Barthes: Mourning

I am reading or pinch reading on thanatophobia and grief in anticipation of a piece I must write and contribute next year at a conference, thus I revisited or flittered into Roland Barthes Mourning Diary (Wang and Hill) and was taken (up) by his sentiment or the resonance to be found in this entry:

“Many others still love me, but from now on my death will kill no one. 

— which is what’s new. 

(But Michel?)”

He’s referring to the death of his mother and it struck me that he marks something here. That there are certain deaths — one’s parents or partner — where, if you like, a standing guard is removed. Barthes records this realization. He seems to also be asking Who will bury me now? or who will be worked up sufficiently to bury me? Since the organization of burial is involved and requires a degree of commitment it’s quite a responsibility that you cannot just ladle on to any passing person.

Barthes is calculating or re calibrating where this puts him as an adult now his mother, his reliable burial steward or executor we might imagine, is already buried. Who remains?

In burial as in most things roles are cast. He anticipates the absence of a key player and marks his grief and death anxiety through this shift.

Mary Harper

Mary Harper is doing terrific reporting on Somalia (and has been since the 1990s). I’ve been following her BBC World Service reports for a while. I began with her report about a writers festival in Somaliland (which I think I must have blogged on) and ever since I keep my ears and eyes open for her reports. I truly admire her work and that she speaks 4 languages!

Here she contributes to BBC Newshour Extra on What is Fuelling the Global Jihad? well worth a listen to this programme.

Quite a contrast to think (in relation to last post) of the luxury of refuting or delaying notions of death vs bloodthirsty death cults donging the instant death knell on other people’s behalf with the equivalent frequency to making a cup of tea.

Radio links: Reith Lecture “Hubris”

The Reith Lectures are underway on BBC Radio 4.

#3 Hubris I found most compelling:

“Dr. Gawande argues that the common reluctance of society and medical institutions to recognise the limits of what professionals can do can end up increasing the suffering of patients towards the end of life.”

I’d add to that the common reluctance more widely to face any notion of death at all (not merely at the end of life or terminal diagnosis when you’ve no choice but to face it, but in the everyday healthy population who chose not to think or dwell on it until it banjaxes them) is also inherent in refusing or refuting the limits. If you were to introduce the concept of the limits early: would you be better adjusted once they were upon you?

A curious change or shift is the lack of visible public mourning. I rarely to never see a funeral cortege in the city I live in. I am therefore never aware of anyone’s death around me unless they are personally known to me. This may be a peculiarity to this city. (You can read my LRB blog on the Final Funeral Forum to understand more about the specifics here) But if you take note of the new forms of overt social media mourning and outpourings, you cannot but notice a certain public possession towards the dead who are not known to us. Whether this is public figures or artists or people we’re vaguely familiar with or stories of people we’ve (now) been familiarized with through the channels of social media. Sometimes it can take the tone of near strident and heightened outpourings. Sometimes it’s verging on an Olympic competition. Then the rapid tributes arrive, endless anecdotes, breached correspondences, it starts to read like the semi-finals of who can now outdo the last espousal. In our confessional culture, the plate is wide and forks lose the run of themselves.

It’s likewise easy to get emotionally operatic at the end of one’s fingertips in relation to a person, actively, unknown to us as a living being but whose persona we’ve attached to. Note it’s much easier to attach to a distant, carefully shaped persona than engage with the difficulties and complexities and, one hopes, liveliness of an actual person. I would be curious about the absenting of one form of visible public mourning (the funeral cortege) versus the arrival of the invisible (self invited) funeral cortege where the stakes may not demand the same level of respect, in tandem with wider deflection on accepting death. (Becker’s Denial of Death) Case in point: you cannot hurl yourself into or at a passing funeral car or group of mourners. You must maintain some kind of decorum and respectable distance while bearing witness to what is passing, what that indicates, a life has ended. This isn’t the case at your keyboard into the vortex of social media and new media journalism, where you can bounce up and down on a trampoline of  self directed, insulated, wombling as you wish, to the extent the dead person is merely an accessory for you to womble around and tweet about.

Strange evolving disparities and disconnects that do not necessarily do much to engage with the urgent matter of thanatophobia. The limit of the final bus stop and the need to at some point get off the bus.

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3×3: Kayaking- Les Miserables – Stay in Bed weather event

Even the experts agree this is one heck of a weather system. A matriarch of a triple mama system. We are due to receive a sub-tropical weather event that involves three storms over three days.

The numbers are madness. The North Shore will see 300mm of rain in the three days. We are currently in round 1 of these three storms. Usually the entire rainfall for November and December is 300mm so obviously this volume in three days will likely cause problems. Floods are likely and more worrying, mudslides are possibility.

There was a recent mud slide on that side of the city (North) during another rain and storm event and there are boulders (I have recently learned) that fell into the Seymour River. Not clear how the boulders tumbled but one hunch is the rain caused it.

If you are a pedestrian it’s very hard to see you in this weather and this is the most likeliest moment not to be seen by a car thus don’t wander absent mindedly staring at your phone. Be careful when crossing the road. Wave your arms if you have to. Visibility is dreadful in this epic rain.

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Thank you to the lovely people of Powell River and Sechelt for coming out to my public reading events in both those communities.

Much joy and exchange on literature was had.

Thank you so much to the Canada Council For the Arts for funding these readings. So marvellous to travel to different BC communities and read and discuss literature.

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I am buried in reading.

From Leskov to Benjamin to Balzac and more. It forms its own cartography.

I hope you are too.

Moins cinq

We are day 3 of the ‘Polar Streak(er)’ weather event. A stride of -5 has struck us. It was anticipated but preceded by a band of sun that suggested there was no way this polar could streak through. Crowd control would melt him!

Last night I had to declare it life-alteringly cold. But the polar streak by night becomes a bounty of sun in the morning, which must give us pause to recognize, perhaps, this is how Winnipeg and Edmonton live to see another day when it’s -37.

It’s excellent reading weather, though suffice to say reading is weather-proof.

Globally weather-wise Britain seems balmy, Brisbane bonkers and the rest you’ll have to discuss amongst yourselves.