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March came in like a lion here in southern Maine, bringing wind gusts and down trees and power outages. It’s hard to believe my winter beach retreat time is waning, but we are are heading undeniably and inevitably toward tourist season, which will be my cue to go. Things have gone mostly as planned as far as reading and writing and work go, but there have also been some amazing surprises.
I spent a chunk of the winter reading and then re-reading Matthew Ratcliffe’s Grief Worlds in preparation to have a conversation with him about it, which we did earlier this week. Grief Worlds emphasizes “phenomenological issues,” which involve both what it is to experience grief and what might be learned about human experience more generally through reflecting on that.
Ahead of my conversation with Matthew—which I can’t wait to share with you soon—I dipped back into philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, which I’d attempted to read a few years ago but didn’t make it through the numerous introductions. This time I managed to break into the preface, where I came across what may be one of my favorite strings of words ever written:
“At each instant, I weave dreams around the things…”
I spend a lot of time thinking about relationships with humans, but Grief Worlds got me thinking a lot about objects as well. One thing I’ve come to understand through experiencing, thinking, reading, and listening to others’ accounts about grief is that the structures that make up our lives are way more intricate and enchanted than we’re ordinarily aware of.
We largely overlook the reality that as beings embedded in complex worlds—of habits and patterns and anticipations and fulfillments and people and non-human animals and objects—we are held by a fabric that is woven so tightly we may come wholly undone with the tearing of one significant thread.
I think there are experiences, like grief, that make us acutely aware of how contingent our worlds are. But also, that maintaining this awareness all the time is not sustainable. Our ability to rely on a certain degree of consistency among the people, places, and things that make up our lives allows us to form habits, and to move through the world without having to reflect first on every action we take.
In my experience, part of losing someone important can involve a sense of betrayal that is not necessarily interpersonal. I trusted the things in my world to behave somewhat in line with the dreams I wove in them. The world is teeming with things that are imbued with meanings, meanings that may go unnoticed until someone is gone and they no longer make sense.
For example, I have a copy of Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love on my coffee table because we like to lay on the couch and read it together. I keep the peanut butter jar on the table—the brand that we love—because we always have it with breakfast. We walk at the beach in the mornings, I keep the rag by the door so I can wipe off your paws while I take off my boots.
So if you who I lay reading with or you who I walk with at the beach go away, what do the book and the towel and the Teddie jar come to mean? Without them, what is a morning? Dreams of us are infused into all of these things. And these things make up just a fraction of the thousand links that forge our shared worlds. Links which reinforce our significance. Ties that hold us together.
Hi, hitting the like button is a great way to support this project. <3