dwelling places

by rantywoman

http://politicsofthehap.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/even-when-i-know-youre-not-coming-im-still-waiting/

Waiting then serves another related purpose, to hide us from the fact we cannot win. For waiting is hopeful and can be the better option when the avenues to express one’s desires are unsatisfactory, limiting and repetitive, when it feels like you’re going in circles (Lewis, 1961). But this then begs the question: What is the grieving person waiting for? In the double-bind of the love affair, the waiting is the hope for a change in circumstances (he/she will treat me better, I will be happy again etc), it is a naïve belief that ‘everything will work out’. It is a better road to follow than one that says: ‘he won’t love me like that’. But of course in grief, he/she cannot ever love you like that ever again. The waiting then is the ‘invisible blanket’ that keeps us situated in the numb sense ‘like being mildly drunk or concussed’ (Lewis, 1961, p5), of not quite being part of the world.

To detach from what is not working, to stop waiting is perhaps then to come face to face with no recovery. But no recovery offers no narratives or objects to follow. It is to lose the anchors one had in the world, to lose one’s dwelling place. This why it is threatening and awkward to detach from what is not working (Berlant, 2011). This is why it so feels like fear (Lewis, 1961). To believe we do not lose others – though a ‘house of cards’- provides a future for the friendship. When grief reveals to us the pointlessness of it all, indeed it is easy to think ‘what does it matter?’ and allow laziness to prevail (Lewis, 1961 p.7). So in vacating the life we once knew (or it vacates us?) creates fear and anxiety. I would propose anxiety is a negative affect that emerges at the emptying out of the imagination. When everything becomes equivocal, anxiety floods to fill the space, that terrifying space of non-signifiers, of the meaningless, the death of the imagination. Anxiety is restless, ‘I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much’, it tries different paths but they don’t stick. Anxious habits become a way of clinging on to give a structure in the horrifying swirl of what is not in the desperate attempt to stop the self-unraveling. And throughout, the anxious mind is plagued thinking: What’s next? What are we becoming?