Grief is concentrated in the face [take2] - The Art of Grief by Jonathan Walker

Grief is concentrated in the face. It makes the flesh sodden and unresponsive, dull with blood, like when you are drunk and heat comes off the skin like vapour off water, as if your vitality is evaporating into the air. The muscles go dead around the mouth and eyes. It almost hurts when others smile and your own face remains inert, held down by the drag and weight of the blood. The memory of grief stays in the flesh. The body recalls it, feels its weight, moulds itself automatically to its shape as the loss is remembered, the mask becoming tighter as the memory becomes clearer; not the memory of the dead person, but the memory of grief itself.

Page 24 The Art of Grief by Jonathan Walker

Geoff - "an early start for the first day of the rest of my life - 'where do you start?'" - Alexandria - 7am Wed 01 Jul 2009 (picasa)
Took this photo of myself the first morning after Jenny had died. I slept OK, all things considered and was up early - I had no idea what the day would bring. All I knew there was a Funeral to organise and many people to be contacted. No stranger to all of this, so I headed up to my usual Coffee shop (Cafe Sofia) so that I could have a few quiet moments to myself before the onslaught of the day.

Not sure why I took the photo - maybe so that I could remember that moment of numbness, despair and initial grief. I did a similar thing when my younger brother Tim died (see here).

The words above by Jonathan Walker (he reviewed one of my photos that I took in Newtown - see here) seem to match up with what I now see of myself in the photo.

The following gives some context to his writings on Grief - The Art of Grief - and its relationship to his new Novel - Five Wounds. It is complicated, but Grief is a long drawn out and complicated process. I am still trying to work it all out myself.

Five Wounds: An Allegory by Jonathan Walker

Five Wounds is a parable as well as a fairy tale. Throughout, it refers to an invisible, suppressed source: ‘The Art of Grief’, an abandoned essay on the deaths of my parents. This essay is never acknowledged directly within the novel, but it will be made available in March or April 2010 as a free download on my website for those who wish to investigate.

[..]

‘The Art of Grief’ is a key, which unlocks hidden meanings in Five Wounds. However, the relationship between the two texts is more complex than that of a riddle to its solution or a joke to its punch line, because Five Wounds has an independent life of its own. Its characters act according to their own natures, and make their own choices. They are not mere ciphers, condemned to act out episodes of my biography in a disguised, pathological form. The characters may be fantastic, but they are real within their own world, even when they unknowingly refer to events beyond its borders.

In this case, then, one text does not solve the other. Rather, Five Wounds places stolen fragments of ‘The Art of Grief’ in a new setting, which transforms their meaning, as the Venetians studded the façade of the church of San Marco with pieces of marble looted from Constantinople. Here, however, the arrangement is reversed. It is not the loot that shines brightly, but the container, within which the quotations are safely hidden away, like bones in a reliquary.

UPDATE: To download a PDF version of 'The Art of Grief', go to this part of my site

[Geoff: A repost of a version I was working on that somehow got posted on the 10 Apr 2010 - subsequently deleted and this is the remaining version.]