The Aesthetics and Phenomenology of Grief: Two Meditations

Abstract

These two short personal essays were written in response to anticipating the death of my mother in 2004. Living Art is written from New York City while working on my dissertation and Clipping Hair is written from Iowa on a short visit in the year and a half before her death. Juxtaposed together, the differing sensations of anticipatory grief, looking at Francis Bacon’s artwork, paintings of distorted bodies, and the fragile sensing dying body, flow into and overlap one another. In retrospect, it is possible to see that each presents a different aesthetic—one of lush grieving and another of a more stark, contained angst. Yet, both meditations center on bodies and the sensations and emotions that figure in grief and illness. They may be read vertically, one at a time, in fragments horizontally, or simultaneously.