Mourning

This is the last of three sections that deal with themes brought up by my post on the short story and movie Don’t Look Now. Although I don’t discuss the story in its particulars in this section, the theme of mourning is central to it, as the two main characters have just endured an unbearable loss — the death of their daughter. As I write these introductory notes, I realize how much I am at a loss for words in describing what mourning is, and how profoundly inadequate language can be when trying to describe feelings of loss. I realize equally how central the concept of mourning is to every moment we encounter, and how this is not necessarily a gloomy or negative idea, but perhaps even a liberating one.

Mourning

~ What do we mourn? The immanent. Immanence/imminence is broken up into fragments of time – past, present and future, and these three tenses are themselves a mourning inasmuch as time itself is a mourning. Because we lack the immanent, because it eludes us in favor of the time of the everyday, we forget the field of the immanent. Perhaps it is only when we reach a proximity to death that this lack is stripped away, and we see the field of the immanent in full view. Thus, we can maintain that we always mourn death ahead of time.

~ Anticipation is a form of mourning. It foresees the possibility of regaining what we have lost. To anticipate, then, is to mourn what we have lost. It is, perhaps, mankind’s most noble form of optimism.

~ Language mourns what it has lost, what it already will have lost in order to speak. To speak is to mourn an absence.

~ Language is the site of abandonment. Every word we utter warns us of eternal absence.

~ Because we have no real capacity to experience time “objectively”, we can say that, in the framework of our own human experience, time is desire and mourning. As time is nothing objectively (it is a wind, a phantom), in order to conceptualize it we subject it to our own desires. To the extent that we think about it, time is expectation or regret, hope or fond remembrance. Recollection, then, either gives us pleasure or repeats a past tragedy. As such, time can be said to be desire or mourning for us. We cannot conceive of it in any “neutral” sense.

~ Fantasy and desire link the past and the future.

~ Mourning (the past) is an obsessive recollection. Desire as hope is our relation to the future. Insofar as this is the case, the relation between hope and futurity cannot know an end.

~ There is no relation to death, thus the language that we speak can say nothing about it. The language of death, of dying, is the language of the impersonal.

~ Remembering is an obsessional act – there are only degrees of obsession. Remembering is an attempt at repetition. Repetition, then, is obsessional.

~ Memory, we would say, revolves obsessively around a single point. Yet the moment we remember, this point splinters into multiplicity; this multiplicity in turn goads memory’s production. The original point, however, cannot be pieced back together again: the remains have long since disappeared from the moment we start remembering.

And so, in a curious way, memory is not the memory of an event. It is the memory of a memory, an echo with no original point, with no original sound or utterance to set it off.

~ Remembering and mourning share similar traits. Remembering can perhaps be differentiated from recalling, in the sense that remembering a cherished experience or a loved one is not of the same caliber as recalling a mathematical equation or a phone number. Remembering recalls an absence in order to piece it back together as a whole. It is an effort to fill a void.

Or perhaps remembering is the guilt that maintains itself when a crime against another has been committed. Perhaps the impossible expiation for this crime is the meaning behind remembering.

~ The work of the Law is to mourn into the future, to make the future a repository of grief for a past that is irretrievable.

Our relation to death is limitless, not because it is a relation, but because it is a non-relation. Our memory stretches back into the limitless; it is a mourning for an event that did not happen.

~ Ἀλήθεια (aletheia), the Greek word for truth – truth as disclosure, as unhiddenness. This “unhiddenness”, however, must be taken in the context of the word that is buried within aletheia – lethe. Lethe is the river in the underworld that brought on forgetfulness to those who crossed it. Aletheia, then, is a remembrance, an un-forgetting. Thought becomes an oscillation between forgetting and un-forgetting.

~ Lethe, the infernal river. The shades of the dead were required to drink from Lethe’s waters before they could be reincarnated. It is only memory, then, and not forgetting, that is linked to mourning. This much seems obvious. Yet memory mourns for the point when all will have been forgotten. The efforts of memory are lost efforts.

~ To think, to mourn — how can we differentiate between the two?

~ Memory is the mourning of logic, its distortion. This distortion gives way to desire.

Yet logic does not function without memory.

~ Is this memory, the memory that logic holds, the same one that animated desire? Are they mixed or kept apart from one another?

~ This mourning takes shelter and solace in the written. The word is its dwelling. Why is this the case? Because the Law and desire both take root in a past that must be written. It must be transcribed and translated.

~The subject mourns the anonymity that preceded it. Being a subject means existing in mourning.

~ Mourning never goes away. We merely forget it from time to time.

~ Translation is a mourning for an origin that is eternally lost. No judgment can return it.

~ His name was the mark of his mourning.