September 14, 2021.
My fingertips and knuckles are tingling as I write this; in breaks between typing I have been rubbing nettle seeds off of their wobbling stems. The trees are shuddering, and dropping brown, crisped leaves in advance of their color show; eagles and hawks are shrieking and crows are greedily croaking through the cleared tobacco field (Grief: how dry and brown and empty it looks). We are fretting about how we will deal with the leaves because we let the grass grow long and wild this summer, which was both wise and foolish.
THIS IS LONG! TAKE YOUR TIME! READ FOR WHAT YOU FIND.
PRINT IT OUT. CUT IT INTO PIECES. CHANT IT. READ ONE WORD
AT
A
TIME.
Before you keep reading, take a moment to notice whatever part of your body is grounded, at this very moment. If you read this in multiple sittings, return to this noticing every time you come back to the text.
First, look around, turning your head and torso to do so. Develop a sense of yourself and the space that you’re in. Yourself, from above, yourself, from outside. Now, yourself from within: notice what part of your body is in connection with a ground. Notice your butt, or the soles of your feet, or the whole of your back, your knees - and feel every point of contact between your body and that ground. Imagine, remember: your body is not a fixed thing. Your electrons are whizzing around, interacting with the ground’s electrons. The longer you sit, the more exchange takes place, and the more connected to this grounding place you become. The paper on which you have printed this, and its life before: trees and their sighing growth, slow flowing bark and deep, searching roots, ink and its chemical origins, the paper’s voyage through the printer; your phone or computer, the glass which was once sand, the metals which began deep in the ground and were brought into the light, into factories, the tiny pieces, all these things touched by so many hands before yours. You are in dialogue with all of these beings, your physical body is, your breath is. Let this interdependence between your body and your reading materials suspend you into Story Time, a time beyond your current time, when you are and are not yourself.
Listen to me and the night creatures tell the story of Latona and her sister, Asteria, a story of grief and witnessing in honor of the dedication of the Temple of Apollo - perhaps Latona’s second birthing day - on September 23.
On September 15, the Catholic Church, which is older in my blood perhaps even than America, observes Our Lady of Sorrows, for Mary as the Mater Dolorosa. I was not raised Catholic, so in the way of an observer and a descendant I approach this tradition with fresh eyes. I have been practicing with Mary this summer, in her correspondences with the goddesses about whom I already told stories, Latona and her daughter, Diana.
I have been sitting with grief since the summer, when I realized the perfectionist in me had no idea how to healthily handle the experience of mismatch between what is in my heart and what is in the world. My usual approach: self recrimination, anger, looking for a way out, reconciliation - resentment, ignoring, and a tentative equilibrium. Anything to stop the reality from slicing me up.
It came to me in bursts and ripples, what to do with grief.
Grief is the feeling of - enough. No more. Letting go. The end of an orgasm, the little death. The end of a bowl of ice cream. The closing notes of a song. Saying goodbye to a loved one, the end of a relationship, a move. The end of summer. My children are teachers in this, this month especially, my own birthing month: for my almost-six, the end of something joyful sometimes leads to destruction, the finished puzzle thrown on the ground, the dance party that becomes a death battle. For my almost-three, the ends of joys lead to loud lament, easy tears, screaming and whining. It’s so hard, I’ve learned to say. It’s so hard.
To know grief then, often is to have known joy, or fullness. Let Mater Dolorosa also be Our Lady of Fullness, Our Lady of Satisfaction, Our Lady of Fleeting Joy, Our Lady of the Infinite Moment. I witnessed the most perfect, blessed invocation of this over the weekend, at Bread and Puppet Theater performance. The final segment of the show was dedicated to Elka Schumann, the Bread and Puppet matriarch who died this past year. Beneath a colossal harvest goddess, crowned with goldenrod with a body of wheat, an earthy Mater Dolorosa - as well as a small icon of the familiar grieving Mary in her blue robes - imagined the growing of wheat and feeding of children and dancing of grandparents around the world, and the grieving of families and tears of the earth at the hands of state cruelty. At the end of this segment, spoken in multiple languages, the audience was invited to eat bread and aïoli. The loaf was thick and crunchy, with cracked grains in it. I tasted the luscious stink of the garlic for the rest of the evening. And here, beneath sorrow and abundance, with this community’s communion, I had tasted nourishment.
The performers said Hallelujah over and over; Hildegard of Bingen, whose birth-day - and whose mother’s birthing day - is this week, wrote an Alleluia to Mary, translated here by Barbara Newman and reprinted in Jane Hirshfield’s collection Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women.
Alleluia! light
burst from your untouched
womb like a flower
on the farther side
of death. The world-tree
is blossoming. Two
realms become one.
Having lived through addiction cycles throughout my life (and my ancestors’ lives), the idea of fullness helps me recognize my struggle with grief. It is hard for me to feel full, because I want more. I am afraid of what will happen when I stop and I am left with myself, and loss. Enough is not a loss, I tell myself. It is enough. If you recognize this cycle and haven't yet, I urge you to pick up Quit Like a Woman by Holly Whitaker.
Hildegard of Bingen also wrote:
Antiphon for the Holy Spirit
The Spirit of God
is a life that bestows life,
root of the world-tree
and wind in its boughs.
Scrubbing out sin,
she rubs oil into wounds.
She is glistening life
alluring all praise,
all-awakening,
all-resurrecting.
Root and wind, care and awakening. She glistens, glorious, this feminine Holy Spirit. I have translated the ave maria, pulling at the weft-threads of this prayer to re-weave it over the same wrap. The beauty of translation is the way in which each word contains strands of its origins, and that the complexes of words together make their own stitches that take on different shades of meaning depending on the threads. Not to over-trouble this metaphor, but the shawl of this prayer is different when the words slightly shift their meanings.
This is what prayer is for, what texts are for: for them to yield to us their meanings, based on the questions we ask.
Ave, María, grátia plena,
Dóminus tecum.
Benedicta tu in muliéribus,
et benedíctus fructus ventris
tui, Iesus.
Sancta María, Mater Dei,
ora pro nobis peccatoribus
nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.
Amen.
We are singing this song at the blade-edge of fall, when the threshing of the wheat becomes the rising of dough, when the fruits of the tree are full and fall to the ground. FRUIT FRUIT FRUIT, my notes say. One of the great griefs in life is the unutterable, cosmic grief of imperfect knowledge, of incomplete surrender: will I ever fully enjoy a peach. Will I ever wholly feel the sun on my face. The grief of fall is like the slow withdrawal of the possibility of that attainment: the ground will harden beneath my feet, and I will have to wait patiently until the mud is warm and yielding enough for the mint to grow, for the worms to dig, for me to actually remember to take my shoes off.
Mary of Compassion (my translation of gratia), rubbing oil on our wounds, tending to our tenderest places. Mary, whose own tenderest place yields all life, and another Great Grief: that that life, no matter how glorious or meek, will die. Mary who speaks up for us even in our mistakes (like in Jewish teachings for this day of Yom Kippur, “mistakes” or “missing the mark” is more appropriate here than “sin”) : this is grief in action. Compassion for that time I yelled, the fact that I use disposable diapers. This may sound like guilt, but it is grief too, I think. Our common understanding of “sin” gets at the confusion there. Probably that is part of the trouble with fully engaging grief. But Mary is here for it. She is a mother too. She stretched and ached and made space for someone else who took over the story once he came along. She is in us, the prayer says - usually translated as “among.”
In the spirit of gathering, let’s dwell on - dwell in - that in mulieribus for a moment. I’ve always interpreted this sentence to mean that Mary is the most blessed of women. But that’s just the translation, and my existing assumption about its intent. In mulieribus literally means in women. Among women would be in mulieres. Mary is blessed in women. Benedicta: She is spoken well of. She is praised. Among women, too, need not imply that this is about the greatness of Mary, to the detriment of other women. Instead, what about the idea that amongst women, Mary is praised?
Women have been gathering in praise and in support for each other since there have been women, of course. The Bonds of Womanhood, by Nancy F. Cott, published in 1977 (!), chronicles the development of “women’s consciousness” in (at least somewhat) literate, white New England women from 1780-1835. In this time, she argued, women’s lives narrowed from the homestead to the home and finally into the proscribed role of housewife; by being reduced to this single sex-role, however, women began to perceive themselves as women by identity - “solidarity with their sex” (99) thus laying the stage for the women’s suffrage movement. One of the fields in which this identity began to solidify was in religion: women dominated religious enrollment through much of American (maybe Western?) history, though their clergy and hierarchy was men.
Religion was both refuge and responsibility, as it became more inward and faith-focused, and also concerned specifically with the family and its preservation.
“Religious faith allowed women a sort of holy selfishness, or self-absorption….In contrast to the self-abnegation required of women in their domestic vocation, religious commitment required attention to one’s own thoughts, actions and prospects…a submission of self that was simultaneously a pronounced form of self-assertion” (Cott,140-141).
I recognize this inward-turning in reaction to the demands of housewife life. Was this radical? Certainly, when Anne Hutchinson, over a century earlier taught about faith and self-culture to the women who were first her midwifery clients and then her students, it was so radical that she was expelled from the Massachusetts colony (and Harvard was founded to correct her errors and educate a generation of conservative ministers!). But Cott reminds us that in spite of their growing group-consciousness, the housewife’s role as “perennial source of comfort” outside the soul-crushing engine of capitalism allowed that steam roller to keep turning. In other words, they were the care that made men able to go back out into the world every day, not a force for stopping it - care work as conservative, enabling. Housewives were separated from the “world of work” not only spatially but also temporally, as men and young women in industrial settings worked by the clock and they, raising children and keeping house, worked according to necessity, because someone has to do the dishes. This argument recalls/predates Silvia Federici and the Wages for Housework movement, which asserts that domestic labor is the uncompensated infrastructure on which the capitalist system rests.
The classic(al) case of refusal to perform this domestic soothing function is in the play Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens refused to have sex with their husbands until they ended the Peloponnesian War. Collective grief for the shocking scale and brutality of American Civil War death, in particular mother’s grief, caused the US Government to develop its sense of responsibility towards dead soldiers and their families, as Drew Gilpin Faust shares in This Republic of Suffering. Grief and obligation are a beautiful combination: how our grief can cause us to notice where we have not met our duties, and can re-commit us to them. I think of Medea, insisting on burying her brother at the threat of death, her grief burning into righteous determination.
I have not read Lysistrata but I know what Greek dramatists thought of their women’s anger because in eighth grade, in a tangle of pubescent bodies with my friends from Shakespeare Camp, I watched Medea stand in shining gold above a towering slip-and-slide of crimson blood and slit the throat of her children and send them sliding down.
Medea and the troubled fate of mother’s love is the shadow narrative of one of my favorite books I read over the past year, one which I loved so much I imagined starting a newsletter in order to tell you about it. It is Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, and it is truly stunning. I want to let you read it. I want to insist that you read it in fact, or listen to it, conjured into the air around you and within you by a fantastic Audible book reader, January LaVoy. It has everything: daughter’s grief, the land’s grief, a people’s grief, a community’s grief, as it takes place in the days leading up to and just following Hurricane Katrina, in Ward’s fictional Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage. The book conjures Toni Morrison’s discussion of ancestors, and how generational grief becomes inscribed on landscape, and then, made manifest through weather.
This “gothic” approach, where the land plays a role in the treacherous emotional landscape of the ensemble, needs more attention in our days of climate change. 19th century New England ladies, it happens, loved the Gothic. It was part of their regional fiction agenda - Louisa May Alcott loved a good scare and a creepy town.
This summer I also read C Riley Augé’s study of magic among early Puritan settlers in New England, The Archaeology of Magic. Her thesis was that men and women turned to magic in order to create buffers between themselves and the extreme uncertainty - hostility, even - of their environment. When I hear coyotes in the distance at night I understand a bit better what this means. I had always scoffed at their fears of the dark and the forest: but their world was alive. Not only was it animate, to them, but it was thick with life in a way that we can barely comprehend. They did not pray the rosary; they etched hexafoils and hung horseshoes and filled witch bottles and planted protective plants, buckthorn, mallow, holly, at their doorsteps. They didn't understand the world they were in, the land, and, for many of them, even land itself - most of the early settlers were mercantile, religious townfolk, not farmers - they had lost their folkways and landways long before even sailing across an ocean. They had few tools for navigating this lost-ness, and had to find and make new ones. Settler life was fearful in its ignorance as much as it was audacious in its self-righteousness.
And here I am, I thought to myself: in a world I don't recognize, made of my society’s audacious ignorance, that has me afraid for my descendants’ survival. A new Great Grief, one both shared and acutely personal. I find myself wondering: is protection magic what we resort to when we feel we have no power to change things? When we feel at the mercy of forces beyond our control? OR is it our way of forging the inner resources we need in order to move forward?
Listen to Lisa Fazio’s Wild Under Root Podcast episode about Italian-American protection magic
In her gorgeous book Trauma and Grace, actual theologian Serene Jones describes the process of going from private grief - allowing oneself to feel the emotions and name a trauma or loss with lamentation, keening, weeping - to shared mourning. This is an essential part of healing. This process requires testimony and witnessing, an act that must be done between people. In oral history, we enshrine this in the value of reciprocity. This is hard! It’s almost impossible to ask for space to do. “Hi, friend, when do you have time to sit with me while I weep?” “Mom, can we get together and just hug for an hour or as long as I need?” Sometimes, these moments do happen organically. But the wisdom of a ceremonial calendar is that the structure is already made for us.
The other day, my sister was talking about some personal grief. This grief, acute and immediate, gave way to other griefs, the Big Ones: “I wish,” she said, “I wish you lived closer. I wish we had a family that saw each other every Sunday.” I wish, I wish, I wish, like a heartbeat, as she let her tears rise and the other two of us nodded over Zoom. It’s so hard.
Listen here to Krista Tippett’s conversation with Ariel Burger, who contemplates witnessing in the footsteps of his teacher, Elie Wiesel. If you observe or would like to observe Yom Kippur, this would be a beautiful listen as it also takes on the High Holidays theme of return and repair - teshuvah.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the serenity prayer. My grandmother, descended from Puritans and French immigrants, sober and devoted to her Episcopal faith, had it on her wall, maybe your grandmothers did too:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change
courage to change the things I can
and wisdom to know the difference
STOP HERE AND CONNECT.
Notice your body in contact with matter
notice how it is feeling to read about grief
right now, at just this moment
Grief work is the intimate work of this prayer. Grief is acknowledging the emotional experience of a world that is not what we wish, and is beyond our control. What we have lost, what has ended, what will never be. The grief of our failures and toils. “‘I am so far from discharging the duties of my station or from meeting the high responsibilities which devolve on me as a mother, that the conviction of my deficiencies which sometimes forces itself on me is sometimes overwhelming,” wrote Abigail Bradley Hyde, Connecticut mother of five, to her parents in 1829 (Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood).
Sometimes, though, I think I let things become grief that I actually do have the power to change: or at least, I could have the courage to wish and work for. This discernment is part of the power of naming and witnessing. This is also the power of atonement or confession: not to be rid of bad deeds, but to be given the chance to place our shortcomings into the light, and to let them become fuel for the fire of the future, so that we may no longer be stuck.
Trauma, grief, depression, anxiety - these systemic states do things to time and to space. Years ago I had the opportunity to work as the rehearsal assistant for Christine Dakin, Martha Graham’s last protégé. She had this look of noble suffering in performance, haughty and tormented, with downcast eyes and a proud, straight back and head. As we set “Heretic,” we tested the limits of how to move while rooted, how to sense and move as a group, how to convey rigidity without becoming inert. It is a simple dance, Graham’s first: a group of unbending women, tightly packed, and a single, wild, Heretic. In her study of women in the late Colonial era, Good Wives, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich remarks that women’s community usually served to keep each other in line. Sociable, but ultimately conservative.
I imagine the story of that heretic woman continuing into the other work that Dakin performed during our work together: “Lamentation” the iconic work in which the dancer - originally Graham, just like the Heretic - moves, seated, within a thick, knit shroud, her body pressing against the fabric like an embodiment of a Käthe Kollwitz print, a moving, material, psychological Pietà.
Watch Graham perform “Lamentation” in 1930, with New York City in the midst of a Depression, flirting with radical politics and new experimental, immediate, abstract kinds of artistic expression.
She rocks, she clasps her hands, the fabric at times obscures her face, and for a brief moment at the very end she stretches all the way vertical, one arm raised high, stretching the fabric of her grief to its limit, just before she folds in half again in a deep, rectilinear bend.
Is this fabric a shroud, a comfort blanket? It certainly looks just like the veil and habit of the Mater Dolorosa and her classical antecedent, our patron Goddess, Latona, whose dark robe was often equated with her modesty.