Offering: February 16, 2025
Indeterminate pasts
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I’m back in Maine and elated to be on this particular stretch of rugged and cold winter coast. The days are getting longer and it even felt a bit spring-like last week at the barn. I’ve been learning to ride western-style this winter, which is new for me but the tasks are the same as they were riding English: I have to relax, I have to sit back, I have to let the horse have her head, I have to let her go if I ask her to go, I have to be confident without being controlling.
During the precious morning hours I’ve been doing a second, more thorough read of Matthew Ratcliffe’s Grief Worlds which was one of the texts that sparked this project studying grief almost two years ago. Ratcliffe thinks really thoroughly about this quality of indeterminacy in ways that are super interesting to me.
He describes indeterminacy in two ways. One as a “sense of lacking something that more usually shapes and guides one’s experiences, thoughts and activities.” As many of us know, grief can involve a sense that those things we’d taken for granted from the major to the minute have been thrown into disarray.
And with this kind of indeterminacy, life structures are eroded, the things we habitually expected are no longer reliable, and presumed futures have vanished undermining the present as they go. There is a small citation in Grief Worlds from religious scholar James Carse, who describes grief as a “cosmic crisis,” an “experience of living “in a universe that makes no sense” and “has lost its fundamental order.”
But there is another kind of indeterminacy that Ratcliffe describes. This is a kind which “enriches the structure of human life, pointing to possibilities beyond the contents of one’s current memories or imaginings.” This kind of indeterminacy is relevant in grief because it can make way for a continued relation with someone who’s gone.
And while it importantly doesn’t provide a new structure to take place of the one that’s eroded, Ratcliffe argues that this kind of indeterminacy can support how we respond to the other kind, by “sustaining the sense that certain kinds of possibilities remain, including the possibility of things coming to matter in new ways.”
While I was digging into this section of the book I followed up on James Carse’s cosmic crisis idea, and found a book he wrote called Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility. In it, Carse describes the difference between finite and infinite play:
“There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
For Carse, infinite play is a way of sustaining possibilities, including the possibility that the past can reveal new meanings over time, continually offering up new beginnings. Infinite players do not assume that the past contains a set of finite beginnings that offer only fixed outcomes. Instead the infinite player has “no way of knowing what has been begun there.” To me, this is fascinating to think about in a grief context because of the way grief in some ways involves a negotiation between past, present and future.