Offering: June 2024
Grief, unconformity, new worlds
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Editorial note: I’m still dealing with a lot of pain in my hands and arms, so I’m making this offering from speech to text. If it reads a bit different, that’s why!
I’ve been thinking about mathematician Alfred North Whitehead’s notions of physicality and mentality, and more specifically how they relate to grief. As philosopher Brian Massumi articulates them, physical and mental are not what we tend to think of as simply body and mind. Physicality refers to “actions performed in conformity to the past” while mentality involves “the capacity to exceed what is given to bring forth a novelty.1”
I think grief refuses blanket statements but in my experience can involve a heightened awareness of the tension between the physical and mental dimensions. Grieving can involve a painful and often disorienting negotiation between tendencies to conform to the past and the capacity to change. As humans we have patterns and habits of thinking and moving, many of which are so minute as to go unnoticed until suddenly someone important is gone.
One does not imagine that how one brushes one’s teeth, or maneuvers through the aisles in the grocery store, or gets ready for bed could be intimately entangled with others. And one might be baffled, bewildered, and disoriented to find out after a loss that they are. These habits and patterns want to do what all patterns and habits want to do which is stretch forth into the future. But in grief they are frustrated by the reality that in this new world they no longer make sense.
Complications in grief might also relate to a lopsided relationship between the physical and mental domains, as could be the case when somebody’s life has changed undeniably and irrevocably and yet they are unable to adjust structures from the past—like patterns and habits—in a way that’s responsive to what’s gone.
I’ve also been thinking about these ideas in relationship to the creative effort of making these offerings each week. In the physical dimension I’m attempting to extend the past into the future by doing things the way I’ve done them for the last three years; writing an essay each week no matter what my body is doing. But I’m in a lot of pain and there is a need here to bring forth some novelty. There is a need to un-conform.
For the Sunday meeting last week on The Tower, I did something other than what I’ve done every Sunday for the last few months and told a story that I knew somewhat by heart rather than typing up notes to share with the group, as per usual. It was the myth of Cupid and Psyche—in which a benevolent tower instructs the hopeless Psyche how to get through the underworld in one piece—and it felt really vulnerable because I usually spend weeks rehearsing a story before telling it to others, plus this wasn’t one that I know particularly well, despite having spent seven weeks writing about it in 2021 when I kicked off the weekly offerings.
Co-incidentally that week I’d been revisiting Brian Massumi’s Politics of Affect in which he says:
“Don’t bring your products, bring your process. Don’t bring your thoughts you’ve already had and rehearse them to us as part of positioning yourself — bring everything else, your passions, your appetitions, your tools and abilities, your intensest procedures, and connect into the situation from that angle. Don’t perform yourself — co-catalyze a collective event with us…You are hereby relieved from the imperative to represent yourself and to be judged accordingly.…The measure of success of your contributions will not be whether they were correct, or complete, or even authentically you but rather what affective force they brought to the event.”2
I can’t speak for what affective force telling a story brought to the event for others, but for me I felt like I’d been struck by lightning and I don’t get that feeling reading notes off of a page. Well, sometimes I do. Ha ha. But this was different.
Anyway, this is my official announcement that the physical structure of these Offerings—weekly text essays that come out each Sunday with a corresponding audio—is loosening a bit, and shifting. I can no longer commit to writing an essay each week but I feel confident promising that there will still be lots of writing because writing is the love of my life. And to be honest speech to text isn’t nearly as hard as I thought.
It can be a beautiful thing when a structure is baffled. It goes without saying that it can also be extraordinarily painful. In this case, the bafflement is being brought on by the unruliness of my body which is not only wholly indifferent to the structures I make and the ideas that I have about what I must do, it has no qualms whatsoever about frustrating them.
In Ami Harbin’s book, Disorientation and Moral Life, she talks about how experiences of disorientation can yield moral action even in the absence of clarity about how to go on. She writes that more than transforming, disorientations can tenderize us. What the past year’s disorientations—including but not limited to a break up, bearing witness to multiple genocides, long COVID, and a body that disagrees with what I think it can or should do—have tenderized in me is, among other things, the incredible value of acknowledgment.
It hurts to be in pain and not seen, or to be treated as if that pain was somehow insignificant or inconsequential when you know that it mattered and meant something. Acknowledging the physical pain in my body is just one manifestation of this. And what’s cool is that I have other ideas about ways to make Offerings that won’t hurt so much. Ideas which I’ve been waiting to move on but think I am leaning towards ready.
An idea that’s been so powerful for me, which I’ll leave you with for now, is philosopher Lauren Berlant’s idea of ambivalence. In their interview on intimacy as world-making, Berlant notes that, contrary to popular belief the word ambivalence means strong on both sides. Not indecisive or waffling or even indifferent, but strong. On both sides.
What this means to me is that, strong as old structures may sometimes be and often are, there is strength in insisting on making new worlds inside and alongside of them. What I’m hoping to do with the Offerings is one small microcosmic expression of this idea. The structure will stay, but I hope to make new kinds of Offerings inside—perhaps more audio, some interviews, some art, and we’ll see what takes shape from there.
Here’s what Berlant says:
“One of the hardest things to recognize…is that you are creating new spaces from within the old spaces without replacing them. This is the problem of the both/and:’ you don’t stop being in the world, but you also make other possibilities. And eventually those folds can become the reference if you allow them to take on some weight or if you can gather the resources with other people to make them.3”
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
Thank you so much for being here as always and, see you next time.
Jessica
Hi, hitting the heart button is a really good and free way to support these Offerings. Thanks! <3
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