I work with absences, with silences, with curious gaps between things.

Laurence Arne-Sayles’s declaration that he works with absences, silences, and gaps defines his self-invented discipline as a search for what ordinary knowledge can no longer reach. In a May 1976 interview, he refuses the labels of philosopher, scientist, and anthropologist, calls himself an anamnesiologist, and concludes that he is more a magician than anything else. The expression turns absence from a mere lack of evidence into the very material of his inquiry.

The discipline of forgetting

Arne-Sayles describes his work in a sequence that moves from study to divination. He studies what has been forgotten, then claims to divine what has disappeared utterly: the first phrase suggests recovery from memory, while the second reaches beyond what can simply be recalled. His chosen name, anamnesiologist, presents this concern with lost knowledge as a distinct vocation rather than a branch of the conventional professions he disavows.

The interview’s phrasing gives the discipline a method as well as a subject. Absences, silences, and curious gaps are not incidental obstacles to be passed over; they are the phenomena he says he works with. By grouping them together, he makes missing information itself appear legible, as though what is not present might still yield knowledge.

Magician rather than academic

The statement begins by setting Arne-Sayles against familiar professional identities. He explicitly denies being a philosopher, scientist, or anthropologist, even while the search he describes might seem to overlap with those fields. Instead, he calls himself an anamnesiologist and finally identifies more closely with a magician. That progression shifts the account from disciplinary credentials toward an asserted power to recover or divine what is lost.

The interview is attributed to The Secret Garden and dated May 1976. Its placement near an epigraph from C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, in which a magician speaks of conducting an experiment on subjects, creates a pointed juxtaposition between magical authority and experimentation. The two excerpts do not establish that Arne-Sayles’s declaration is itself a response to the epigraph, but together they bring the language of magic and the language of experiment into the same opening frame.

Narrative significance

The expression supplies a compact account of Arne-Sayles’s self-conception: he claims to make knowledge from what has vanished, rather than to work within a recognized scholarly category. Its emphasis on gaps also gives the language a double edge. The pursuit of what is forgotten can sound like a promise of recovery, while the move from study to divination places that promise beyond ordinary verification. The statement therefore introduces both his ambition and the unsettling reach he assigns to it.