Towards a Collective Lament
Nine of Swords & what ancient humans knew
Hi friends. Just want to give a quick head’s up up top that this is a heavier missive than usual. I’ve been wallowing in the dark waters of Scorpio season and maybe you have too. If you’ve been having a hard time this might be a newsletter to skip or come back to another time.
Real talk: today I write you from the nine of Swords place. When I was first getting acquainted with the tarot I originally learned that the meaning of this card was made up of nightmares and anxieties. The swords, representing thoughts and their ability to cut through us, to cause a specific kind of pain, hang in the dark above the head of a sobbing person. It’s not a card you might be excited to pull.
It looks pretty bleak, but I love Rachel Pollack’s interpretation of it in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. Of the nine of Swords she says, “In the card’s deepest sense it shows a mind that takes on itself all the sorrows of the world… Can we see a way out of such dreadful pain? Both Buddha and Christ pictured the world as a place of unending sorrow, yet both also said that tragedy remains always a half truth, that the universe seen as a whole brings joy and peace. And Nietzsche wrote of embracing existence so completely, with such total ecstatic honesty, that we would gladly repeat, endlessly, every moment of our lives, whatever the pain.”
Total. Ecstatic. Honesty. To that I say: Yes, please! But I say it so quickly, knee-jerk, that I’m afraid I don’t actually fully know or understand what that would cost me. I’m afraid I wouldn’t actually be strong or brave enough to bear that cost. I love the idea of total ecstatic honesty, but who can really live like that?
I forget where exactly I got this from, I think maybe one of Ram Dass’s books, but I love the idea that perhaps instead of needing the perfection of a thing – the totality of total ecstatic honesty, for example – perhaps we can open ourselves to, say, fifteen percent more total ecstatic honesty in our day-to-day lives. What would that look like? What would that shift? What would that make possible that wasn’t possible before?
Maybe that’s a cop-out, but maybe there’s something to it. I don’t know – you try it and tell me how it goes.
I have been thinking a lot about what prehistoric humans knew that we will never be able to know, knowledge that we will never have access to. The vestigial senses and resonances through which they experienced the world, lost to us now. Sure, now we have vaccines and running water and all of human knowledge in a tiny glowing monolith that we keep in our hands, but I am craving a life with a deeply felt ritual context. I am craving the wholeness of the fabric of the world that comes with that context. In context, within a cohesive worldview (I imagine), every tragedy makes sense, even as it breaks your heart.
Did you know that, as archaeologists and scientists learn about our prehistoric ancestors, the more they believe that that we may have sung to each other before we spoke?1 Singing through the instrument of their bodies and into the larger instrument of the cave, reverberating resonance through which all of culture was created?2
The Adonia was an annual festival in ancient Greece to mourn the death of Adonis, the god or demi-god of annual vegetation. In the myth, Adonis is killed by a wild boar (whose crescent moon tusks associate it with Persephone, queen of the underworld), and anemone flowers sprout where his blood was spilled. In his honor, women grow lettuce or fennel in little pots and then let them wither and die. They carry the dead plants, grieving and lamenting together the whole way to the sea, into which they release them.
It was a way to ritually mark time (the end of the growing season and beginning of winter) and a place to put one’s own personal grief into a larger context of death and rebirth.
Like so many others, I have been deep in horror and grief about the genocide unfolding in Palestine, struggling not to close my heart off in helplessness. And I feel acutely, like a sword, the lack of a way to communally process that grief. Gabriela Gutierrez recently wrote an essay about traditions of ritualized lament that has been sticking with me. She says: “Ritual lament ensured that grief was fully expressed. It was a public display of pain for those who were suffering, but who were in the initial stages of grief that often causes us to dissociate and numb out.”
It is a place to put the pain. A place to take it where there is company, where it is outside of us. It makes a place for the un-fill-able, un-mend-able hole in our lives. A lamentation ritual, a grief ritual – the lament of the Adonia, the funeral keeners of Ireland, the grief doulas. That is what I am craving right now.
I have a dear friend, one of my oldest and closest. One of the strands that ties us together, across the decades and the different parts of the country we live in, is music. Not just that we like the same music, but that very specific artists and albums have seen us through some of the most tumultuous and difficult times of our lives. They have held me as I sobbed to that one song on repeat until there were no more tears left, just a guttering emptiness from which life can continue, and vice versa. The emotional tie between us and that music is incredibly vivid and deeply felt. It, too, feels like a sword, but in a positive way.
We make plans to travel to each other’s cities to see bands we loved when we were seventeen or twenty-four, so we can stand in front of the musicians who made us weep, together, separately, over and over again; so we can weep together to the live songs, in real time that is also layered all the way down with memory. To be seized by the feelings and the memories that carry them, to run our tongues over the old wounds and remember. To make peace offerings to old versions of ourselves. To be in one place, in front of the people who are responsible for holding the space for all of that to flow into, to thank them with our presence and our tears.
This is the closest thing I have to a grief ritual practice at this point in my life, and I think it’s beautiful and I’m grateful for it. And. I also crave something that is outside of the specifics of my own life, something that is based in a community, something like the Adonia. The closest thing I can think of today is the Good Friday ceremony within the Christian church, but I do not feel connected or like I have access to those rites for a number of reasons, as I know is the case for many of us.
My friend and I are like two notes harmonizing with each other, the resonance keeping each other company. But I imagine a hundred people, or a thousand people, or 100,00 people singing together, our collective lament reverberating across space and time. It is one way to feel less alone in our grief - to move the pain through our bodies with synchronized breath. The chorus becomes the instrument - maybe - for a future that is different from the past.
May there be peace, & may we be its instruments.