Wish You Were Here & the materiality of absence

When I was a teenager (many thousands of years ago) Pink Floyd were almost exclusively listened to by the boys in my life – most particularly, the ones who took a lot of drugs and used that down/up time to reflect upon life’s big questions (such as, who’s skinning up next? Why can’t I feel my face anymore? Am I always this insufferable?). Of course, I generalise. But this is to say that, whilst I’ve always been aware of the music of Pink Floyd, it wasn’t until I was in early adulthood that I properly listened to them at all. I know very little about their work and cannot, by any measure, be called an expert on it – but I know what I like, and I listen to it.

So, so you think you can tell/Heaven from hell?

Blue skies from pain? Can you tell a green field

From a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil?

Wish You Were Here is one of those songs that will occasionally stop me in my tracks (literally, figuratively) when it pops up on my playlist and I’m in the correct frame of mind. I know what biographers say about the song (it was influenced by Syd Barrett’s breakdown, and is a reflection on the “dichotomy of Waters’ character, with greed and ambition battling with compassion and idealism” [Schaffner, 1991]). To me, it’s an elegy, a lamentation for loss, a kind of keening.

It took the wind out of me a bit the other day as I walked home from work. I had to sit down on a path next to the National Library of Wales, listening to the song as I watched the students Snap each other in their graduation robes. I had a bit of a cry amidst the cut grass and the relentless sunshine. I wonder now whether I might’ve been captured in the background of their TikToks – I might go viral, endless images of my sadness dubbed over with a Taylor Swift track. I wonder if that would count towards the REF somehow, as a measure of impact? Anyway, I digress.

There’s been a fair bit of death and loss washing around the place for me over the last few weeks. Family, friends, former colleagues, all of whom have played their parts in my life to varying degrees over the years, and whose absence I felt in that song, in that moment. Relationships changing, familial bonds tearing. Rupture, fracture. I’ve seen far more of 3am whilst sober than I’ve done my whole life, which may suggest I simply need to drink more.

Pink Floyd has also featured, in those dark hours of the mourning.  

How I wish, how I wish you were here.

You know that I talk about materiality a bit sarcasm. The warp and weft of music is much the same as a manuscript folio, I suppose, in the uniqueness of their whorling, the phenomenology associated in their consumption. What they also both similarly reflect is absence. You can hear it in Wish You Were Here; Waters by way of Gilmour wishing, in that beautifully melancholic way, for what has been lost to be found again, somehow, whilst knowing all along that it can’t. The whole album is about what is missing, really, and detachment. The first guitar on Wish You Were Here sounds distant, an evocation of the past. The second guitar, louder, clearer, represents presence.

There is materiality in absence, of course, because absence leaves a space in the world. As the poet John Donne put it, absence is present. The places in manuscripts where something has been but then scraped away or faded over time, leave their own spaces. The materiality of absence is also evoked by the comparison to what once was; boundary encounters between the past and the present/presence. Absence is found in the liminal spaces between life and death: scratched marks on headstones, the sound of a voicemail left years ago and saved; the last time you held them, the echo of a song.

We think of materiality as something physical, tangible, but it is just as much about the intangible, the things we can no longer touch. This materiality is experiential, and by choosing to engage with it, we give it space. Thus, it exists. And if objects acquire meaning from their proximity to other things well, then we can say that of course absence has materiality, because when something or someone is “gone”, it is brought back in some form by us providing a space for it, by its proximity to us. 

It’s all going a bit Donne again, hasn’t it? Let’s bring it back to Floyd.

Gilmour describes Wish You Were Here as a country song, due to its emotional weight. His cough at the beginning, attributed to heavy smoking, sounds apologetic, and seems to open a door to a hollow space filled with regret and longing. Even the musical instruments involved in the song’s composition demonstrate loss and absence, if we consider Grappelli’s missing violin contribution and the gaps in the score within which it used to exist.

Waters’ lyrics caution us not to retreat from the world. The world is both green fields and cold steel – we know the difference, and we must go on anyway.

Anyway, TLDR: absence is presence, and has materiality. Those people who are seemingly gone are still here with me, even when they’re not. So here’s to fucking up people’s graduation pictures with my goblin tears. Here’s to the places in which they still exist, the palimpsest people, scratched out but still present. Here’s to music, and manuscripts, and all the rest.