Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, The High Priestess by Pamela Colman Smith. In the image, a person is dressed in blue robes that look like water. She’s wearing a cross over her chest and a crown with the phases of the moon. She is holding a scroll and sitting between two pillars. She is seated in front of a body of water that is covered over by a screen.
Hi All,
This week I’m reading bell hooks’ All About Love, re-visiting Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” and remembering Andy Fisher’s Radical Ecopsychology.
Hope something here will be useful for you.
Jessica
October 11 | High Priestess | Refuse closure
The more confused I am about the legitimacy of my pain, the more dogged I seek after meaning. As professor Saidiya Hartman has written, “The loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide closure where there is none.”1 Gaps in knowledge are also an invitation. Sometimes what’s difficult to name has been intentionally obscured. Then, the details we do have are more of a “register of our encounters with power”2 than anything. For Hartman, dwelling in the gaps, resisting the urge to fill them, and refusing closure are crucial to the task of finding ways to say what “resists being said.”
October 12 | Five of Cups | Raw pain is a thing that’s worth seeing
There’s no better place to study denial than from a place of deep pain. You will see, feel, and learn what it looks like, what’s at stake, and the lengths others will go to maintain it. When pain has been deprived of an adequate witness, Saidiya Hartman writes that there’s often a temptation “to create a space for mourning where it is prohibited.”3 If you have an urge to mourn in a space that prefers you would not, remember that your urge is sacred. Though it’s sometimes hard to see what’s happened with clarity when you’re hurting, facts are sometimes besides the point. Raw pain is a thing that’s worth seeing.
October 13 | Seven of Swords | Lying’s antithetical to love
In All About Love, author bell hooks writes about how we’re conditioned to lie. Some lie to maintain power, others to perform powerlessness. But lying’s antithetical to love. Telling the truth is a political leaning. It jeopardizes the cultural imperative to hide, conceal, and deny in allegiance to a status quo. Consider denial, again. Have you ever accepted emotional entanglement or even care, when what you yearned for was love? Have you settled for affection or good looks or validation from family when what you really sought was someone who’d go out of the way for your growth? Have you ever lied and said “I want this?”