Loss Exhumed: Notes on Relative to Loss. 

“ Pale and blind driver, luckless slinger,

Lost discoverer, in you everything sank! ”

From The Song of Despair, Pablo Neruda [1]

The images in Relative to Loss can be seen as a phemenological investigation of what it is to experience loss. Phemenonology allows us to understand the being of something. It makes visible what is hidden, that which is the all of something, its belonging in meaning. phemenonology makes tangible the full and complete essence of something which would otherwise remain hidden. In this sense phemenonology is a true and complete making visible of the phenomenon. It makes visible the invisible, objectifies the idea.  A phenomenon can be partly hidden, or exposed then covered over, leaving only a small opening uncovered. It can be disguised. For something to be phemenonlogical, it must allow the being of something to be conceived, to be understood by way of a visible revealing of meaning. This meaning showing happens non-verbally, through physical expression, movement, visuality. Phemenonology, a semiotics of movement, where the verbal gives way to the nonverbal, is a fitting medium for showing loss- a sensation that so often removes one from the world of speech into the darkness and despair.

The experience of loss removes oneself from oneself. It creates a bridge between experience and being which only becomes shorter through time and healing. The wrapping, billowing and decorated costumes, covering the subjects in the photographs, expose only parts of each person. These fabrics obscure identity and facilitate a negating of the self and a blending of person to landscape, symbolising how one is unbound by loss and sent to a place outside of logos, to a land where nothing is fully known. 

When I experienced loss and its associative emotion- grief, I felt only partly present. I felt that the parts which made me who I was had been hidden, while the parts left exposed were fragments that I could not relate to anymore. I felt boundless in an uncontrolled way, as if I had been turned inside out and back again and could no longer know where my experience of the present and of others started and stopped. I felt alien to my surrounds and a stranger to everything.

Loss, in my experience of it, was so profound that it become an entity in and of itself and I became subsumed in the phenomena of it. In living through loss, grief and mourning, I became removed from the everyday operations of life.  

Loss is in many ways an entity of itself. It is experienced almost as an external force, not ever fully known. Clouded, enveloping, boundless. Once inside loss, the self becomes caught in its mist, enfolded and osmotically blended to the loss that has descended upon you, slowly altering the person you are as loss moves through your space.

Loss is transformative, you can not go through the experience of loss and come out the same person. Loss isolates as it covers, it hides the world from you and you from the world. You hibernate and loose your grounding as loss lifts you from your position in the world and you float, not knowing quite where you are.  Just as we are social beings, bounded to others by laws, geography, culture and customs, loss unbinds us, removes us, suspends us, halts us. Loss is the great unbinding, the bigger the loss, the bigger the tear to the ties that bind us.

Loss is transgressive, it is experienced both within and without. It sits outside of logic- unbinding, unravelling, it suspends logic as it creates a fissure in the fabric of social bindings. Loss, through its transgressive nature, can bring the experiencer of loss to a place of mythos- that space which is left after logic alights. A space where speech cannot be held onto and the language of mourning takes over. Whilst bringing feelings of grief, horror and despair, loss also has the ability to bring one to a place of mythmaking, where reality is suspended in the full experience of dark despair that loss brings about. In this space, one can be remade, new stories woven, new heroes created, new lives borne, new identities found. As loss lifts and logic slowly returns, society is gently entered again, and speech is regained. Loss leaves behind its trace and with it the new worlds that were found in the space of mythos, the shadows and silhouettes from a place where life was suspended.  Loss had held aloft the experience of living and beheld a place with no reference. The transformation from before loss to after had begun in this non space and the experience of this remaking will always remain.

In the experience of loss, everything becomes relative to its touch. Loss bleeds into all parts of life, marking everything, transforming it all. As one who experienced loss, even though time has passed, there is always the knowledge that loss has left its trace on all things before and after.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, it is just another way of experiencing life.

As loss and the lands of mythos and magic are left behind, the world re affirms itself through language. Words become the anchor as one gently arrives on the shore of logos once more.

Metaphor allows us to experience anguish once removed, through reflection. Just as Medusa was subdued and killed by being turned into stone through looking at her reflection, we can withstand the abhorrence of death- physical, spiritual, social, and the fear of its horrors that death brings,  by putting something between us and the object of our fear. In Relative to Loss, the images use fabric, bright colours and decorations, and later, words, to speak the abhorrent language of loss, grief and despair. Come revel in misery with me.

“the image captures the fear, calms it and restores it to the symbolic order” Kristeva, The Severed Head Capitol Visions p 51.

Emiko Artemis 2018

Bibliography

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence Verso London and New York 2004

Heidegger, M. Being and Time HarperCollins New York 2008

Kristeva, Julia. The Severed Head Capitol Visions Columbia University Press 2011

Neruda, Pablo. (translation W.S Merwin) Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair Penguin Classics New York 2004

Spitzer, Anais. Derrida, Myth and the Impossibility of Philosophy Continuum, London and New York 2011

[1] Neruda, P. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, 2004 pg 87,89