow is upon us whereas the present's appearance is cast into the future. So, only in retrospect does the present become real - only as past. Only in disappearance does the body gain real - apparent - corporeality.

What use then is disappearance?


Many have claimed that it is only in death that we find Being - in leaving the transitory existence of Becoming, we enter a new state of eternal subsistence. Certainly the concrete presence of the absent implies this. In being not-here, it transcends and solidifies out of the living-death of the corruptible world.