Search results for "meaning "
Commonplace and Singular
Thursday, 24 December, 2009 - 14:53
The umber journey through bereavement reveals itself as the experience which levels everyone sooner or later. No-one is born who cannot expect to grieve a parent, except by reversing the calamity. Notwithstanding the silence we collectively smother over death in our discomfort and inability to handle one another's tragedies, grief and bereavement touch every but the most unlucky life. Mourning is a commonplace, a universal. And yet it is utterly singular, uniquely experienced and individually felt; an axis around which a life will eventually turn. Like love, it happens to us all, and when it does, we are the only lovers in the world.
It was around Easter this year that I decided to study the nature of creative expressions of grief. I knew earlier than that that I wanted to study how creative activity - whether journal writing, drawing, poetry, musical composition, anything - had a therapeutic dimension. I struggled wildly to find an ailment of the body that I felt I could talk about without feeling like a charlatan interloper from a soft science - a quack calling the advocates of hard science, "quacks". Choosing instead an ailment of the soul may have been a retreat from an anticipated "clash of civilisations" where science and hermeneutics meet, but it was an advance in terms of making the study my own.
The vernacular ear hears words like "complex" and "syndrome" as mental illnesses - this is of course because they are wielded by doctors and psychoanalysts whom we so often call upon only when we feel sick in mind or body. But complexes and syndromes are what we all are made of. What makes you you, and makes me me, are the respective complexes through which we see the world. Far from seeing the world clearly, we all have our own individual motes in our eyes which render the glass dark. Grief is another complex, another mote; grief makes me me. If grief is an illness, then everyone who has lost someone is ill.
A friend said, a few weeks after my father died, that over time the pain of grief would die away. His mother had died when he was young. "Now I think of her occasionally," he said, "And it's sort of... 'Oh yes... Mum! She was a person, a long time ago...' you know. It'll get better." I was sure he was right, but that only made it worse. I didn't want the pain to go if it meant that the memory of those I loved also receded and lost their significance. Surely this meant that they died twice: their lives ended both in their own death and the death of their memory. If it meant that the memory of my father would dwindle to the facts and material residue of his existence, then I did not want the pain of grief to end.
Grief is something I do not want to let go; but equally I know it is a phenomenon with its own logic and evolution which, if not allowed to take its course, will become more than a complex: a neurosis, a pathology. I try to write again, and each time I summon spirits of grief as though the words are a magic rite which revives memories, enriches them and brings my father closer. There is an interplay between letting go and holding on; between inarticulacy and making meaning; between forgetting and remembering; between pain and solace.
Christmas, Grief and Shadowplay
Wednesday, 23 December, 2009 - 22:47
Christmas is a hard time in my family. My father died eight years ago on Christmas day, after a few short months of living with a terminal diagnosis. It is still hard to summon words to trace the contours of the experience and its wake. Each thought rushes back; memories and meanings impossibly offer themselves for articulation; words flinch from the responsibility of bearing the burden.
It is easier to write of the difficulty of voicing the experience than of the experience itself. How do I select from the galaxy of emotions that I recall; how order the candidate sentences; where do I even start? Do I begin with the way he lived; the way he died; the way we go on; or what no longer goes on, now that he is gone? A few years ago, I wrote about several of my memories of christmas, culminating in the christmas of his death and the scattering of ashes; only such an oblique method seemed possible, since a direct approach was less surmountable than a sheer cliff.
If I talk about the way he dignified his illness with a grace I can't imagine anyone exceeding; or the pang of pain at his death that no anticipation could deaden; or the way that time, which so many said would heal, is for that reason, the very enemy of grief; if I put into words any of these or other countless confessions, then it is only as a laboratory scientist handles toxic germs or radioactive metals with gloved and levered tongs through reinforced glass and platinum barriers.
Only by pushing away the significance of experience can it be diminished enough to be compressed inside words. An eclipse cannot be viewed directly, but projected as a phantom through a pinhole. Or perhaps it is more like the everyday landscape when inverted in the darkness of the camera obscura. Perhaps it may be like the shadows on the wall of the cave: perhaps the direct experience reveals less than its shadowplay, since the hands working the spectacle disappear off the stage.
The facts and experiences are no less mundane, bleak and irredeemable for bearing such volatile emotions: but maybe the alienated handling of them with ever new words, the constant renewing of the bare events with repeated efforts to give them voice, are what produces new meaning and new significance each time, and create some sort of sense out of the senselessness of brutal reality.
