WOJCIECH KALAGA

Given the domination of the contemporary cult of silly cheerfulness, grieving does not belong to the mainstream; it is a niche of culture. However, it is a niche which, despite its gloom, should be precious to any society and any individual. A society incapable of grieving can only produce superficiality; an individual who has not experienced grief is only half a person. “Happiness is beneficial for the body”, Marcel Proust wrote in Remembrance of Things Past, “but it’s grief that develops the powers of the mind”.

Yet grieving is ambivalent – ambivalent in many ways. It is a state of mind – some would say: of heart – and at the same time a process, almost an activity, albeit an unintended one. In principle (which, as we shall see, may be broken), it is not, however, a teleological process, which would end with an achievement of its task: if there is a telos, it is not at the end, as a final cause, but rather as an all-encompassing and permeating condition – grief – a necessity to maintain itself as permanence. In its essence, thus, grieving contains no end: no end as a chore to be fulfilled or as a process which, from the start, would have completion inscribed into it; the sense of an ending is alien to the idea of grief. The griever falls into grieving with no intention to terminate it, no plans to carry it out, to bring it to a conclusion. Grieving takes place in time, but – and here is another touch of ambivalence – it evades time: it is a-temporal in the sense that closure is external and contingent to it.

What may eventually bring grieving to an end is the unaware labor of forgetting, the external working of time bringing rather an unwanted finale than an anticipated or inherently predictable cessation. In this sense, grieving is masochistic, but without the component of pleasure – rather than contentment, it i

suffering for its own sake, the kind of suffering that fuels itself in an endless cycle of pain.

The ambivalence of grieving extends itself to the corporeal: by way of an existential metonymy, it is also a state (and a process) of the body. Like happiness, grieving affects the body, but unlike happiness it is detrimental to it. There seems to be no greater unity of the soma and the psyche, but in grief. The grieving body is a body of pain. In the visual images of grieving, that pain is pain/ted into the contortion or blankness of the face, emblazoned in the arched torso, limp and excruciatingly tense at the same time, in the twisting of hands and the hollowness or infinite depth of the eyes. Sometimes the hands cover the face to safeguard the loneliness, to keep away the compassionate gaze from the outside, to beg off sympathy – because true grief is a lonely affair, not something to be shared with those who do not grieve. Compassion and sympathy are external impositions, they have no access to the body; the body rejects them as intruders obliterating the pain. No cure is desired because it would spoil grieving; if there is cure, as one rabbi insists, it is to continue: “The only cure for grief is to grieve”.

Grieving thus re-adapts the idea of pain in a double way. First, the body aches even though no pain has been inflicted to the body itself; grieving brings about corporeal suffering without corporeal cause: no wound or fracture of bodily tissue, no impact on the skull or chest apart from the inside. The body aches from within, and even though the griever’s corporeal pain may not be as acutely intense as the pain caused by physical injury, it is by no means less severe. Rarely converging in one afflicted spot, it unhurriedly permeates each cell and, while creeping in this way, unites with the pain of the self, or heart, or soul – that part of an I which has no substantial or tangible existence. If the continuity of the self is a combination of time and awareness, the agony caused by grief fills each molecule of this amalgam and eventually becomes its semi-organic surrogate. In the griever, the two kinds of pain – the corporeal and the existential – unite to create a polyphony whose score charts the graph of suffering.

Henceforth this pain of grieving? From knowledge – the condition and cause of grief. In Lucille, Edward Bulwer Lytton asks both radically and rhetorically: “– what is knowledge but grieving?” Yet, in his allegation, he is only partly right because not all knowledge incites grief: there is neutral knowledge, impassive, free of emotions, in-affective, one might say; there is also joyful knowledge, the chocolate for the mind, filling the knower with the self-reflexive bliss of pure knowing or with the happiness of knowing the good. Bulwer Lytton is right, however, in identifying knowledge as the essential prerequisite for grieving; yet to do justice to his question, we should, in fact, reverse it and ask: “what is grieving but knowledge?” In the narrative of our lives, anagnorisis always precedes the peripeteia of grieving: the latter, without exception, transpires from the former.

Yet this painful knowledge, which gives rise to grief, is not a uniform power – it operates in its own multiple ways, perhaps too diverse to be pinpointed or categorized. From the perspective of grief, however, three kinds of knowledge impose themselves as those that mark out the spectrum and can be identified as grief’s major determinants.

On one extreme of the spectrum, there is the knowledge of a singular event – the knowledge which strikes one like a lightning and fills the mind with the awareness of irrevocability: the death of a dear person, the loss of a lover or child that seems forever unbearable, a sudden detection of a terminal illness and the necessity to leave whatever is dearest. When set against the background of human experience in general, this kind of particular knowledge is, in fact, a triviality, unnoticed by the movement of history. Yet it is a triviality which ruins the whole procession of one’s life. It has two simultaneous modes of operation and works in two directions: a posteriori (post mortem, one might perhaps more aptly say) and a fortiori: it shreds one’s past into a mash and turns the future into a void. What has once been a life filled with unique occurrences and encounters, a life of remembrances and expectances, is now crushed into a pulp, out of which protrudes only the devastating awareness of bereavement and irreversibility. Both the past and the future now constitute only a pulverized milieu for grief.

The other extreme is occupied by – or perhaps privileged with – the knowledge available only to the few, the kind of knowledge which requires time for its accumulation. Its object is not a particular event; no loss or bereavement is involved. This is slow and inductive knowledge, which emerges from the apprehension (in its full ambiguity) of the world and entails both distance and commitment. There is a kind of conclusiveness and finality in this knowledge, underscored by a sense of hopelessness that one might call existential: the loss of faith in the goodness of humanity, the recognition of the incorrigibility of evil in man, the awareness of the unfathomability of transcendence, the realization of the inevitability of zum-Tode-Sein, the ultimate understanding that there is no sense to be understood. It is bleak knowledge that blackens gradually through the various shades of lightness of life and changes doubt into certainty, leaving no promise of hope. The grieving bred by this kind of knowledge may be a detached kind of grieving of a hermit observing the world from the shelter of his cabin, but it can also manifest itself as an innermost trembling, an insurmountable anxiety of the self, not limited, however, to an individual ego, but imparting the trembling to the world, like Kierkegaard’s grieving over himself and man, or Sisyphus’ anguish in Camus, or Schopenhauer’s pessimism. This kind of grieving knowledge wipes out the boundary between the personal and the universal, elevates the knowing self and merges it with the Other, thus turning the griever into a philosopher.

Between those two kinds of grief-breeding knowledge, there is an intermediate kind, less distinctly marked on the spectrum. It entails neither direct loss of an object of love nor aloof reflection on the fate of humanity; rather it creeps in steadily carrying with itself residues of pain. This kind of knowledge verges on or alters with bitterness; it works in its mild and subliminal way, sneaks into clear thought and stains it with a slight sense of anxiety. Bitterness, if experienced only incidentally, will not turn into knowledge that causes grief. There is, however, a point of crossing over the critical mass – when one drinks one too many cup of disappointment with those one had trusted – that changes it into grief-inciting knowledge. The grief thus produced is not the utmost grief in which one drowns entirely and sees no surface to return to; it is rather a lingering sediment of grief which builds up and slowly raises its level. What feeds this kind of grieving is a loss of trust and faith in the other, rearing despondency and disillusionment. Like the emotional grief effected by personal trauma, this kind of grieving originates in individual experience, but it requires time to accumulate; unlike traumatic grief, however, it reaches beyond individuality and again bridges the personal and the universal. In this way, it approximates the philosopher’s grief, but never attains its magnitude; rather than a philosopher it yields a misanthropist.

Grieving thus construed emerges as a trans-rational reflection of knowledge – a reflection and transmutation of the rational into the irrational. The rationality of knowledge disperses in grief into the chaos of tremulous vacillation and trembling. But if knowledge is an efficient and immediate cause of grieving, maybe we should reconsider the question of the telos and ask what is the final cause of grieving (if there is any)? A profound suggestion of that final cause is contained in Ecclesiastes (1:18): “In much wisdom is much grief [...]”. Wisdom thus would seem to cause grief, but at the same time it is posited as a possible effect, if not the absolute telos, of grief: much grief is required to attain wisdom.

But, of course, it would be a falsity to claim that all wisdom comes from grieving: there is wisdom that comes from joy, or tranquility, or distant observation of an entomologist of humankind. Yet certainly there is also a kind of wisdom that falls upon one only as a result of grief (and which perhaps, as implied in the passage from Ecclesiastes, in a self-reciprocating loop reinforces grief). And further: the final cause of grief – wisdom – may never be attained because the (non)teleological movement of grieving usually turns on itself into a circle or spiral without end: one may fall short of attaining that wisdom, as Kierkegaard did, remaining forever in the state of trembling and anxiety, but which Schopenhauer reached by turning to the East. However, when knowledge sifted through grieving reflects on itself, wisdom does emerge: it is this special case when – in the long run – grieving becomes a bridge to wisdom, when in and through grieving, knowledge and wisdom come together.

This coming together of knowledge and wisdom may take on the form of a collision, when wisdom eventually overpowers and neutralizes the knowledge that was the source of grief. In Pearl, an exquisite medieval depiction of grieving, spiritual rebellion and discernment, the griever-poet mourns the death of his beloved two year old daughter Margaret – the pearl, margarita. He is a “joyless jeweler” overwhelmed with grief which „pierces [his] heart with pangs”. One can read the Pearl, of course, not only as a symbol of the lost child but also as an allegory rich in religious and spiritual meanings (innocence, purity, perfection of the soul, beatitude, eternal life, the Eucharist etc.). However, irrespective of possible allegorical senses**,** what remains central is the grief of a mortal bereaved by the death of his dearest child and engrossed in his earthly suffering. When Margaret appears to him in a dream – now as a young woman in garments adorned with pearls – she demonstrates the erroneousness and triviality of his earthly comprehension of death. The griever’s sense of injustice is countered and appeased by the parable of the vineyard and the vision of his daughter amongst blissful maidens following the Lamb. Yet it is not his own earthly wisdom that brings him consolation; the Pearl imparts to him the wisdom of heaven and thus drives his „dire distress” away. Her teaching eventually leads to the illumination of the griever; his sense of bereavement and his suffering are overridden and annulled by the wisdom of the heavenly realm. Grief now emerges merely as a veil of blindness which only heavenly wisdom can uncover and replace with solace and peace. If in the Pearl the Dreamer wakes up from his grief reconciled with the world by the wisdom conveyed to him – or, better, thrust upon him – in the dream, in Synge’s Riders to the Sea grief changes into wisdom when the knowledge of ultimate loss falls upon the griever. For the mother of six sons, who has lost five of them and her husband in the sea, life is anything but a mixture of grief and fear for the life of the last one. We witness the peak of her grieving when the death of her fifth son is discovered and the peak of her fear when the last son is going to sea again. But then, suddenly, the fear and the grief turn into tragic wisdom. We behold this alteration of utmost despair into utmost peace when the last son’s body, still soaking with water, is carried in and laid on the table: “They’re all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me”, says Maurya, the mother. In her wisdom of acquiescence, Maurya has now not only achieved her dreadful calmness, but also the wisdom of existential stoicism in the face of destiny, contained in the simple truth of her final understanding: “No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied”. It is interesting to see this kind of alteration of grief and wisdom, which was dramatized by Synge, multiplied to an ineffable diversity in th�e spatial separateness of the images of Pietà. Subsumed under one title – if we ignore chronology and geography, and focus just on the face of the Mother as an embodiment of the inner calamity – an opalescence of visions of grieving comes into view: from the all-encompassing, though invisible grief of the face covered by cloth or hands, as in the paintings by Arnold Böcklin and Franz Stuck, through utmost loss in Agnolo Bronzino or pure, insurmountable pain in Juan de Valdes Leal, in an anonymous Pietà in the National Museum in Warsaw, in Louis de Morales, or in Ippolito Scalza; through blind suffering drowned in itself, as if separate from the body of Christ, in the Gothic Pietà in St. Barbara’s church in Cracow; through the emptiness of grief in Pietro Perugino, or emptiness and reproach in the Bouguereau Pietà; through the brooding grief in Giovanni Bellini or almost carnal grief of compassion in his other painting; through helpless despair in van Gogh’s versions of Delacroix; through grief twisted with anger in Röttgen Pietà; through rebellion and disbelief on the face turned obliquely to heaven in Paula Ruego and much earlier in Jacob Jordaens; through grief and thankfulness in Massimo Stanzione to the solemn understanding in Titian or in the Avignon Pietà; to the sadness of wisdom in El Greco or in an anonymous German sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; to the wisdom of tenderness in the painting by Van-der-Weyden and, finally, to the mature wisdom in Michelangelo: the quiet suffering overcome by the awareness of inevitability in the sculpture in Vatican and the gentle wisdom of care of the Pietà Rondanini in Milan.

Albeit occupying the traumatic end of the spectrum, Maurya, the Dreamer, and the Mother in some versions of Pietà epitomise the transition from knowledge through grieving to wisdom. Wisdom thus achieved brings consolation to the griever; it combines humility with stature for it grows out of hardening pain. This is not wisdom of a joyful kind – it is rather nourished by stoic resignation and acceptance. Grieving, as a transitory stage, emerges therefore as a necessary moment of reflection and deliberation ensuing from knowledge, but also enriching knowledge with forbearance and thus neutralizing its trauma into the wisdom of acquiescence. With the philosopher and the misanthropist the modus operandi is the same, even though no immediate trauma strikes the mind or the body; the trauma of steadily accumulated knowledge is extended in time and thus dissolved into a plateau of accruing ache of disillusionment. Yet despite the lesser intensity of grieving, and maybe a greater distance to the knowledge that is its source, wisdom comes – or, at least, may come – in the end: with the philosopher, it is the wisdom of understanding, albeit disenchanted; with the misanthropist – the wisdom of bitterness. If we imagine that wisdom grown out of grief as a hemisphere (the other hemisphere being the wisdom of peaceful enjoyment of knowledge), its space is occupied by experience: either sifted through individual sensitivity or, via empathy, generalized on humankind. This wisdom, as in the Japanese proverb, cannot come from books – its only source is the grief-breeding knowledge construed as an immediate encounter with the world.