Mourning After

A year ago right now, I was in Bangkok, doing a lot of thinking and writing prior to having facial feminization surgery. 

Looking back on this time in my life led me to look back on some of Masha’s writing that I was reading at that time, and that brought me back to this piece, Mourning After, which she posted three years ago today. It’s one of my favorite pieces of hers, and has all the elements that I love most in her writing. The interweaving of one’s personal experience of life with one’s personal experience of the art and media that are part of one’s life. The pushback against the disposable, consumer-oriented nature of so much of our culture, and against the way that many people treat language and the things that words are supposed to mean as disposable, too. The love ethic. 

In an email to me recently, Masha wrote, “I have a handful of good friends… The surface is not a comfortable place or way for me to be.”

This is true of me, too. And I can only give someone what I have to give them. 

I think you could understand a lot about the kind of person I am, or at least the kind of person I aspire to be, by reading this post.

mashatupitsyn:




“First wedding night.
But first mourning night?

-Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary




In her book Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler writes:

“I am not sure I know when mourning is successful, or when one has fully mourned another human being. Freud changed his mind on this subject: he suggested that successful mourning meant being able to exchange one object for another; he later claimed that incorporation, originally associated with melancholia, was essential to the task of mourning. Freud’s early hope that an attachment might be withdrawn and then given anew implied a certain interchangeability of objects as a sign of hopefulness, as if the prospect of entering life anew made use of a kind of promiscuity of libidinal aim. That might be true, but I do not think that successful grieving implies that one has forgotten another person or that something else has come along to take its place, as if full substitutability were something for which we might strive.”

Butler is mostly talking about political violence and death in Precarious Life—the sphere of political marginalization, persecution, subjugation, occupation, erasure, annihilation. But given that her book is about “who counts as human?” and “What makes for a grievable life?,” who and what gets (deserves) to live, I think one can talk about love here, too. How love (and lovers) survives in the world—gets to live—and how it doesn’t. How love gets beaten out of our system (ours and the greater systems at large), or never taught to begin with. When does one let someone or something go and what does it mean to do such a thing? When should one let go and when should one hold on? And how do we let go rather than simply replace, which only fills (or pretends to fill) a space (gap, person) symbolically? How do we grieve what and who we’ve lost in a way that let’s us love more, not less?

Knowing when to go and when to stay has been a major struggle in my life. Therefore the greater question for me is: are we becoming the kind of people (culture, world) who can never really let someone in to begin with, and so can never really mourn a loss? Who never truly risk being wounded and affected; who never allow themselves to get to the point of being imprinted or dented, or god forbid, hurt. For what do we do—how do we live, love—once, after, we’ve been wounded? Once we’ve been left and once we’ve left. Once we’ve loved and lost. Let go or not let go. And do we love again? As Butler puts it at the beginning of Precarious Life, “Let’s face it (the face being an important ethical trope here, as Butler’s final chapter looks at Emmanuel Levinas’ theory of the face and human sociality), we’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.” The question of replacement, as Freud defines it, becomes much easier if you never risk such losses and imprints at all. If you fill yourself up with an endless cycle of people (watch The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. Reality TV shows are themselves predicated on an on-going replacement cycle). Butler’s reading of loss here is especially interesting to me because it suggests that it’s the inability to miss or grieve—to be, or admit to being, undone—that’s missing. That missing itself is not a sign of lack or loss, it’s the not-missing (not acknowledging our precarity and the precarity of others) that’s the real danger.

As a teenager, one of my favorite remarks about suffering was by the Romanian poet, E.M. Cioran from his book On The Heights of Despair: “I owe to suffering the best parts of myself as well as all that I have lost in life.” When it comes to love, it takes a lot of time and mourning for me to let someone go. If it isn’t even going to hurt, and if I’m not going to live with the hurt, why even let someone in? If there isn’t even a chance of being hurt—undone? So much emphasis is placed on narcissistic individuation as a sign of health and function. My needs, my space, instead of our needs, our space living together. Entering each other, mixing, communing, so if the two spaces (hearts and bodies), the “ties and bonds that compose us,” were to ever split apart, the tear would be unbearable. Would have to be. Rather than focusing on and emphasizing our delicate and complex proximities and vulnerabilities, we focus on the illusory delineations (boundaries) between people. But, as Butler notes:

“Loss has made a tenuous ‘we’ of us all…Perhaps, rather, one mourns when one accepts that by the loss, one undergoes that one will be changed, possibly forever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full extent of which one cannot know in advance…Maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are…It’s not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am. If I lose you under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who ‘am’ I without you?”

As a culture we have become much more preoccupied, if not solely preoccupied, with a precautionary formulation of relationality; a relationality that is built on a hermetically narcissistic subjectivity: who am I when I am with you and what would I continue to be, or be able to be regardless, and in spite of, whether I am with you? How can I act as though we are never really together (part of each other); as though we are always-already split, or as though we might break apart at any moment? How can I always be prepared to lose you?

But what constitutes a break? An end? And what needs to happen in order to love again? Love another and anew in a way that isn’t simply about erasure, recuperation, and replacement? Hardening and cynicism, so that the next person you love never gets to experience or have access to your original thrall and openness. There are many reasons to hold on, not least of which to do for others, for the other, what others may not do, may not have done, for you—hold on. What if you give up (let go) too soon? What if you hold on for too long? When should you leave and when should you stay? When are you pushing someone away and when are you letting someone in? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I am always wrestling with them.

"For Levinas, coming face to face with the Other is a non-symmetrical relationship. I am responsible for the Other without knowing that the Other will reciprocate…Thus, according to Levinas, I am subject to the Other without knowing how it will come out. In this relationship, Levinas finds the meaning of being human and of being concerned with justice” (from Face to Face).

What if I stay and you don’t want me to? What if my loving you despite you telling me you don’t want me to is what will ultimately bring us together? What if waiting and holding on is part of what makes a love possible? What if one person has to learn to let go and the other person has to learn to hold on? What if that’s the bond at stake? What if that’s the road to, the test of, love?

In Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du lac, Guinevere, who is stronger than Lancelot, who knows more about strength, and therefore love, than Lancelot does, and who knows that God is love, not death, tells Lancelot, “you can use my strength.”

Guinevere, who can feel Lancelot even when he isn’t there, who knows that he is with her, even when he isn’t. Guinevere, who can feel—-love—-through the distance. See through the invisible.

Guinevere, who says, “I know he’s alive” when everyone tells her Lancelot is dead.



So much depends on just the right pressure, just the right time, just the right amount—not too much and not too little. Faith, when then there’s no reason to have it. Love, when maybe there’s no reason to give it. To know these things, we can’t rush—can’t be in a rush, with ourselves or with others. But we are living in a culture of disposability and speed, after all, and in Consuming Life Zygmunt Bauman writes about how this precarity and liquidity (the dissolve of bonds) also applies to love in a society of consumers, where subjecthood is increasingly defined by consumption and consumerism.

I treat the whole idea and task of “moving on” with suspicion and rigor, and always have. Mourning is often synonymous with forgetting and denial. So I think I will always prefer (trust) people who mourn—even people who can’t “get over” someone or something; who take too long—to people who don’t mourn or take any time at all. Or, who promiscuously and indiscriminately claim to do everything in the name of love; who call everyone a lover.

I want to hold on and I like others who do the same. Character is formed there and devotion is made possible. I’ve always been bad at the exchange part, partly because I never wanted or set out to exchange or be exchanged in the first place. The whole process terrifies me. I’ve been called an obsessive and a die-hard romantic because of it. And it’s true, I am one. I want to wrestle, grapple, stay, linger, hold on, remember, recall, retrace, ruminate, honor, know, understand—hold on. So when it comes to what Freud refers to as incorporation, I take (absorb) everything in order to fiercely guard what comes in and what stays out. That is, the relation between the two, for you can’t do or understand one without the other. “Perhaps we can say that grief,” writes Butler, “contains the possibility of apprehending a mode of dispossession that is fundamental to who I am.”

After the break-up of my first adult love (H.), the constant command for me to “get over it,” move on, love and/or fuck someone else, was just as traumatic as the dissolution of the relationship itself. I was simply talked out of my mourning. Talked out of holding on. I was constantly being told to let go. I refused this command though, and even wrote a story about it Solace when I was nineteen, the same year I read Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse:
In a 1977 interview called “The Greatest Cryptographer of Contemporary Myths Talks About Love,” Roland Barthes states, “Love-as-passion (the love I talk about in Lover’s Discourse) is almost ‘frowned upon,’ it’s considered to be an illness from which the lover must recover, and no enriching aspects are attributed to it any longer.’”

So much of love—and mourning—is about language. The way we handle love and loss in words. The way we get talked into and out of love. The way we say things we don’t mean and don’t say the things we do. What we say and don’t say about love and what we let others say about it. But if it can’t come out, where does mourning go—happen? This silence and internalization only further isolates us and privatizes our suffering. Maybe that’s how and why replacement works, is so reassuring. There is simply no place for real, and therefore radical, heartache in this culture. No time and no place. We teach ourselves and each other what it means to love by what we say about it. What we’re allowed to say and what we’re not allowed to say. What we’re trained to say (our ready-made vocabularies and cultural discourses) and what we’ve already said. Women have historically been permitted to say more about it, but that’s because of the trivialization not just of women, but love in general. When it comes to love, we circulate either a repressive and reactionary set of values and narratives, or disposable platitudes. Sometimes we give up too soon and sometimes we don’t try at all. We miss the opportunity to try. We don’t say enough, when we should say everything. As Heidegger points out in What Is Called Thinking?, “Words are constantly thrown around on the cheap, and in the process are worn out. There is a curious advantage in that. With a worn-out language everybody can talk about everything…To speak language is totally different from employing language. Common speech merely employs language. This relation to language is just what constitutes its commonness.” Which is what James Baldwin meant when he noted that true rebels are as rare as true lovers. This is also what I was trying to talk about in “Solace.” Love and grief as something rare and precious and difficult and necessary. As Butler puts it, “…I am speaking to those of us who are living in certain ways beside ourselves, whether in sexual passion, or emotional grief, or political rage.”