Loss makes the body sad. When old forms have disintegrated we lick our wounds, nostalgic for the past. Leaning back to what once was and will be never more, the melan-choly twang of a blues guitar ®lls the night air; sitting with the fragments of what was once a life, the animator weeps. Old memories return of times when the world was familiar and intact, regressive desires to reconstitute what was lost mix with the awareness of its impossibility. The bell tolls ± for us. Loneliness is the order of the day, being separate from what once was whole. Matter has the blues. The country singer's ballad tells us that she took his dog, she took his home, and she drove off in his pickup truck. In blue we ®nd the angel under whose aspect our suffering becomes bearable. When suddenly it dawns on us that our acute most private loss connects us to the nature of existence ± which in its constant motion is all about loss, always ± our personal suffering has found its angel, its timeless aspect, which the alchemist called the caelum, the heaven in all things. And like the heavens it is blue.
— Robert Bosnak
Bosnak is pointing at something the consolation industry works very hard to prevent you from finding: that the loss does not need to be repaired. The blues does not transcend suffering — it does not promise that the dog comes back, the home is restored, the pickup returns — it finds the dimension in which the suffering has always been happening, the dimension the alchemists called *caelum*, not heaven as reward but heaven as the timeless register already present inside earthly matter.
The ratio of desire runs hard in grief. What the soul wants is reconstitution — *de-sidera*, the volatilized thing returned from wherever it went. Regressive desire, Bosnak calls it plainly, mixing with the awareness of its own impossibility. That awareness is not the problem to be solved. It is the opening. When private loss finds its connection to the nature of existence — which is, as he says without apology, *all about loss, always* — the suffering does not dissolve. It becomes bearable in the way that blue is bearable: by belonging to something that was never only yours to carry.
The angel is not rescue. It is the timeless aspect that the personal loss has always, without your knowledge, been an instance of.
Robert Bosnak·Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel·2007