{"id":60838,"date":"2025-02-05T06:47:41","date_gmt":"2025-02-05T14:47:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=60838"},"modified":"2025-02-05T06:49:10","modified_gmt":"2025-02-05T14:49:10","slug":"thoughts-on-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=60838","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on Change."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A friend sent me an essay from the New Yorker<\/em> this week – I somehow managed to avoid subscribing to the magazine for all of my decades on American shores. Lessons for the End of the World<\/em> is a moving, lyrical piece by poet and MacArthur fellow Hanif Abdurraqib<\/a><\/em>. It braids together strands of reactions to loss, material and immaterial. I read it as a flock of robins descended on the Hawthorne tree in front of my window, in search for the last remaining berries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I agreed with the author’s acknowledgement that the loss of personally meaningful, irreplaceable objects requires psychological adjustment, regardless of the ways things get lost, accidentally dropped at an airport, or violently destroyed by all-consuming fires. The essay embeds his reactions within a tapestry of reminders about women’s writings on trauma and loss, Nikki Giovanni and Octavia E. Butler among them. Butler’s Parabel of the Sower<\/em> is currently making a come-back in public discourse, its seemingly prescient descriptions of a society destroyed by fiery climate catastrophe and held in the thralls of authoritarian violence a detailed narrative, all too fittingly depicting this moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As I wrote 2 years ago (see below,) many of her novels manage to make the grief attached to loss, particularly traumatic loss, astoundingly explicit. We mourn what is taken from us, often irreplaceably so, whether destroyed heirlooms, or body parts, no longer being physically whole. Simultaneously, though, if more implicitly, she points us to the psychological opportunities attached to new beginnings. Loss raises awareness of our ability to make choices, how to deal with the loss itself, how to move forward both as individuals and with regard to the structures that surround and constrain us. Living through existentially hard times can produce new ways of thinking, acting and re-acting, a shift in values that could lead to favor mutual aid and empathy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Octavia E. Butler, Beacon.<\/a><\/blockquote>