The Racket #16 : GRIEF
Poster by Eli Myers
02.18.2018 - ADOBE BOOKS - 7PM
The grief we know.
As hopeful as we've been here at The Racket that 2018 would leave the tatters of 2017 fluttering in the wind - it hasn't been a great year. It's only been 51 days and the upheaval and transition and heartbreak in the world and in our lives has been just a little too much.
Our upcoming, 16th edition of The Racket is on the theme of GRIEF. We chose it for specific reasons, but they weren't our reasons, it wasn't our grief we were seeking to address. But now in these flickering first moments of 2018, we are in the midst of grieving, in the thrall of heavy emotions that need sorting and processing and the application of other vaguely bureaucratic terms to suss out meaning and a path moving forward.
To do so though, we've been trying to put shape to our grief, to carve it out of the foundation of our emotional foundation so we can analyze it, break it down to it's basic parts and discover what makes it tick.
But here's the thing: every time we look our grief is a new shape, a different form, an unfamiliar combination of dark blues and smoky grays. It is sleepless nights or endless, oppressive naps. It's sharp pains or crippling numbness. Spikes of manic, happiness that curl like a wave offering a glimpse of what we're missing before pitching us back down into the cold, hard earth. Quiet followed by anger, anger followed by sadness, sadness always pooling at the bottom. Our grief shifts into the shadows, slips between our fingers, finds new nooks and crannies to dig itself into.
And without shape, how do we move past? Without a path, how do we find our way back?
We don't have that answer and we can't imagine when we might.
All we can do is offer ourselves up to the time stream and hope the constant, inevitable forward progress of life will someday drag us up on a shore with a view a little less grim than where we're currently standing.
