I took the stars from my eyes and then I made a map

I had this song stuck in my head all weekend and I was struggling to put into words what I was so caught by. Writing this blog post about Kristeva’s Black Sun left me with a much clearer sense of what I’ve been circling around without being able to articulate it. What she’s describing is a shattering loss. A total collapse of meaning.

The stars, the moon
They have all been blown out
You've left me in the dark
No dawn, no day
I'm always in this twilight
In the shadow of your heart

There is a loss of the Other, without whom “I was in the darkness so darkness I became”. There is an incorporation of the loss in which she is “always in this twilight in the shadow of your heart”. Through the creative force of signification she maps out her exit from the darkness, acknowledging that when she leaves she will always be marked from the experience: she could find her way back.

I took the stars from my eyes and then I made a map
And knew that somehow I could find my way back
Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too
So I stayed in the darkness with you

But then she hears the Other’s heart beating. They too have become the darkness. The map is forsaken. The exit is abandoned. Instead she prepares to make her home there together. It’s a beautiful sentiment. Or is it? After writing that Kristeva post it feels more like a refusal of mourning masquerading as an act of cosmic solidarity. It’s a peculiarly self-deceptive form of melancholia in which going deeper into the loss feels like it’s getting closer to recovering the lost object.

The fantasy that there is some deeper form of togetherness latent within the traumatic reality of the unravelling. At what point would the imagined togetherness actually arrive? Unless there’s a point where the bottom is reached, where the bedrock of cosmic solidarity is actually located, this is ultimately an act of tragic self-deception. It is one in which refusing to abandon the Other doesn’t give them what it aspires to while also abandoning the self. It made me think back to this passage from Nick Cave in Faith, Hope and Carnage:

But what I want to say is this: this will happen to everybody at some point – a deconstruction of the known self. It may not necessarily be a death, but there will be some kind of devastation. We see it happen to people all the time: a marriage breakdown, or a transgression that has a devastating effect on a person’s life, or health issues, or a betrayal, or a public shaming, or a separation where someone loses their kids, or whatever it is. And it shatters them completely, into a million pieces, and it seems like there is no coming back. It’s over. But in time they put themselves together piece by piece. And the thing is, when they do that, they often find that they are a different person, a changed, more complete, more realised, more clearly drawn person. I think that’s what it is to live, really – to die in a way and to be reborn. And sometimes it can happen many times over, that complex reordering of ourselves.

The choice to stay in the darkness is an embrace of that shattering. But it’s simultaneously a refusal of the piecing together, the healing, the rebirth which follows the shattering. It’s a refusal of life masquerading as an embrace of life.