ON MEMORY #2

(SNIPPET ON GRIEF AND MEDIATION)

i asked myself what i thought grief was. i used to know. or else, i used to think i knew, when i was young and young-in-grief, when grief felt as immediate and instinctive as arousal. when i thought i could name it; could call it by any single name. i thought that grief was an absence and an urgency. which it is, but not only this. it is also an accretion, a thickening in time and texture. grief has a taste, a colour and a shape, is shaping – reshaping – my attachments to others, to the world, to the body, to the “self”. yes, it is reshaping still. against the implied trajectory contained within much of western thought, that says beyond its immediate moment, your grief will diminish or fade. i used to dread this as betrayal and failure; found ways to – as i saw it – keep my grief alive and livid, insisted upon it as an ethics: that which we owe to the dead. silly girl, grief does not diminish. grief, if we allow it, is intimate, metabolic, and slow. grief is transformative. that is, as it transforms us, grief also transforms: from the emptying distress of acute personal hurt, to a rich and weighty way of being with. i think we are looking at healing through the wrong end of the telescope. perhaps we are using the wrong word altogether. supposing the aim was to acclimatise? suppose we sought not to reduce, but to deepen? to lean into this deepening. grief for a while was a wall between me and a more varied experience of the world. i could not move out of the immediate, i was stuck in the raw and ruined spaces of the “self”. something has shifted; experience is no longer overwhelmed, but strangely informed by grief. how did this happen? through reading. by mediation. by which i mean – what? staying with, troubling over, delving into. i owe so much to peter for this. to hegel, of course, but to peter, who was the critical supervisor for my doctoral thesis, first of all. mediation – that is, theory – is the heady space where my grief meets the world, becomes not less but other, a vulnerable and serious practice of thought – care. grief is a feeling. it is also – or can be – a perceptual lens, an exercise of thought. this is how i will honour the dead; this is what we owe to them: to think, with great patience and diligence about our world. memory is animal. and memory is abstract. and memory is a continuous unfolding. meet me in my attempt to understand; in the bestowing of my time and my attention. this too is how i carry you.