OCCASIONAL ZODIAC

reflections on Eris, how mourning can break up personal mythologies of death

Written while listening to Cucina Povera & Haron - “Riffittelyä III” off the album Plafond 6.

Eris’ birthday today. She would have been 30. I didn’t know her well. Well enough to fill the remainder of this notebook with words about her. Or even a page?

I do know that in a way there is just as much impulse to jump in and claim to have been her friend. On my part and maybe on the parts of others. It seems to depend on how publicly this jumping in takes place. Twitter is loud. Maybe this will be quieter and more of a meditation of mine.

The mourning period for some will not end, or will not taper off in some uniform deliberate measurable way. Something about the twitter-ghost presence serves as an irritant that won’t let the skin heal—as long as the videos and photos persist, the spirit and the sadness might not settle. Maybe some don’t want it to. And I don’t know what I’m talking about other than what I imagine is true for other people. It’s a bad trait. My imagination and intuition are all I have to go on. My perception is hit by the thought and warps itself into thinking it’s a sixth sense. A kind of metaphysical arrogance or prejudice or presumption in a court of reality where the kings and courtiers rest on their legitimacy. That is my habit: making claims about the ether world like John Dee scrying in a broken bauble of mental illness. “We’re all already dead.” What do I know about the universe’s spiritual machinery, how it all works—a spy sent into the world to report on its engineering and escape with some information to give to my side, but no one gets out alive or with their wits intact.

And no one believes the spy because to believe them would have a dismantling effect upon reason, proofs, judgment, inquiry itself. I think it would be so much worse if I took psychedelics. The crystal ball would be even more darkened, the epistemological instrument would be even more cracked and polluted than it is now.

What does this have to do with Eris? Nothing, to my embarrassment, except to say that the integrity of the whole death scheme I’ve built up suffers a blow when apprehending the death of another. I said I feared death on twitter, when the Ukraine war started and Putin started talking about nukes, I really thought we were done for, like that week, and Eris asked me if I’d ever read the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I said no. She said it really helped her to let go of a lot of shit and she recommended it to me. I haven’t read it yet. I dismissed her recommendation as new age hocus pocus but what do I know? Very little, obviously. Anyway, something about witnessing a death affects the vicissitudes and perceptions of your own. It shapes you. How dare you think death is this “one thing” when in truth it happens to others outside your solipsistic envelope. What kinds of somersaults of private logic do you need to perform to incorporate the world’s total capacity for death (that is not your own) into your idiosyncratic mythology of mortality and immortality? How many times do you need to be wrong — but what’s right or wrong? I’ve had grandparents die but miraculously on this planet of perpetual death I’ve evaded for 46 years witnessing grief outpoured the way I saw it for a 29 year old woman. Who was tapped into social media and had touched people’s lives with depth on one hand and the breadth on the other.

Seeing the ripple effect on other people not relatives, not coworkers, people with a certain status or importance, so when they fold under the sadness it takes a specific origami shape of paper folding to make some shape—a swan? an eleven-pointed star? No, something astrological, Eris would like that…a crab or a goat marking the two edges according to a private belief. Watching the group apprehension, the objectivity of the sum total of the testimonies, the personal density, the publicity of the mourning, the binding of disparate strands of many lengths of which mine was so short, but the binding is nonetheless meaningful…

What am I doing, what need of mine or others am I trying to assuage. You’ll never make it make sense. Her first birthday of not being alive was just the same day you picked up a pen to write. The occasionalism is what appeals to you as the zodiac seemed to do with her.

I haven’t watched the MLC video collating all the times she appeared. I don’t know who did that nor how. It’s going to take some kind of endurance and fortitude and commitment to sit through 3 hours of it. I want to do it but it will take time, not because of any goopy emotions it’s just that I want to watch the whole thing.

Tonight in a few minutes I go to watch the Mets try to fight off San Diego for the post wild card position to be in the National League Division playoffs. I like baseball fine but one whole motivation is to watch baseball with my dad. Who is mortal just as every child of Adam and Darwin and Nebuchadnezzar and Caesar must be. Death is an appointment that can only be put off so long. They say knowledge of mortality should enrich your living hours, this thought of an inevitable end, does it?

I’m sure if the deceased in any case, not just this one, knew what we write about them, knew how we carried on and on with WORDS, they would hate it, they might reach in to alter what we write, they could change the direction of the word-plumbing inside our brains to cut off this or that flow. So I’ll change direction and subject and talk about something only kind of related, a recent poem of mine that will be included in my poetry collection coming out in a month from now. The poem is called “Dinner Party” and it was printed in Opt West a little while ago. It’s fine, it’s whatever, I’m proud of it, but there’s one section, which I have highlighted below, which I think is key to understanding what is wrong with my crystal ball, my field of vision on things like death and the universe. See below:

The poem is what it is, but the highlighted red parts get to the heart of what I think could be wrong with me, the “mood hits the thought so diagonal and warps the five senses into thinking it’s a sixth.” It, in this case, being “the mood.” I have a mood disorder that wants to pass itself off as being a mental faculty, a sixth sense. My mood and imagination are disordered and it’s through that lens that I interpret the world, including these thoughts about death and the “architecture of the afterlife” which the mind can’t know, can’t sense. Do I have sixth sense powers and an ability to see beyond? I don’t know. This is one of the questions they ask you when you’re in intake at a psych hospital. To evaluate whether you need to be on antipsychotics. None of my psychiatrists or therapists have ever asked to read my poetry or look at my art. To see what might be said there that I can’t say in a therapeutic session or a fifteen minute zoom call. That I don’t know how to say.

The YouTube video below is the piece of music that I listened to while writing this. Maybe it’s garbage but I really like this musician. “Riffittelyä” means “riffing” in Finnish according to Google translate, and I guess that’s what the singer is doing. No idea what she’s singing about but it sounds very melancholic and obsessive to me which I like. I could listen to this forever.

The three photos of Eris (Elizabeth V Aldrich) above are taken from a video she sent me in which she offered to send me a pdf of her novel to save me some money and she also told me she needed someone to yell at her to go grocery shopping. She’s squinting because she’s trying to see something in her window. I wish I had engaged with her more but she was frankly intimidating and I didn’t know what to make of her seeming instability and willingness to communicate with me out of nowhere. Isn’t that sad that we interpret friendliness as being unhinged?