29/100 Sitting Shiva

how do you mourn a space?

In the same way a book reveals itself to you as you write it, so too do continued preoccupations across a body of work. It is not possible to understand these at the start of an endeavour, instead they uncover themselves, and the writer must pay attention to what it is that makes you so mad you want to explore it. I noted that down while watching Anatomy of a Fall - a film so razor sharp it was nearly unbearable, the kitchen scene one every writer will understand. Or so I want to think, one I understand at least, too well.

What makes me so mad are spaces, absences, holes. All my life, these have driven me mad, both to the point of insanity and white hot anger. If there is one thing that my life has been characterised by, it’s absence. And I come back to it, again, again, again.

I run after spaces. Perhaps I see absence as a form of injustice. Perhaps at times as a necessary condition. As a child, I ran after my absent father, until I found him at the age of 19. As a teenager, all I wanted was to be space incarnate. And I mean this in the most literal of sense; I wanted to be made of something other than flesh. I moved from a child obsessed with astral projection to a teenager fixated on not eating. I now write absence. I do not write about it, I write it. I wrote The Last Days because my mother was absent, at the heart of Ava Anna Ada is Ada’s absence, the whole story revolving around this, and yet Ada never comes into focus.

I also run away from spaces. Easier to be busy than face them. This might be why they come out in my work. What else is there to do with a blank page?

It is absence that creates the circumstances leading the adamant need Gluck spoke about, this adamant need being a precondition for writing. I am currently working on two more projects about absence, both of them women who in some way have either become absent or absented themselves. Either I want to understand them or I already do.

And yet, it is only over the last week that I’ve made these connections.

Last week, I was faced again with an another absence. This is one I knew or thought I knew, was coming. The problem with anticipation is it rarely matches the reality. You think - and by you, I mean I thought - that in expecting this thing to happen, I would know what to do when it did. I was wrong. I have been thrown by this new grief. I can’t talk about it clearly, either in private or public. It is another thing there are not simple names for, it doesn’t corelate to established vernacular. I have not known how to write since but that has not stopped me, I have written badly and worked shoddily and read for work although there is no pleasure in anything, I want to be sick, I work out more than I should, I clean, I cook, I find sleeping difficult; I feel, nothing at all. Just this numbness. I know this means I need to make sense of the space I suddenly find myself faced with although it is near inexplicable space, so incomprehensible my brain is doing its best to block it off.

At three this morning, I craved to sit shiva. The same, after my mother was gone. I would like, instead of evading this space, to mourn it. I would like to sit in a room and have others feed me, I would like others who understand to mourn alongside me; I would like ritual and tradition for this thing but there are neither for it. There is just space. It is driving me mad. I would like to give it the seriousness it deserves, but how do you, when there aren’t words for it?

I would like to sit shiva because shiva brings the grief we avoid into a room, forcing the absent to be present. I would like to sit it for my grandmother, who newly assimilated, could not. I would like to sit it in the same way every Shabbat I would like to pray; not because I believe but observance is a way of dealing with absence, a tradition, a prayer, a custom, becoming a thread connecting to people now absent. It is a way of making sense of time and our place in it. I cannot now stomach the thought of a God, but I can contend of prayer, incantations, songs for the missing. And the repetition of these known phrases creating both a soothing effect and the hope that this time, the outcome will be different. I have been thinking this a lot, trying to work out why artists repeat themselves in the hope I will understand why I do, all this remaking, this repatterning, this returning, is I think, the hope for a different outcome, the hope of escape perhaps, from ever having to make art in the first place, the hope for a day of reconciliation, a moving on and beyond.

I think now of this from Felix White, sometimes you read something exactly when you need to read it ‘Lyrically …. I’m starting to realise I’ve always been plagued by this sense of always feeling like I’m not exactly sure where I’m meant to be. There are always six or seven other theoretical places that I should be or could be if I’d made better decisions. That’s where all the stuff in the song came from about seeing yourself as you pull away, from the window seat of another train etc. It’s reaching at trying to make peace with the constant wrestling with where you are now versus where you could be; trying to appreciate that might never leave you, but at least working out how it might haunt you less.’

How it might haunt you less. This is why I want shiva. I want seven days in a room that is all elephant until it is exorcised and gone from my body. I want to sleep and to not wake with those three minutes in which everything is fine and then you remember, the sickness returns, the weight in the feet. Rather not sleep than that. I want to talk over the better decisions I could have made, I want to explore the theoretical other possible outcomes. I do not want to think that I want to play god although it’s starting to sound a lot like I do. As if this need to sit shiva is a need to repattern, to change the outcome or at least to control it. Perhaps this explains the endless writing, what doesn’t work in life, at least, on the page.

I want to sit shiva because it does what We’re Going on a Bear Hunt says - you can’t go under it, you can’t go over it, you’ve got to go through it. It forces the through.

I sent those lines to a grieving friend two weeks ago, and now I am doing all I can to go under, over, anywhere but through. How do you face an absence? How do you go head straight into it? How do you honour the immensity of a thing we haven’t learnt to give words to? I am not sure. I think it must go with the same thing sitting shiva reveals, that in the midst of sorrow and absence, there is still life. Although joy might be paused, there are still memories, there is still the possibility of a future joy. There is still the possibly of much good, if there once was. And it is all a case of balancing the reality of the present with the possibility of the future.

The balance beam was the only thing I was good at in gymnastics. There is a knack to it. Don’t look down. Don’t think of falling. Eyes fixed on the future. Eyes fixed.