Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, Ace of Cups by Pamela Colman Smith. In the card, a hand is coming out of a cloud and holding a golden cup with water flowing out of it into a larger body of water. There is a dove descending on the cup with a wafer in its mouth. Behind the card are a bunch of plants including zinnias whose bloom is impending.
Audio Offerings are currently on hiatus. I apologize to those who need or prefer to listen, and hope to be back with them soon.
In last week’s Offering I wrote about Kathleen Higgins’ article on the way objects and practices can offer a containing experience for those struggling in the aftermath of loss.
The article, which is called “Aesthetics and the containment of grief” draws on Ellen Disanayake’s idea of aesthetics (among others) as a way of “making special.” I found pleasure in imagining the connections between special items, rituals, beauty, and loss.
This week I finished Catherine Keller’s Facing Apocalypse, which is the first book I’ve read cover-to-cover in months. It is in many ways a book about loss, and contains phrases like collective mourning and cosmic griefwork. It got me thinking—again—about simple technologies for mourning.
Since I’ve been wondering so much about how physical objects can be containers for experiences that at times feel uncontainable, I’ve found myself back asking about the grail. Could the grail itself—this mythical vessel that I dream about often—also have something to do with containment and grief?
Higgins describes containment as sometimes involving vessels and receptacles “to gather and carry contents.” Because of the way a vessel gathers and carries, it is a tool for communicating and thus for connecting. In this way, a vessel is undeniably relational. It has the capacity to receive and transmit information, from one to an other. (See also: Ace of Cups, which is often read as an image of the grail.)
Higgins applies this idea to the way special objects can be used to express things that are difficult or impossible to articulate to others, or in circumstances when communication is or feels blocked, as can be the case when someone dies. Here, Higgins notes Itaru Sasaki’s wind phone.
Reckoning with the fact that he could no longer make regular phone calls to his cousin who’d died, Sasaki placed a booth in his garden with a rotary phone inside from which he could make calls to his cousin whenever he wanted. The booth has become a site of pilgrimage, where bereaved visitors can send messages on the wind to their dead.
Describing the project, Higgins wonders whether the physical performance of going to the booth and speaking into the phone increases the visitors’ senses that their messages will be received by their lost loved ones. And her wondering made me wonder.
It made me think of anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff’s comments about performance and remembering: “Our senses are naturally persuasive, convincing us of what the mind will not indulge…in ritual, doing is believing, and we become what we display.”
—
A few hours after last week’s Offering went out I went to the pottery studio for the first time in months, where a box of my unglazed pots were sitting abandoned after their first round of firing in March.
Hey, it’s been a hard year. Cascading fears about losing, and then losing itself, and then in a lot of ways I simply lost touch. And that’s one thing I love about clay. It puts me back in touch simply. And helps me to be less heady.
As I held each bowl in my hands, feeling/fearing their fragility, running my fingers over the inscribed JESSICA DOREs on the bone-hued bottoms—proof of a differently arranged early spring version of me—it was hard not to consider Higgins’ ideas on vessels, containment, and grief.
Image description: A set of ten small white bowls and cups that have gone through the kiln once but are not yet glazed are sitting on a blonde wood desk against a white plater wall.
I’ve often referred to my practice of working with clay as “grail studies” because I took my first wheel throwing classes around the same time I read my first telling of the grail. I also fell in love at that time.
It’s been an era marked by hands-on, relational learning that has hugely impacted not only how I understand and make meaning of the grail story, but my research interests. Responsiveness, curiosity, and grief are not only major grail themes, but work/life themes for me.
The grail story is often interpreted as relating to the virtues of compassion and curiosity, of “suffering with” and of caring. After all, Perceval attains the grail only when he’s able—after great tribulations—to ask the wounded grail king: “What ails you?”
And in light of Higgins’ work on aesthetics and grief I’ve been wondering if the grail could also be a symbol of containment; a vessel bearing instructions for the grievers of the world. Perhaps something to do with the material aspects of mourning.
It doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. Perceval, the grail king, and just about everyone else of significance in the story is in some way grappling with loss. Losses which are often named, and sometimes detailed at great length. Maybe the grail has gathered up and carried secrets about how to mourn that could apply to personal, collective and cosmic grief works.
Recalling Higgins’ definitions of containment, maybe there are ideas about how to channel or direct the raucous parade of disoriented thoughts and feelings that come, or to stop the fabric of one’s reality from tearing to the point it cannot be salvaged, or to carve out clear spaces for the ten thousand meanings that one meets after loss.
There’s a lot more to unpack here which I hope to do when I’ve had a few better nights’ sleeps.
See you next time,
JD
Audio Offerings are currently on hiatus. I apologize to those who need or prefer to listen, and hope to be back with them soon.
You’re reading the Offering for September 2023. I make these Offerings weekly for those interested in making a contribution of as little as $5 a month or $50 a year. If you’re interested in upgrading your subscription to receive them weekly you can do so by hitting the subscribe button below. As always liking and sharing are great ways to support the work as well.
Sources
Higgins, K. (2020). Aesthetics and the containment of grief. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 78(1), 9-20.
Keller, C. (2021). Facing apocalypse: Climate, democracy, and other last chances. Orbis.
Myerhoff, B. (1982). Life history among the elderly: Performance, visibility and remembering. In J. Ruby (ed.), A crack in the mirror: Reflexive perspectives in Anthropology (99-117). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Your unglazed pots are a fresh image for the 10 of Cups. Instead of the happily-ever-after of the Rider-Waite-Smith version, this image of happiness opens up possibilities and makes room for the incompleteness that haunts even joyful moments (e.g. because someone important to us is missing).