I’m teaching Tarot for Change: An Introduction to Tarot for Spiritual Practice on October 19 on Zoom. For more details & to register, click here.
With many thanks to Desirée Dawson for thinking ongoingly with me about art and power and grief and responsibility.
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I’m leaving for a big trip in a matter of days and am spending most of my time putting things in containers and wiping down counters and running errands and making lists and grabbing quick meals with friends and not doing much reading at all.
One thing I did read was a bit of Palestinian-American philosopher Edward Said’s Beginnings, in which he argues that “beginnings are a consciously intentional, productive activity whose circumstances include a sense of loss.”
It was theologian Catherine Keller who pointed me there—through her book Face of the Deep which I’m still wading through—and who added that the loss beginnings entail “may be bland or tragic, but it is inescapable…A cloud of missed possibilities envelops every beginning: It is always this beginning, this universe and not some other.”
In five days, I am leaving the house that I love for a specific stretch of coast in New England where I was born and spent the first half of my life. I’ve been away for so long that this home going carries the excitement of a real new beginning. But it’s absolutely not pure. Far from a fresh start, it’s a a complex reaction to all kinds of things with lots of loss woven in.
I’ve been looking back at some of the writing I did around this time last year. I was grieving and bolstering my days with artist Carrie Mae Weems’ daily questions, “where I am, what I’m making, what I’m committed to, and why it matters.”
On a flight to Mexico City to celebrate a friend’s birthday, I read an interview with philosopher Brian Massumi who talked about the “supernormal,” as that which “creatively exceeds the typical and refuses to be limited by resemblance to past forms.” That language in particular stood out to me right away because it sounded a whole lot like grieving. Except a lot cooler than anything I seemed to be doing, to the point that it was almost enticing.
To lose something or someone of enough import to experience grief is to endure a rupture of normalcy, and to exceed what was taken for granted. Mourning is in a sense responding to loss—often creatively, sometimes wildly—perhaps even to a degree that one is transfigured in the process, and no longer fits inside pre-loss life structures. Borrowing Massumi’s language, grieving may be a way one experiences supernormal tendencies, a process through which one “creatively exceeds the typical” and comes to no longer resemble past forms.
Though I’d not yet begun to flesh out a vision of mourning as eclectic, eccentric, and strange at that time, something glimmered to me in Massumi’s language of supernormality. Was it possible that a.) something creative was happening amidst all the loss, b.) whatever it was, was transcending the typical and c.) it would be unconstrained by the limitations of the past?
Like I said, it sounded almost exciting. Not enough to make it all worth it, but it was enough to keep me going at least. To keep doing Weems’ questions, to keep locating myself daily, to keep situating my efforts and work, to keep committing, adjusting, and responding.
I am thinking of another thing I read this week, an essay by English and Black studies professor Christina Sharpe called The Shapes of Grief. In it, Sharpe describes the difficulty of knowing how to go on with students in the classroom this past year, amidst the unbearable violence of genocide in Palestine, “contests of power, contests over living. And dying.”
Sharpe writes, “We adjusted. We talked. We held space. We read. They were present. They showed up, and together we did our work.” Sharpe also cites Fargo Tbakhi’s stunning essay, Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide which I loved, and recommend reading.
To really take in an absence is to risk becoming other than what one has been. It involves a willingness to be disoriented, at least long enough to be changed by what one has seen, experienced, and come to know. Maybe to mourn is to become supernormal. The alternative to the supernormal, and to going beyond what is given, is to fight for more of the same. It is to refuse to acknowledge, and to keep living as though we weren’t touched or transfigured by loss.
More recently, I became interested in aesthetics, the philosophical study of beauty, and how aesthetics and ethics are entwined. Aesthetic and ethical questions are interesting to me as a writer who is committed to writing and lamenting in public amidst violence at every level of existence.
And this is part of why I loved Carrie Mae Weems’ questions. As I wrote through a series of ruptures, it was crucial to situate my self each time I sat down. Where am I? This might be the most vulnerable question of all. Because it asks about social location, somatic situation, the condition of one’s heart, and how each of these might make themselves known in the work.