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Age of Grief
John Zerzan
http://www.primitivism.com/age-of-grief.htm
A pervasive sense of loss and unease envelops us, a cultural sadness that can justly be compared to the individual who suffers a personal bereavement.
A hyper-technologized late capitalism is steadily effacing the living texture of existence, as the world's biggest die-off in 50 million years proceeds apace: 50,000 plant and animal species disappear each year (World Wildlife Fund, 1996).
Our grieving takes the form of postmodern exhaustion, with its wasting diet of an anxious, ever-shifting relativism, and that attachment to surface that fears connecting with the fact of staggering loss. The fatal emptiness of ironized consumerism is marked by a loss of energy, difficulty in concentrating, feelings of apathy, social withdrawal; precisely those enumerated in the psychological literature of mourning.
The falsity of postmodernism consists in its denial of loss, the refusal to mourn. Devoid of hope or vision for the future, the reigning zeitgeist also cuts off, very explicitly, an understanding of what has happened and why. There is a ban on thinking about origins, which is companion to an insistence on the superficial, the fleeting, the ungrounded.
Parallels between individual grief and a desolate, grieving common sphere are often striking. Consider the following from therapist Kenneth Doka (1989): "Disenfranchised grief can be defined as the grief that persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported." Denial on an individual level provides an inescapable metaphor for denial at large; personal denial, so often thoroughly understandable, introduces the question of refusal to come to grips with the crisis occurring at every level.
Ushering in the millennium are voices whose trademark is opposition to narrative itself, escape from any kind of closure. The modernist project at least made room for the apocalyptic; now we are expected to hover forever in a world of surfaces and simulation that ensure the "erasure" of the real world and the dispersal of both the self and the social. Baudrillard is of course emblematic of the "end of the end," based on his prefigured "extermination of meaning."
We may turn again to the psychological literature for apt description. Deutsch (1937) examined the absence of expressions of grief that occur following some bereavements and considered this a defensive attempt of the ego to preserve itself in the face of overwhelming anxiety. Fenichel (1945) observed that grief is at first experienced only in very small doses; if it were released full-strength, the subject would feel overwhelming despair. Similarly, Grimspoon (1964) noted that "people cannot risk being overwhelmed by the anxiety which might accompany a full cognitive and affective grasp of the present world situation and its implications for the future."
With these counsels and cautions in mind, it is nonetheless obvious that loss must be faced. All the more so in the realm of social existence, where in distinction to, say, the death of a loved one, a crisis of monumental proportions might be turned toward a transformative solution, if no longer denied. Repression, most clearly and presently practised via postmodern fragmentation and superficiality. does not extinguish the problem. "The repressed," according to Bollas (1995) "signifies the preserved: hidden away in the organized tensions of the unconscious, wishes and their memories are ceaselessly struggling to find some way into gratification in the present -- desire refutes annihilation."
Grief is the thwarting and deadening of desire and very much resembles depression; in fact, many depressions are precipitated by losses (Klerman, 1981). Both grief and depression may have anger at their root; consider, for example, the cultural association of black with grief and mourning and with anger, as in "black rage."
Traditionally, grief has been seen as giving rise to cancer. A contemporary variation on this thesis is Norman Mailer's notion that cancer is the unhealthiness of a deranged society, turned inward, bridging the personal and public spheres. Again, a likely connection among grief, depression, and anger -- and testimony, I think, to massive repression. Signs abound concerning weakening immune defenses; along with increasing material toxins, there seems to be a rising level of grief and its concomitants. When meaning and desire are too painful, too unpromising to admit or pursue, the accumulating results only add to the catastrophe now unfolding.
To look at narcissism, today's bellwether profile of character, is to see suffering as an ensemble of more and more closely related aspects. Lasch (1979) wrote of such characteristic traits of the narcissistic personality as an inability to feel, protective shallowness, increased repressed hostility, and a sense of unreality and emptiness. Thus, narcissism too could be subsumed under the heading of grief, and the larger suggestion arises with perhaps greater force: there is something profoundly wrong, something at the heart of all this sorrow, however much it is commonly labelled under various separate categories.
In a 1917 exploration, "Mourning and Melancholia," a puzzled Freud asked why the memory of "each single one of the memories and hopes" that is connected to the lost loved one "should be so extraordinarily painful." But tears of grief, it is said, are at base tears for oneself. The intense sorrow at a personal loss, tragic and difficult as it most certainly is, may be in some way also a vulnerability to sorrow over a more general, trans-species loss.
Walter Benjamin wrote his "Theses on History" a few months before his premature death in 1940 at a sealed frontier that prevented escape from the Nazis. Breaking the constraints of marxism and literariness, Benjamin achieved a high point of critical thinking. He saw that civilization, from its origin, is that storm evacuating Eden, saw that progress is an single, ongoing catastrophe.
Alienation and anguish were once largely, if not entirely, unknown. Today the rate of serious depression, for example, doubles roughly every ten years in the developed nations (Wright, 1995).
As Peter Homans (1984) put it very ably, "Mourning does not destroy the past -- it reopens relations with it and with the communities of the past." Authentic grieving poses the opportunity to understand what has been lost and why, also to demand the recovery of an innocent state of being, wherein needless loss is banished.
This puts your mourning in a new light. I thought it was for a person and
you're really mourning the environment. Remember our dreams we talked
about: my yellow green water without fish.
Capt. This piece is a prelude to my next piece, in which the meaning of my
intention will be clearer. My mourning is not just for the environment but
for persons as well, and more. As they say, it never rains but it pours. I
do not see it as depression but rather as a need for being introspective.
I'm interested to read your next piece on this. I'll be happy to wait for
the entry to answer the question, but I admit I'm wondering if you expect
the effacement to be replaced, with the analogy of recovery in traditional
mourning. I'm not familiar with the primitivism of the site linked above,
but is that where you think things would go, or do you think perhaps we
won't get to the recovery soon?
I am sorry that I will have to keep you waiting until this weekend, before
I will get a chance to finish my piece, in which I will go into depth about
the subject. Death and sorrow most people will rather just dismiss as a
morbid subject, however I have found that it affects us in far reaching
ways, much more than we realise. As with everything, the traditional ways
are just not practical in the rush of modern life anymore, so we have to
look at other ways to achieve the same effect. But by just trying to cover
it up, or ignore it, and not facing it, we are losing out on a fundamental
part of our psychological make-up. In my piece I will cover all of that, it
has been a very illuminating journey for me.
Are "WE" a society that has lost its way?
WHAT PROVIDES YOU WITH A SENSE OF HOPE?
BE WELL... and happy new year...
mike
Mike, I think you have touched on the core of what is ailing the world at
large. I have to wonder whether whether at the bottom of it is not the
realization that we have been sold empty dreams. Within our dreams are held
our fire , our passion. As you say the Western culture brought with it a
dream which is the basis of consumerism, always needing more, nothing is
enough, until one day - and that day is now - we realize that we have lost
what was our most precious gift, that which we already had, but in our
business just did not see.
What gives me a sense of hope?
Hi Sophia... Hope is a very cool thing!!!
Hope is also the most feared reality of any
oppressive system... it is the doorway
from one reality to another....
Can you sit with anothers pain???
Can you be with anothers suffering??
Can you watch the world we live in and not
shed a tear???
Be well... mike
"Listening to anothers pain is a primary form of nuturance... kids speak
their pain automatically when there is a listener. The problem is that most
adults do not like listening to anothers pain(especially kids). It is
difficult and uncomfortable.
Hi Sophia... hope you are well...
"We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: "Improved means to an unimproved end." This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern . If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual "lag" must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the "without" of nature subjugates the "within," dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.
Be well... mike
Mike, thank you once again for bringing these quotes.
Hi Sophia... really enjoying our communications.... thank you...
King and the Soul of America…
What did they see???
America’s soul is about the possibility of people becoming fully human of realizing our humanity.
Prophets always have a way of showing us a place that does not yet exist.
He awakened America. He brought us face to face, and allowed us to have
“ Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed
But one hundred years later the negro still is not free.”
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." 1963.
Kings words were and are inspiring….. Inspiration is the oxygen of the soul.
It always comes from a place of love and service. ( GENEROSITY )
Listen to his words:
America needs to wake up again…..
"We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: "Improved means to an unimproved end."
- Martin Luther King Jr., in his Nobel Peace Prize address, Dec. 11, 1964.
“WE MUST BECOME THE CHAGE WE WISH TO SEE IN THE WORLD.”
Hi All.... a lovely fall night here. The air has once again cooled and
the beach is mostly empty.
"Sometimes I lie awake at night and wonder, where my life will lead me, waiting to pass under sleeps dark and silent gate........" Jackson Brown
The connection between hope and despair is interesting to me as i have gotten older.
A while back Sophia said:
When you numb the pain, you also douse the fire of continual renewal. Our environment reflects us. What are we creating? We are numbed by the horror of what we have created, are ability to emphatize becoming reduced in trying to hide the pain.
Be well...... mike
Mike, I have been quiet for a while now, in some ways I feel like I am
learning to speak all over again. Speech reflects one's unique energy,
vibrational fingerprint; in letting go, in dying, it takes a while before
once again you can speak again. I know well the place between hope and
despair. For hope to rise again from the fires of transformation, you have
to die first to all you thought you were and desired. In that in between
state, hope of any kind might be the wrong kind, hanging on in desperation
to that which was. Sometimes it takes several small deaths before the
transformation can be complete. Perhaps so, because where we really want to
go, is too radical for one leap. So, one might find oneself experiencing a
series of events, where hopes keeps being dashed in quick succession, and
each time it is as if the same original matrix of a concept gets reborn in
a new light. One keeps on hoping, that this is it now, only to find that
hope dashed again, but each time you come closer to where you eventually
are heading for.
Mike, I am also reminded of a review by Elaine Sutton on Mirabai Starr’s
book, Dark Night of the Soul, I came across recently;
Hi Sophia,
Hope this finds you well and so good to hear your voice once again.
Creating Reclaiming Environments for Students At-Risk and as I am putting it together the ideas of despair and hope are running around thru my head.
Teaching like any truly human activity, emerges from ones’s inwardness, for better or for worse. We Teach who we are. As I read your writing, I get a peak at your inwardness and find you to be an exceptional teacher. Good or should I say great teaching requires self-knowledge and your ability to share your interior knowledge is a gift to those of us who have stumbled upon your little place inthe cyber world. Thank-you.
- Elie Weisel
Be well Sophia...... mike
Be well…. mike
