Offering: December 8, 2024
Extraordinary experience
I’m in Vermont for the weekend and reading Grief Worlds again, which I finished for the first time last month. This time I’m reading much slower, because I’m trying (really hard) to understand what the author Matthew Ratcliffe describes as the two-sided structure of grief.
I’ve also been thinking through some of the under-storied aspects of James Stephens’ telling of Tuan Mac Cairill, who—as the Irish legend has it—survived everyone he loved, died many years later and then was born again, multiple times. Reborn first as a stag, then a boar, then a hawk, then a salmon, Tuan had to relearn the world1 every time.
Stephens doesn’t spend that much time fleshing out those first moments, and what it was like to wake up in a world that was in one sense exactly the same and in another totally altered. Though the landscape of course hadn’t changed over night, it was a new experience for Tuan because he was in it within a new body. He was walking with four legs and not two. Seeing with eyes on the sides of the head, not the front. Moving off land altogether to a fresh life in air. I bet he had to move slowly at first.
And though Stephens doesn’t attend much to those moments—understandably, since relearning the world is a much slower and more painstaking process than any storyteller these days has the luxury of time or attention to elucidate—what he does do is describe Tuan’s elation by the time he is born as a fish. In elaborate, astonishing detail.
Tuan himself might say that his bliss at that point boiled down to the ease of being in a fish body. Whereas human arms are “excessive and hindering2,” stag’s legs must be “tucked away for sleep, and untucked for movement,” hawk’s wings “must be folded and pecked and cared for,” the salmon is “but one piece from his nose to his tail.”
But, nearly two years into a deep dive of grief, loss and mourning, I have a suspicion there was something more to it. I am curious: What became possible for Tuan after relentless cycles of losing? What did he come to know about himself and the world through this perpetual process of learning and loss and relearning?
For Ratcliffe, grief typically involves moving “toward reconciling the reality of one’s current situation with the structure of one’s life.” We are living beings in a world that is not made up of fixed, meaningless objects, but “a cohesive, unfolding arrangement of significant possibilities, which are experienced and acted upon in ways that reflect projects, cares and concerns.”
Since neither our selves nor our worlds are fixed entities, learning to live within the dynamic tension of interior and exterior is in a sense what we’re up against, both as living beings and sometimes also as grievers. When we are grievers, it makes sense to describe the task after significant loss as “relearning the world,” while bearing in mind that the world itself has been undermined by the loss.
This tension—between what we’re anticipating from the world and what the world is disclosing to us—involves ongoing negotiation. And it seems this is part of what goes on in a process of grief, during which Ratcliffe notes that one often “knows full well what has happened, continues to inhabit a world that runs contrary to it, and experiences a tension between the two…”
A person may be completely disoriented by the loss of someone important. But the material components of the shared world within which the relationship existed doesn’t and, in fact, can’t change overnight. And this is why, though Stephens doesn’t spend much time fleshing out those first steps Tuan took in the world from within a new body, I just know it took time to adjust. Tuan just needed time to orient in a world that was in one sense totally altered and in another exactly the same.