Loss

"It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now. All my life I've heard of people speak of finding themselves in acute pain, bankrupt in spirit and body, but I've never understood what they meant. To lose. To have lost. I believed these visitations of darkness lasted only a few minutes or hours, and that these saddened people, in between bouts, were occupied, as we all were, with the useful monotony of happiness. But happiness is not what I thought. Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life."

This is the opening of Carol Shields' novel, Unless, a book I adore, and return to again and again.

I recently gave it to someone very close to me who has suffered a great loss, not of a loved one, but of her self. The kind of loss that comes from encountering unexpected darkness, from having to discover firsthand what it is to be, as a woman, subject to violence, vulnerability, and a shattering of security.

In the wake of her loss, that I feel partly is my own, I care both more and less for my work. I was in a reading sharing group for my upcoming theory comp and I've opted out of that (with all ensuing guilt and fears that I am indeed a lousy PhD), deciding to just read summaries from the Norton Anthology.

But last night I stayed up reading Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost. It is set in Sri Lanka in 1990 - at the time when my life was horses, figure skating, tree-lines streets in Saskatoon, the lives of the people in that country were filled with organized terror, the threat of disappearance and torture. Ondaatje writes,

"...in the midst of such events, she realized, there could never be any logic to the human violence without the distance of time. For now it would be reported, filed in Geneva, but no one could ever give meaning to it. She used to believe that meaning allowed a person a door to escape grief and fear. But she saw that those who were slammed and stained by violence lost the power of language and logic. It was the way to abandon emotion, a last protection for the self."

My work is to walk in words like these, knowing real things and people are in them, behind them. That said, I hardly know what my work is, or will be, but it is enough for now to just read.