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Description
Language, like all carnivores, lives by means of the corpse--the carcass of the sign, the mourning that lingers in the sounding of the depths of words. Writing, especially, participates in the risks of mourning--a hazard marked by the lure of "closure." This essay, after Derrida, explores the relationships among mourning, writing, forgetting, and naming.
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In order to make a display of their mourning, the Tlinget of Alaska paint their faces black with ash to make sure that the tracks of the tears down their cheeks will be visible in the snow. The Blackfeet Indians cut a joint from their fingers when a child dies, bones to bones to ash. A Taiwanese Taoist funeral enacts a journey to the spirit world filled with slapstick and Keystone Cop-like chases involving the ghosts of the dead. The Bororo of Brazil make cuts in their arms and legs, self-torture replacing weeping, self-bleeding replacing tears. The Chippewa, too, must never cry or else another person close to them will soon die. The Irish throw a wake, the Italians eat until they burst, and we American Midwesterners gather in funeral homes, hold back all our emotions, try not to make eye contact, and bring each other strawberry-red Jello-molds and crumbled-Ritz-cracker-topped casseroles, never speaking of the dead.
For whom do we mourn? Acts of mourning, like tears, are almost always communal. Tears are the moral equivalent of a yawn: they are contagious in company. We cry together. Science has no answer for why we cry when we are sad. Tears are cleansing, it is true. They clean the eye and mark a sort of healing, a transition back to the fiction of normalcy after something has intruded. But it is not clear how tears became associated with pain outside of the eye, why the nose runs and the tears flow when we are sad, why these liquids pour out of the body and, rather than wash us clean, make us into that much more of a mess.
So many cultures have professional mourners, paid experts who will help cry, help bear our loss. In the Wolof tribe of Senegal, women are paid in brandy to come wail and weep at a funeral, as the hours wear on and the brandy flows, the funerals get--interesting. The classic ages of Greece, Rome, and the Middle East all had professional mourners as well, but it is almost always the case that the profession is thought to be just one step above prostitution. The word "placebo" comes from the Latin for "I shall please" and originally referred to laments sung at funerals by professional mourners. They are the fake cure for what ails us. And yet, is their mourning less than real?
Perhaps it is because such professionals control their emotions that we mistrust them. Stopping and starting their tears on cue, we might think that such persons are not feeling true emotion because true emotion is overwhelming. It is true that if you say you love me, I would prefer you not be paid to say it. I would also prefer you not explain your love for me using syllogisms and modus ponens. I want you to be overwhelmed and out of control in your love for me. And thus in your loss when I am dead, as well. But is this just a final vestige of selfishness, a selfishness that has no self left to which to attach--this phantom self with, as Michael Naas reminds us, its phantom sovereignty, pre-haunting us long before its death?
There is no such thing as a fake tear. To assume otherwise is to assume that there is a distinction between real life and performance. All of life is performance. We play our roles and assume our responsibilities, and we are always on stage. Each context provides a new narrative--or more precisely, a new drama--and we step into the part, don the mask, and play our characters. To think that there is a moment that is the real self, the real life, the nonperformance, is to think that there is a moment that is without context, without hermeneutical enmeshment. This is the fiction of modernity. To assume that there is a fake tear is also to assume that there is emotion without performance, but emotion is always communally constituted. To be sad is to be within a community of those who recognize sadness and who are capable of echoing it back to us, tear for tear.
When the Other dies,... |
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