These most-sweet-tasting vine-fruit we have procured since arrival in North America, and possibly ever, sat in the fridge, on the upper shelf near the light bulb. So that every opening of the fridge door produced an explosion of pink radiance that prompted me to share, and burn it unto my hard-drive, this photo-botanical wonder. Art capturing the fleeting beauty of nature as a commentary on the transience of human experience. In other words: get a loada those grapes.
Speaking of loads, I went to see a therapist for one session, and decided it's not worth the time and money (oh my god, so much money) to start re-narrating to a stranger the whole story of my life to eventually possibly figure out things that might just need their own time to heal. I still am experiencing good days and bad days, naturally, with the bad days being really horrible and frightening and devastating and insane, but these usually also gleam with some hope thanks to the kindness and amazing trust of DH. Sometimes it is almost heart-shattering (in a good way. There must be a good way to understand your heart being shattered. Like exploding into a million pieces from, well, compassion. Egads the spirituality) to realize how well one man knows you.
Speaking of spiritual: so I called up one of the local soup kitchens to get information about their volunteering program. And it seemed it was never a good time because I always got their answering machine, telling me in a deep, very slow voice of a Morgan Freeman combined with, oh I don't know, (I'm so cliche it's sad, I cannot think of any other African-American figure of preachy wisdom) that Pastor Something is attending his flock at the moment and what the hours of service are and after the third time I finally waited the length of the recorded message to leave my number (they never called me back, which seemed suspicious to me. What? You've got TOO MANY volunteers at your soup kitchen? I knew it, huge pots of seething brew are SO SEXY, people are just standing in lines...). Point being: their message ends with "May God bless you. REEEAL GOOOOD."
Meanwhile, I joined a group of students engaged in a project of mapping the University of Chicago and its surrounding neighborhoods, most of which are fairly-to-extremely poor and crime-ridden. The crime part may be more a bit of mythological terrorism than a statistical fact, fueled by the University, who is itself a major landowner in the city, and has been leading a deliberate process of gentrification and segregation for decades. In other words, I have become a mild activist.
And lo, the immediate need for therapy and/or volunteering for the needy has subsided. I detect several reasons for this:
1) The obvious one, I am busier (including some independent Aeneid reading that I'm getting done. Excuse me while I rejoice. Yeah!), which of course makes me feel like a bit of a sell-out, as if the whole urge to make a difference in others' lives simply originated in my own boredom.
2) My own interest is in "mapping" (I still have to figure out exactly what form that will take) the homeless people of the neighborhood, specifically the borderline-homeless selling Streetwise. In the face of utter nihilism and despair (thoughts such as: poverty and crime are such global, deep-structure problems that there is nothing even the most enthusiastic students can do to change them), perhaps being part of a group of people who want to raise awareness to our mutual situation is, at least to some degree, effective? Stress on the group. Not me alone in my room. Not me in front of a computer screen on the online hotline of RAINN (did I tell you about that? well, another one of my attempts to get myself out there… and help victims of sexual assault. An option that from the outset seemed overwhelming, or: not the right thing for me to do at this point in time, and was thus soon, but not without heartache, dropped.)
3) The therapy experience was not like "sinking into a good couch", as my mother put it when I was deliberating with her if I should go on with this. Herself a psychologist, she said there should be no question marks about it: it should feel good. And realizing that verbalizing my sisterhood plight is not what I need right now, I guess I am in search for my comfortable couch.
In one of my first-year courses of my BA, on early Christianity, the TA - who was training to be a clinical psychologist - introduced us to Lacan's "sujet supposé savoir". In that particular context (the mystic-mental trainings of the frankly obsessive Evagrius in his struggle against all demons), the sss - it was implied - might be understood as Christ. I'm not sure what I'm getting at here (or if that Lacan link has any relevance at all to this stream of associations), but these things have all been swirling around in my head lately.
I most certainly do not think I have seen the light, or that I will deal with the grief over my sister's death by some spiritual overflow of Mother-Teresa-ish giving to the world.
I most certainly do not think I have seen the light, or that I will deal with the grief over my sister's death by some spiritual overflow of Mother-Teresa-ish giving to the world.
I do assume that if anything is prompted in me following this load of indescribable grief, it would be to consciously (re-)shape the way I tell my story to myself, to my loved-ones, to whoever happens to be my sss (probably different people at different times), to "my" world and to the "others" I choose to see and embrace as inhabiting it.
Wow. I totally did not intend to write this conclusion. Which means it might actually be sincere. Go stare at grapes, people.
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