“After Catastrophic Loss: Finding What Is No Longer There”
Alongside the poet Elizabeth Gray, the second colloquium in the FLPI series will explore the unique issues which catastrophic loss presents, through cross-disciplinary engagement with Gray’s 2020 work, Salient, and its meditations on loss and permanence.
Our twenty-first century world is no stranger to catastrophic loss, whether it results from large-scale violence, wildfires, a tsunami, a terrorist bombing, or an unchecked global pandemic. In these instances, the familiar has been obliterated or altered beyond recognition; before is now unavailable; the assumptions, landmarks, and frameworks by which we oriented our lives are unsettled, or have even disappeared. The desperate struggle to restore a sense of stability amidst shock and upheaval is common, as is the desire to avert or prevent such disasters in the future.
In the early part of the twentieth century, the devastating loss of life during World War I radically upset perceptions of the present and the future. Millions of young men went to war; tragic numbers died on, or vanished into, the battlefields. Many came home broken in mind and body. The number of dead overwhelmed traditional processes and rituals of mourning. New ways of remembrance and commemoration had to be found. Families tried to access the spirit world, desperate to connect with their lost one.
In Salient, poet Elizabeth Gray wrestles with what it means to try to find what is no longer there. In this poetic sequence, an account of her efforts to find ‘The Missing’ of a specific time and place––the Ypres Salient in Belgian Flanders in October and November 1917 and the soldiers who vanished there, Gray insists that before we can think about moving forward after catastrophic loss toward healing and protection, we need to access the catastrophe itself. Only then are we able to get our bearings in an altered and unrecognizable landscape. She asks, “By what landmarks (literal, figurative, spiritual) might we orient ourselves? Where is North?”