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Absence is often misunderstood as mere lack, as though what is missing simply subtracts from the world and leaves the remainder untouched. But lived experience rarely works that way. What is absent does not always recede into insignificance. Sometimes it becomes the central organizing force of perception. Sometimes the missing thing acquires more weight than what remains. This image turns toward that paradox. The parking structure is vast, cold, and largely empty. Its architecture should suggest utility, transit, and impersonal function. Yet the vacant bay at its center begins to behave as something more than empty space. The eye is drawn to it. The surrounding lines submit to it. The subject, pushed toward the edge of the frame, does not fill the scene. He stands within a world already reconfigured by what is not there.
That structure belongs intimately to the lived-world of Confessions to the Empty Chair. The book understands that human beings do not encounter absence as a neutral blank. They encounter it as pressure, orientation, rearrangement. A missing person, a missing answer, a missing innocence, a missing coherence, a missing future—these do not simply leave holes. They bend the field around themselves. They reorganize memory, attention, desire, and moral awareness. In that sense, absence is not passive. It is formative. It does not need to appear as a ghost in order to exercise power. It needs only to remain unresolved.
Phenomenologically, this matters because it reveals that emptiness is not always experienced as nothing. It can be intensely structured. It can disclose a world in which significance lingers precisely through nonappearance. A person walks into a room and immediately senses what or who should have been there. No argument is required. The perception arrives whole. The missing element is not inferred after the fact through detached reasoning. It is given in experience as missing. That distinction is crucial. The absent thing is present as absence. It inhabits consciousness not by occupying space, but by altering how space is encountered.
This image tries to preserve that mode of appearing. The empty parking bay is not dramatic in itself. It is an ordinary feature of an ordinary structure. Yet the composition grants it an authority the occupied spaces do not possess. It becomes the scene’s true center, not because it contains an object, but because the image has allowed the void to gather meaning. The young man remains secondary, and that secondary placement is essential. He does not dominate the absence. He is subjected to it. He stands as one who has already recognized that the world is no longer arranged merely by what is materially present. Something missing has acquired jurisdiction over the scene.
This is also one of the deeper theological intuitions within Confessions to the Empty Chair. Spiritual life is not experienced only through positive presences, consolations, declarations, and luminous certainties. Often it is experienced through withdrawal, silence, delay, estrangement, and the felt contour of what does not come. Yet these absences are not identical. Divine silence is not the same as emotional abandonment. Moral vacancy is not the same as contemplative stillness. Lost innocence is not the same as chosen renunciation. The book’s world remains attentive to such differences. It does not flatten absence into a single category. Instead, it shows how multiple forms of missingness shape the soul differently, each with its own atmosphere, demand, and consequence.
Psychologically, absence acquires power because consciousness is relational. We do not merely process objects; we inhabit patterns of expectation, attachment, memory, and anticipation. When something central is removed, the psyche does not simply update the inventory and move on. It continues to orient toward what once belonged there. Habits of attention outlast their objects. Affection outlasts its immediate satisfaction. Meaning continues to seek a center, even when the old center has vanished. That is why absence can feel heavier than presence. Presence occupies. Absence unsettles. Presence can be incorporated into routine. Absence resists routine because it leaves the self reaching toward what cannot presently answer.
The parking garage setting intensifies this truth by refusing comfort. There is no domestic softness here, no intimate room, no sentimental relic. The architecture is impersonal, repetitive, and coldly functional. Precisely for that reason, the image makes a stronger claim. Even in a space designed for use rather than reflection, absence can rise to centrality. Even here, the missing place exerts a force that reorganizes vision. This matters because it suggests that absence is not only an emotion projected onto private interiors. It is a way the world itself can be encountered once the self has been marked by loss, memory, or expectation.
In the book’s broader vision, this is one of the recurring burdens of consciousness: the soul does not live only among what is given. It also lives among what failed to arrive, what departed, what was withheld, and what can no longer be recovered in the same form. Such missingness does not remain inert. It shapes interpretation. It sharpens longing. It colors moral judgment. It alters the scale of things. A trivial object can become unbearable because of what it recalls. A vast space can become cramped because of what it lacks. A life can remain outwardly intact while inwardly reorganized around a vacancy that others do not see.
“Absence Has Its Own Gravity” names that condition with deliberate precision. Gravity does not shout. It does not need spectacle. It acts by ordering motion, by pulling bodies into relation, by setting the terms under which space is navigated. So too with absence. What is missing may never appear, yet everything around it can begin to move in reference to it. The deepest losses, omissions, and silences do not always announce themselves. Often they do something more powerful: they quietly become the axis around which the visible world turns.
She stands somewhere between presence and absence, where reality begins to dissolve into memory.
Perhaps she is not a woman at all, but a fragment of consciousness searching for the self.
In the surreal space between what exists and what is imagined, identity becomes uncertain—and the boundary between the real and the unreal disappears.
There are experiences that are fully lived long before they are truly known. We move through them in real time, speak within them, suffer within them, desire within them, make decisions within them, and even narrate them to ourselves while they are happening. Yet the meaning of those same experiences often remains withheld until afterward. Only later—sometimes much later—does interpretation catch up to life. This image turns toward that delay. The man stands by the window in a quiet room, slightly apart from the scene he inhabits, as though he has stepped back from his own life just enough to begin reading it. The room is not empty of history, but neither is it cluttered with explanation. A chair, a table, a light, a window: these remain as traces of lived experience rather than as its final key. What matters is the distance now opened between what was once lived immediately and what is only now becoming intelligible.
That structure belongs deeply to the lived-world of Confessions to the Empty Chair. The book understands that experience is not self-interpreting. The fact that we have undergone something does not mean we have understood it while undergoing it. Much of life occurs under the conditions of immersion. We are too close, too reactive, too invested, too wounded, too hopeful, too confused, too defended, or too desirous to read events clearly as they unfold. The soul lives first and understands later. This does not make life meaningless in the moment. It means meaning often exceeds immediacy. The truth of an event may be present from the start, but our capacity to receive that truth lags behind the event itself.
Phenomenologically, this image concerns retrospective disclosure. Human beings do not possess their own experience all at once. They inhabit it from within, and what is lived from within often lacks the distance required for interpretation. Only afterward does a new relation emerge between the self and what it has lived. The man by the window embodies that relation. He is still inside the room, still within the world that formed him, but he is no longer fully coincident with it. He has stepped, inwardly, into the position of witness. That shift matters. To become a witness to one’s own life is not to leave it behind, but to see it under a different aspect. One begins to recognize that what felt immediate was also preparing meaning not yet available at the time.
In Confessions to the Empty Chair, this delayed arrival of meaning is one of the book’s deepest structural truths. The memoir does not simply report events as they were once felt. It revisits them under later light. Scenes that once appeared confusing, charged, seductive, painful, or ordinary return as readable. The adult consciousness reads what the earlier self could only endure. This is not an act of falsification. It is an act of existential completion. The event is not fully itself, in the life of the person, until it has also been interpreted. The original moment and the later understanding belong together. What was lived without knowing becomes knowable only because it was first lived.
Psychologically, this reveals something humbling about consciousness. We often imagine that self-awareness should accompany our own actions in real time, as though maturity would mean full transparency to oneself at every step. But that is not how the human person usually works. We are shaped by events before we grasp them. We are wounded before we understand the wound. We are drawn before we know what we are moving toward. We are changed by relationships, losses, desires, and silences whose significance only later becomes clear. Meaning arrives late because the psyche is not a machine for simultaneous living and perfect interpretation. It must survive first. It must carry things forward before it can re-read them. Sometimes understanding is delayed not by failure, but by necessity.
There is also a theological seriousness here. In the deeper vision of Confessions to the Empty Chair, truth is not always given at the speed of experience. The soul may be led through realities it cannot yet interpret, and only later discover the deeper moral, spiritual, or personal significance of what it has passed through. This delay can feel cruel because it denies us mastery in the moment. We would prefer to know while living, to grasp while acting, to comprehend while suffering. But the structure of creaturely life often refuses that demand. We are not omniscient participants in our own stories. We are finite persons whose understanding ripens over time. Meaning therefore often arrives as visitation rather than possession. It comes after the event like a second coming of the event, one in which truth steps forward from beneath what was once only felt.
The room in the image matters precisely because it does not over-explain. It is neither courtroom nor sanctuary, neither crowded archive nor dramatic ruin. It is a lived space now entered under retrospective awareness. The warm light behind the man and the faint coolness beyond the window create a subtle theological and existential tension: the inward life and the world outside, what has been inhabited and what remains beyond, the intimacy of memory and the distance of understanding. He is not crushed by what he sees. He is not in spectacle or collapse. He is aware. That awareness is the image’s true subject. The event is over, but interpretation has finally begun to arrive with force.
In the broader world of the book, this is one of the conditions of narrative itself. A life becomes narratable only because meaning arrives late enough to gather what was once scattered. Without delay, there would be event but no interpretation, feeling but no form, immersion but no witness. Yet the lateness of meaning also carries sorrow. One understands after opportunities have passed, after innocence is gone, after harm has been done, after the moment in which clearer knowledge would have changed things. That sorrow is part of the truth. Delayed understanding is not purely redemptive. It can clarify and wound at once. It can redeem memory while condemning former blindness. It can offer coherence while revealing how long one lived without it.
“Meaning Does Not Arrive on Time” names that painful and necessary structure. It refuses the fiction that life hands over its significance immediately. Instead, it acknowledges that meaning often belongs to aftermath. We live first, then read. We undergo first, then understand. We cross thresholds before knowing what they were thresholds of. In Confessions to the Empty Chair, this is not an incidental feature of memory. It is part of the human condition itself. The self is always arriving late to parts of its own life, and yet that lateness is also where truth becomes possible. The event ends. The room remains. The figure stands at the window. And only then, after living without knowing, does the deeper interpretation begin to show itself.
I realise that I resemble an existentialist wanker in this upload. Here I go merrily contemplating death, meaningless, and utter nothingness.
"Huis Clos" Play Rehearsal In Progress. Follow us www.mesmeriseme.co.uk/what-is-hell, twitter.com/#!/HuisClos_2011, www.facebook.com/pages/Huis-Clos-MesmeriseMe-2011/1212970...
In a world built on endless consumption, the human spirit slowly trades freedom for possession. Surrounded by abundance yet imprisoned by desire, the image questions whether we own the things we collect—or whether they quietly own us.
Four figures stand before a small image, yet each seems absorbed in a different world. The artwork becomes a quiet mirror of human existence—we may stand together, but what we see, remember, and feel is always deeply personal.
Perhaps art is not what we look at, but what it awakens within us.
Self-portrait/devART id
The blur on the red part of the scarf was unintentional, but I like the way it came out.
Edits: colours, slight sharpening on the jacket, noise reduction on the background.
This photo can also be found here...
This image is not to be used without my permission.
Comics Exhibition: "From TELEOS to the Beyond”
Dithers Humor with the Existential and the Mundane
SILVER SPRING, MD— DWIGHTMESS Cartooning & Comic Arts, a new gallery devoted to experimental and cutting-edge independent comics and illustration, is proud to announce its next exhibition, From Telos to the Beyond, a conceptual group show exploring material spirituality and existentialism through comics, featuring the original comics art of Sam Sharpe, Everett Bass, Bob Kubbers and Peach S. Goodrich.
Combining the uncanny and the profane, the arcane and the contemporary, From Telos to Beyond represents a cartoonists' inclination for testing out possible habitable cosmic systems through the particularized and unshared realities of their art. Humanity's inclination to obsessively name its purpose through art is a feature of popular Western cosmogony, and is put into illuminatingly weird action by these artists through the language of sequential storytelling.
Sam Sharpe and Peach S. Goodrich are collaborators on Viewotron, an anthology of recurring stories that match comedic riffs with philosophical narrative rhymes that could only happen in comics. Populated with talking animal college students, goal-less explorers, space monsters, debunked deities, and unexamined consciences, the publication's weird humor reminds us that no one is safe from the stresses in our lives that can embolden one to self-sabotage.
Combined with Sharpe and Goodrich, the perfect draftsmanship and storytelling of comics artist Bob Lubbers (1922-2017) reveals a mastery of and seamless relationship to the comics medium that would seem, to contemporary eyes, eerie to maintain and distinctive in its compositions. His bold creativity, on display in comic strips such as 'Lil Abner, Tarzan, The Saint, and Secret Agent X9 should have afforded him more recognition. According to comics journalist Paul Gravett, Lubbers is 'not the celebrated cartoonist he should be.' Additionally, in these strange & obscure, possibly unpublished comic strips titled Buck Danes, Everett Bass, an artist surmised to have worked in the 1940's, engages a singular, running commentary about making ends meet through its characters that mirrors the political realism of Harold Gray's renowned and long-running comic strip, Little Orphan Annie. That the comic may well represent a failed attempt to capitalize on Gray's success by featuring familiar working-class themes and a relatable drawing style, it ultimately still succeeds at replicating Gray's comic universe, but for purposes too fascinatingly odd to be understood.
An experiment between presence and absence, where reality slowly loses its certainty.
The image is not meant to describe a place, but to question what remains when the familiar becomes strange.
Light, shadow, form, and emptiness become fragments of an unknown language — a space where perception creates its own reality.
Perhaps photography does not capture what exists, but what exists between seeing and understanding.
Eternity resides not in arrival, but in the endless postponement of it. Truth never reveals itself completely; whenever it seems near, a new horizon emerges. What endures is not a possessed truth, but the infinite movement of seeking.
Comics Exhibition: "From TELEOS to the Beyond”
Dithers Humor with the Existential and the Mundane
SILVER SPRING, MD— DWIGHTMESS Cartooning & Comic Arts, a new gallery devoted to experimental and cutting-edge independent comics and illustration, is proud to announce its next exhibition, From Telos to the Beyond, a conceptual group show exploring material spirituality and existentialism through comics, featuring the original comics art of Sam Sharpe, Everett Bass, Bob Kubbers and Peach S. Goodrich.
Combining the uncanny and the profane, the arcane and the contemporary, From Telos to Beyond represents a cartoonists' inclination for testing out possible habitable cosmic systems through the particularized and unshared realities of their art. Humanity's inclination to obsessively name its purpose through art is a feature of popular Western cosmogony, and is put into illuminatingly weird action by these artists through the language of sequential storytelling.
Sam Sharpe and Peach S. Goodrich are collaborators on Viewotron, an anthology of recurring stories that match comedic riffs with philosophical narrative rhymes that could only happen in comics. Populated with talking animal college students, goal-less explorers, space monsters, debunked deities, and unexamined consciences, the publication's weird humor reminds us that no one is safe from the stresses in our lives that can embolden one to self-sabotage.
Combined with Sharpe and Goodrich, the perfect draftsmanship and storytelling of comics artist Bob Lubbers (1922-2017) reveals a mastery of and seamless relationship to the comics medium that would seem, to contemporary eyes, eerie to maintain and distinctive in its compositions. His bold creativity, on display in comic strips such as 'Lil Abner, Tarzan, The Saint, and Secret Agent X9 should have afforded him more recognition. According to comics journalist Paul Gravett, Lubbers is 'not the celebrated cartoonist he should be.' Additionally, in these strange & obscure, possibly unpublished comic strips titled Buck Danes, Everett Bass, an artist surmised to have worked in the 1940's, engages a singular, running commentary about making ends meet through its characters that mirrors the political realism of Harold Gray's renowned and long-running comic strip, Little Orphan Annie. That the comic may well represent a failed attempt to capitalize on Gray's success by featuring familiar working-class themes and a relatable drawing style, it ultimately still succeeds at replicating Gray's comic universe, but for purposes too fascinatingly odd to be understood.
Comics Exhibition: "From TELEOS to the Beyond”
Dithers Humor with the Existential and the Mundane
SILVER SPRING, MD— DWIGHTMESS Cartooning & Comic Arts, a new gallery devoted to experimental and cutting-edge independent comics and illustration, is proud to announce its next exhibition, From Telos to the Beyond, a conceptual group show exploring material spirituality and existentialism through comics, featuring the original comics art of Sam Sharpe, Everett Bass, Bob Kubbers and Peach S. Goodrich.
Combining the uncanny and the profane, the arcane and the contemporary, From Telos to Beyond represents a cartoonists' inclination for testing out possible habitable cosmic systems through the particularized and unshared realities of their art. Humanity's inclination to obsessively name its purpose through art is a feature of popular Western cosmogony, and is put into illuminatingly weird action by these artists through the language of sequential storytelling.
Sam Sharpe and Peach S. Goodrich are collaborators on Viewotron, an anthology of recurring stories that match comedic riffs with philosophical narrative rhymes that could only happen in comics. Populated with talking animal college students, goal-less explorers, space monsters, debunked deities, and unexamined consciences, the publication's weird humor reminds us that no one is safe from the stresses in our lives that can embolden one to self-sabotage.
Combined with Sharpe and Goodrich, the perfect draftsmanship and storytelling of comics artist Bob Lubbers (1922-2017) reveals a mastery of and seamless relationship to the comics medium that would seem, to contemporary eyes, eerie to maintain and distinctive in its compositions. His bold creativity, on display in comic strips such as 'Lil Abner, Tarzan, The Saint, and Secret Agent X9 should have afforded him more recognition. According to comics journalist Paul Gravett, Lubbers is 'not the celebrated cartoonist he should be.' Additionally, in these strange & obscure, possibly unpublished comic strips titled Buck Danes, Everett Bass, an artist surmised to have worked in the 1940's, engages a singular, running commentary about making ends meet through its characters that mirrors the political realism of Harold Gray's renowned and long-running comic strip, Little Orphan Annie. That the comic may well represent a failed attempt to capitalize on Gray's success by featuring familiar working-class themes and a relatable drawing style, it ultimately still succeeds at replicating Gray's comic universe, but for purposes too fascinatingly odd to be understood.
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