Grief I. / II. / III.
At this moment, I am stricken with grief. Roland Barthes had a diary for his, when his mother died. Should I do the same? – I don’t know. I know nothing. I feel nothing but grief, omnipresent, all-consuming. It’s a dark shroud, enveloping me and slowly replacing me with itself, while I fade into oblivion. The shroud is my mourning dress: but it is an empty shell. I am only a shadow, I am transparent, I am a fleeting thought, and now I am gone. All thoughts have transformed into ungraspable wisps, dancing around in a dark forest, mis-leading travellers to their certain doom. I am one of these misguided travellers. I always have been.
—
22.7.
The silence is blinding, deafening, stifling. It is choking in the blistering heat of these still summer days. The air is thick with foreboding gloom and in a feverish disposition; it is like a heavy, leaden blanket whose weight consists of bleak apathy and a general world-weariness. No clouds which could make their way across the sky and carry the hope of a silver lining. No rustling whispers in the trees, which would carry the promise of change. No movement. Only stillness. Silence.
— 25.09.15
There’s a certain vanity involved in suffering, one would think: A sense of Weltschmerz; a noble martyrdom; a certain self-pity that elevates you above the suffering of others, making yours seem more noble, more aesthetic, treading on the sacred grounds of art. The suffering of poets and painters, it would seem, must have been a different one than that of the common people: A sublime of suffering, a divinity in desperation. But this is a shallow delusion, really.
There is no nobility in grief: it is devastating, all-consuming. It is a radical despot, choking every last flickering ember of hope until there is nothing left but cold, dead ashes. It is an inexorable, merciless storm which sucks out the breath and lifeblood of all living things and leaves nothing behind but a drained, barren wasteland.
In grief, much like in death, we are equal.