However, one of the things I remembered of this piece was the note from the composer about writing it during the final days of his mother’s illness and the ways in which large swaths of the requiem mass didn’t fit the emotions he was going through or wanted to nurture through the process of grief. Dwale’s death hit me particularly hard not just because we were friends, but because the last thing he said to me one-on-one spoke of a low sense of self-worth on its part. It felt that it couldn’t understand why I was so supportive of it or what it did to deserve that support. The process of grieving while trying to process a last conversation like that turned an already deeply introspective act up to eleven. It wasn’t a question of what I could have said differently in that conversation, as I think I handled it fairly well, but more a question of how I honor this person who meant a lot to me in the face of its death.
-Add in the fact of my dog’s sudden passing in mid December and the whole last two years, and death and grief have been on my mind a lot. As I process so much through writing, I always try to be deliberate about tackling my emotions. This approach of acknowledging death while at the same time very deliberately doing so through the lens of growth (in Lauridsen’s case, the rest and hope in spirituality) is something that I wanted to look into. With my essay this semester, I want to, yes, process my grief, but also to use it as a stepping-stone to becoming something better. That could be something as trite as becoming a better writer, but I also want to come out of this project as a different person, hopefully someone better..
+Add in the fact of my dog’s sudden passing in mid December and the whole last two years, and death and grief have been on my mind a lot. As I process so much through writing, I always try to be deliberate about tackling my emotions. This approach of acknowledging death while at the same time very deliberately doing so through the lens of growth (in Lauridsen’s case, the rest and hope in spirituality) is something that I wanted to look into. With my essay this semester, I want to, yes, process my grief, but also to use it as a stepping-stone to becoming something better. That could be something as trite as becoming a better writer, but I also want to come out of this project as a different person, hopefully someone better.
Beyond the more intellectual take on this piece, one thing that I found useful about it was the shape of each of the movements and of the piece as a whole. As I plan on tackling the essay through the framing device of the four seasons, I also need to consider that shape-made-of-shapes in order to make for a more cohesive end product. There will be structural similarities between each of the sections of the essay — the poem and related works to dissect as well as my related thoughts in footnotes — which will lead to those inner arcs. It would be vanishingly easy to write four essays about related topics, but much more compelling to write a four-part essay that has an arc of its own.
In particular, on listening to “Lux” with a more critical ear, I kept hearing various callbacks to the melody introduced right off the bat in the first movement, and finding a way to tie everything together at the end is something I’m already considering.