Presence does not guarantee presence. Sufficient and not necessary condition, the present body is often confused with presence.
Long ago it was said that you had to differentiate the quantity of time from its quality Attention time, for human beings, is scarce. We try to increase it through meditation and other techniques, but right now it is in free fall.
The home office combines in a somewhat improvised way a post-pandemic lifestyle with family and work all in one. You can be “at home” but working more than ever With the family present, but far from being present in body and soul. This appeal to the soul sounds strange in the 21st century. But it is evident that the body is not enough to account for the presence.
What’s more, it is known that you can even have “virtual sex.” You can be unfaithful by keeping messages with someone without even having a kiss. Without even “eye contact”, as they say now.
Personally, it doesn’t sound so strange to me, given that in the 18th century there was an epistolary life that could range from passionate loves to lifelong friendships. The famous Madame de Sevigne and the transcendence through her letters to her daughter, as well as Victoria Ocampo, in Argentina, director of the magazine Sur, and whose correspondence I believe has been more extensive than her literary works published for the public, They account for a “virtual” aspect, if we can homologate it to what is now “non-face-to-face” connection.
In fact, today we handle this material, left by Sigmund Freud, through letters and writings. Epistolary activity was more frequent than the presence in times when social activity was considered “in-person”.
Writing takes time, but much less than moving from one country to another. This limitation was not an impediment to the meeting between human beings and the possibility of sharing and even agreeing on common ideas, activities, passions, many kilometers away.
Distance
A couple today can share a work company, children, daily routines, without shortening the distances between two human beings This distance is usually a conventional, and variable, distance from one social group to another, due to the studies that have been carried out, for example, among those who attend a stadium to watch a sporting activity.
In everyday life, it coincides spatially in a public means of transportation, as well as in bars and places of gastronomy, without modifying the space that separates one person from the world of the other. Touching the reality of another is something that love and literature do.
The comfort of “as if” it were there, in the kiss, in the squeeze that is not casual and annoying, suspends every encounter. The world of objects and routines moves forward beyond the outdated traditions that are now occupied by the gadgets that the market offers and controls.
Blocking, seen as a new mechanism of distance, typical of the era of WhatsApp and networks, is not only a possibility of virtual reality, but something that takes place in everyday life, when a body is immersed in the distance of the millimeters that the comfortable way of sitting allows you to choose as company.
And the other is there but does not attract. It is too available, but in a deceptive way He is in body, but in a body closed to the other. “Object body” effect of the lock.
“I thought he wanted it, but I didn’t tell him. We were sitting next to each other, but each one in his own comfort and that created a distance.” Overcoming that distance was difficult because we had naturalized it…”
Now we realized that we had stopped hugging, because being comfortable was overcoming the pleasure of being with each other in a hug and a kiss.”
Opportunity makes a lover
But not every bodily encounter is opportune to generate desire. Because desire feeds on what is missing.
Space is a variable linked to the body. And when space is modified, unified and loses symbolic dimensions it is only at the expense of something. The desire.
Missing others is a task that must be worked on when curiosity is satisfied in a way that blocks desire.
There is no stipulated economy to cement desire. There is what the shadows of doubts serve to feed it. Or to cover his absence.
Presence is not without absence In indecipherable degrees of permutability since the contingent flies over the human world.
Blocking someone from zero contact may simply be living with the strange as known, with the intimate as the most alien. We know well that when a couple separates, they only meet the stranger that they could not visualize before.
You see what you want to see until reality creates obstacles that end up making a relationship impossible Or we can think that a life is the way in which we circumvent reality to continue seeing what we want to see.
“The wall that separated us was not made of bricks. It was customary. “It was impossible for me to cross it.”
Few true words take place in the midst of the slimy verbal tangle and supposed good manners… People who get excited in sordid environments. The sordid does not exclude something from the agalmatic.
The body is no excuse for encounters, we already know that. Saying “present” requires leaving aside the ability to not camouflage with nothingness. It is no coincidence that the most common word in my country is “boludo”.
A fool is someone who camouflages himself. That is in his world, in his limbo. That he gets together with others to continue playing that role that he does not commit to, for example. Who doesn’t realize. One can be stupid with one body, one time. But that time of putting the body and nothing else leaves a hole.
Desire inhabits a body or it does not inhabit it. It leaves him free to be a mere object of support for the gazes or actions of others.
In the world of multitasking there is a “doing everything” without grasping anything.
This tends to be identified with a “feminine” way of doing things, because men could not do two things at the same time.
I find this criterion unconvincing. Rather, we would have to see how to make this new coexistence between absent presences and present absences viable.
The symbolic order has been the human task par excellence to delimit spaces and functions.
We will have to start making decisions about what we want for our way of living , don’t let them take us by surprise. Absence, when it is available space between two people, generates the desire for reunion. Presence can be a material substrate where the desire that inhabits the human being is disguised as habits and obligations.
In a world inhabited by profiles and avatars, it is a world where we must find the coordinates of love again.
