Years ago, I asked students in a creative writing class to tell me the words that they most loved. Several of them chose showy, poetic words I don’t remember. But one young man said, “Fullness.” The very breath as it was expelled from his lungs seemed to fill the word. 

Fullness: fullness as a synonym for presence. Presence links to something indefinable, something more than simply being here. Presence gestures toward the transcendent, a quality of the animated and divine. Humans? We’re just half-inflated bags of flesh. We don’t have true fullness. We are always seeking after presence.

Presence: that-which-is-larger-than-the-self-into-which-the-self-might-enter. Is presence the “transcendent”? Is it “God” (or “god”)? Traditional western theology claims that God is out there and is immutable. All the slipperiness of language—its inadequacy—suggests that this Presence (if that’s what we resign ourselves to calling such an energy or phenomenon) is a shapeshifter, so very wily. The irony: we are at a loss as to what presence is.

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Often, when I was a child, my family camped in remote parts of Baja California. On one trip, we stopped on a dirt road to eat and stretch our legs. There was not a soul in sight. Not a creature. The desert was rock and sand, bereft even of much flora. As my parents leaned against the car talking, the three youngest kids (myself among them) ran down the dirt road, then up a hill. At its crest: the improbable. Below we saw a canopy. Were people beneath it?  We never saw them. In the browns and olive greens of the arid landscape, the canopy was purely white, a strange beacon in an otherwise empty scene. We were close enough to see movement—if there had been any—but heard no voices. We stood mute, watching, squinting for humans, animals, for anything. A kind of fear came over us. Then: someone screamed. We laughed hysterically and sprinted to the car. In what I take to be a kind of weird kid-reverence, no one spoke of the incident ever again.

Now, the canopy was clearly there. It was present. Three of us saw it, we could have gone down the hill to touch it.  But we didn’t. Its strangeness frightened us; we couldn’t understand it as a mere commonplace—a tarp meant to give shelter from the sun. Driving away later, we wordlessly craned our necks to look back, but the canopy was obscured from sight by a hill. What we had seen, we would not see again. Here is the ache of presence. Trained by our bodies, we understand presence as a kind of proof of. It must be empirical, palpable. The senses must repeat it for our observation. Presence so rarely submits to that kind of proof. 

We want presence to be accessible and immediate in time: right here in the present. But the fullness of experience refuses to be defined that way. Presence abides in the uncanny state of recognition that can’t be satisfied by what is merely empirical.  So we prove the larger sense of our being by way of the mundane. I can’t be the only human who proves presence to myself by quirk. Sniffing my own armpits, fascinated by my aroma: my body produced that, so it must be real. Haven’t you wondered about those people who honk into a Kleenex and then peel it apart to look at their own snot? My body records in scars my childhood obsession with peeling off scabs to look at the half-repaired flesh (and the bright beauty of blood) underneath. 

One creation myth has it that humans are made of divine waste: shit, blood, and the expelled breath of the gods. Presence is thus the hereness and nowness of our cast-off state. I smell my own stink, lick sweat from my lips, and commune with the gods. I am one with presence itself.

Zoroastrians, on the other hand, believe that the body and its products are intrinsically dirty. They are careful to throw away hair and nail trimmings. Zoroastrians don’t, I have heard, take baths (instead: showers), because why would anyone want to soak in their own filth? Some modes of presence are unwelcome, as they pollute the purity of the Real Presence. Still, doesn’t a soak in a bath, or a run that makes the body greasy with perspiration provide the kind of delicious privacy, an interiority that makes one, inside one’s body, feel especially real? 

Therefore, another speculation: privacy, or aloneness, is presence. Ancient anchorites built stone huts onto the sides of churches. They were bricked into these by their religious superiors, with tiny squint windows into the sanctuary so they could observe liturgy, and small windows through which charitable neighbors could deliver food and other necessities.  (That whole “divine waste” question comes up immediately: after a short time, these huts must have given off a powerful stench.) 

Such isolation appeals to me—hide and seek disguised as a religious vocation. Isn’t hide and seek, par excellence, the game of presence? Its ruling question is Where? Its ruling goal is to reply Here. You don’t want to be found, you do your best to remain hidden, but being found is the surest proof that you exist. 

Anyone who has played this game knows that the one who hides too skillfully and too long ceases to be. That person leaves the bounds of the game and no one looks for her anymore.  If you are not sought, are you real? Hardly. 

And yet—at the back of the closet, gut sucked in, cheeks brushing scratchy wool coats, my child-self thrilled between being found and being lost forever. At one point, my father tipped me off that there was a hollow space behind some built-in cabinetry. A very small person could squirm into a crawlspace behind the cabinet, bend into an L, and stand upright. The seeker who opened the cabinet door would see only my feet in the dim recess. I learned to chimney-climb up the space, leveraging my hands and feet against the walls until the opening below me appeared blank. No one could find me. I had only my self encountering my self straining to hold my body above the line of sight. If being neither sought nor found erodes one’s reality, having only one’s self to find makes for a solipsistic paradise, at least for a little while. I listened to the “it” person calling my name, and eventually moving on to the next round of hide and seek.  I squirmed out of the darkness, eager to prove my relevance by my presence.

Paradox arrives and enmeshes itself in all our absence and in all our being present. The other dimension of presence, after all, is social. A being or phenomenon exists because it elicits response. (Does a falling tree make a sound if no one is there to hear it?)

I pause here in frustration. Responsiveness may be the most painful problem of presence. Right now, for example, I have an abscess building steam in one of my molars. Pain is one of the most troubling markers of presence and perception. No one can really see my tooth, much less sense how its pain pervades my body. There is no response to invisible pain.

So what about the real presence of things that are never blessed with response? Unrequited love? Emily Dickinson’s fascicles tied into neat bundles that few eyes saw during her lifetime? We understand that response can anoint a person or experience with a greater reality, with fullness. Surely people begin to wonder if they really did send an email, when it never receives a reply. I write poems, publish them, and feel stunned when people I’ve never met before comment on them. The poems must be real. 

I suspect this is why people seek signs everywhere in their environment. You think of a person you haven’t talked to in a long time, suddenly they call you, and you are certain this is no mere coincidence. If our suspicions (or hopes) confirm themselves, does that make them manifestations of presence? 

The question of presence too easily becomes (for me) a query into the supernatural. What I doubt is less “God” than presence itself, even if, for me, the two are adjuncts of each other. Once I taught a class on “spiritual autobiography,” expecting my students to come ready with mystical narratives. They didn’t. By the end of day two, I forced the question: “Why are none of you willing to share anything that is either spiritual or autobiographical?” Reply: “We’re afraid to go to that woo-woo place and have people think that we’re nuts.” With that, all the mystical stuff came pouring out.

Here’s my mystical woo-woo stuff. As a child, I was subject to a series of mystical experiences that I kept to myself. In one sequence of visions, I’d see a bright, white light. I’d pursue it but it never resolved into anything clear or clearly manifest. I felt myself going further and further out onto a ledge that threatened to unbalance and dump me, disembodied, into a free-floating abyss. I learned from this, as with so many instances in life, that presence is always a dubious or contested entity.  All that exists seems to move within peripheral vision, like that agonizing eye test the optometrist administers: “Look straight ahead only at the central dot on the screen. When you perceive lights flashing to the side, push the button.” I glimpse a flash of something. I cannot apprehend it.

Another vision from childhood: I woke from sleep to a sense of warmth. I felt solid, held in embrace. The world around me was as I knew it: mundane. Yet it was an enhanced mundanity. A presence that knew me intimately and loved me for myself rippled through me. This was an embodied, erotic experience, this sensation of being known. The possibility of presence as response reasserts itself in this memory: was presence a response to a query or desire I was unaware of having initiated? Or is presence response to a query that never has been made, never imagined? 

I believe, obstinately, that presence, my presence, is confirmed when I receive a response.  By that I mean, I understand  presence as a rejoinder to the invitation that a self is. Presence is fulfilled by the rejoinder of presence.  More mysteriously, presence manifest when I respond—when I am the verb acting on a subject who is often indiscernible. Shapeshifter, canopy bright with light, waning and pulsing fullness. The “It” in the game of presence oscillates forever between seeking and being sought.