burrow_owl said:
I totally agree that the grieving ought to be given a kind of ethical control; you're right that we ought to defer to them within the realm of the ethical*. However, that's not what they're asking for; they're asking for semantic control. They want to control the meaning of the event itself - while understandable, it seems hubristic to me. At a minimum, it's a project reminiscent of Tantalus - since meaning is always-already decentered and fractured, there is no semantic center from which the grieving may control the semiotic effects of the event. If I throw a rock in a pond, the rock vanishes and the ripples move outward - their project is equivalent to diving in, grabbing the rock, and then demanding! that the ripples obey their command.
*Your conception of the ethical really, really reminds one of Emmanuel Levinas. You two sound like peas in a pod.
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Point me to Levinas, please.
I think that control, the choice of sought control, is always likely to be post traumatic. I wonder if what these loss survivors wish to do is not control per se, though that remains possible for some: but rather, to prevent the world from simply moving on, with insufficient remembrance, with insufficient contrition for culpability; where the personal corrolary of this for the loss survivor, is not yet having taken the event of loss to their God.
Here the media and opportunistic-politics domination of our social process, its essential unGodliness in not cleaving to absolute integrity: becomes superimposed on the grief process of the loss survivor; as they seek that assuagement of loss that can only occur in God, in return to the grounds of who you eternally are.
Going on getting on, just business as usual, in and as unGodly social process: by definition and experiential evidence, is not to be with God; the survivor can be forced, being unable to cleave to God alone, to forcibly disrupt the collective process, in a ferally driven approach to God.
Such terrorism is, or can be, and ferally, God seeking. These are the feral pragmatics of it: holding even in the absence of any God perspective. Closure in such absolutely incomprehensible loss, can only occur in returning to the whole from whence we and our experience and our meaning, come.
If we embrace those who do these things: if we are patient as they seek this God, this whole; then they cry.
All these people seek, in all probability, and despite any PTSD reactions to the contrary, are tears. Tears that start, and never stop: that become, in their persons and biographies; a stream of living water that heals, and gives eternal measure to their loss.
Our responsibilities, to those who have lost what we still have, are unlimited. Their loss begins as that of a loved one, and extends to a loss of one they might and should have loved, but may never have known.
We have a duty to return God to those who grieve, and those who grieve to God. We cannot deny them moments of grief-centrism.