56 Is searching for the dead parent related to seeking the child one was in another country?
We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?
—David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything
In his memoirs, Adam Zagajewski wanders back through his birthplace, the town of Lvov which haunts his poetry and writings. He reflects on the marvel of long June evenings, how they seem prepared for nostalgia. He wants to reveal the mystery of Lvov, implicated in what it meant to his family, a place that disappeared with his birth. But he mourns the silence—and the smart folks who could never “acknowledge the postulate of a mystery hidden in a city, or a park, or a quiet street at dusk.”
The exile leaves the child behind. Zagajewski returns to Lvov in search of his childhood memories—in search of himself as a child.
Most language related to death and loss is intended for the living. I suspect we know that death has very little to do with the dead. It may be the ultimate dehumanization.
To live is only less lonely than dying. Only a little—and barely.
The child screams in those raw, bare, furious parts of me that only dead parents understand. Naomi Lowinsky calls it “attending to the ghost,” separating from the mother enough to see her as a separate being. “When we don’t have enough of a relationship with ghosts, they come get us.” So, I sort my fate from hers, drawing distinctions. Now I must learn a new language, the one which calls back the missing mother. What happens when words are only allowed to bury them?
“Pro-natalist, nationalist ideologies…are preoccupied with descendants, connected to ancestors in an endless chain through time,” Katherine Verdery wrote of Ceaușescu’s regime (though she could have been writing about Alabama’s present leadership). This connection between birth and death is sustained by burial practices that follow a proper burial. Ancestors only exist as long as we remember them. And this act of remembering, in many cultures, is the difference between a blessing and a curse.
On the white plaster wall, attached with a thumbtack, inscribed in faded orange marker, this quote from Anne Lauterbach:
What I know is sometimes a defense against what there is to be known. This defense can realize itself as fear, as contempt, as doubt, as ideology, as polemics—the desire to fasten one’s partial knowledge and conviction into universal value.
I glance at it as a reminder that I don’t yet know what I don’t know. My desire to theorize what I know, or to find words with which to explain how I know it, often leads me to invoke conventional critical distance. But if we take critique as a literary form that draws the reader into a deeper relationship with the text, then how deep—or what deepness involves—depends on the reader’s appetite for risk. Construing the role of critic as closer to that of reader allows us to experiment with stand-insideness rather than stand–asideness as a critical approach.
Like Elias Canetti, “I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.” There is nothing seductive in the patina of my own innocence, or the critical distance that makes such innocence possible. Don’t be definitive; be interesting. Pose intractable questions that challenge the world as we know it. Experiment with formal challenges to knowing. Don’t re-invent the wheel but please do re-vision it. Broaden the banks of the critique-creek, as Daniella Cascella does with “transcelation”. Concoct new ways for polylingual critics to engage texts that haven’t yet been translated into English. Palpate the posthumous embodiment that challenges the border between self and text.
Conviction does not allow the world to change; it refuses happenings. Over-investment in ideology gives us a ready-made critical lens while depriving us of a relationship with the reality that the world has changed, that it will continue to change, that it will be unrecognizable. Re-visioning the world requires us to get dirty, to be implicated, to theorize from inside capitalist realism.
Ideology turns a promise into an absolute—this is why people compare ideology to God, or why religions become ideologies. Judgment that doesn’t interrupt itself comes closer to conviction than thought.