Whenever I visit the house of my grandfather, who now lives in a single room of a nursing home, I drop my stuff in the entryway and go straight to the basement, waving a rolled-up newspaper like a wand to clear a path through the cobwebs.
Love this. It has a nice, spooky feeling. Here is my contribution to the spirit of the essay (although it's not a neologism and not Greek, it is amusing!): Kummerspeck: The weight we gain from emotional overeating. Literally: Grief bacon.
In the void. Christian you reach into the basement and kenopsis rises from the depths of despair. A world tunnel discovered is eviscerated by explosions that catapult lives to result in anemoria future times never known by world children yet to see a life without gashes, amputees. I am empty. What word explains later today? A few minutes away. In seconds the basement collapsed. Are we lucky to survive. To be found under a grandfather’s trunk of memories that are useless trying to breathe concrete dust. What word?
This reminds me of my first-year linguistics course at uni and structuralism: relationships between words can be "in presentia" (collocations, word 1 + word 2), or "in absentia" - when you replace one word with another, which used to be in a strong phrase. It's often used by advertisers. The best scripted T-shirt I've ever seen (that I remember too!) was "Just did it!" playing on Nike's "Just do it". "Just did it" is good, but it starts shining only through the absent word. :)
Immediately thought of a B/W photo of my grandparents farm where my mom grew up. My favorite place to go as a kid. A barn, chickens and cows, Grandma’s cooking. Now it is gone, a victim of oil & mineral development, everything scraped away by bulldozers and derricks. Now I have a new word for this hollowness.
Beautiful. Thank you for bringing this word to me. My home city of Kolkata is full of mansions that evoke the same sentiment, sometimes in their utter abandonment, but maybe sometimes also in their degraded afterlife. It isn't kenopsia then, but something else, I guess.
I've been trying to name this since I was a little girl. The Monday after the weekend festival, the banal taking back its hold... the transparent silhouettes superimposed. Thank you.
Love this. It has a nice, spooky feeling. Here is my contribution to the spirit of the essay (although it's not a neologism and not Greek, it is amusing!): Kummerspeck: The weight we gain from emotional overeating. Literally: Grief bacon.
I could go for some grief bacon
Lol did not know this was a thing. 100% on board with it.
First piece I've read by you. Excellent, Christian.
Thanks, Mike, glad you enjoyed it!
In the void. Christian you reach into the basement and kenopsis rises from the depths of despair. A world tunnel discovered is eviscerated by explosions that catapult lives to result in anemoria future times never known by world children yet to see a life without gashes, amputees. I am empty. What word explains later today? A few minutes away. In seconds the basement collapsed. Are we lucky to survive. To be found under a grandfather’s trunk of memories that are useless trying to breathe concrete dust. What word?
This reminds me of my first-year linguistics course at uni and structuralism: relationships between words can be "in presentia" (collocations, word 1 + word 2), or "in absentia" - when you replace one word with another, which used to be in a strong phrase. It's often used by advertisers. The best scripted T-shirt I've ever seen (that I remember too!) was "Just did it!" playing on Nike's "Just do it". "Just did it" is good, but it starts shining only through the absent word. :)
Chernobyl
Completely absorbed by this, thank you. Incredibly relatable and relevant to my own work.
Immediately thought of a B/W photo of my grandparents farm where my mom grew up. My favorite place to go as a kid. A barn, chickens and cows, Grandma’s cooking. Now it is gone, a victim of oil & mineral development, everything scraped away by bulldozers and derricks. Now I have a new word for this hollowness.
Thanks for sharing, Tim. It's never easy when a place filled with memories no longer exists.
Really enjoyed reading this piece.
Thanks, Maureen!
Hey, whattya know: https://open.substack.com/pub/jenn5c3s4/p/kenopsia?r=1fslzq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thanks for sharing, Jenn. I enjoyed reading your own connection to and interpretation of kenopsia.
Is the top picture with the piano from the book the Ruins of Detroit?
I actually found that photo in the book ‘Lost Pianos of Siberia’
´Lost pianos' is the best book we've read this year!
It’s excellent isn’t it! You’d love Sophy Robert’s podcast too, called “Gone to Timbuktu.”
Will check that out. Thanks!
Thanks. I’ll have to look it up. Love this post. The first post I wrote for Huffington Post was about the book the Ruins of Detroit.
Beautiful. Thank you for bringing this word to me. My home city of Kolkata is full of mansions that evoke the same sentiment, sometimes in their utter abandonment, but maybe sometimes also in their degraded afterlife. It isn't kenopsia then, but something else, I guess.
Glad you found it useful, Nishant. I just did a Google search of abandoned mansions in Kolkata. Had no idea it was such a widespread phenomenon.
Thank you for sharing this word. Appreciate the writing and glad to be here.
I've been trying to name this since I was a little girl. The Monday after the weekend festival, the banal taking back its hold... the transparent silhouettes superimposed. Thank you.