Practices of Quiet: On the subject of mourning, mothers, and love. . .

Last night, I had dinner with a friend whose loved one had recently passed. We spent a good deal of the evening speaking about presence, and what it means to be there for another person. As is usual, I learned a great deal from her and spent much of the night stumbling through a variety of complaints and jokes. Each served as an attempt to outline the contours of a generalized, abstracted mourning.  It was my hope that in mapping these contours I would be able to enact the sort of presence I wanted when my loved ones passed. I failed. Every reflection, every joke, every complaint only further denied the precision of individual pain. Each elided what both she and her loved one meant to each other. 

Thankfully, my friend is generous to a degree that exceeds most others, and, rather than refuse my folly, she simply and gracefully accepted my intentions. I watched her prepare dinner. Onions, tomatoes, garlic and ginger were first chopped and then gathered by dragging the blade across the cutting board. It was a violence that portended the tension present and more satisfyingly explained the pinkish tint that stained the board's surface. I sat next to her stove and struggled to find songs that were neither sad nor elated, neither quiet nor loud and that would leave no residue, pink or otherwise. 



Cymande "Genevieve"

Melodies blended like spice to oil and into the hissing and popping of frying onions, ginger and garlic. Our conversation moved across a wide variety of topics, each arrived with an ease that belied my friend's generosity. At some point, the conversation shifted to mothers, and, in particular, the wonder of ours. And it was then that she gently nudged me toward a better way to be present. 

She told me that her mother's way of grieving was to abstract pain. Pain was not to be felt but known, not experienced and shared but explained and talked through. This practice of abstraction, she told me, gave her mother the necessary distance through which to understand the passing. It was her mother's way to heal. But for my friend, the abstraction merely cleaved her from the hurt and denied her the right feel sad. By intellectualizing feeling, death was no longer an immediate and enduring loss, but, rather, something more distant--that, even if no less real, was made unavailable to her. 

After hearing her describe her mother's process, I could not help but wonder if my own attempts at comforting her had created a similar sort of abstraction. Had I rendered her pain abstract? I think that the answer to such a question is--most likely--yes. And so in lieu of an attempt to remedy the mistake, which would inevitably reproduce it, I offer a cobbled mess of quotes and songs and words below. They are, perhaps, as abstract and imprecise and searching as anything said last night, but I hope that they also shed some of the earlier pretense and document the lesson that she, as is her wont, so generously gave to me.  

From Susan Sontag's Journals:  

"But if I'm afraid of my mother, she is also afraid of me. On a more specific level, afraid of my judgment. Afraid I will find her stupid, uncultivated (hiding Redbook under the bedcovers when I came to kiss her goodnight), glamorous, morally deficient.  

And I, obligingly, do my best not to look, not to record in consciousness or ever consciously use against her what I see, or (at least) not to let her become [aware of] that + when I see.

But there's something more. Hard to describe. Like magical powers which my mother ascribed to me--with the understanding that if I withdrew them, she'd die.  I must hang on, feeding her, pumping her up. " 

I don't know if my mother and I share the sort of relationship Sontag describes. Frankly, I doubt that she fears my ability to see her beyond that which she chooses to show--either to herself or to me.  Nevertheless, Sontag's appraisal of her mother's dependence gets at something larger than the immediate circumstances described in the passage. I would venture that it describes how love is always a state too intense to linger upon, and so we glimpse it--this state, this feeling, this yearning for--not because love, as the cliché goes, is fleeting, but, rather, because we know that to stare, to linger, to gaze is to undo the person upon whom our love is directed. To stare is to render the individual into parts, to, as it were, abstract the person, replacing the subject with object of our affection. It is not, then, that it is impolite to stare (as momma's across the country tell us); it's that embedded within the courtesy lies an existential mandate, an obligation to always be aware that desire of all sorts (motherly, sisterly, friendly, sexual) is the space of construction and vulnerability. To stare is, of course, to build, but it's also always and simultaneously to destroy. 

Darando  "Didn't I"

And, yet, to not stare feels a bit like a lie, too, if only because it is a non-act that acts,  one that demurs and preens, and so pretends that desire isn't greedy, isn't desperate, doesn't want to take in all of another. Continually. Perpetually. Until all energy is depleted. Until both people arrive at relational entropy. The glimpse is no more than a gesture, an affect performed, moving us back to the space of clichés, of sitcoms and sentimentality, of myths that dissatisfy and exact a distance in the midst of presence. The impossibly close becomes the infinitesimally unavailable. And there, caught in gestures of looking away, we are left alone, isolated in a space that offers proximity without propinquity. There, caught in some perverted and vertiginous dance, we enact an absence under the guise of presence, as strangers casting glances across a subway train, all while pretending that glance and glimpse are enough.  They're not. They never were.  They never will be. 

David Ruffin "Let Somebody Love Me"

If we take Sontag's observation to heart, as I think we should, how do we apprehend those whom we most want to be present for and with? How do we take in those whom we seek to celebrate? How do we avoid depletion and abstraction? To be sure, Sontag doesn't offer us much by way of direct answer, but I would suggest that she leaves us an answer all same. It lies in the words themselves, and in how they explicitly deny us the ability to gaze upon her mother. We don't see her mother hiding a magazine under the covers; we see Sontag remembering the act. We see, then, Sontag. Bare. Alone. Trying to wrest meaning from fragments. They--these words, these fragments, as rambling and searching as my own right now--make Sontag vulnerable to the atomizing gaze and, thus, demonstrate that it is not that we apprehend our loved ones by being strong for them. Nor do we apprehend them by abstracting their vulnerability or hurt, nor in solving nor in articulating nor in explaining them. The passage, instead, makes clear that any desire to bridge the infinitesimal divide obliges us to drop our words. It demands that we abandon our abstractions and allow ourselves to be glimpsed, to ceaselessly make ourselves available for inspection and, thus, to always risk being seen without the protective myths we wear. In becoming less than precise words, in leaving behind abstractions, in allowing another--a trusted other--to glimpse us, or, if it be his or her want, to destroy us, we, in that moment, reach across the divide, fingers grazing fingers in an electric shock, and apprehend what it means not only to be loved but, in fact, to love--whether as mother or daughter, as brother or sister, as friend or lover. In refusing the urge to hide behind abstraction, in having no answer, no recourse, we conjure a moment in which we are finally present to and for others.

And so we listen and, more crucially, admit that there is no answer, no saying, no joke, no complaint that solves or explains away the sorrow born from death. To be present in such moments is to admit defeat, to give into the totalizing fact of sorrow, to accept, as another friend has taught me, that it never goes away completely, and to learn how to be ok with the sorts of discomfort borne by such an admission. 

Valerie June "Somebody To Love"