Absence

geisha In The Poetics of Transgender, a book with many chapters, there is one called “Absence”. It is also the shortest chapter. It says only, - “When will he come again?” And it quotes two texts – In The Ming Dynasty.... “Writers associated courtesans with high aspirations and disappointed hopes, seeing parallels between their own predicaments and those of talented but powerless women waiting for a lover able both to appreciate them and to remove them from their demeaned circumstances.” And I think of this “Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again. “ 浮世 Not everybody who lives on their own is neglected. In here the material world is a world of gifts, and we are left with the art, the poetry, the painting, the techno CD, the smart-phone. We do our own thing. We have our freedoms, our liberty. Out there is the floating world, with all its conventions and forms, but we are defined by our relationships and while he is absent something about us is missing. We only seem to be afloat.