Encountering the Secular: Philosophical Endeavors in Religion and Culture

3. Mourning

3 MOURNING It is possible we have no idea what secular grief is; what grief unsustained by an apparently coherent symbolic system would feel like. —adam phillips, promises, promises Silence may only be the tying of the tongue, not the relinquishing of words, but gagging on them. True silence is the untying of the tongue, letting its words go. —stanley cavell, the senses of walden What more is there to say? Is there anything left that is unsaid? Time has passed now. Have we not said all there is to say about the events that have come to be known simply as “September 11”? The most obvious (and perhaps the most responsible) answer is: Of course not. A tragedy of this magnitude is inexhaustible in our minds. It constantly produces thought, emotion, and concern . How could we not continue talking about September 11? Could we allow ourselves to stop thinking about it? Is there not some obligation to pursue insight, if not understanding, in the face of horror? Yes, but . . . there is the lingering suspicion, the disturbing thought, that maybe we have said it all, or at the very least, that we are repeating ourselves. All of the stories, the condolences, the expressions of shock, anger, and sadness—each individually important—are bleeding together into an undifferentiated sentiment that is unbearably light. Such a situation is not exactly a moral failure—the inability to speak properly about a tragedy. It is due, in part, to the mediated culture that we (those who find ourselves in America) live. Through the “endless nightmare feedback loop of jumbo jet, fire bomb, and towers falling down,”1 the 48 E N C O U NTE R I N G TH E S E C U L A R patriotic propaganda put forth by our leaders (not to mention the unjustified conflict in Iraq), and the kitschy cultural products displayed to convince us that we really are a united nation under the watchful eye of a benevolent god, we have assimilated into ordinariness an event that should be inassimilable. From Joan Didion: As if overnight, the irreconcilable event had been made manageable, reduced to the sentimental, to protective talismans , totems, garlands or garlic, repeated pieties that would come to seem in some ways as destructive as the event itself.2 Thomas de Zengotita expresses similar thoughts: How often did you hear, how often did you say, “Since the events of 9/11”? A new idiom had been deposited in the language , approaching the same plane of habituality as “by the way” or “on the other hand.” And in the process we got past it after all. Six months or so was all it took. The holidays came and went, and—if you were not personally stricken by the terror of September—chances are you got over it. You moved on.3 I do not intend to demean those who have not moved on, those who lost loved ones in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, those who on that terrible Tuesday found themselves covered in ash. On the contrary, I wish to respectfully emulate those people who just can’t get over it. Which brings me to the question: What is it that the rest of us have been mourning through the rerun simulacra of tragedy? Certainly the strangers who died. No one should make light of the straightforward and unequivocal loss of so many lives. I would liketomaketheawkwardsuggestion,however,thatwealsomourn the event itself. The event has been absorbed into its own representations , its impact muted into a news item so familiar it seems familial. Our ability to suffer the event has been lost. In other 49 M O U R N I N G words, we mourn for not mourning. This inability to mourn, it seems to me, stems from the language we so frequently use to talk about September 11. For one of the things that seems to characterize such language is its thin excess. We cannot stop talking about this tragedy, but what we say is so often banal. There seems to me no genuine loss of language (even when a news anchor claims to be at a loss for words). Without the loss of language, I would think, there is no mourning. What I mean by this is that for our mourning to reach a level of intensity and value that goes beyond the merely reactionary, our words...