How Does

“It Is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there… if I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who am ‘I’ without you? When we lose some of these by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ’I’ have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost ‘in’ you… is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related … Our cultural frames for thinking the human set limits on the kinds of losses we can avow as loss. After all, if someone is lost, and that person is not someone, then what and where is the loss, and how does mourning take place?”

"What grief displays, in contrast, is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves ads autonomous and in control… My narrative falters, as it must. 

Let’s face it, we’re undone by each other, and if we’re not, we’re missing something…

This seems so clearly the case with grief, but it can only be so because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. One may want to, or manage to for a while, but despite one’s best efforts, on is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, the the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel."

“When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who ‘am’ I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost ‘in’ you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationship that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related.”