Image description: A hand is holding an oracle card, beauté from L’oracle Belline. In the image, a flower is blooming with a heart at the top and above the heart a crown. Behind the card there is grass, various plants, and two zinnias, one fully bloomed and one about to. Both are hot pink.
This week I pulled the beauté card from my Belline oracle deck. I set it aside and then a few days later encountered an article by philosopher Kathleen Higgins on the aesthetics of grief.
The first zinnia blooms opened out in my garden and I considered the ways that objects and rituals give mourners something to hold onto in the disorientation that often accompanies a big loss.
Spurred on by Higgins article “Aesthetics and the containment of grief,” I spent time considering the difference between closure and containment when it comes to grief.
I am critical about the idea of closure in part because I just devoured theologian Catherine Keller’s book Facing Apocalypse. In it, she writes that the word apocalypse comes from the Greek word apokalypsis, which “means not to close but to dis/close. To open what is otherwise shut.”
My mind has been moving again in the way that it does when I’m well. I’ve been connecting dots between loss, opening, and flowering zinnias.
I like art philosopher Arthur Danto’s words here, that “recourse to beauty seems to emerge spontaneously on occasions where sorrow is felt.”
Higgins writes that bereaved people “ubiquitously turn to aesthetic practices,” like bringing flowers or other special objects to grave sites. Or like storytelling, music, and dance.
I am curious about how the dissonance that is mourning can give way to resonance and beauty. I want to know about the conditions that make this possible, and about what one might do who hopes to cultivate the kind of flower that blooms only from a skeleton’s mouth.
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So it was Friday that the Zinnia seeds my mother planted—three days before I experienced a significant and somewhat unanticipated loss—opened out into flowers.
As I write these words there are two blooms, and as you read it there will likely be more. This is resonance after weeks of dissonance. It’s cool nights and cool walks with my dog. I’m reading every day again.
On Thursday a friend helped me hoist my pottery wheel into the back of my truck and to the basement of my local studio. There I’ll resume my studies in the tension between distinct but responsive bodies, who have their own ideas about things.
After weeks of sorrow I am dreaming of beauté again. With the degree of enthusiasm that is typical for me I am visioning the juiciest next steps for my life. My life, whose rhythms of resonance / dissonance, connection / separation I am devoted to, still.
I have to tell you that for the Zinnias’ first days of life I was in so much emotional pain I was practically hostile to them. Arrogant fools to come into this world.
In resistance to my shady, pained gaze those seeds burst out green in the soil and shot up into stalks. Albeit leggy, despite neglect they made a point to be seen. It was there they began to grow on me.
Even still there were nights (many) when I could not haul the hose and spray water for even three minutes in that dissonant dusk. Who cares? By the time these things bloom, I’ll be elsewhere.
Like a wicked stepmother who thinks just of herself I would leave those tender plants to their dry, dusty bed. But something bigger than me was at work there. It was on the side of beauty. A big rain would come as I slept.