After the death of my mother I noticed that I didn’t have a repertoire of off-the-shelf feelings. Sometimes I was sad, but mostly I was happy in a way unconnected to her going. Sometimes I was forgetful. When I poured her ashes off an old cast-iron bridge into the river she had lived on all her life, it seemed an intimate and friendly act, and I fe

When I talk about enjoying the void, I’m aware that this might sound like a kind of suicidal, or life-denying impulse. It’s the opposite, though. It’s not that I don’t want more life, or that I act without concern for my physical safety. I really like life and the body I happen to live in. It’s just that I experience it as gratuitous, something pre

Grief is a frightening condition, and at its extreme is like the sun: impossible to look at directly.

Sometimes, silence in the face of trauma is useful. It allows time for those grieving to mourn, to organize, for a feeling to lose its haze and ossify, and to try to give words to what has been done unto us. And if not words, then sound, music, rhythm, an ah, a gasp, a hum, a groan, spillage, deluge. But a continued silence, this might consume us.

Far too many creative people have been taught to distrust pleasure and to put their faith in struggle alone. Too many artists still believe that anguish is the only truly authentic emotional experience. They could have picked up this dark idea anywhere; it’s a commonly held belief here in the Western world, what with our weighty emotional heritage