I'll Be Writing About Grief Some More Now, Dear Reader

Where is grief permitted, in these daily maelstroms of progress? All of our edges attended to by the pull & ordinary weight of living, such that the heft of a heart plucks into scrap & seared ember. Now we read what is reft from us in the refigured palimpsest that spare & rare time affords. The days are dizzying & still uneventful & I am very much the same when dusk draws in. Jack-self, for Hopkins, who I think of today while guilted by myself for the burdens of myself. When I find a quiet moment, I should fill it with thoughts of my Dad, but I also want after joy, after respite. I hear that same music under the countermelodies of the day, the breeze under the singing of the birds, the retreat of wave under the susurrus of reed & sedgegrass. There is a constant humming of grief, & if we face it headlong it topples us, & if we look away for wanting a fugitive happiness, it feels like a sort of shunning, an abnegation of what is certainly our most paramount responsibility. There is such unmooring in it, & such distrust of where safely to call to port. It’s a curious thing. 


The Hopkins I’m thinking of is this one: 


My own heart let me more have pity on; let

Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,

Charitable; not live this tormented mind

With this tormented mind tormenting yet.

I cast for comfort I can no more get

By groping round my comfortless, than blind

Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find

Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

 

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise

You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile

Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile

's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather — as skies

Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.



Whatever his notion of what was enduring in his torments, I don’t read the sad self as a resignation to martyrdom, to the permanence of that state. We simply are sad, time to time, & that’s alright. There isn’t a thing I ought to do with my sadness, but for reckon with honestly. The tide of dailiness is its wind shear, casts it in curious angles, shifts its exigency & realigns it with the coma behind the comet of time. We are subject to forces beyond our making. Maybe all Hopkins is saying is to forgive ourselves when grief like water fills the low & quiet moments of the day, to permit & accept what is inexorable in it. Sit with it a while. Time will carry on with or without our carriage of time, & maybe honest grief requires a letting go in that regard, a loosening of the clutched fingers around the reins we think we drive from dawn unto the gloaming. I don’t know. I haven’t had this sort of attendant emotional companion for a long while & have grown accustomed to the brighter muscles of hope & happiness. Now that their edges are dulled, I stumble a little in the adumbrated day. But we keep walking, & the light is always changing. 


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