Let go
Dear Reader.
If you are new here, welcome to my Substack. This is the last of these weekly offerings excerpted from the draft my book “Glottis: Love Letter to the Open wound”. If you are the kind of person who wants things to make sense, you may want to go back to the beginning.
Summer is here. Those of you following along already know I spent most of last Summer in the hospital. For 3 months now I’ve shared this story of grief, a little at a time, every Friday. I do hope parts of this will become a book, so I think its time to stop sharing on the internet.
In any case, its time for me to go outside and enjoy the good weather. And to thank you, dear reader. I feel deep gratitude for the support I’ve received from all over the world, since I started sharing this story 3 months ago. It has literally lightened my burden. I am sure that without your feedback, support and kindness I would not now be saying I am light enough to want to go outside.
Warmly and with love.
Jess
Little one, something beautiful is happening. As I write I feel you getting further away. Almost gone. Peacefully becoming part of other beings and nonbeings. The place in my womb that ached for you is healing. The blood has returned. I feel you everywhere. I’ve stopped spending my days trying to reach for you. Your voice no longer a penetrating howl going out to call for being heard. Now, most of the time, we speak together subtle and intact. A familiar record, close-miked, in the background.
Last week I purged an abject overload of stellar ejaculate, bursting bleeding with all the matter that makes a constellation. This week the body will be brief. I take my pressure off the wound. And begin with an image of a child, a star, a box.
Leo’s father, like mine, is good with his hands. He painted Leo’s coffin with a scene from his favourite childhood story. He spent the days before the cremation on our Crabbelmatte (crawling mat) covered in paint, trying out arrangements of planets, stars, and night skys. The results were good. The final image was of the “Little Prince” in paper, standing on a brightly coloured planet.
Leo was cremated at the same place as her Uncle Ryan. When we arrived at the crematorium, though we had used a different undertaker and no-one had planned it, we saw Leo’s tiny box laid out on the same plinth where Ryan’s gigantic casket had been a year earlier.
There are 6 crematoriums in Berlin. To discover Leo here, on the exact spot where Ryan had been, without any orchestration on our part, seemed a near miraculous, circular moment. Ryan’s casket was closed. Leo’s was open. We blew shameless bubbles and tenderly laid rose petals over her last moments in flesh.
In an act of rebellion, we took her outside to see the light. This was most definitely not allowed. You had never seen the sunlight. This seemed so extremely unfair. I wanted that your body had known the feeling so we carried you out, just for a few moments.
Then we sang. Spontaneous harmonies broke out. The friends, the philosopher, the undertaker, the doula, and her tiny Chihuahua, our temple dog: “Granola”. We stood in a circle, shoulder to shoulder, rib to rib. Sphincters moving in unison. Open, close, open, close, went our glottises, diaphragms and tear ducts. Our breath and bones opening and closing for you. We permitted ourselves the comfort of knowing Uncle Ryan was waiting to take care of her.
I sang Feldman’s setting of Rilke’s Sonnet to Orpheus XXIII:
Only
Only when flight shall soar not for its own sake only
up into heavens
lonely silence,
and be no more
merely the lightly profiling, proudly successful tool,
playmate of winds, beguiling time there, careless and cool:
only when some pure Wither outweighs boyish insistence
on the achieved machine
with who, has journeyed thither be, in that fading distance
all that his flight has been.
…then carried Leo’s coffin into the room with the oven. There was a stainless steel conveyor belt. Our Doula, Caracol, sang. I crouched on the ground, held by many hands. The machine fed Leo’s body to the furnace. The flames were orderly. The heat steadily increasing in volume, filling the space with orange light.
As the furnace door descended “the Little Prince” jumped into the air. Vanishing in a puff of ash. His shadow stayed attached to the box until it too disappeared.
I held the metal of the conveyor belt a long time. Until I’d released what I could from the bottom of me. When I had nothing left to let go of, we all went outside and it was over. From the parking lot we saw the heat escape the crematorium’s chimney. We watched our daughter become sky.
These days of sorrow were so intense I could not hold it all at once. But I took notes. And photos. I think I was trying to get it all down in some form or another, because there was so much I could not bear to see but knew one day might feed my machine for making sense. Photos of bodily fluids and solids. Texts. Selfies. Poems. Screenshots of astrological predictions, hiking trips I thought I’d never take. Hospital food. Stuffed toys. Sticky notes. Important notes. Snaps with friends. Tarot cards. Cat pics. Lists of things like “Boxhornklee. Fascia gun. Grey Shorts. Straws” on scraps of paper. Fragments from Anne Dufourmantelle. Nikita Gill. Hannah Arendt. Sedric Perry. Saint Augustine. Judith Butler. Simone Weil. Ryōji Arai. Olga Khazan. Ocean Vuong. Cloud Atlas. Anatomy. Astronomy. Biology. Bodhichitta… stop resisting.
I could not capture that moment in the crematorium. The way the little paper Prince jumped off the casket and immediately ignited. I don’t know if it was real or imagined. I asked a friend, the artist Markos Xenarios, to capture it for me in a painting.
Markos was there in our apartment in the days after the hospital. Helping out, being our connection to the outside world where people whose child had not died were waist deep in the end of Summer. You could feel the threat of autumn in the uncharacteristically cool air. The morning after I was released from hospital, Markos sat at the foot of our bed and told the Philosopher and I about his adventures and the turning of the season:
“Do you know why the leaves turn red?” He said.
“Each individual leaf tries so hard to survive that even though there is not enough sunlight to sustain them, they push themselves to strain every last drop of energy.”
I later learned how the chlorophyll begins to break down, in its fight to turn sunlight to glucose. How anthocyanins accumulate on the surface of the leaf, bringing into being the whole spectrum of reds, purples, browns and oranges we see in the fall.
The infinite value of the singular, and its desire to keep living, brings about the winter that turns the wheel.
There was a Whatsapp group for Ryan’s queer family as we mourned his loss. In the weeks and months after he died we shared so many memories, stories and words. There was outpouring all over the internet. Those threads held us together, the gravitational pull of a black hole of loss. Ryan was a human whose heart had been so big it couldn’t keep going. Leaving us bereft in the habit of pouring love towards him, without hope of reciprocity. So much love with no-where to go. Except each other. And that worked. To hold each other through those waves of grief as the reality of his not being became real.
There was an excerpt from a text by Judith Butler that a composer friend shared in that whatsapp group. I read it over and over, until it became a kind of chorus:
Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. …..To be ecstatic means, literally, to be outside oneself, and this can have several meanings: to be transported beyond oneself by a passion, but also to be beside oneself with rage or grief. I think that if I can still speak to a “we,” and include myself within its terms, I am speaking to those of us who are living in certain ways beside ourselves, whether it is in sexual passion, or emotional grief, or political rage. In a sense, the predicament is to understand what kind of community is composed of those who are beside themselves.” Judith Butler -Undoing Gender
Leo was conceived in the shadow of Ryan’s loss. I think I had imagined her as a chance to reach beyond our present generation, as we grew in community with those who were “already beside ourselves.” A family of passion, grief and rage, choosing kindness, care, and connection. Leo and I were held so beautifully through this experience by those chosen kin. Though I have no biological family in Berlin I rarely had to eat the hospital food. I was always well attended. So many artists passed through that hospital room you would have thought I was running a venue. Hosting entirely post-romantic compositions. Their love turned out to be the corrective experience I was seeking. When Leo died the artists, perverts and musicians of Berlin all came to pay their respects.
I wish I could have stayed focused on their sincere practice of loving. I wish I had not been distracted by romance, which was in the end, the undoing that could not be undone. The Burlesque dancer was just about the only person I knew in town who didn’t visit me in hospital. She did not send her condolences. What passion, grief and rage could make someone so cruel I hope I never understand.
Eros is want without productivity (The Philosopher). Immanent proximity to death is probably the most erotic experience I’ve ever known. I read “proximity” as “toxicity”. Perhaps this is more accurate: Intimacy with toxicity is the libidinal force that keeps us wanting.
During the difficult parts of the pregnancy, I convinced myself I “wanted” nothing. That I had no fear of missing out. Hellbent on bearing life I became petrified of risk.
“How is it possible, as a living being, to think risk in terms of life rather than death?” Anne Dufourmentelle
I said some weeks ago I’d often visited casinos but never placed a bet. Leo was my big gamble. I put everything at the stake and the dice had their way with me. Yet here I am. It’s a contradictory experience but its true to say that on the other side of having failed to bring forth that singular life, I feel more connected than ever. Compelled to reach beyond with the raising of my voice. There is very little to fear. What do I risk?
After your body left my body, after you left the smoke stack. Suddenly you were everywhere. And I wanted everything like I had wanted you. At first this was terrifying, but now I know we have no other choice. Desire goes nowhere and everywhere. I go to you nowhere in a flash of bottomless tenderness. I long to surrender into being safely held. I crave relaxation in a moment of precarity.
I’m sure this softened state, like all the rest, is temporary. I remember Fucking. I liked it a lot.
“…I am here to teach you a new system of love….There have been many systems of love in the West which have been sort of degenerate, should we say. The first system being the main system, the In-And-Out System, which I have now revised... to the Sideway-and-Sensitive System.”
(text spoken by Julius Eastman, in his realization of “Solo for Voice No. 8” from John Cage’s “Songbooks”)
So here we are. Life demands more from me than laying down at home in the pain of this singular death. Getting fucked by the In-And-Out System.
I start to sing again.
The glottis yields and yields,
opening toward freedom, closing to the midline.
I return and return and return to you, Love.
We take turns “almost dying”.
Open, close, open, close,
not to the old system. We open to
a new system of love
looking for ways to close the gap
and ways let go
again and again and over and under
the ground deep in the weeds
loving each other in languages beyond me.
The violence has passed. This post is supposed to be a closing. I wont kill myself labouring over the letting go.
I hope it will by now be obvious that in the logic of this Glottis, closing is always opening again. I’m trying to catch ephemeral moments of completion in words. The Glottis, Lumen, Sphincter, Muttermund, the empty-passing through, of a story taking place in the non-places of a body. Text parting the flesh to dwell in deeply programmed want, yearning to be filled again. An end that is inevitably unsatisfying.
It’s time to be a singer now. My voice stays firm at the difficult edge of the vocal fold as the void of my throat fills itself with song. The glottis comes together and undone birthing frequencies that thicken in my throat mothering a sound recognizable as me making a bid for freedom. Lament projects outward from lack. The keening goes out into space, calling for its being heard.
A voice is a void hoping to catch itself in the unobtainable other. “It is idle to fault a net for having holes”. (Nelson)
You caught me baby, big time.
There was a song our Doula Caracol sang at the funeral. She adapted the words especially for us, though the language was beyond me at the time. She has now shared a translation and I’ll share it with you here as a farewell.
Beloved. I thought this might mean something to you.
You’ll have to trust me and imagine how beautiful her voice is.
