politics of the hap

I have been reflecting on how COVID-19 has fostered a sense of living in liminality for many people. All of us are orientated to an unknowable future, waiting expectantly. More so perhaps for those managing grief and bereavement at the moment. I have previously suggested that grief can be compared to an experience of liminality, one where people draw on rituals, practices, means of making sense and reorienting themselves back to whatever is deemed ‘normality’. Now many more people may find themselves ‘stuck’ in grief unable to engage in the activities that might have helped them mark their grief, waiting for a future, and inhabiting a space of ‘non-recovery’.

A post I wrote in 2013 explored the role of waiting in grief inspired by C.S. Lewis’s account of grief following his wife’s death. The themes – life’s permanently provisional feeling, suspended agency – appeared remarkably relevant to our present moment.

Below are some extracts:

In A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis compares grief to a feeling of suspense (1961, p.29): ‘Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling.’ (p.29). This is not about patience. This is a situation of suspended agency. Last time I closed with this thought: ‘No recovery suspends action because it remains counter-active, it does not offer identities or resolution; it provides a view of the world laid bare, an emptying out of the imagination.’ No recovery is a situation that offers no catharsis, satisfaction, virtue nor culminates in some kind of purgation or purifying release. In this definition of ‘no recovery’ I am borrowing from Sianne Ngai’s idea of ugly feelings. Ugly feelings do not facilitate action but are characterised by their ‘ongoingness’ and ‘flatness’ (2005, p7). In this feeling of suspense there is too much time; everything feels flat and boredom arises (Lewis, 1961). Whereas a narrative of recovery is expectant and (hope)full.

Yet grieving, I would like to suggest, could be viewed as a gesture that reads: even when I know you are not coming, I’m still waiting. This is statement that points toward the ways in which grieving is often grounded in an ambivalence that both seeks an object whilst accepting the impossibility of this goal. As Lewis continues: ‘I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual’ (1961, p.41). Grief is a state of frustrated feelings, of a love cut short, curtailed in what seems an untimely manner. And yet everything feels provisional: a permanent provisional feeling. The permanence of death is acknowledged which makes time feel long and inescapable, and yet the state of mourning feels novel and thus transitory. As Lewis describes, there doesn’t seem any point in starting anything, he cannot settle: ‘I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much’ (p.30). There is a restlessness and laziness in Lewis’s feeling of grief: what’s the point in completing tasks when weighed with loss (and thus aware of the futility of each and every task) and yet the fidgeting speaks of a need to fill the spaces and ‘flatness’ that have now opened up in his life.

In grief there can be a use to remaining within this sense of suspense; this is the ambivalence that says that while grief is not desirable there is an obligation to the one that has died to prolong grief, to prolong the unhappiness. If one has been cut in two, to feel better is to pretend one is whole and complete again and subsequently do an injustice to the memory of a marriage or life together (Lewis, 1961). As Derrida (2001, p.110) puts it: ‘mourn we must, but we must not like it.’ Perhaps this feeling of suspension can then be seen as an impasse in the present that allows the grieving person to remain attached to these feelings of loss and frustrated impulses. As Lauren Berlant (2011) describes through her concept of ‘cruel optimism’; even with the image of the good life (recovery/happiness) to sustain our optimism, it is awkward and threatening to detach from what is not working. We stay attached to what is not working because at least we are attached to something, to let go is to risk loss and the insecure promise of a better life. Waiting can feel like temporary housing when death has taken away our sense of origin, our sense of the world once shared with our dead ones (Derrida, 2001, p.115). Moreover ‘what makes us feel, is also what holds us in place, or gives us a dwelling place’ (Ahmed 2004, p.11).

So we don’t want to do away with the feelings of grief, ugly or otherwise, because they give us something: a way of being in the world, and to detach is to lose that feeling. But those same feelings suspends us in ambivalence, it is a feeling that does not facilitate positive action: ‘I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much’. It is a distracted set of feelings. Yet in this double-bind withdrawal does not feel like an option. Lauren Berlant (2012) describes this feeling of a double-bind through the example of a destructive love affair:

if I leave you I am not only leaving you (which would be a good thing if your love destroys my confidence) but also I leaving an anchor for my optimism about life (which is why I want to stay with you even though I’m unhappy, because I am afraid of losing the scene of my fantasy itself). So this double bind produces conflicts in how to proceed, because massive loss is inevitable if you stay or if you go.

I find Berlant’s example instructive for grieving for whilst recovery is a narrative that would point towards detaching from the lost object (successful mourning) the lost object is the very anchor that sustains hope. Hope in grief exists only in the form of the fantasy of the return of the dead one. In Berlant’s scenario ‘even though I’m unhappy…I am afraid of losing the scene of my fantasy itself’. Perhaps this is why for Lewis grief feels so much like fear (1961, p5). The fear is of detaching from what brought optimism to life, and thus losing for a second time, even if staying brings unhappiness.

Waiting is hopeful and can be the better option when the avenues to express one’s desires are unsatisfactory, limiting and repetitive, when it feels like you’re going in circles (Lewis, 1961). But this then begs the question: What is the grieving person waiting for? … The waiting is the ‘invisible blanket’ that keeps us situated in the numb sense ‘like being mildly drunk or concussed’ (Lewis, 1961, p5), of not quite being part of the world.

To detach from what is not working, to stop waiting is perhaps then to come face to face with no recovery. But no recovery offers no narratives or objects to follow. It is to lose the anchors one had in the world, to lose one’s dwelling place. This why it is threatening and awkward to detach from what is not working (Berlant, 2011). This is why it so feels like fear (Lewis, 1961).

…Vacating the life we once knew (or it vacates us?) creates fear and anxiety. I would propose anxiety is a negative affect that emerges at the emptying out of the imagination. When everything becomes equivocal, anxiety floods to fill the space, that terrifying space of non-signifiers, of the meaningless, the death of the imagination. Anxiety is restless, ‘I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much’, it tries different paths but they don’t stick. Anxious habits become a way of clinging on to give a structure in the horrifying swirl of what is not in the desperate attempt to stop the self-unraveling. And throughout, the anxious mind is plagued thinking: What’s next? What are we becoming?

… In the event of loss, ‘the act of living is different all through’ (Lewis, 1961, p.12). Loss covers everything. … In this situation, waiting, can appear a favourable prospect. … the waiting is necessary, not in order to figure it all out, but maybe just as a space for unhappiness to lie.

References

Ahmed, S. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press.

Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Duke University  Press.

Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Berlant, L. (2012) ‘On her book Cruel Optimism’, Rorotoko, June 5^th 2012, http://rorotoko.com/interview/20120605_berlant_lauren_on_cruel_optimism/?page=2

Butler, J. (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

Derrida, J. (2001). The Work of Mourning. (Edited by Brault, P. & Naas, M). London: University of Chicago Press.

Lewis, C.S. (1961). A Grief Observed. London: Faber and Faber.

Ngai, S. (2005). Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, Massachusetts: HarvardUniversity Press.