Richard Siken and the Vocabulary of Loss

A few years ago, as they are wont to do, a member of the Internet asked Richard Siken, poet, a question. Paraphrased, it was: “Why can I only write when I’m sad?” Siken’s response: 

“The vocabulary of loss is the dictionary. If you can point to it, you don’t need a word for it. You only need a word for it when it’s no longer there.” 

The tweet racked up over three thousand likes, and doubtless countless screenshots on other platforms. Clearly, Siken had struck a chord. Is it true, then, that the reason we turn to words, to writing in particular, is that we struggle to articulate the feeling of loss? Could it be literature is just a gigantic anthology of grief, an endless description of absence? 

Not necessarily. Anyone who has read a good handful of the classics knows they circle around this dreaded, dreadful concept of missingness. They use different mediums, from numbers to verses to free indirect discourse, but it’s clear, at the very least, the narratives of the works of art that stick around poke and prod at our most tender spots. They look loss, death, and grief in their faces, grappling with them as only humans can.

“Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath
of great Achilles, son of Peleus,
which caused the Greeks immeasurable pain…”

The Iliad, translated by Emily Wilson

The Iliad is one of the oldest works of narrative art we have. And it starts at its own end, encapsulating in its first line the narrative arc of one of its main characters, Achilles. In Emily Wilsons’ excellent introduction, she posits that The Iliad is simply an exercise in grief and a lesson in how we process loss. We don’t fight on horseback anymore, and the gods no longer walk among us. But when Patroclus dies, when he is no longer in the world, and Achilles is filled instead with a rage so deep he clogs a river full of bodies, we know what it is to lose someone dear to us. And we understand, also, this kind of grief is unsustainable, will tear us apart from the inside out and make a monster of us. It is a lesson, and a story, Wilson says, we must learn again and again. It’s important that The Iliad was passed on orally, told over and over, the traces of grief and the cautionary tale revisited, until Patroclus’ absence is a pain that feels familiar. 

Shakespeare is another, a writer with an intuitive grasp of how his words would sound onstage. In his plays, when confronted with the dizzying finality of grief—a father losing his daughter, a man with no family anymore—characters break the comforting march of verse by cutting off their sentences a few syllables too early, jerking the audience into an unexpected beat of silence. In Hamlet, when Gertrude tells him that his sister drowned, Laertes responds with “Drowned? O, where?” Before Gertrude speaks again, there are seven beats of nothing. Before the next line starts, visible even on the page, a place where something should be. But is not. An audience holds its breath, for a moment wishing to hear a child’s cry, a young woman’s laugh. But there is only silence. They are forced, in this crowd of people saying nothing, to reckon with the spaces where people should be, and why they are not. In a play all about speaking and shouting at the void, the audience are invited to look into it and perhaps understand a small sliver of what that loss might feel like, and how it goes on and on. 

One of Virginia Woolf’s earlier novels is Jacob’s Room. It follows Jacob, the main character, throughout his life, as he attends school, explores the world, and walks around London. What’s curious about this novel is we don’t get to see inside his head. Instead, we watch him pass through the women in his life; from his mother to his paramours to the women who see him through shop windows. Aside from a silent period during university, we very nearly get a whole picture of Jacob. We see him grow up. Then, the final scene of the novel is just Jacob’s room. His shoes are where he left them, the pictures are on the wall. But Jacob is not there. Suddenly, the book becomes a different thing entirely. We will never know Jacob. We can’t ever see inside his head. All we have is the places he left, the shape he held in the world, and the connections however brief, that he made. Just his room, without him in it. The reader is confronted with Jacob’s sudden disappearance from the pages and from his own life; a departure that is all the more devastating because we never got to know him—and now never will. 

A Prayer for Owen Meany turns out to be just that: a prayer. It’s a large book, but it doesn’t lose sight of what it is—a portrait of one Owen Meany: loud, strange, abrasive, and ostensibly sent from God to do good on Earth. The book is really hundreds of pages of what it feels like to love somebody and be very fond of them; reading it is like gaining a new childhood friend. In its final pages, the book rushes you breathlessly to a conclusion that hits you right where it hurts, and a last line that brings home the endlessness of grief, and the pain of remembering an entire life that now, nobody else does. 

Beloved by Toni Morrison is a book made up of absence, and the rage and bitterness that might fill up its empty spaces. It asks if the fierceness and intensity of a loss, the completeness of a feeling of grief, might itself become a presence. And it also asks if it’s possible that turning to that presence, that manifestation of a loss so deep it reverberates, a loss so large it fills up a house and eats into everything, can in some ways resolve it. If we make our inability to understand permanent absence a character itself, if we talk to it the way we would talk to a small child we love very much, can we construct a way to continue living, to continue weathering and understanding losses so great they nearly stop us from functioning? 

It might be as easy to say the dictionary is a compendium of loss as to say that literature is a list of questions, yelled out into the void, asking the universe over and over the things we know we may never get an answer to: 

If I tell this story enough, if I trace the outlines of where you were enough times and with enough detail, if I pour every moment we had together into this document, will it be enough? Is tracing the exact outline of the hole you left in the world the same thing as having a part of you in it? Is there any amount of words that will bring you back? 

Words can be used to describe a presence instead of an absence. But we have chosen, as humans, to add an even more impossible goal: to anthologize the concept of nothing; to put the presence of absence into our great narrative. We have chosen to dedicate our words and our writing and our great works to those who have left us, and to struggling to explain to ourselves and each other the impossible, enormous gap that they have left in our lives. It’s quite a large thing to ask of language. We may never get there. But we will have tried. And when it comes to absence, grief, and loss, the attempt is all we have.