The Blasphemy of Mourning

By George Hartley, January 29, 2011


The Blasphemy of Mourning.

The distinction between mourning and melancholy? It comes down to narratives and their impossibilities. The lost loved object and the twists and turns of trauma.

For it’s the narratives that we lose at the moment we lose all else. There is no story we can tell ourselves in the moment of trauma that can make sense of what’s happened to us. The stories by which we charted our stars and steered our boats no longer make sense, no longer offer us a conceivable order to the terrible universe or give us a sense of our place within that universe. We lose, have lost our moorings.

Melancholy stands with the tragic truth of death in its tearing into and disfiguring our universes. Our songs. Our stories. No story can be true to the darkness, for every story in its illusion of narrative order, its arrangement of character relations in the world, rings hollow and false in the wake of tragedy. Nothing can explain this. Dead children most definitely are not God’s little angels dancing in their new-found heaven, and to suggest as much is to profane the terrible illogic of traumatic truth. Smash the ceramic cherubs on the ground!


But mourning comes along one day—for some—and offers just such a story to domesticate the grief and horror into the “way things are.” The story might give us a happy world and a choir shouting heaven’s glories. Or it might give us reasons for the darkness, and in its dystopic immediacy give us answers to the questions of Why? Who’s responsible? Whom can we celebrate and whom can we hate? Whom can we blame and in whose lap we can bundle up the universe’s unknowns—the lap of our newly beloved enemy?

Society cannot exist without its narratives, and so the hounds of social order badger the melancholic into accepting new testaments. But these stories reek of blood and lies. The charnel houses’ stench cannot be brushed aside so easily. The grit of bone and ashes does not sink so quickly beneath the ocean’s waves. Responsibility, for better or for worse, can only make sense in a world that responds and makes room for our responses in return. They reek, those stories, of blood and lies, and blaspheme against the sacred truths of loss and the evacuations of longing. The sun, radiating all back into itself, sucks life and sense into its own darkness. The blossoming flowers in spring are the greatest of mockeries, for what logic remains that can guide their resurrections?


No, not stories but tragic songs, the poetry of Orpheus’s lamentations sounding their way into the fractures of the cosmos, his howlings of despair, the swirl of melancholy song from out of the sunken heart of sorrow. Songs against the blaspheming crocuses peeking through the snow.


[NOTE: This is part of a larger work in process entitled "Paper Cranes and the Beauty of Disaster." In those terms, it is incomplete. In its own terms, though—the terms of melancholy—it is true to itself and stands on its own. — George]