America is not good at grief. We are an optimistic people, consumed by a propulsive need to constantly hurtle forward. “Moving on,” Maureen Dowd stated in a column last weekend, “is the favorite American activity.”
And yet, many people feel a little shaky these days. My mother recently said that everyone she has encountered again since restrictions have been lifted, people she used to see at work or at gatherings, has resembled “a cracked egg.” People who lost a family member to Covid-19 have obvious reasons to grieve. But what name will we give to the mourning that must come after everything else that has been lost? The two years of life, love, sex, school, friendship, freedom, and one’s cherished place in society? Some of us have lost not only loved ones, but home states and political affiliations we thought we’d adhere to for life. Some of us have lost our youthful appearance. Millions of Americans have lost jobs or entire businesses. Or homes. Or something more ineffable, like faith in other people. What should we call this?
Seeking conversations on the subject, I found an episode curiously titled “Erotic Grief” from the podcast “Speaking of Sex.” Claiming that an erotics of grief is about experiencing it fully, the hosts also describe the phenomenon known as “disenfranchised grief.” This occurs when the loss a person mourns is outside of what is typically recognized as grief-worthy, or when there are no public rituals to commemorate private pain. Disenfranchised grief is distinct from but can coincide with what researchers call complicated grief. This is mourning that remains unresolved and lacks closure, like when a family member goes missing and is never found. Or, perhaps, after a pandemic that has no clear end.
America’s ineptitude when it comes to mourning is part of why its gothic subculture has always been so strong. There must be an elegiac force to counter our relentless enthusiasm, and both impulses are essential to American life. This is why certain figures embody an antiheroic quality that reminds people of the presence of the darker emotions: think Megan Fox’s emergence in the late 2000s, or My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way in the “I’m Not Ok” video. Emotional hardcore itself — the genre distinguished by visceral displays of passion which eventually reached the mainstream as emo — was born in the epicenter of Apollonian liberalism, Washington D.C.
In Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” a character named Masha is asked why she always wears black. “I’m in mourning for my life,” she famously replies. We may all be a bit in mourning for our lives at this point, and this is something that must be acknowledged. Grief is the underside of eros. And just as there is a refractory period after orgasm, there is a recovery period after great loss that must not be ignored.
When it comes to emotional intelligence, this is something the right gets wrong. Trauma is real. And it is precisely because it is real that its definition should not be broadened beyond recognition.
I still like to rage-read The New York Times. This is not an act of self-preservation, but I must admit it fills me with a kind of motivating indignation I can find through very few other sources. Why? Because The New York Times loves to loathe Pentecostals. Include in this mix other varieties of charismatics as well as evangelicals in general. They, and so much of liberal establishment media, love to treat with suspicion any Christians whose religious practice is deeply passionate, reaches ecstasy or verges on the otherworldly. In short, anyone whose practice doesn’t involve sitting politely in a church pew. Pentecostalism is not politically correct. It is not an exercise in mindfulness. It is felt in the body and can be profoundly transformative.
A Times article from last week, which raises concern over the politicization of Christian worship — a concern I share — contains the usual alarmed descriptions of “explicitly religious fervor … much of it rooted in the charismatic tradition, which emphasizes the power of the Holy Spirit.” These words are reminiscent of the kind of freak-out that occurred over Amy Coney Barrett, whose membership in a charismatic Catholic group raised the hackles of any unfortunate soul who had gotten a Notorious RBG tattoo. In that article, the Times warned that Barrett’s community “believes in prophecy” (gasp!). What is prophecy, exactly? According to 1 Corinthians 14:1, it is a “spiritual gift.” Someone who prophecies “speaks to people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation.” Doesn’t sound too nefarious, does it?
The interweaving of certain strains of Christianity and the figure of Donald Trump, perhaps the least Christian man on Earth, is perverse and twisted. It is rightly decried by the Times as a worrisome example of “a political movement … whose adherents find spiritual sustenance in political action.” This is laid out as being automatically objectionable, but what were the George Floyd protests, full of kneeling and hands raised to the sky, if not part of the same phenomenon? Such an impulse is only condemned in heartland conservatives. The subtext is always look at these fucking rednecks. Look at these hillbillies, holding us back from implementing our agenda! If only they’d get out of the way! If only they’d conveniently cease to exist, with their nettlesome opposition to rapid social reform and invasive mandates. But witches hexing the president is fine, right?
Deep down, even as someone who believes in Jesus, I prefer the maniacal anti-theism of a philosopher like the Marquis de Sade to what Ross Douthat calls “the liberal Christianity of Barack Obama and Joe Biden” — a kind of socially respectable spirituality that “lacks internal vitality.” Sade was a disgusting, unrepentant libertine, who once said that “the idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.” He is also paradoxically the author I turn to when I want to be encouraged in my faith, so that I don’t succumb to notions inculcated by the likes of the Times that the only acceptable Christianity is a bland one. In the introduction to one of his most famous works, Sade urges his readers to “nourish yourselves on its principles: they foster your passions.” He advises them to “listen solely” to those same “passions; their source is the only one that will lead you to happiness.”
I have always been attracted to extremes. It’s something I try to fight against, but I prefer to find figures throughout history who felt the same affliction and somehow managed to enjoy it. I suppose this is why I’ve always loved Colette. Country at heart, she came to thrive in turn-of-the-century Paris and is now regarded as a kind of bisexual icon as well as feminist heroine. Her own relationship to feminism, however, was fractious: as Aida Edemariam notes in The Guardian, Colette once declared, “You know what the suffragettes deserve? The whip and the harem.” Reading this article, I found her described — in a glorious phrase that has stuck with me ever since — as “both a libertine and fitfully conservative.” The legacy of this great woman writer is deeply tied to her explorations of eros. Her cross-dressing habit (and ambivalence toward feminism) was shared by George Sand, who remarked that “sex is the most respectable and holy thing in all creation, the most serious act in life.” It is fascinating to consider what these romantic, activist-allergic figures said about sexuality, so often the domain of argument between rigid religionists and salivating social innovators.
In Roger Scruton’s “Sexual Desire,” the late conservative philosopher asks whether sexual desire is the same thing as desire for sexual pleasure. If desire were merely physical, after all, there would be far more convenient ways of satiating it than “the time-consuming stratagems of courtship and seduction.” Pursuit of physical pleasure matters, of course, but in my experience desire is about something more: I have seen someone whose soul I like so much that I want to be as close to it as possible, to be consumed by it. Scruton writes that a “kiss is a recognition of the other’s dearness, and its pleasure lies in the other’s rejoicing in that.” He speaks of the “pulsing of the spirit in the flesh” (a positively Pentecostal description) and affirms that “sexual arousal, then, has an epistemic intentionality: it is a response to another individual, based in revelation and discovery, and involving a reciprocal and cooperative heightening of the common experience of embodiment.”
This is a strange time, a liminal time, in which we can feel the souls of the Covid dead, if we try, and perhaps the souls of the future-living if the erotic opportunities of the moment are taken. In my freer mental moments, I must admit that I believe life begins not only at conception, but before it. Scruton wrote that “intellectuals may scoff at [Edmund] Burke’s idea that the dead and the unborn are as much members of society as the living. But it captures a deep truth about the human condition.” Here in Washington, tulips are blooming everywhere as the cherry blossoms start to wane. There is a feeling in the air, a kind of constant “reminder that life awaits,” as the podcasters mention in their episode about grief. They claim that after “a loss of great proportions we see a resurgence of eros.” This, they say, “is why flowers at the funeral make sense.”
Special note: It was my pleasure to review Tara Isabella Burton’s “The World Cannot Give” — a new novel about mystic transcendence, desire between women, and the dangers of zealotry — for the Washington Examiner. You may read that here.