Weeping girls.

Today I ran across this feature on COLOSSAL, an imaginative placement of figures from classical paintings in modern scenes of Kiev, by the artist Alexey Kondakov. I especially love this one:

It reminded me, when I saw it, of a series of sculptures at Jupiter Artland (closed for the winter months, don't even think about going to Edinburgh just to see it!), called 'Weeping Girls' by Laura Ford.

The artist says that her inspiration was that a friend of hers told her a story about 'a fantastic tantrum his daughter had had where she was inconsolable whilst at the same time watching herself and the effect she was having in the mirror.'

We all thought the sculptures were compelling but also creepy. It was impossible not to go up to one of the girls to see if the thick, long curls of her stone hair covered an actual weeping face. But the faces were only evoked by their hiddenness. 

In the days that followed, as we traveled and everyone had episodes of crankiness, those weeping girls seemed animating spirits of the ways that our emotional lives shadow us like the drowned girl in The Ring. Or any embarrassing secret, or the compulsion to keep to ourselves what we're really thinking.

And still, the girls' bereftness struck me also as having a truth that isn't just self-dramatization. Freud talked about grief as a kind of temporary narcissism--but grief seems elemental anyway, despite its inward turning. Tears choke us, overtake us. Sometimes we apologize for them. Sometimes when I find myself in tears, I self-deprecate. Sorry, I say with a gesture, I know I'm being ridiculous.

Still elemental. Egregious and excessive and uncalled for. If I were doing what the Russian artist did with figures from classical paintings in Kiev, I would place weeping girls, this week in Salt Lake City, at the movies. At church. Driving a car from here to there. Talking on the phone. Alone in the office. Before falling asleep.

On grief.

We spent a good part of today at a funeral. Our close friend and his family lost their daughter and sister.

All day, I kept thinking of the injunction from my faith tradition's scripture, to mourn with those that mourn; but also of how we have such awkward language for thinking and talking about death. On a day like today, that scripture felt like, perhaps, the only adequate words, for the terrible loss, for the way the living go on in the face of it, for the longing afterward, and for what any of us could do to help.

When the service was over, and the interment, there was food waiting--the Mormons at the church house next to the cemetery had prepared it. People from every sector of the mourners came in, in bunches and pairs and threes. We sat with people we knew, and after awhile, our friend came over holding a plate of food. You could tell he felt he should talk to us and listen, but we told him to eat, we just wanted to sit with him. So he ate, and we sat with him. That's all, and for those few minutes it felt almost, briefly, all right.

Tonight, I am thinking of him and his family, and also of my dearest friend, who recently lost her son. These words, inadequate as they are, are for them.

In the middle of the middle of the end.

Why does blogging seem like a big question mark, wrapped in briars, right now?

I don't give a damn about the blogging zeitgeist. I have loved this space as a little art gallery, as a place to try things, as a small space to speak. I think I still do love it. I'm sure I still love it, but something is getting in the way.

Is it that the many ways to enter this space--visual, textual--crowd its entrance?

Is it that life itself seems thick with sadnesses, potential and real?

Is it that the marker of my work life, the semester, is at its most crushing point?

Oh, let's focus on the semester. By all means, the semester, with its thicket of grading, its consultations, its many indicators that my optimism may be unwarranted, that I am not, as it were, succeeding in aiding my students toward their achievement of the course outcomes? Is it that school life is filled not with nouns but nominalizations? Is it that the semester's weather has finally settled into its wintry trajectory?

I want and do not want to talk about the many deaths that seem to be accompanying me along my path. They're not my deaths--am I even allowed to talk about them as if they were my own story? The walk alongside a loved one, if briefly, in the valley of the shadow, as it is said--not my story. My own age pressing on me--this is my story, but it is not delightful.

I know I have delightful stories to tell. I live them almost every day. I'm sure I have small amusing anecdotes to tell about the inventive definitions my students are concocting for syntactical terms. Pictures to post. Things to celebrate. I have them. They spill out of my handbag whenever I go looking for my lipstick, and fall out of my pockets with the small change, and trail behind me, an invisible vapor, when I walk from here to there.

I feel like I just had to say this: it has been a long year with much grief, some of which feels very close to me and which I don't have the blog-language to talk about. Maybe I can say it in poems, but only maybe; and if I don't say it here, anything else I do say would feel dishonest to me. So tomorrow, I hope to be able to set this all to the side, at least for the moment, having acknowledged it, and get on with the business of joy, which business I want to choose every day if I can.

Dinner.

Today we went to a memorial service for a friend's husband who recently died of cancer.  After, I find myself face to face with--or more aptly catching a glimpse as it turns a corner--the flatness of the things you can say, compare to what you wish to say.  I am remembering this man, whom I did not know well--his lovely smile, his way in the kitchen, his voice--and thinking about how many things there are to miss in life, how often I avoid what is awkward or difficult, which means not being surprised by what may be beyond the awkwardness, the difficulty.    

Tonight I feel grieved by this, by what feels to me like a failure.

When we got home, I made dinner for us and two of running son's friends.  I took special pleasure in the preparations--omelets and toast; roasted potatoes, carrots, parsnips; sliced oranges and black grapes; a lemon cake.  My friend and her husband together were geniuses of hospitality, conviviality.  I want to nurture that in myself and in our home, the simple human gestures by which we help each other live, connect, thrive. 

For starters, learn how to cook.

This is Poet Laureate Charles Simic's advice to people who want to learn to be happy, at the conclusion of his little interview with Deborah Solomon in this Sunday's New York Time Sunday Magazine:

Solomon: Have you noticed all these new nonfiction books on “happiness”? It’s an industry.

Simic: It’s really frightening. People need to read a book on how to be happy? It’s completely an American thing. Can you imagine people in Naples sitting on a bus or in a trattoria reading a book about happiness?

Solomon: What advice would you give to people who are looking to be happy?

Simic: For starters, learn how to cook.

Some simple things I think might improve the likelihood that you'll be happy: find something you like to do that there aren't too many barriers to doing--like taking a walk, going to the library, watching sports on television. Develop some kind of hobby or art, and give yourself over to it. Enjoy the people closest to you. Get enough sleep. And yeah, learn to cook.

I do think a certain modesty in what you want is conducive to happiness. I read somewhere in The Nation awhile ago an argument that aiming for happiness is unreasonable, given the state of the world. I certainly have felt that way. I have often thought that the steady state of the human condition is actually grief, and that happiness is lucky, infrequent, a blessing when you find it, but you shouldn't expect to feel happy all the time. On the other hand, how unreasonable is it to tell people that? Like, somehow advising people that coming to terms with misery, sorrow, and grief as your lot in life would be persuasive. I think I'll keep working on that cooking thing. And getting enough sleep.