something encloses the impossible in a fable
“Beauty stands in for unconsummated mourning” was a beautiful sentence in a review of beautiful and not so beautiful things (art!) that included a brief and violent aside on a brief life violently ended. Is there a “good” way to learn about people who were, ahem, overlooked by contemporary news and recent history?
In that obituary, a reflection: “But [Theresa Hak Kyung Cha‘s] death has sometimes overshadowed her work.” There’s a similar (glib!) aside in the first essay: “Where art is concerned, death need be no more than an inconvenience…and…being all but invisible may turn out to have been merely a speed bump.”
Well then.
In the US, folks are so allergic to grief and grieving that we are attempting to medicalize it, to pathologize it as “prolonged grief disorder”.
Disorder, disordered. Death is so often disorderly, and grief is an unruly beast but why the urge to define either as an inconvenience, a speed bump, something that gets in the way?
At dinner in the fast-casual London restaurant, the one we shared so many meals in, suddenly weeping because your favourite order was no longer on the menu, and in that disappearance feeling your absence anew.
I know you are not forgotten, because tears are the testimony of remembering.
These times demand unruliness. We must remember, especially when the alternative is the convenience of forgetting, all we have lost and why. We owe it to them, and to ourselves, to consummate our mourning.
Attribution:
something encloses the impossible in a fable
an unreal world called real because it is so heavily metaphoric
we can't keep our fingers of connection out of it
— from Responding by Juliana Spahr