#8 Mourning as a Spatial Narrative
“What I find utterly terrifying is mourning’s discontinuous character.”
-Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
It is the start of a new year, and there is no utterance of this grief. Articulation, which is supposed to provide respite, is lost in the liminal spaces of suffering. The transient nature of mourning, from the onset of grief to its dissipation or eventual adaptation, is a recurrent limbo, a stasis with no beginning or end. Mourning adopts an eternal character, changes its form from an abstract transient process to an atmosphere that is induced through a careful employment of hidden character devices. In the absence of language, I am incapable of understanding my own grief. The maintenance of the edict, that most of life can be contained in a language, has translated into the comprehension of life through language. In the absence of words, I am faced with incomprehensibility of the self. The philosophical question that faces me, is, that if I can’t articulate it, could I not feel it? If I made language the limits of my world, would the world adhere to my definitions?
Or is this mourning itself?
This conflict that tears apart the whole fabric of self, that seeps into the spaces that we inhabit, that mutes the auditory understanding of one’s own voice for the disenchantment with one’s own words, one’s own language, deemed imperfect, inadequate, irresponsible, unable to adhere to one’s own artistic vision —a metric for suffering, for the emotive content of this mourning, this sentimentality. What is the divide, this inherent conflict that the year has bestowed on us? What are you trying to understand, through my words?
What I am trying to understand is the discontinuous character of grief itself. If mourning is the transience of grief, the distance between the start and the end point of it, I am trying to plot it on a map. If I am trying to reach somewhere, I want to transpose that journey into a spatial narrative. Inside a room, where language is supposed to be created, there is also a lot of grief hidden in both the presence and absence of language. In every room, in every curve of the stairs, in every home that is ever built is also the hidden truth of decay. The mortality of beings is also extended to the structures that humanity has extended itself to. In all this non-living cement, there is the portrayal of humanity. I am grieving in a supermarket, and I am thinking of how my grief is anonymized through these recurrent symmetric structures, where every shelf is an imposition at two levels. Structurally or rather existentially, I am marked insignificant in the face of a large shelf that peers over me with its sheer size, and quantitatively, I am reminded of my own commodification, of being another anonymous commodity thinking of its own grief as a by-product of literature. In a supermarket, my mourning is the translation of my existential grief into a literary one. A literary grief, that finds itself in the anonymity of cereal brands, each aisle clearly demarcated and marked, a map I have been searching for that provides the directions to my grief, that is so lost in its own symmetry and efficiency, that the lack of humanity is oppressive enough to condense grief. In the parking lot, I am overwhelmed by the vastness of it, the inability to reconcile a vast space with the lighting requirements. The underbelly of grief, covered in darkness, with no ends in sight but neon signs with directions that need to be trusted on faith. A cold encounter with empty cars, with people leaving and arriving, a place of no stasis and no life. I am mourning in an empty car, in the basement parking lot. I am unable to reconcile the space my grief takes, and how vast life is. Grief has an architecture, a design principle that dictates how to mourn in public and private spaces. In my washroom, I am overcome with grief. Mourning takes its transient form, in the confined spaces where everything flows. In my room, I morph into my grief. The room is a liminal place where a person turns into a structure. During phases of intense grief, I cannot find my way back to my bed. The spatial metaphor that you employ is, that you are lost in your own city. In absence of language, I am extending my grief to spaces I inhabit, trying to build it into a superstructure, an architectural design, a plethora of symbols. In the absence of language, I am employing on own semiotics, my own way of mourning in space.
In Mourning Diary, Barthes says, “What’s remarkable about these notes is a devastated subjected being the victim of presence of mind.” I wonder about the remarkable aspect of it, if literary merits overshadow the process of mourning, if there is a perverse pleasure in watching yourself mourn, if mourning makes us all victims of an overbearing consciousness. In other lines, he writes, “Depression comes when, in the depths of despair, I cannot manage to save myself by my attachment to writing.” I have not written for months now, and made a map of all my mourning. There is a hidden motif in all curtains, which is to hide oneself from one’s own voyeurism of the world. I am trapped in the discontinuous character of mourning, that refuses to yield to language, that refuses to explain itself. And within the discontinuity of the word, is the understanding of the temporal nature of grief, the slow metamorphosis from Form to Content, from a process to an entity. Within the discontinuity of mourning, I am attempting to find the ability to maintain the continuity of the self.