How I Spent My 1987 Summer Vacation: The End

This is the final post in a unified series of seven in which I use an autobiographical incident to explore some connections between trauma, memory, human community, and social-political institutions in the broadest sense.  The incident at issue is my breaking of one of my legs when I was still a young child, then reliving the experience as an adult, years later, triggered by the chance coalescence of various circumstances at that time.

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Trauma changes nothing, it changes everything.

It is only because trauma changes nothing, that it can change everything.

“From death, from the fear of death . . . ”:  That is how Franz Rosenzweig begins his masterpiece, The Star of Redemption, first published in 1920 in German.  Here he how he ends it:  “. . . into life.”  There is a very important sense—perhaps it is even the most important, final sense—in which the entire book should be read as one long sentence with that beginning and that ending.  In the more than 400 pages that intervene between those opening words and those closing ones, Rosenzweig struggles valiantly to articulate his vision of that very transition–the one from death, or more precisely from the fear of death, into life—for his readers, in a loving effort to give guidance to those same readers as they undergo the same transition themselves, undergo it precisely by reading the book itself.

By the end of the book, even for the most diligent, attentive, sympathetic, understanding reader—the “perfect” reader, if you will—in one sense, the very most important, final sense, in fact, nothing has changed.  All the facts of that perfect reader’s life, and of that reader’s death, remain the same, unchanged.  That the perfect reader was born, and born whenever, wherever, to whomever, and to be whoever that reader was in fact born as, and born to be—none of that is changed one bit by all that reader’s reading.  None of the facts of birth of the reader are altered even to the slightest degree.  None of the background, including genetic, or circumstances of the reader’s birth, down to the tiniest, most trivial, inconsequential details, are changed in any way whatsoever by the transition Rosenzweig has led the reader through.  The same thing goes for all the facts, background, and circumstances of the reader’s death, in all the certain uncertainty of just when and where and how death may actually come to the reader, as it inevitably will.  They, too, stay the absolutely the same.

Thus, neither anything about the reader’s life, nor anything about the reader’s death has changed at all from going through the transition Rosenzweig articulates for the reader.  In fact, not one single thing about anything–or any range of things, no matter how wide the range, all the way out to infinity itself—has been   altered in any way whatsoever.  Absolutely nothing has changed.  And yet:

Everything has changed.  The whole way the reader sees everything, or sees anything at all, has changed.  Forever after, absolutely everything has absolutely changed.

Trauma is the transition from death, or, rather, from the fear of death, into life.

As I said at the start of this post:  Trauma changes nothing, it changes everything.

Before my 1987 summer vacation I was a professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Denver.  After my 1987 summer vacation I was a professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Denver.  I still am.  Nothing has changed.

Before that vacation, I had a wife, and we had two children.  After it, I had a wife, and we had two children.  I still do, and we still do.  Nothing has changed.

A lot of things have changed for me between 1987 and now, of course.  I’ve been promoted, and am set to retire in a year.  Instead of being married to my wife for seventeen years, I’ve now been married to her for what will be forty-two years come vacation time this summer.  Our children have both grown up and moved away, starting families of their own with their own spouses.  We’ve moved from one house in one town in northern Colorado to another house in another town in northern Colorado.  Both the current house and the current town are much bigger than the previous house and town.  We make more money, and pay more taxes, at least by absolute dollar-amount.  Both of my parents were alive in 1987, but both are dead now, along with my father-in-law, who was also still alive in 1987.  I drive a different car than I drove then, wear hearing-aids now that I didn’t need then, have been to a lot of different places I had not yet ever been by 1987, have read a lot of books I hadn’t read by then, eaten a lot more food than I’d eaten by then, and so on, and so on, and so on, for as long as I might choose to keep going on, which I don’t.

I neither know nor care to know which of such matters if any–some trivial, some not so trivial, and some anything but trivial, and filled to overflowing with significance (at least to me: for example, the death of two parents whom I loved, and still do)–of all those countless things that have happened since, would, could, or might have been different, had I not spent my 1987 summer vacation the way I did in fact spend it.  That, indeed, they would have been different in at least some ways, in all the various registers of triviality and consequentiality, and not in others—of that, I have no doubt.  But just how they would have differed, in just what ways, I neither know nor care to know.  Nor can I imagine how knowing such matters could possibly ever matter to me, such that I might ever come to find such knowledge at all worth having or caring to have.

What was itself born in the first breaking of my leg in 1949, then finally took its place fully (filling that place over-full, to full overflow) thirty-eight years later, in 1987, didn’t change anything for me.  It changed everything.  Suddenly, I found myself living in a new day—or, more exactly, I found myself living in a new way in the same old day.  In that new way of living unto the day, that same old day never grew old, but stayed ever new.  Since then, I keep awakening again and again morning after morning to the same old day, day after day after day after day, like Bill Murray caught in Groundhog’s Day.  That, too, remains unchanged from how I awakened again and again day after day before my summer vacation of 1987.  It’s still that same old day again today, as I write this, on May 12, 2012, the day before Mother’s Day, which this year happens to coincide, as it often enough does (so that too is the same old same old), with my wife’s birthday (after all, when nothing changes, nothing changes).

It just keeps on being the same old day I wake up to, the same day I’ve been reliving over and over and over again all the days of my life—the time of which I know, by the way, will eventually run out, just as the time of the hourglass that always began the old TV soap-opera The Days of Our Lives eventually did, so that the network finally pulled the plug on that so long running daily series.  The day never changes.  But what did change for me, back in 1987, was how I lived to that day, and in it.  Suddenly, one day in the summer of 1987, I woke up yet again to find myself living yet again the same old day I’d already been living over and over every day until then, as though I were trapped in it as in a nightmare, or in a broad comedy, I couldn’t tell which.  But all of a sudden that same old day was an altogether different, brand new one, as it keeps on being every new morning since then, when I awake to it.  As Heraclitus said of the world, each morning my day—the self-same, single day of my entire repetitious life—is born again anew, for the very first time:  A brand new day!

Thus, I awoke on that morning back in the summer of 1987 to find myself waking differently to the very same day I’d awakened to all the days of my life until then, and would continue to wake to every day thereafter, as I will continue to do till all the days of my life at last run out.  What’s more, just as I found myself waking up differently but still to the same old day, so did I find myself waking up differently with all the same old mannerisms, gestures, and behaviors I’d developed over all my life till then, and woken up for countless days before that day.  All of those, too, all the things I did habitually, without even needing to think about them, were just the same as they’d always been.  But I found that I inhabited all those habits differently.  I still spoke the same way, with the same verbal intonations, patterns, and other idiosyncrasies, still accompanied by the same characteristic gestures.  Yet they all just no longer carried the same emotional, symbolic charge, in effect, that had invested them with significance for me up until then.  I was “stuck” with them still, in the sense that they were the only tunes I was able to play–the only tunes in my repertoire, as it were, of behaviors.  Yet they no longer had the same significance, the same “meaning,” with which I had always, without even being aware of it, vested in them.  I had lost all my “investment” in them, in that sense.  Or, to put the same thing from the other side:  Those behaviors themselves had lost all their power to infest me with themselves, taking up residence in me like a virus.    They had been stripped of all their prior power, and had become dis-empowered.  All their charge had been discharged.

I still played all the same old tunes.  What else could I do?  They were the only ones I knew.

Since then, of course, I’ve learned some new ones.  But that took time, and was a very gradual process.  And it really didn’t matter that much, one way or the other.  The old tunes were still perfectly good for playing, but now I had finally learned how to play them well, to fill them with my newfound “musicality,” so to speak.  What mattered, I found, was really not which tunes I played, but how I played whatever ones I did play.

Just so does it stand with all our institutions, and what trauma does with and to them:  Trauma changes nothing, because it changes everything.

“Love—and do what you will!”  Augustine famously—or, in some circles, infamously—said that.  One thing my 1987 summer vacation taught me what how to hear that sentence differently than I’d always heard it up till then..  I found to my surprise that it no longer sounded to my ears as a dangerous formulation that could all too easily degenerate into a rationalizing justification for wantonness, if not in one’s sexual behavior specifically, then in one’s ethics generally.  In one sense, I spent my 1987 summer vacation learning that, if I just placed the emphasis in Augustine’s sentence differently than I’d been accustomed to placing it, that very same sentence delivered to me some crucially important advice, along with direction along the way of heeding that advice, to boot.  My new way of hearing it changed nothing in the advice itself, just in my hearing of it.  In that sense, nothing changed in what the sentence said.  It was still the same old sentence.  Nothing new.  My 1987 summer vacation taught me nothing on that score, any more than it did on any other.

So, in conclusion of this long, long-winded account (seven consecutive posts!), I guess, when you come right down to it, I have to say that I really spent my whole, long 1987 summer vacation doing nothing at all.

No wonder it has taken me so long to tell you about it!

Some sentences just take longer than others.   Some are even life sentences, “until death.”

How I Spent My 1987 Summer Vacation, penultimate post (with another tip of my hat to Bob Dylan)

This is the next to last of a total of seven in a series of posts using an autobiographical incident to explore some connections between trauma, memory, human community, and social-political institutions in the broadest sense.  The incident at issue is my breaking of one of my legs when I was still a young child, then reliving the experience as an adult, years later, triggered by the chance coalescence of various circumstances at that time.

I would like to dedicate today’s post above all to my old friend Larry, and add a tip of my hat as well to Bill, another old friend, and yet another to Mark, a more recent but no less valued one.

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A weather proverb from the part of the globe where I grew up and still live says that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb.  We who live in the climes in question can attest that sometimes the lamb in March only comes out at the very end of the month, when one has all but given up hope for its appearance.

If trauma were a March, it would be that kind of late-lambing one.

To mix my metaphors, if trauma were a play, it would come on as a tragic drama that at its very end surprised the audience by going out as a pleasant comedy.  Furthermore, the tragedy that trauma would play out as would, throughout most of its duration, fit the classic formula for a tragic drama:  The first part of the play would introduce the underlying conflict, followed by parts imparting the rising action of that conflict, finally culminating (like an act of coitus) in the climax (classically supposed to come four-fifths of the way through), and ending with a dénouement, in which the conflicts all get finally resolved (a sort of de-tumescence).  If trauma were a classic play, and were well done, it would be one that artfully presented itself as though it were a tragedy up until it suddenly and altogether unexpectedly surprised the audience, at the very point where that audience would have expected the climax of the tragedy, by showing itself really to have been a comedy all along.  If well done, such a play would defy the audience’s expectation—an expectation planted and nurtured by the play itself– of a tragic climax, the very sort of climax suggested by the lowering, doom-presaging, contorted, and tragic mask the play had been wearing up to that supposedly climactic point.  It would suddenly at that point remove its tragic mask to show, as the reality beneath, the face of a welcoming, happy, harmless, and benignly smiling clown beneath.

In doing that very thing, however, the playful, comic trickster of a play would not deny the audience its climax (as though it were a certain oft-derided kind of ‘tease,’ to allude, perhaps tastelessly, to some sexist vernacular of my youth).  No, the audience itself would most certainly have its climax; but it would be a climax of a no less unexpected sort than the sudden revelation of the comic nature of the play.  Defying the cathartic (perhaps also salacious) expectations of the audience it itself had fostered, the expectations of being afforded a welcome opportunity to indulge some of its more guilty, voyeuristic tastes, by witnessing the climax of another, the play would turn the tables on the audience in such a way that the latter would be surprised to find that it was the one who had been brought to climax.  Instead of enjoying the satisfaction of its voyeuristic expectations by watching some other person climax, the audience would suddenly find itself caught in the act of coming, all unexpectedly, to climax itself.  The watcher would have suddenly found himself become the watched, like a naughty boy caught spying through a key-hole on a couple in bed together, and the shock of that sudden recognition of being exposed triggering an unexpected climax, as though it were a premature ejaculation.

However, defying no less the very salaciousness definitive of all voyeuristic audience expectations, the play would have brought the audience off (to say it in a vulgar form) in a wholly un-salacious, even wholesome way (not a “sexual” climax at all, even second hand—and least in the vulgar understanding of such matters).  It would have brought the audience to an eruptive climax of . . . well, laughter (or its equivalent, if the laughter does not erupt aloud, as, perhaps, the most profound laughter never does).  That, after all, is what happens at the end of a good joke, well told:  the audience laughs.

Of course–as any practiced stand-up comic will readily confirm, I’m sure –there’s always the risk that some boorish, drunken lout sitting in the audience may ruin the whole thing by yelling out the punch-line before the joke has had time to be told to that line itself.  While interrupting a joke’s telling may be no tragic matter, at least in most cases, still, in all cases, it is no joke.

Nor is it only the jokester who is robbed by such an interruption.  He is not even the one most robbed by it.  Rather, the audience to which the joke is addressed—which, after all, must always come down to those sitting there listening to the telling of the joke who have not “heard it before”—are also robbed, and they most grievously.  It is they who are robbed, not just of appreciative applause, but of their climax.  Such an interruption of a joke is not even like the one typical in coitus interruptus, in its ordinary reference:  Interrupting a joke in such a boorish fashion doesn’t just change where the climax happens, so that it just happens elsewhere than where the one experiencing it would have had it happen if all caution had been thrown aside.  Interrupting the joke stops the whole process, so that the climax does not happen anywhere at all.

Trauma is like that.  It is like a comedian giving heart and soul to telling a long, long joke that is anything but funny until it at last comes to its punch-line, to send the audience off laughing.

Unskilled intervention into a still unfolding trauma, be the intervention consciously manipulative or done in all innocent ignorance and good intention, is like that, too.  It is like a drunken lout who yells out the joke’s punch-line before its time, thereby ruining the joke—and all too often precipitating the eruption of an ugly, sometimes riotous scene.

And that, as I was saying, is no joke.

Lest my own vulgarity in joking about such a serious matter as trauma give offense, let me hasten to add by way of an underlining that in far too many cases the banal boorishness of interrupting the unfolding of a traumatic process is not merely no joke.  It is all to often a very serious matter indeed.  Sometimes, interrupting the unfolding of a trauma has tragic consequences.  If they are not tragic, at least in the classic sense, since there are no heros at all center stage, they are all too often overwhelmingly horrendous and unimaginably ugly, as was Auschwitz and the whole Nazi system of death-camps, to give perhaps the prime example.

By offering Auschwitz and all it stands for as an example for what I’m talking about, I am implying that Auschwitz and all the horror for which it has become the synecdoche arose neither sui generis nor directly out of the innate evil of any heart, but ultimately out of the numberless, unskilled, clueless efforts to interrupt an earlier, already long-unfolding trauma.   To give no more than a brief indication of what is at issue, I will just remind the reader of the history of the emergence of Nazi Germany and all that went with it, a history inseparable from the refusal to face and address the wave of trauma that was the First World War.  That war—which was simply “the” War for at least a generation—was itself inseparable from the refusal to face even earlier waves of trauma such as the devastation wrought by colonial expansion, which were generated, in turn, in the flights to evade and avoid yet earlier waves after waves of traumatic shock.  A telling case could even be made that the entire, all too sorry story of what has for so long called itself “the West”—in short, that the very “West” as such—is the story of the unfolding of one single, abysmally profound trauma.

If “the West” itself is indeed what we might speak of as the very Mother of All Traumas—as Sadam Hussein not all that long ago spoke of “the Mother of all Battles”—then the shift in perspective that happened to me in my own tiny, distant, distant offspring of a tiny trauma, namely, the so very minor, common, everyday event of breaking a bone, gives me at least glimpses of an totally unexpected, surprising comic face smiling at all the audience beneath the far, far more than tragic, even infinitely far too far horrendous, murderous, rictus of a mask that “the West” has worn so far, throughout its whole, long history.

The same shift in perspective, brought to me on the waves of breaking my leg, my own mere joke of a trauma, lets me glimpse this, too:  The deus ex machina of the play of trauma is no deus, no “god,” at all.  Nor is the trauma play itself any “machine.”  It is, rather, an unimaginably humble, gentle jokester, telling itself as a joke in order to bring its audience off in the very Mother of All Climaxes.  It is, indeed, so humble and so gentle that it refuses in any way to manipulate its audience by any fraudulent means, no matter how divine.  Instead, it just humbly trusts the audience, in all its happenstances of set and setting, to provide it, sooner or later, with what it needs to get, at last, to come to its punch-line.  For that, the comedian that is trauma needs, in fact, a strait-man, but never brings one along, because that comic trusts the audience itself spontaneously to provide, eventually, someone to play the strait-man’s part.  And the trauma jokester is as patient as it is humble and gentle, so it does not mind giving the audience all it has (after all, as the Don Rickles of the world of comics say, “these are the jokes, folks!”—there are no others) for as long as it takes for that audience to bring itself around to playing its own, indispensable part.  Only then, once the strait-man finally does appear, and delivers the crucial set-up, deadpan line that provides the indispensible catalytic agent to precipitate the crystallization of the whole process of the joke, does the punch-line finally get delivered.  And only that, in turn, finally sets the audience free, by bringing it to its own sudden, unexpected, eruptive climax in an involuntary dissolution into laughter—audible or not.

The indispensible strait-man’s role in my own little joke of a trauma of merely breaking my leg, was played by the elder of the two friends who stayed with me throughout the final act of my tiny trauma’s whole comic play, the finally revealed, benign joke of which was on me.  The two-ness of those two friends was itself equally indispensible–as was their being friends, not parents or parent-substitutes, by the way.  No less crucial to the success, at last, of the whole, long, joking process in my own petty case of trauma was also that those two friends, out of their friendship for me and for one another, did not abandon me, but insisted on staying with me.  In that very regard they were–crucially so, for the joke to pull itself off–unlike either my parents when I first broke my leg in 1949 or my two parent-substitutes when I broke it again in 1987, at least as I experienced them all at the various times at issue.

However, delivering the straight-man’s set-up line, to unleash the punch-line of my trauma’s so prolonged telling of its joke, fell, as it happened, to the lot of only one of my two friends, not both.  It was my elder friend, as I’ve already said, who played that role.  He did so by doing no more—but no less, and it was really no small thing he did—than a little bit of what counseling therapists often call “reflective listening,” in which the listener says back to the one being listened to what that listener has just heard from the lips of that very one.  What my friend reflected back to me was simply this, that in all our so prolonged talk with one another as we no less prolongedly walked with one another while I was enjoying myself elsewhere, in the land of my delusion, I seemed to keep returning, in numerous asides, to my having broken my leg when I was three.  All he did was told me that he’d noticed that recurrence of that aside in what I’d been saying myself, at length.

That simple deadpan strait-man’s line was all that my trauma had been waiting for.  So now, at last, after thirty-eight long years since my tiny trauma had first begun to tell its little joke, delivered its punch-line.  Master at his business (since I’m a “he,” please permit me to let my trauma be one too) that my tiny trauma was, however, he had delivered that punch-line so artfully deadpan himself, that it wasn’t until a few hours later, when I was alone in a small shower-stall taking a long shower, that I finally “got” the joke, and how funny it was.  I broke down in laughter alone in that shower.

Significantly enough, the sounds my own laughter made when I involuntarily dissolved into them at that, my own climactic point—and, therewith, the point of the whole joke, which was told for that very purpose—didn’t sound at all like laughter to my teen-aged son, who happened to be alone with me in the place where I was alone in the shower (my two friends were off elsewhere, walking along by themselves together for a while).  How my son happened to be there is a different part of the story, which I need not tell now.  Suffice it to say that my son did happen to be there at any rate; and what he heard coming out of the shower-stall where I was dissolving in laughter didn’t sound to him like laughter at all.  It sounded to him like crying–like convulsively erupting sobs sounding from the deepest depths of the one from whom they were issuing, wracking him.  He was right, they did come from such depths, and they did wrack me.   And by their sound, even to me, they were indeed sobs, but the truth of them was something else, I knew—and knew that I knew, even at the time.

My son, in concern, called out to me from outside the shower.  He asked, his voice filled with that concern, if I was all right.  It replied, between my still ongoing, noisy, but now somewhat abating, convulsive noise-emissions, that indeed I was. I was all right, I answered him, and more than all right—far more.

I told my son the truth, in giving him that answer.  How that truth could have been true, and just what the content of my “all-right-ness” was, I also tried to tell him, but that was only later.  I have tried to tell the readers of this blog the same thing in this current series of posts, an endeavor itself climaxing in its own fashion in my immediately preceding post in that series, which I will finally end with my next post.

Before I close this current post, however, there’s just one more thing.  What I’ve just been saying here in this post reminds me of another story I’ll also tell here.

Have you heard this one?

In his autobiographical Chronicles:  Volume One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004, pp. 61-62), Bob Dylan is describing the profound effect it had on him when he was first exposed to the music and musicianship of folk-singer Mike Seeger in New York, not long after Dylan showed up there from the Midwest at the beginning of the 1960s.  I have used the following passage elsewhere already in writing about trauma (specifically there, about the trauma of September 11, 2001), but I am using it differently to write some more about trauma here.  Dylan himself writes in the passage at issue:

Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change, but you can only feel it—like in that song of Sam Cooke’s, “Change Is Gonna Come”—but you don’t know it in a purposeful way.  Little things foreshadow what is coming, but you may not recognize them.  But then something immediate happens and you’re in another world, you jump into the unknown, have an instinctive understanding of it—you’re set free.  You don’t need to ask questions and you already know the score.  It seems like when that happens, it happens fast, like magic, but it’s really not like that.  It isn’t like some dull boom goes off and the moment has arrived—your eyes don’t spring open and suddenly you’re very quick and sure about something.  It’s more deliberate.  It’s more like you’ve been working in the light of day and then you see one day that it’s getting dark early, that it doesn’t matter where you are—it won’t do any good.  It’s a reflective thing.  Somebody holds the mirror up, unlocks the door—something jerks it open and you’re shoved in and your head has to go into a different place.  Sometimes it takes a certain somebody to make you realize it [as seeing and hearing Mike Seeger did for Dylan, in this account].

For Dylan, Seeger himself was not the revelation.  Seeger was “just” the mirror the revelation needed to reveal itself to Dylan.  What Dylan at that moment saw, though he may well not have seen that he’d seen it until much later (maybe even only when, forty or so years later, he wrote about it in his Chronicles), was not Mike Seeger.  Seeger was but the mirror in which Dylan saw what he saw.

What Dylan saw there, in that mirror that Seeger was for him at that moment, was himself.  He saw “Bob Dylan,” regardless of just when it was that he began to go by that name (whether his taking of that name occurred at that very moment, or later, or even at some point before he saw himself in the mirror Seeger became for him).  At that moment, Bob Dylan, the very one and only one who has for so long now been known by that name, was at last brought to full birth.  Dylan became, at that moment, the very one he had always been—the one and only one he was born to be.

During my summer vacation in 1987, the elder of the two friends who spent the crucial part of that vacation with me, became my Mike Seeger.  I am thankful to my friend himself for letting himself be used as my mirror back then.  I am more thankful for him, that he was sent my way by whatever it was that sent him that way–which, as I’ve said before in this series of posts, might as well have been a conspiracy of untold conspirators, all conspiring together for no other reason than to do me personal, lasting good.

How amusing!

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My next post will be the last in this series of seven on How I Spent My 1987 Summer Vacation.

How I Spent My 1987 Summer Vacation (5th of a series of 7 posts)

This is the fifth in a series of what will be seven posts using an autobiographical incident to explore some connections between trauma, memory, human community, and social-political institutions in the broadest sense.  The incident at issue is my breaking of one of my legs when I was still a young child, then reliving the experience as an adult, years later, triggered by the chance coalescence of various circumstances at that time.

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When I was three and the shock-waves set off in me by the first breaking of my leg began rolling over me on a rising tide—and began rolling me over and over right along with them—what I most needed to feel was that something would hold me safe till the tide finally ebbed, and then continue to hold me safe lest I be swept out to sea with the tide’s retreat.  For me as the child I was at three, that so necessary sense of security came from my blind trust in my parents being there to pull me through.  Only by clinging to them and my own certainty of their ongoing love and power to keep me safe by enacting that love, was I able to survive the tidal flood—or at least so it was for me in my world at three.

My parents were not perfect, but they were good enough.  As a wisdom I later learned from reading David Winnicott, the founding-figure of “object-relations” theory and therapy in psychoanalysis, has it, that means they were parents of the very best kind.  My parents never read Winnicott, nor, so far as I know, ever even heard of him.  For that, I am also grateful, since I also learned from Winnicott that one very effective way of failing to be good enough parents is deliberately trying to be that very thing, rather than just mucking around as best one can with the bewildering business of child-rearing.  As Pope Gregory the Great wrote of Saint Benedict, the father of Latin Christian monasticism, my parents were “wisely uneducated” with regard to all such matters of parenting.  By not even trying to be good enough parents, but just doing the best they could, they did everything I could have asked for, if I’d had the wisdom to know what that might be, which I didn’t (which in turn let me be a good enough son, I still have good reason to hope, years after my parents both died).

By failing to be perfect parents my parents wisely proved to be just what I needed when I broke my leg the first time.  In their fumbling and bumbling love for me they made it a point to protect me from the truth, by telling me lies about how I broke my leg, beginning when I first broke it.  I am especially grateful to them for that lie, for without it I would never have found myself in the double-bind that engendered my nightmare projection  whereby I was able to preserve the illusion that was absolutely indispensible to me at the time.  If I was not to drown in the waves of the rising tide of the shock of breaking my leg, I needed at three to believe that I had not only loving parents, but skillful one’s as well—so skillful that they may as well have been all powerful, that is, skillful enough to keep me safe from all possibilities of accidents ever happening to me.  Had I had to confront the reality of their utter ineptitude at playing the divine role that my childhood, in common with every other, required them to fill.  I would actually have lost what eventually proved to be my best chance ever to become hale and whole “this side of the grave,” as Gregory Bateson says.  By closing all my exits, save that of my own dreams, my parents’ well-intentioned lie gave me that chance.  Paradoxically, in that sense their lie proved to be not only well-intentioned but also utterly successful:  It hit its mark.  That is, their genuinely loving intention toward me (and no less toward my brother and sister, for that matter fulfilled) itself above and beyond all their own expectations, not despite but through their very ineptitude as divinities. (I cannot speak for my brother and sister, and I do not know whether the arrow of our parents’ love has yet found its mark for them.  I can only speak for myself in saying that the thirty eight years it took my leg finally to finish breaking taught me to trust that it eventually will find its mark, one side of the grave or the other.)

That may just be how divinity itself works:  through the stumbles and fumbles of its wonderfully inept agents, rather like how otherwise unsolvable mysteries somehow got solved through the egregious missteps and pratfalls of the doltishly incompetent Inspector Clouseau in the old Pink Panther movies.  At any rate, as it turns out I had had an insight to that effect five years before I broke my leg the second time.  It came to me while I was sitting on a beach with my wife in Mazatlan Mexico in February, 1982, working on my second Pacifico beer of the day, but I had no way to hold onto the insight and build it into my life—or, rather, my life into it, to be more precise—at the time.  Only in 1989, when I broke my leg again, was I able to begin that construction project, one which is still underway.  So I will return to that leg and its breaking here, and leave the story of my Mazatlan weekend till another time, perhaps in some later post to this blog.

To return to my broken leg, as a child of three when I first broke my leg I was fortunate enough to have been given a good enough rearing by good enough parents to that point in my life that I was able to take the chance that my parents’ bumbling lie gave me.  That the lie was a bumbling one was obvious even then, when they first told it.   After all, I was there at the time I broke my leg, so lying to me about it could not possibly work.  At least it could not work, unless by my own unconscious connivance I myself compensated for my parents’ incompetence at lying.  Thanks to my good enough development to that point, my unconscious actually generously granted my parents’ lie its chance.  I unconsciously (as it had to be, to work at all) took my opportunity to become an accomplice in my own mystification.  I took it by projecting into a nightmare image the very rage that otherwise, had our laughable conspiracy to lie not given me the opportunity to take such a way out (the only way out of a situation in which every way out had been blocked to me:  the way of going crazy, in short), would have consumed me.  Without that nightmare, that rage would have had no other choice than to direct itself toward my parents, now exposed to me as the false gods they really were.  Had that happened, it would have cut the ground out from under the illusion that—as Nietzsche says is true of all truth, I might note—was indispensable for me to maintain around myself, if I was not to vanish in the waves of my own shock.

To use another way of putting the point, it was only by enacting, all unknowingly, a “disownment” of myself at the level of my own affective response to my own experience, enacting it by “projecting” what would otherwise have become a self-consuming rage toward my parents and the world at large “outside” myself and into my nightmare image of an axe-murderer stalking my family and me, was I able not to let myself know the “reality” of my situation—a knowledge which I could not let myself know, if I was fully, and still in some sense whole, to survive the very “reality” such knowledge would have revealed to me.  My projection of all that negative affect into and upon my axe-murderer as gave me the only viable chance I had left for not dying of my broken leg.

Only because my parents were no more than good enough to let me get by well enough by hiding myself under the covers from myself by projecting the disowned part of myself into the axe-murderer I hid from in my nightmare, was I given enough sense of security—paradoxically put, the sense of security that only the illusion of security could have given me at that age—to keep on bumbling through on my own for the next thirty-eight years.  Only thus was I able to keep bumbling along until at last, in the summer of 1987, the combination of set and setting I found myself in finally gave me a good chance of coming out of hiding from myself.  On that second occasion, too, by my good hap my unconscious once again took its opportunity:  It withdrew the nightmare projection of negative affect it gave me in my childhood, and recast it as the waking, daytime delusion that my parent-substitutes at the time were so filled with all-embracing love, humility, wisdom, and skill that for all intents and purposes they were divinities.  The necessary, Nietzschean-truth of an illusion that manifested initially in the projection of a dream-image that let me disown my own negative affect had to be taken back and projected anew, this time not in dreams but in delusion, and this time not of dark, obscure, negative things but of bright, gleaming positive ones.  The illusion of parental perfection that was protected by the nighttime projection of some horrible something stalking me in my dreams to do me untold harm was recalled, like a automobile in which a defect has been discovered, then corrected and sent back to me again, now become the daytime delusion of in reality being guided by a parental pair effectively exercising a boundless care toward me that knew my own deepest good and how to help me find my way to it.  Caught in the very throws of my delusion in 1987, I could not but be awed before the utter humility of such selfless love as I then projected to be operative within my two main benefactors—and, indeed, by the entire conspiracy that I in delusion perceived to be operative around me, a conspiracy that included my two colleague-friends who were with me in our shared enterprise at the time.

Nor was that—the recall of a dream-projection of a deadly threat and its conversion into a delusional projection of an life-bestowing love–the end of the process—the long, thirty-eight-year process of breaking my leg at last, clean through.  Rather, the end came, at least in the first of the clock-strikes announcing its hour, only at the close of that whole delusional day in 1987.  It came when the delusion of that day in 1987, the very delusion that had come to replace the nightmare of that much earlier day in 1949, was itself recalled, withdrawn, taken back.  It came, that is, when I finally came out of my delusion and “reconnected with reality,” as the saying go.

Utterly appropriately, given the slapstick comedy in which we were all acting, as it turned out, I came out of that delusion only thanks to the bumbling, fumbling efforts of my two clueless friends to help me.  Neither of them had any idea how in the world, or out of it, one might break through such a blissfully self-reinforcing delusion of bliss as I was lost in.  Everything they tried—whatever they said or did in hopes of somehow helping me regain my sanity—just became more grist for further grinding in the bliss-producing mill of my delusion.  The harder they tried to free me from that delusion, the more it tightened its grip upon me.  Yet they kept on trying.  They did not leave me alone, as virtually everyone else (my two reluctant parent-substitutes included) certainly at least tried to do, walking wide paths around me, as animals—which we all are, of course, by our good hap–will instinctively (and without any malice whatever) do around an ill one of their kind, to avoid infection themselves by whatever has infected that one.  Too blinded themselves, no doubt, by their friendly concern for me to give room for that healthy instinct of self-preservation to do its usual salvic work, my two friends did not abandon me.  They stayed with me.  They kept me company.

That is what saved me.  Or, rather, that is what became the delivery system for my own delivery from delusion.  My two friends just stayed with me, accompanying me–mainly as we walked endlessly around with one another, with no destination beyond the walking itself.  Had they mounted attacks upon the fortress of my delusion, they would have succeeded only in strengthening it further, as I have already indicated.   Happily, for my sake, they had no idea how to go about launching such attacks.  So in their concerned befuddlement they just kept walking with me—and talking while we walked, and listening to me as I talked, which I did a lot.

As already articulated, when I broke my leg in childhood I projected into and upon a nightmare image the negative affects that, had they been allowed fully to affect me when I was three and first broke my leg, would have utterly incapacitated me.  Then, thirty-eight years later, when at the emotional level I relived that childhood breaking of my leg, that earlier nightmare projection was effectively taken back or retrieved and completely recast in terms of purely positive affects.   What is more, both the initial projection of negative affects and the later retrieving re-projection wherein those affects were transformed into positive ones were two moments or phases of one and the same overall process. That is, it stands between those two projections just as Freud says it finally stands between what he called the “negative” effect of trauma (numbing, dissociation, distancing, or “going into shock” in the face of trauma) and its “positive” effect (the “return of the repressed” in symptomatic, compulsively repetitive behaviors):  in the final analysis, both are actually just the two sides of one and the same single process—that process which is itself the processing of the trauma as such.

However, as also already indicated, the entire traumatic process as such is not yet over, once it reaches that second stage of projection, the stage at which the initial projection gets recalled/transformed/re-projected, as occurred for me when I broke my leg “again” in 1987, thirty-eight years after I broke it “the first time” in 1949.  Rather, the culmination and end—the final fulfillment–of the entire overall traumatic process of breaking my leg, to which both the “first” and the “second” times I broke it belong, occurs only when the “second” recalling-transforming re-projection of the “first” projection is itself recalled and thus, since the projection and the re-projection are both one and the same process (just as Freud’s “negative” and “positive” effects of trauma are, as he says, really part of one and the same overall traumatic effect), the entire projection that unfolds in that two-stage way gets recalled, in the sense of crossed-over, cancelled, or annulled.

Thus, for example, when in my own case the whole traumatic process—the whole “trauma as such”–was finally allowed to reach its culmination and fulfill itself, it ended up retrieving–withdrawing, taking back–both projections, not only the initial, “negative” one of my nighttime dream but also the subsequent “positive” one of my daytime delusion, and canceled or annulled them both together, crossing them over.   Moreover, once the whole double-projection process was finally cancelled out, something was left behind—something fine, like a treasure left behind on the beach by a flood-tide once it finally ebbs away.

More precisely put, at last something that during all those years had been able to show itself to me only in tantalizing glimpses flashed, as it were, through flickering, unstable, subliminal images, was finally allowed to come to the fore, to manifest itself in a clear, focused, stable figure or form.  At last, what had been struggling to form itself into a steady figure for all those years finally succeeded in con-figuring itself.  What had really been there all along, the whole “sense” of what had been happening to me throughout all that time, stood revealed: the one simple truth of the whole process, of the whole traumatic event itself as such–“what it was all about,” what it “meant.”

What was that truth?   In once sense, that is easy to say, and countless voices have said it throughout history, in an inexhaustible variety of ways.  It was the truth, to put it in one of my own ways, that the only real security lies in giving up all illusions that one is ever really secure, which means giving up those very illusions that it was necessary to maintain around oneself for so long, until one was secure enough to give them up.

It comes down to this, that only when one is secure enough to give up all illusions of ever being secure enough, does one suddenly come to find that just that—the simple, unvarnished, dis-illusioned truth of one’s radical, ineradicable in-security–is always security enough, and indeed more than enough.  Good enough is good enough, but only when we can succeed in letting it be what it is, do we find it good enough for us—and then, to our surprise, we find that finding to be so much more than merely enough for us.  We find to our delight that good enough is good galore, that it is a super-abundance of good, more than enough to go around for all, giving each an overabundance of good in turn, of itself overflowing our hands and into the hands of others, sharing itself out in equal, immense portions to everyone, without anyone ever even having had to try to share it.

Our great good luck is that we are all finally without defense against what threatens us, whatever form that threat may take.  But just as lottery winners must still show up to claim their prizes before they receive their winnings, so must we all still abandon the illusion that we can somehow secure ourselves against what threatens us, whatever that is, if only we manage well, as it were.  We must abandon those illusions—or, rather, we must be brought to abandon them, since we can’t even manage that ourselves—before we can finally see what’s really been there all along, which is that no security is good enough security, and not only good enough, but ever so much more than that.

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My next two posts will complete this series on how I spent my 1987 summer vacation.

How I Spent My 1987 Summer Vacation, continued yet again

This is the fourth of a series of posts using an autobiographical incident to explore some connections between trauma, memory, human community, and social-political institutions in the broadest sense.  The incident at issue is my breaking of one of my legs when I was still a young child, then reliving the experience as an adult, years later, triggered by the chance coalescence of various circumstances at that time.

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One of the after-shocks set off by my breaking my leg the first time, when I was three, took the form of what I remember as the recurrent nightmare recounted in my immediately preceding post, a nightmare in which an axe-murderer was on the loose in our house, bent on the brutal murdering of my entire family.  Then, thirty-eight years later, when I was forty-one and broke my leg a second time, that second episode set off reverberations in recollections of the recurrence of that old nightmare when I was a child.  As I also recounted in my last post, those reverberations in and as my memory of that recurrent dream culminated before long in a flash of insight wherein I saw, at forty-one, that the axe-murderer of my childhood nightmare was none other than myself—in psychoanalytic terms the “projection” of the boiling rage the fist breaking of my leg set off in me, a projection of that rage onto and into my nightmare’s image of an axe-murderer.

The insight that the after-shock of breaking my leg the second time in 1987 brought me, insight into what had happened when I broke it the first time, way back in 1949, was that the only way the child I was at three when that first blow struck could process what was happening to him was, at least in large part, by such a projection outside himself of the rage with which he affectively responded to that blow at the time.  To use one way of putting it, that child could not directly “own” his own rage.  He could not “own up to it,” as we say.  The reasons for that were complex, including some pertinent to the very idea of “primary” or “precocious” trauma, an idea I have explored a bit in some earlier posts.*  But for my purposes here, I will leave such matters without further discussion, so that I can focus instead on something else—which is how what happened to me thirty-eight years later, when I broke my leg again, involved an interestingly parallel but very different “projection” on my part—significantly different from the one that occured back when I broke my leg the first time.

In that second projection to go with the second time I broke my leg, in 1987, what in effect occurred was that the first projection, the one that came with the first time I broke my leg way back in 1949, got withdrawn and re-projected differently.  As I have been explaining, in the initial incident and projection the child that I was at the time externalized the negative affect of rage, projecting it in and as the image of the axe-murderer in my childhood nightmare.  What happened when I broke my leg again thirty-eight years later was, as it were, a taking back—an active withdrawal, in the same sense that we withdraw money from the bank–of that initial projection, with and in a new re-projection whereby what I experienced was transformed into positive affect.

That with-drawing re-projection thirty-eight years later of the first projection completed the latter, fulfilled it.  As a man of forty-one I was at long last able to own and own up to what as a child of three I could not and, therefore, did not own and own up to.  Thus—at last!—my leg finally broke once and for all.  After that I was free—but only after that was I free—finally (!) to become (a process that is still ongoing to this day) who I had been all along.  I will try to explain a bit more what I mean.

As I recounted in my last post before this one, by sheer luck and happenstance both the set and the setting in which I found myself in the summer of 1987 replicated the set and setting in which I had found myself in 1949 when I first broke my leg.  To recapitulate what I already said along those lines in my preceding post:  As there were three of us siblings playing during the incident in 1949, so were there three of us colleagues and friends serving as sibling-substitutes in the incident of 1987**; as there were two parents overseeing the activities of the three of us siblings in 1949, so were there two presiding figures to serve as parent-substitutes overseeing the enterprise in which we three sibling-substitutes were engaged in 1987.  Finally, just as the incident of 1949, at least in its nearest after-shocks, involved an institution the day-to-day operation of which depended on the service of mostly-offstage nuns (a Catholic hospital), so did the incident of 1987 unfold in an institution serviced by mostly-offstage nuns (a place of retreat)–though of a different denomination, a difference that made no difference in terms of my twice-breaking leg.

I will let that suffice for my recap of parallels I’ve already mentioned in earlier posts.  Now I will add some new ones that were just as important for what happened to me.

Another such parallel is that both incidents involved experienced abandonment for me.  By speaking of “experienced” abandonment I mean to highlight that what matters is not whether the one undergoing such experience was “really” abandoned or only “thought” so; all that matters is that it was so experienced by that one.  So, as I did in fact already recount in an earlier post, the first incident in 1949 involved for me an experienced abandonment at two points.   At unconscious or at least pre-conscious levels I experienced my parents as somehow abandoning me to the physical pain of the initial breaking blow to my leg, and then repeating and deepening that abandonment by leaving me with all my pain in a hospital for ten days in traction.  Well, in parallel with that first incident, the one in  1987 also included me experiencing myself as being abandoned by the two parent-substitutes involved.   At the very heart of the abandonment in both cases what was at stake was feeling myself crucially left alone in torment by those whom I trusted to “take care of” me.  The excruciating physical pain that went with the first incident, in 1949, was absent in the second one, in 1987.  However, even in 1949 what most mattered in my experience was not the physical shock as such, as intense as it must have been, but the affective—“existential” would not be a bad word for it—shock of finding those I trusted for care not there for me, not pulling me out of my pain and rescuing me, but leaving me alone in it.  In parallel, the pain in which I found myself in 1987 was the non-physical but nevertheless still excruciating pain of coming to feel publicly humiliated, as I perceived it, not only in the presence of the two “authority” figures I was trusting in, without them intervening on my behalf, but also, far worse, by their very hands—at least indirectly, insofar as I humiliated myself by my own behavior, but which behavior in turn was a matter of me doing just what I thought they were giving me to do.  Beyond that, the details of the episode do not matter for my present purposes, any more than does the question of the “accuracy” of how I experienced things, at least in any usual sense of that term.

That experience of abandonment, of being left alone in torment, left alone there by the very ones in whom I deeply trusted and by whom I could never have expected to be so abandoned, was only half of the crucial parallel, however.  Coupled with that sense of abandonment in both cases, 1949 and 1987, was a equally strongly experienced blockage and even prohibition of processing either episode in terms of attributing any betrayal on the part of those in whom I trusted, and who were so suddenly and shockingly abandoning me to deal alone with my own intense pain.  That is, in neither case was blaming the parental authority figures for my torment involved, as though they were somehow at fault for it.

In the 1949 case, what blocked me from such blaming was, in effect, that it would have been even more traumatic for the child of three I was then to entertain the possibility of such deep perfidy on the part those whom I loved and on whose constant and continuing love for me I was utterly experientially dependent—my parents—than it was for me to find myself suddenly and shockingly left alone by them, abandoned to my pain.  Betrayal by those parents, for the young child I was in 1949, was even less conceivable than abandonment itself—and would have been even more tormenting.

Nevertheless, even at three I needed some sort of “account” of what was happening to me—some way of making sense of it.  The sense it turns out I made (as I came to see it, finally, thirty-eight years later) was to relate to my abandonment, in all its torment, as deserved punishment.  Given the strictly unthinkable thought that my parents would betray me, which thought would have torn all ground out from under me and cast me in free-fall into a bottomless abyss, the only thought left for me to think was that all the blame was my own, in effect.

Thus, the axe-murderer of my nightmares did double-duty for me by coupling the externalization of all my un-feel-able rage, on the one hand, and embodying my own self-condemnation—read as an affectively effective sign, my axe-murderer image functions as a sort of performative utterence wherein I pronounced a sentence of condemnation upon myself, as I merited for being the monster I projected myself as being in that same image—on the other hand.  I have always preferred stones that let one kill more than one bird at a time, and my axe-murderer was just such a stone.  He let me finish off the very ones who loved me, and simultaneously in the very process enact my own condemnation to the hell where I belonged, thereby finishing my despicable self off as well.  In him I washed my hands of myself, like Pontius Pilate.

Fast-forward to the incident of 1987.  Because of the conditions under which I had, voluntarily after full and careful deliberation, delivered myself, in company with my two colleague-friends, into the care of the two parental-authority figures who ran things in the setting at issue that summer, the idea of those figures not measuring up to the very trust I was putting in them was finally as unthinkable to me as betrayal by my parents had been for me as a child of three in 1949.  I had submitted myself to their authority because I was experientially convinced beyond a shadow of an existential doubt that they had what I had long been searching for, without ever even knowing it until by hap I found my way to them.  Finding them, or what I thought was them, finding the liberation, the deliverance that I took them to be offering me, was–as I had said more than once to my two colleagues when we all three decided to turn ourselves together for a time over to their care and supervision in the first place–“like going home,” but to a home I’d never known I’d left, until I found my way back to it.  As I have already remarked, the details do not matter for my present purposes.  All that matters is that, as I have also already remarked, the possibility of perfidy on their part was no less inconceivable to me with my mindset in the setting at issue in my summer of 1987, than perfidious parents had been to me thirty-eight years before, in 1949.

Thus, on both occasions, 1949 and 1987, I found myself, experientially, in what R. D. Laing and others have called a “double-bind.”  Alternatively expressed, on both occasions I found myself in a condition of radical “cognitive dissonance”—or what might better be called “existential dissonance,” perhaps.  I was, to put it colloquially, in an insane situation.  As a number of others have observed before me, when in an insane situation the only sane thing to do is to go insane oneself.  That’s just what I did, on both occasions, but in two different ways—different, yet complexly interwined in compound ways, as though to fit the compound, complex fracture of my leg that had first put me in ten-days’ traction.

In 1949, my insanity manifested symptomatically in my dreams, and recurrently in a choice variety of apparently bizarre, repetitive behaviors for the next thirty-eight years.  Then, in 1987, I went insane differently—this time not at night in my dreams, but in broad daylight and in full public exposure.

The closest I can come to saying what happened to me in the middle of my 1987 summer vacation is this:  I went to spend a day in the absolute elsewhere of a psychotic episode—specifically, of a full-blown paranoid delusion.  That, at least, is how I have always categorized it ever since then, and that is close enough for all my purposes.  Beyond that, I am happy to leave it to experts to decide about the “objective accuracy” of that categorization, if any care to waste their expert time on the matter.  For me, it more than suffices, at least provided that one interpret the notion of paranoia broadly—broadly enough to involve what I will call a “positive” form to go alongside the “negative” form that, in my impression at least, paranoia more usually tends to take.

In the case of my own paranoid delusion, I was indeed thoroughly convinced, beyond all possibility of doubt, that there was a massive conspiracy focused on me going on behind my back.  However, whereas (by my impression) is that in most cases the conspiracy that the paranoiac discerns everywhere to be at work is aimed at doing him harm, in my own case in 1987 the conspiracy was wholly aimed at doing me good.  I was convinced, at a visceral and immediately perceptual level that could only confirm itself more profoundly with each new affection or perception, not that the whole world was out to “get” me, but that all the world was out to help me.  As delusions go, one could not ask for a better one, surely.

That is, in my 1987 delusion I projected upon the two parental authority figures at issue the entirely positive affects with which, on that occasion, I was overwhelmed and swept away no less than I had been by the thoroughly negative affects of pain and terror and responsive rage thirty-eight years before when I first broke my leg in 1949, and projected those negative affects into and as the nightmare image of an axe-murderer.  What is more, when the echoes of the events of my 1987 summer vacation at last died away–which took till that fall, on my way to take my wife to the airport, as recounted in my preceding post—all of the so much louder and longer echoes of what had first happened to me way back in 1949 died away too.  When the din of all those multiple soundings and re-soundings finally stopped, it restored to me the blessing of silence, and thereby let me hear clearly again anew—and feel that way as well.   In the process of all the noisy sound and fury finally dying away, I found to my surprise that the very negative affects that I had only just then discovered to have owned me for so long had also themselves vanished.  Along with all the idiotic sound and fury, the rage and terror and pain were gone.  Those dominant, dominantly negative affects no longer affected me, at least not in any dominating way.  They had all been taken back, withdrawn, as I said earlier in today’s post, from their so-long-standing projection into and as my nightmarish axe-murderer, and recast no longer as something experientially outside me, but rather recast upon me and into me, transformed from pain, terror, and rage into joy, delight, and gratitude.

Said differently, when all the bells and whistles at last stopped echoing in my ears, I was finally able to hear that something had been patiently and persistently knocking on my door for all the while that din had kept itself up.  It was knocking still.  And now I was at last able to answer the knock, and open the door, at least tentatively, given how drained the whole process had left me.

When I did open that door, who I found standing there no one but myself, at last delivered.  My now at last fully broken leg had done the delivering.  In the end, when it was finally done, breaking my leg gave me myself to be.

Accordingly, ever since I broke it the second time, I have been very grateful for my broken leg.  How could I not be grateful, given that it delivered to me such a sudden, unexpected, unmerited gift?  What is more, what difference does it make to me–or my gratitude—how long the giving took?  So it took thirty-eight years from the rap on the door that first announced the delivery, plus some months more than three years before that since the gift was first sent my way (which by hap was on January 1, 1946, the day I was born), for a total of almost forty-two years (till well along into 1987) for the delivery to be completed in my reception of it from the hands of the delivery system—my long-breaking, at-last-broken leg.  So what?

My broken leg delivered me doubly–at least.  First, it delivered me in the sense that we say the mail-carrier delivers the mail:  It brought me to my own door.  But we also call the mother’s labors in bringing forth a child a delivery.  In that sense, too, my broken leg delivered me.  Indeed, in terms of birth and birthing, my broken leg both delivered me of myself, as a skilled midwife might deliver a mother “of” her child, and delivered me to myself, as the same midwife might deliver a child “to” its mother, perhaps even placing it in that mother’s arms, for her then to cherish and nurture.

In sum (at least for this post), the truth I was at last given to see one snowy morning in October 1987 talking with my wife on the way to the airport to deliver her in turn to her pending flight, was that the day I broke my leg was the luckiest day of my life.  In my next post (unless it proves to be the one after that—it’s hard to predict such things), I will address the next day, the day after I broke my leg, which is the day I’ve been living in ever since (like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day—a trauma-trip of a movie, by the way).

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This series on How I Spent My 1987 Summer Vacation will be continued in my next post.

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* Especially in the series of three posts I recently devoted to the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques André—the series that immediately precedes this current one on my summer of 1987.

** It is worth noting, as well, that the differences in age between the three of us involved together as friends in 1987 was roughly the same as that between my sister (about 10 years older than I, as is the elder of my two colleague-friends), my brother (about 3 years older than I, and a bit more than that for my second friend), and me.  Another good fit!

Responding to Trauma #7: Rebecca Solnit on Building Paradise in Hell, Continued

NOTE to my readers on October 22, 2009.  The post below should have gone up a month ago, on September 28, as the seventh in a series on “Responding to Trauma,” and as the continuation of a discussion I began in my post published September 25 of Rebecca Solnit’s most recent book.  Somehow, I never managed to publish it at the time, and did not realize my error until today, a month late.  So I am posting it now, with my apologies.

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Today’s post concludes my discussion of Rebecca Solnit’s recent book A Paradise Built in Hell.  It is part of what I hope will eventually be a book chapter entitled “Truth and Trauma.”  My preceding post ended with some reflections on a chapter of her book in which Solnit considers what the zapatista movement of southeastern Mexico can teach us about “disaster communities,” which she says is the subject of her book.  Below, I pick up my discussion at that point.

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The Truth of Trauma (cont.)

At the end of her next chapter, devoted to the disaster communities of mutual aid that formed in New York City after the attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, Solnit quotes Astra Taylor, whom she describes (page 193) as “a tall young woman from Georgia working at a left-wing publishing house in TriBeCa” on that day, who after the attacks “went out into the street with hundreds of others to watch the extraordinary spectacle not so far away,” and ended up being caught up in the mass exodus of New Yorkers leaving the city on foot.  Taylor, after remarking (quoted on page 194 in Solnit) that “[t]he experience on television was so different than the experience on the street,” goes on (with my emphasis added):

I felt connected to the people on the street and I felt impressed by them.  I also felt that reality is not what I thought it was, I still have a lot to learn.  The reality that people would do this, commit this act of terrorism but also the reality that people in the street would help you and that you would help.  Work—I really hate work—and it gets in the way so much:  we’re rushing to work and we’re at work and rushing from work.  We didn’t go to work for a few days, and you had all this time to talk to people and talk to your family.

“Taylor had a lot of family on hand,” Solnit adds:  ”two of her three younger siblings were with her in her warehouse in Brooklyn.  Her wheelchair-bound younger sister wasn’t threatened by the attacks either.  She was terrified that her parents would make her come back home because of them, and she’d lose her newfound liberty.  She didn’t, and the usually reclusive Taylor put on an exhibition for the neighborhood in their home.  Taylor summed up Brooklyn that week as an anarchist’s paradise, a somber carnival:  ’No one went to work and everyone talked to strangers.’ ”

A bit later (on pages 221-222) Solnit expresses some chagrin about the subsequent history of the American response to 9/11:  ”It’s possible to imagine a reality that diverged from September 11 onward, a reality in which the first thing affirmed was the unconquerable vitality of civil society, the strength of bonds of affection against violence, of open public life against the stealth and arrogance of the attack.  (These were all affirmed informally, in practice, but not institutionally, and they constituted a victory of sorts, a refusal to be cowed, a coming together, and a demonstration of what is in many ways the opposite of terrorism.)”

But isn’t the very granting of “reality” to the institutions of power that were so dissipated on 9/11 itself—those very institutions that Taylor sums up eloquently and accurately with the four-letter word work—exactly to accept the illusion on which such power feeds, and on which it must always feed to maintain itself?

“From that point on,” continues Solnit in the passage at issue,

the people yearning to sacrifice might have been asked to actually make sweeping changes that would make a society more independent of Mideast oil and the snake pit of politics that goes with it, reawakened to its own global role and its local desires for membership, purpose, dignity, and a deeper safety that came not from weapons but from a different role in the world and at home.  That is to say, the resourcefulness and improvisation that mattered in those hours could have been extended indefinitely; we could have become a disaster society in the best sense.

That we did become just that, or, better, that we always are just that—just such a “disaster society in the best sense”—is, it seems to me, what her whole earlier discussion of Marcos and the zapatista’s, as well as Solnit’s own immediately preceding discussion of the testimony of Taylor and other New Yorkers on 9/11 itself, helps make clear.  Furthermore, isn’t her regret over supposedly lost opportunities a forgetting of Marcos’s zapatista lesson that the “the means are the end,” which is also, I would argue, the lesson of “fiesta and carnival” in general?

Earlier in her discussion of 9/11 (page 189) Solnit quotes this from an email account of that day by a survivor who “escaped with several coworkers from the eighty-seventh floor of the north tower”:  “ ‘They [who made the attacks] failed in terrorizing us.  We were calm.  If you want to kill us, leave us alone because we will do it by ourselves.  If you want to make us stronger, attack and we unite.  This is the ultimate failure of terrorism against the United States.  The very moment the first plane was hijacked, democracy won.’ ”

Solnit’s own accounts of various other disasters in places other than the United States make it clear that if this survivor’s insight holds, it holds not just for that one place, nor for any one political system.  Rather, if the insight holds at all, it does so as one of universal applicability, pointing to the inevitable failure of all acts of what this survivor, following the general usage of that day and still this one, calls “terrorism.”  All such attacks are doomed to fail because they rest on an illusion, one dispelled immediately by the very response they first call up, precisely from those being attacked.

However, cannot the same insight finally—indeed, above all—be applied to the very thing the attackers at issue on 9/11 thought they were attacking:  that same United States that the survivor just cited regards (falsely, I am saying) as especially immunized against such attacks, or at least against them succeeding?  The so called terrorists themselves could say the same thing to and about themselves that the survivor Solnit quotes says about 9/11:  “The Great Satan (that is, the United States) failed in terrorizing (or demoralizing, or annihilating, or destroying, or the like) us.  We were calm.  If you want to kill us, leave us alone because we will do it by ourselves.  If you want to make us stronger, attack and we unite.  This is the ultimate failure of the United States.  The very moment the first Muslim was degraded (or the first Palestinian uprooted, the first African enslaved, or whatever), Islam (or Liberation, or ‘the beloved community’ of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the American Civil Rights movement, to which Solnit devotes a good discussion) won.”

That is the important, deep truth of the 9/11 survivor’s remark:  Poor Satan (whatever or whomever that may functionally turn out to be for any given situation, whether it be “the United States,” “terrorists,” “demon rum,” or some other thing or person)!  No matter how hard the poor devil tries to do evil, good comes out of it!  No sooner does the devil start to do his dirtiest, than everything is swept bright and clean again, even brighter and cleaner than before.

The survivor of 9/11 quoted above, as well as countless other survivors, not just of 9/11 but of countless other disasters, including those Solnit studies and as her own analyses make clear, did not just believe that to be so, or just hope that it might be.  Rather, they directly experienced its being so, just as Marcos and the Zapatistas did in the uprising of 1994 and their other “actions,” when, as Marcos put it, they experienced that the means were the end.

Later in her book, after not only the remarks just discussed concerning 9/11 but also, therefore, after her analysis of the Zapatistas, Solnit remarks that she “had long wondered whether there was a society so rich in a sense of belonging and purpose that disaster could bring nothing to it”—bring nothing by way of an opportunity for the celebration of life and one another in what she calls disaster communities.  That would have to be “a society where there was no alienation and isolation to undo.”  She makes that remark in one of her chapters devoted to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and adds that she’d always thought she might find such a society “in Mexico or a traditional community.”  At any rate, she writes, “I found a little of that in New Orleans.”

She returns to that theme in the concluding chapter of her book, in terms of the broad lessons her study of disasters and disaster communities has taught her:  ”Who are you?  Who are we?  The history of disaster demonstrates that most of us are social animals, hungry for connection, as well as for purpose and meaning.  It also suggest that if this is who we are, then everyday life in most places is a disaster that disruptions sometimes give us a chance to change.  They are a crack in the walls that ordinarily hem us in, and what floods in can be enormously destructive—or creative.”

As her preceding studies in the book have made clear, what above all determines which outcome a given disaster will have—the destructive one, or the creative one—is whether it is “civil society” or “elite panic” that wins the day.  Thus, she continues the passage just cited as follows:  ”Hierarchies and institutions are inadequate to these circumstances [of disaster]; they are often what fails in such crises.  Civil society is what succeeds, not only in an emotional demonstration of altruism and mutual aid but also in a practical mustering of creativity and resources to meet the challenges.  Only this dispersed force of countless people making countless decisions is adequate to a major crisis.”

Yet isn’t it really exactly this same thing, the “dispersed force of countless people making countless decisions,” that must be always at work beneath surface appearances to let “hierarchies and institutions”—those very hierarchies and institutions whereby the elite maintain their status and power—function in the first place?  Solnit’s own discussions of the responses to disaster have surely made it clear that it is nothing other than the prospect that the people will suddenly come to realize that very point–when they find themselves in the carnival atmosphere of a mutual aid community that responsively forms after a disaster—that puts the elite into such a panic in the first place.

Thus, Solnit herself continues the passage cited above, after observing that it is only the “dispersed force of countless people making countless decisions” that can address such major public disasters as she examines, by writing:  “One reason that disasters are threatening to elites is that power devolves to the people on the ground in many ways:  it is the neighbors who are the first responders and who assemble the impromptu kitchens and networks to rebuild,” thereby making manifest the irrelevancy of the powers that be, with all their “hierarchies and institutions,” and who do not even show up to help in such emergencies, phantoms that they are and are thereby shown to be, the illusion of their power dispelled in the process.  Indeed, by her own analysis that is not just “one” reason, but is, rather, the reason, at least in the sense of the most important and the sufficient reason, for “elite panic” at the prospect of disaster or its aftermath.  As Solnit herself goes on to write, such devolution of power upon the people after a disaster “demonstrates the viability of a dispersed, decentralized system of decision making.”  What is more, I would say, it demonstrates that exactly such a dispersed, decentralized system of decision making has been operative all along, giving the only substance they can have to the phantoms whereby the elite appear to themselves and the people as necessary, or even merely relevant.

“Citizens themselves,” notes Solnit as she continues, “in these moments [of response to disaster] constitute the government—the acting decision making body—as democracy has always promised and rarely delivered.”  However, that is so not only at moments of disaster or crisis, but also in moments of calm and “business as usual.”   At all times any actual government, as any hierarchy or institution at all, is sustained only insofar as all the anonymous individuals that constitute “the people” continually re-enact them—or, as Thomas Mann, or certainly as literary theorist and Jewish and German studies scholar Erich Santner, in his Psychotheology of Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), would say, re-cite them, as though they did indeed have some sort of authority of their own.  In that crucial sense, the “democracy” Solnit mentions is far from rarely delivered, nor need its delivery even be promised, since it is always already given, whenever any government at all is.

So is the “revolution” Solnit goes on to mention in her next sentence already there, for those who but wake from dreaming dreams of—and even more for—power:  “Thus disasters often unfold as though a revolution has already taken place.”  In a certain, crucial sense, it has.

We might say that community and revolution and all that goes with them–the “purposefulness, meaning, involvement” that Solnit lists on the next page (306), along with “the immersion in service and survival, and . . . an affection that is not private and personal but civic:  the love of strangers for each other, of a citizen for his or her city, of belonging to a greater whole, of doing the work that matters”—are always there and active, even dominantly so, as latent, a word she uses in such a context herself toward the end of page 305.  What disaster offers is the opportunity for that latency to become patent, as it does whenever one of Solnit’s “disaster communities” forms in disaster’s aftermath.

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Resistance and the Meaning of Trauma #6: The Affirmation of Resistance, Continued

In my preceding post, I discussed the work of Dori Laub, coauthor with Shoshana Felman of a classic work in trauma studies.  In today’s post, I pick up that discussion with some remarks by Felman.

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To bear such witness to the truth of trauma as Laub discusses—even and perhaps especially if it is a “delusional” truth–is itself as such to put up an effective resistance.  Later in their book Testimony, Laub’s coauthor, Shoshana Felman discusses Claude Lanzman’s famous film Shoah.  At one point (page 278), Felman quotes Philip Müller, one of the death-camp survivors interviewed in the film.  Müller had belonged to one of the Sonderkommando, the “special units” of camp prisoners who were allowed to live yet a while longer at the price of being forced to assist the Nazi’s by performing such tasks as keeping fellow prisoners calm as they were being herded to the gas chambers, then cleaning out the mess afterward, so a new contingent of the doomed could be ushered to their deaths in turn. Müller, a Czech, recounts an episode in which he accompanied a group of fellow Czechs to the changing room, where prisoners were made to strip before entering the gas chamber, disguised as a shower-room:

The violence climaxed when they tried to force the people to undress.  A few obeyed, only a handful.  Most of them refused to follow the order.  Suddenly, like a chorus, they all began to sing.  The whole ”undressing room” rang with the Czech national anthem, and the Hatikvah.  That moved me terribly. . .

That was happening to my countrymen, and I realized that my life had become meaningless.  Why go on living?  For what?  So I went into the gas chamber with them, resolved to die.  With them.  Suddenly, some who recognized me came up to  me . . . A small group of women approached.  They looked at me and said, right there in the gas chamber . . . :  “So you want to die.  But that’s senseless. Your death won’t give us back our lives.  That’s no way.  You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to . . . the injustice done to us.”

Concerning this episode, Felman makes the following excellent observation:

The singing . . . signifies a common recognition, by the singers, of the perversity of the deception to which they had been all along exposed, a recognition, therefore, and a facing, of the truth of their imminent death . . . a repossession of their lost truth by the dying singers, an ultimate rejection of the Nazi-instigated self-deception and a deliberately chosen, conscious witnessing of their own death.

She then goes on to note on the very next page (279):  “The singing challenges and dares the Nazis.”   The act of singing, and of thereby bearing witness even in their very dying, embodies resistance among the Czech compatriots about to be gassed.  But for Müller as a member of the Sonderkommando, someone who can survive, at least for the time being, resistance cannot mean giving up his life, even while singing out his defiance.  Rather, for him it has to mean renouncing such very dying—which in this context also entails his continuing to act in apparent complicity with the Nazi killers themselves.

Later in a note to a passage on the same page (n. 52), Felman also quotes yet another Czech survivor, Rudolph Vrba, on his “decision to escape, after the suicide of [fellow inmate and Resistance figure] Freddy Hirsch that aborts the Resistance plan for the uprising of the Czech family camp:  ‘It was quite clear to me then that the Resistance in the camp is not generally for an uprising but for survival of the members of the Resistance.’”

For these two Czech survivors of Auschwitz, Müller and Vrba, continuing to live becomes as such the act of resistance.  For the woman Laub interviews, the “failed” Sonderkommando rebellion at Auschwitz near the end of the war—and even the joy with which she later  (mis)remembers and (mis)recounts it—effects resistance.  For Antelme, resistance is manifest even in the very act of dying, and even the corpses of the dead continue resistance to what the Nazi endeavored in vain to accomplish with all their killing.

So different on the surface—as different as life (in Müller and Vrba) and death (in Antelme)–all these cases are the same in at least two key ways.

First, in them all, the efficaciousness of the resistance they display has nothing to do with what would ordinarily be accounted the success or failure of the enterprise to which the resistance attaches.   So, for example, Müller’s choice to head what the other Czech prisoners about to be gassed tell him, and therefore not to join them in the gas chamber, is as such already fully effective as resistance, and would have remained so, even if Müller had later been gassed or shot in turn, as was the standard Nazi practice for dealing with the members of a Sonderkommando, who only temporarily escaped such a fate.  Similarly, as Laub’s account makes so powerfully clear, that the rebellion at Auschwitz was a “failure” by historians’ standards does not really touch its effectiveness as resistance.  Finally, the corpses of which Antelme speaks constitute a mutely effective resistance even though there is no sense in which they represent the success of any endeavor, including even the endeavor to resist as such.  Rather, their resistance consists in their being at all, at a level that clearly has nothing to do with success or failure of anything.

The second way in which all these diverse cases of resistance are the same is really just the flip-side of what I have called the first way:  They are all the same in that what they do is to “put the lie” to that which they resist, to use Antelme’s way of speaking.  Or, to use Laub’s excellent way of wording it, they all, just as themselves and apart from all ordinary question of the “success” of the resistance they embody,  “break the frame” of that against which they resist.  The Sonderkommando uprising broke the frame of Auschwitz, even if it blew up “only” one smokestack and even if all the rebels were “betrayed” by the Polish underground and almost immediately killed after their rebellion had barely begun.   For that matter, even the joy with which the woman who witnessed the rebellion recounts it, with however many “mistakes” in her recounting, also breaks that frame, just as effectively and completely as the uprising itself did.  Finally, Antelme’s corpses also break it no less.

Responding to Trauma #8: Concluding Remarks

What follows is the final section of my reflections on the truth of trauma, which I hope will eventually become a chapter in a book on the topic of trauma and philosophy.

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The Truth of Trauma (concluded)

At the beginning of these reflections on the truth of trauma, I said that what I meant by that phrase was the response that trauma itself elicits from those whom it strikes.  Given that definition, what can be gleaned from the diverse sources I have been considering—from the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, to the scholarly studies of Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Paul Eisenstein, and Sudhir Karak, to the survivors’ memoirs of Marguerite Duras and Robert Antelme, to the investigative inquiries of Rebecca Solnit—might be put this way:

The truth of trauma is living in the irrelevancy of all relations of power.

That way of articulating the idea is, perhaps, especially indebted to Solnit’s work on what she calls “disaster communities,” but it also fits the other sources I have considered.  What Solnit’s analyses claim to show is that such communities form on their own among those most directly affected by disasters.  That applies whether the disaster be “natural”–as were, to stick with her own examples, the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco or the one decades later in Mexico, or Hurricane Katrina more recently–or brought about through human agency–as was the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001.   By arising from the ground up among disaster survivors themselves as “mutual aid” societies, rather than being effected from above by official governmental agencies, independent charitable organizations, or the like, what such disaster communities effectively do, as Solnit herself puts it at one point (page 153), is to render irrelevant the official institutions of power.

Thus, the response that such disasters as Solnit examines elicit is to live in the situation of the irrelevancy of all such “official” channels and institutions, “governmental” or “non-governmental.”  Disaster calls upon those it strikes to live, instead, in community with one another, relying upon one another mutually, aiding and accepting aid as need and opportunity present themselves.  Indeed, that is another way to formulate the truth of trauma—at least of such “public trauma” as Solnit discusses:

The truth of trauma is living in community.

The community trauma calls forth has nothing of the “communalism” against which Sudhir Kakar’s The Colors of Violence warns us.  There is nothing enclosed or enclosing about communities of trauma, Solnit’s “disaster communities.”  Rather, they are communities in which aid is extended by all to all, and in which there is no challenging of anyone’s claim to aid, no demanding that aid claimants prove their need, certify their disabilities, or document their qualifications for receiving assistance.

The community called forth by trauma is in principle universal.  It is the universal community of all those who have nothing in common save trauma, and who therefore cannot be sorted out, or sort themselves out, in terms of diverse identities and the exclusionary groups that go with such identities.  In the community of trauma, everyone is a Jew, as Paul Eisenstein points out everyone should have been after Kristallnacht.   But in the community of trauma everyone is also at the same time no less a Nazi, as Marguerite Duras knew she had to become as soon as the obscenity of being a Nazi became undeniable.

The community of trauma is the community of the broken, and of those who fall with no chance any longer of righting themselves, of standing themselves upright again, and warding off trauma.  Thus, insofar as philosophy, according at least to Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, has always been definitively characterized by just such a struggle to stand itself erect–namely, in its perpetually repeated efforts to ward off sophistry–the community of trauma is also not a philosophical community.

But nor is it an anti-philosophical one, in the sense of still defining itself in terms of philosophy, as what it opposes.  The community of trauma needs nothing against which to define itself, since it needs no “definition,” no “identity,” of its own in the first place.

Thus, the community of trauma has no need to be “heroic.”  There is nothing rigid and “manly” about it.  It is as soft and gentle as the voice of Sheriff Bell’s father whispering to horses at the end of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, the voice of that father who, by the world’s lights was “less a man” than his son, but who “never broke nothin” in Bell, and to whom, therefore, Bell owes everything.

Such soft and gentle community nevertheless grows from, and embodies, the only genuinely effective resistance to the very structures of power the irrelevancy of which trauma demonstrates, as I will discuss in detail in my next series of reflections, on “trauma and resistance.”

Responding to Trauma #6: Rebecca Solnit on Building Paradise in Hell

Continuing with the draft of what I hope will become a book chapter, I pick up below where I left off in my last post.  In that last post, my reflections on Robert Antelme’s memoir of surviving the Nazi concentration camps led me to the suggestion that effective resistance to the perpetrators of such trauma as Antelme experienced at the hand of the Nazis demonstrates what I called the ultimate irrelevance–the vacuity and irreality– of what such perpetrators stand for.  My draft then continues as follows.

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The Truth of Trauma (cont.)

It is just such vacuity, such irreality of what passes itself off as to be taken seriously, that is unmasked, to put it paradoxically, by the masks of carnival, as Rebecca Solnit explores in her recent work A Paradise Built in Hell:  The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York:  Viking, 2009).  The topic of her book is what she calls “disaster communities,” those communities of “mutual aid” that so often spring up after disasters such as the five she studies in detail:  the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; the munitions boat explosion in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1916; the Mexico City earthquake of 1985; the attacks on the Twin Towers on Septmeber 11, 2001; and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2004.  Such disaster communities, she writes (page 17), are “utopia itself for many people, though it is only a brief moment during terrible times.  And at the same time they manage to hold both irreconcilable experiences, the joy and the grief [so often described by the survivors of such disasters, and of the communities that flower from them].”  As she goes on to say a few pages later (page 21), such disaster communities are “ubiquitous, fluctuating utopias that are neither coerced nor counter-cultural but universal, albeit overlooked”—overlooked, especially, by the mass media and, above all, the powers that be, the very powers behind those media.  She adds:  “Elites and authorities often fear the changes of disaster or anticipate that the change means chaos and destruction.”  Her analysis shows that fear to be just a sort of cover for what such forces are really afraid of, which is what she mentions next:  “or at least the undermining of the foundations of their power.  She adds:  ”Too, the elite often believe [or at least wish they did] that if they themselves are not in control, the situation is out of control, and in their fear take repressive measures that become secondary disasters.”

This “elite panic” contrasts sharply to the popular altruism and generosity with which “disaster communities” themselves form to address disaster with various sorts of mutual aid.  Indeed, it is that very prospect that creates the panic among the elite, who fear not the disaster itself so much as that their own irrelevancy will be shown, for all to see, by the success of spontaneous, unregulated, mutual aid efforts that spring up to address a disaster’s aftermath.  As Solnit writes (pages 152-153, italics added), what takes place after most disasters is a sort of “anarchy,” not the dreaded anarchy of rapacious selfishness and egotism depicted, for example, in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, but

another kind of anarchy, where the citizenry by and large organize and care for themselves.  In the immediate aftermath of disaster, government fails as if it had been overthrown and civil society succeeds as though it has revolted:  the task of government, usually described as ‘reestablishing order,’ is to take back the city and the power to govern it, as wall as to perform practical functions—restoring power, cleaning up rubble.  So the more long-term aftermath of disaster is often in some sense a counterrevolution, with varying degrees of success.  The possibility that they have been overthrown or, more accurately, rendered irrelevant is a very good reason for elite panic if not for the sometimes vicious acts that ensue.

At least it is “a very good reason for elite panic” in the mind of the elite itself, whose very elite status is dependent upon preserving the illusion of the elite’s own necessity—a dream from which the elite must hope that those over whom they set themselves to rule will never awake, since then such illusions would vanish like phantoms, just as the Psalmist sings.

It is just such irrelevancy that, as Solnit goes on to argue, is revealed in festivals of carnival, as well as in such carnivalesque political movements as the zapatistas’ in Mexico.  She writes (pages 173-174):

A disaster sometimes wipes the slate clean like a jubilee, and it is those disasters that beget joy, while the ones that increase injustice and isolation beget bitterness—the “corrosive community” of which disaster scholars speak.  Some, perhaps all, do both.  That is to say, a disaster is an end, a climax of ruin and death, but it is also a beginning, an opening, a chance to start over.  (It is also a way to start over for capitalism, creating markets for the replacement of what has been destroyed and more.)  And in this light, we can regard the Puritan work ethic as a force of privatization, not only the spiritual privatization of Protestantism but also the privatization of what was hitherto public civic life.  The moments of carnival, community, and political participation are in those terms nonproductive, wasted time, even—if you think of the seventeenth-century New England Puritans punishing those who celebrated Christmas—violations of belief.  The widespread distrust of the life of unpoliced crowds, manifested in urban and particularly suburban design in the United States, in the bans by dictatorships on public gatherings, in the . . . plans for disaster are measures against carnival and popular power.

The utilitarian argument against fiestas, parades, carnivals, and general public merriment is that they produce nothing.  But they do:  they produce society.  They renew the reasons why we might want to belong and the feeling that we do.  The product is far less tangible than everyday goods and services but vital all the same—if absent from many contemporary societies.  A festival is a sowing of wildness and a harvest of joy and belonging.  An endless fiesta would be exhausting and demoralizing:  the pleasure would go out of it, the masks would disguise only fatigue and apathy, and there would eventually be nothing to celebrate.*  The ordinary and the extraordinary need each other, or rather everyday life needs to be interrupted from time to time—which is not to say that we need disaster, only that it sometimes supplies the interruption in which the other work of society is done.  Carnival and revolution are likewise interruptions of everyday life, but their point is to provide something that allows you to return to that life with more power, more solidarity, more hope.

I would revise this overall compelling account on only one point, a point which Solnit herself touches upon a few pages later (page 178), when she cites a frequent remark from Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, the most widely known of the masked zapatistas (which I will leave with an uncapitalized first letter, as they do) of the mountains of southeast Mexico.  Marcos says that for the sort of revolution the zapatistas embody, “The means are the end.”  Insofar as that is so, then carnival and fiesta, or the mutual aid extended to one another by those who encounter disaster, like the carnivalesque “political” acts of the zapatistas, do not so much “produce” society as they are that society itself.

Thus, on the very next page Solnit herself goes on to quote Laura Carlsen–who went to Mexico after the 1985 Mexico City earthquake and remained there, reporting on the aftermath of the quake as well as on such subsequent developments as the zapatistas–in her introduction to Marcos’s The Speed of Dreams::  Selected Writings 2001-2007 (San Francisco:  City Lights, 2007, page 20):  “Unlike previous revolutionary movements, [the zapatistas] did not announce plans to take power and install a new state.”  Rather, says Carlsen, ever since they first appeared, “the zapatistas have deepened their commitment to building alternatives from the grassroots rather than controlling, competing for, or often even confronting the formal power of the state.”

“The utopias achieved amid disaster,” Solnit writes in her own voice one more page later (180), “are perhaps the once and future ordinary arrangement of things.”  If we remember that the expression “the once and future” functions much the same as does “once upon a time”—functions, that is, to dis-locate what is being said from the realm of history as journalistically understood, so to speak, history as some one time and not another, and to re-locate it instead in the always and everywhere of what is truly eventful—this amounts to saying that the utopias of “disaster communities” are the reality into which we wake when we awaken from the dream that power would have us dream, and dismiss its phantoms as the illusions they are.

Significantly, on the preceding page (179), just before quoting Carlsen, Solnit writes this about Subcomandante Marcos:

His “real” identity became an obsession of journalists after the uprising [of 1994, triggered by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) going into effect], and when one journalist took him at face value [when he said in an interview] that he had been a gay waiter in San Francisco, he wrote, “Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian on the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany . . . a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the metro at 10:00 p.m., a celebrant on the zócalo, a campesino without land, an unemployed worker . . . and of course a zapatista in the mountains of southern Mexico.”  This gave rise to the carnivalesque slogan “Todos somos Marcos” (“We are all Marcos”) . . .

That line, “We are all Marcos,” used in that way, resonates with Alain Badiou’s discussion of the early Stanley Kubrick film Spartacus, which ends with the leader of Rome’s legions, who have “defeated” the Sparticist uprising of gladiators and slaves in ancient Rome, offering the mass of the captured rebels a way out of crucifixion—namely, by “identifying” Spartacus.  In the film, when Spartacus (played by Kirk Douglas, to give Hollywood its due) steps forward from the ranks to save his comrades, first his young friend Antoninus (Tony Curtis), then one after another of the rebels steps forward too, each one claiming, “I’m Spartacus.”  Obligingly, the Roman general (Lawrence Olivier) has them all crucified.  However, as Badiou realizes and insists, by their refusal of the exclusionary identification of Spartacus, instead embracing a universally inclusive identification of everyone with one another, by and as the identification of all with and as “Spartacus,” these rebels dispel the illusion of Roman power and glory, emerging “in truth” as the victors in their battle with Rome.

“We can go home.”  That, according to Badiou, is the truth that takes place in the Spatacist rebellion.  Importantly, Badiou also makes it clear that, so soon as that insight dawned on one gladiator or slave, then another and another, and those gladiators and slaves began to act in what Badiou calls “fidelity” to the event of that truth, they were already at their desired destination, even as they struggled to escape Rome.  And, having continued in their fidelity by their universalizing identification of themselves as being all Spartacus, even as they die on their crosses that is just where all the rebels at the end of Kubrick’s film remain: home.

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*This remark and others like it, as well as the general force of Solnit’s argument on the point, seems to have escaped Tom Vanderbilt in his review of her book in the New York Times Book Review for Sunday, September 6, 2009.  Vanderbilt ends his review by asking: “As heady as it can be, would Carnival feel so energizing if it were the norm, and not the brief subversion of that norm?”  By ending his review in that way, one suggesting that he is saying something Solnit has not considered, Vanderbilt, intentionally or not, reduces the issue she is raising to the level of the foolish child wishing Christmas could come everyday.  As Solnit realizes—in the passage above and throughout her analysis—the issue is not to replace mundane time with a time of endless Carnival, but to change the time of everyday itself.  Thus, on the very last page of her book (page 313) she writes that the sort of “paradise” that becomes visible in disaster communities “is the only paradise possible, and it will never exist whole, stable, and complete.”  Instead, she says that such a paradise “is always coming into being in response to trouble and suffering.” In contrast to “[a]ll the versions of an achieved paradise [that] sound at best like an eternal vacation,” she writes that “paradises built in hell are improvisational; we make them up as we go along, and in so doing they call on all our strength and creativity and leave us free to invent even as we find ourselves enmeshed in community.”  On the other hand, nevertheless, one might want to reflect a bit further on the extent to which the insistence on keeping such things as Carnival or Christmas within the banks of regularly recurrent annual celebrations may all too often be little more than an effective ploy in the service of the preservation of elitist privilege, and against the threat that becomes patent in those very celebrations.

Responding to Trauma #5: Sudhir Kakar, Robert Antelme, and the Human Kind

Below is the continuation of what I hope will become a chapter in a book.

The Truth of Trauma (cont.)

Eisenstein’s analysis in Traumatic Encounters can be profitably combined with that of Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar in his book The Colors of Violence (University of Chicago Press, 1996), where Kakar draws a valuable distinction between “community” and “communalism,” to use his terms.  Here is one way he formulates that distinction (pages 191-192):  “Communalism as a state of mind . . . is the individual’s assertion of being part of a religious community, preceded by a full awareness of belonging to such a community.  The ‘We-ness’ of the community is here replaced by the ‘We are‘ of communalism.”  Thus, what Kakar calls “community” is a state of being, whereas the explicit assertion of that state of being–that is, of membership in the community at issue–becomes the focal interest of the state of mind he calls “communalism.”

It is helpful to remember, here, that, all other things being equal, the felt need to assert that one is or has some given thing varies inversely with the felt assurance of being or having that same thing:  The more secure I feel about myself or whatever I have come to identify with myself–whether that be my looks, my intelligence, or my community membership—the less do I feel myself driven to assert myself or my having the identity at issue.

But what if the very “awareness” of being a member of a community–one’s “cultural/communal identity”–does not, as Kakar says in the lines just quoted, “precede” the “assertion” thereof, except and unless it is a retrospectively cast myth or fiction of the origin of the community, membership in which is being “asserted”?  Just before the lines already quoted, Kakar borrows his psychoanalytic colleague Oscar Peterson’s account of the stages through which one must go as ”an individual who, as a consequence of a shared threat, is in process of self-consciously identifying with his or her ethnic group.”  But isn’t the very constitution of the ethnic group itself as a definite “we” another retrospective projection, to use an accurate if paradoxical expression, of itself as already having been there all along?  And isn’t the very constituting of a threat as a “shared” one a part of that very process–i.e., isn’t the “sharing” itself something that must be communicated in Heidegger’s sense in Being and Time–whereby “Mitteilung,” the German for “communication,” is taken seriously in its etymological meaning of sharing-with –in order to come into being at all?

Following Peterson, Kakar says the first stage of “the change from community to communalism” is that “I declare to all who share the crisis [whatever it may be, that has set off the whole process] with me that I am one of them–a Hindu, a Muslim [or whatever].”  With regard to that, it is striking to compare the post-9/11 Le Monde headline  “We are all Americans now,” and then go on to compare both (Le Monde’s ”all Americans,” on one hand, and Kakar’s example of all being Hindus or Muslims or the like, on the other) with Eisenstein’s notion of all Germans of conscience identifying themselves as Jews after Kristallnacht.

Those three cases of self-identification with, or constitution of, a self-defining group are significantly different from one another, in ways that deserve to be noted.  For example, there is something offensive to many about the Le Monde identification, especially insofar as it is an identification with the very community (“America”) that itself marginalizes so many members of so many other communities, and silences, refuses to hear, and refuses even to let be heard, the voice of the marginalized that sounds in the 9/11 attacks themselves.  In contrast, insofar as globalized capitalism marginalizes both Hindus and Muslims in the “global market,” constitution of, and identification with, either of those two communities, “Hindu” or “Muslim,” has a liberatory potential completely lacking in the constitution of, and identification with, a global “American” community, as in Le Monde’s post-9/11 headline, which is not at all liberatory.

In contrast to both “we are all Americans” after 9/11, or “we are all Hindus” after some attack or other crisis for the Hindu community, Paul Eisenstein’s suggested “we are all Jews” in Nazi Germany after Kristallnacht is wholly liberatory, and escapes the very oppression of any “communalism” at all in favor of a constituting and identifying with a genuine, genuinely open community.  Similarly and importantly, taken in its concrete historical setting, Duras’s willingness to affirm community even with the Nazis—her willingness literally to own up to their crimes:  to take those crimes on as belonging to “us” all, that is as being “our own” crimes—is a movement of universal opening and inclusion, and is as such wholly liberatory and void of what Kakar calls communalism.  Far from being a movement of assertion of identity via membership in some special group, Duras’s affirmation that we are all Nazis is a turning aside from all such exclusion and exclusivity, such sticking to “one’s own.”

Duras’s movement of universalization, made while she was still awaiting her husband Robert Antelme’s return from the camps, or at least some clear news of him, one way or another, was, as it turned out, unknowingly but simultaneously reciprocated by Antelme himself, as he was later to recount in his own memoir, The Human Race, first written in 1946-47, but not published in France until ten years later, and eventually translated into English by Jeffrey Haight (Evanston, Illinois:  The Marlboro Press/Northwestern University Press, 1992).  The reference at issue comes near the end of the book, finally explaining the title thereof.  Antelme begins by writing (page 219) that “there are not several human races, there is only one human race.  It’s because we’re men like them that the SS will finally stand powerless before us.”  On the next page he elaborates:

[I]f, facing nature, or facing death, we can perceive no substantial difference between the SS and ourselves, then we have to say that there is only one human race.  And we have to say that everything in the world that masks this unity, everything that places beings in situations of exploitation and subjugation and thereby implies the existence of various species of mankind, is false and mad; and that we have proof of this here, the most irrefutable proof, since the worst of victims cannot do otherwise than establish that, in its worst exercise, the executioner’s power cannot be other than one of the powers that men have, the power to murder.  He can kill a man, but he cannot change him into something else.

Those lines are the culmination of his whole account of his experience in the camps in the preceding pages.  Thus, much earlier (page 51) he writes:  ”For the most despised proletarians there is the reassurance of reason.  He is less alone that the person who despises him, whose position will become narrower and narrower, and who will inevitably become more and more isolated and steadily weaker.  The insults of these people are no more able to reach us than they are able to get their hands on the nightmare we have become in their brains:  for all their denying of us we are still there.”

Thus, Anthelme also joins the Psalmist, to return to that ancient source once again, in declaring the impermanence and ireality of those who would exclude others to their own profit–of whatever sort, material or other–and affirming, in contrast, the abiding reality of just what the excluders would exclude.   Here, Anthelme gives that idea radical form, affirming the irreality of the very Nazi camps themselves, and the reality of the life those camps would deny and annihilate.

Anthelme returns to this theme a bit later (page 74), adding more detail.  He begins with a reflection on the spectator to the calamity of the camps:

Th[e] passer-by who happens down the road and goes strolling past the barbed wire, a small dark silhouette against the snow—he is one of the world’s forces.  But if he sees us [that is, the camp inmates] behind the fence, if somehow the idea just enters his head that there are other possibilities in nature than being a man who walks freely along a road, if he launches out on some such train of thought, then it is very likely he will soon feel threatened by all those shaved heads, by all those figures not one of whom he has the slightest chance ever of getting to know, and who are for him of all things on earth the most unknown.  And these men themselves will perhaps contaminate for him the trees that in the distance surround the fence, and this passer-by upon the road will then risk feeling himself smothering within the whole of nature, as though closed shut upon him.

The reign of man, of man who acts or invests things with meaning, does not cease.  The SS cannot alter our species.  They are themselves enclosed within the same humankind and the same history.  Thou shalt not be:  upon that ludicrous wish an enormous machine has been built. . . . [Yet:] They must take account of us so long as we are alive, and it still depends upon us, upon our tenacious hold upon being, whether at the moment they come to kill us they are made to feel utterly certain they have been cheated.

Thus, like William Faulkner’s “mixed-race” character Joe Christmas at the end of Light in August, whose lucid eyes displaying continuing consciousness escape and banish the attempt, by those who have just castrated him and left him bleeding to death, to erase the insufferable yet insuperable fact of his very existence, the victims in the Nazi camps escape their captors’ attempt to make it that they shall not have been.

Equally, however, the perpetrators and their crime cannot be made not to have been.  Thus, Antelme continues:  ”But we cannot have it that the SS does not exist or has not existed.  They shall have burned children, and they shall have done it willingly.  We cannot have it that they did not wish to do it.  They are a force, just as the man walking down the road is one.  And as we are, too; for even now they cannot stop us from exerting our power.”

An episode he then tells of an SS guard from the Rhineland effectively attests that power.  One day, approaching Antelme and another inmate in the factory basement where the two prisoners are sorting machine parts, the Rhinelander holds out his hand to them.  They shake his hand.  Doing so, Antelme writes (page 75), “We had become accomplices.”  By that he does not mean that he and the other prisoner have become accomplices of the SS in their crimes, however.  Rather, as the whole passage makes clear, in offering his hand to shake the guard from the Rhineland has become an accomplice in the act of overturning the SS order:

We had become accomplices.  But he hadn’t so much come to encourage us as to seek reassurance himself, to obtain a confirmation.  He came to share in our power.  Against that handshake there was nothing that could prevail, neither the barking of thousands of SS troops nor the whole apparatus of ovens, dogs, and barbed wire, nor famine, nor lice. . . . Nor did this covert and solitary gesture have a merely private character. . . . Any human relationship a German were to enter into with one of us was the sign itself of a deliberate rebellion against the whole SS order.  Once could not do what the Rhinelander had done—could not, that is, behave as a man toward one of us—without thereby classifying oneself historically. . . . as if they [that is, such human relationships as even a simple handshake] were themselves the paths, narrow and obscure, that history had there been forced to follow.

This example merits a moment’s further reflection.  For one thing, it contrasts with the self-serving—by self-exculpating—acts of the Nazi Auschwitz doctors who, as Robert J. Lifton discusses in The Nazi Doctors, could continue to think of themselves as “saving” lives in the very midst of taking so many.  As Antelme presents it, the Rhinelander’s gesture is a sort of sacramentally effective sign of humanity shared by the guard and the prisoners.  As such a gesture, one that sacramentally effects the very solidarity it signifies, it is indeed, as Antelme has it, an act of genuine rebellion:  an affirmation-demonstration of the very reality the camps sought to deny.  It’s value, however, lies solely in serving such a sacramentally effective lesson; it has no value at all for exculpating the guards, including especially the Rhinelander himself, insofar as he continues, by his very continuing SS membership if nothing else, to be an accomplice, as well, of the Nazis and their entire system.

Just such rebellion is already manifest in the assertion already cited, “We’re still here!” made by the mere presence the victim, like Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s novel.  It is also still–and strongly—there even in the inmate dying or, what is more, already among the dead.  Thus, Antelme writes (pages 93-94):

There are moments when you could kill yourself just in order that the SS fetch up against this limit as it confronts the impassive object you’d have become, the dead body that has turned its back on them, that goesn’t give a shit about their law.  The dead man will at once be stronger than they are just as trees and clouds and cows, which we call things and incessantly envy.  The SS undertaking is careful not to go to the point of denying the daisies growing in the fields.  And like the dead man, the daisy doesn’t give a shit about their law.  The dead man no longer offers them a handle.  Let them savage his face, let them hack his body to bits, the dead man’s very impassiveness, his complete inertness will counter all the blows they strike at him.

That is why we are not always absolutely afraid of dying.  There are moments when, in a flash, death stands there as a simple way for getting away from here, for turning our back, for not caring anymore.

Here, death functions as does the retreat into fantasy whereby the prisoner being tortured by the representatives of the only apparently all-powerful and ubiquitous State at the end of Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil.  Thus does the victim escape even the executioner, whether by fantasizing or by dying—and displaying thereby the enduring irreality of “all that,” of all the trappings with which the powerful seek to hide their own vacuity.

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Responding to Trauma #4: Paul Eisenstein on “the Traumatic Kernel”

Below is the continuation of my draft of a chapter for an eventual book.

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The Truth of Trauma (cont.)

“We are all Americans now.”  That was the famous front-page headline in Le Monde the morning after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.  What might have come to pass if, instead, following Marguerite Duras’s line of thought at the end of World War II about the crimes of the Nazis, it had read:  “We are all terrorists now”?

In Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject (SUNY, 2003) literary theorist Paul Eisenstein, specialist in German literature, suggests that what decent non-Jewish Germans should have done after the beginning of Nazi action against Jewish Germans on Kristallnacht in 1938 is what a few of them actually did, when they put the Star of David in their own shop-windows, actively and effectively identifying themselves with their vandalized Jewish neighbors.  That is, Eisenstein argues, after Kristallnacht the only thing left for non-Jewish Germans of conscience to do was to proclaim that they were all Jews now, too.   Those who did just that in one fashion or another chiseled their own water troughs of promise in the rock.

What Duras adds to the work of that promise is the insight that, once the Nazi extermination camps were opened, the only way all the prisoners of those camps could be set free and kept that way was for all those with a conscience, who so recently all needed to become Jews, to become, now that the Nazis were at last defeated, Nazis in their own turn.  Paradoxical as it may seem, that was the only way, she saw, to turn aside from the Nazi road—or, better, from that long, long road of which only an all too long and too recent stretch bore the Nazi name, but which has borne many other names both before and since the Nazis.  Only so could one wake from the dream, letting its phantoms dissolve in the morning sun while one went about one’s daily business.

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In Traumatic Encounters Eisenstein provides an excellent analysis of liberalism–in the classic sense of that term, not the modern, American one–as sharing with Fascism the endeavor to avoid trauma (pp. 42ff).  But I am not sure that he fully appreciates what his own analysis shows, or at least what it showed me.   I will use a line of Eisenstein’s own, to point to what I think that is. Early on in the book (namely, on page 42), he uses the phrase, “the prevention of future catastrophes,” to name the goal to the service of which he hopes his own analysis may contribute.   (In the next sentence, he does go on to qualify that statement a bit, but not in a way that affects what I want to say here).

The argument he advances is that both liberalism and National Socialism end up “disavowing” the “traumatic kernel”—what French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls the point de capiton, the “quilting point”–that is “internal” to any political order (like the point of “decision” from which law and legal right themselves come, according to the right-wing German legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who used his thought to support the Nazi state, though Eisenstein does not draw that connection himself).  They disavow that “traumatic instability/inconsistency” that is internal to any and every social order, by turning it into a definite historical “something,” rather than keeping cognizant of what Eisenstein, using a Kantian terminology, calls its “transcendence”—by giving the traumatic kernel or quilting point (p. 45) “a context, a history, from the beginning.”  Eisenstein uses “the figure of the Jew” in National Socialism as his example.  However, his analysis also applies just as well, so far as I can see, to the liberal construction of any such presumed actual historical starting point, whether that be “the state of nature” of classical social contract theory, or even John Rawls’s notion of  “the original position” in his contemporary reworking of such theory.

At any rate, what it seems to me Eisenstein himself may miss, or at least underemphasize, in his persuasive analysis is precisely what it brought most clearly to my own attention:  that the very endeavor to “prevent” such catastrophes as the Holocaust is itself a move of just the sort he so clearly exposes in liberalism and National Socialism.  In short, it is precisely the endeavor to secure oneself against a future recurrence of catastrophe that counter-intentionally ends up generating just such recurrence—indeed, that requires such catastrophe to found itself and whatever order it imposes, found itself and its order in and as the very disavowal of the un-disavowable occurrence of trauma.

The discussion could also be cast in terms of the notion of idolatry. National Socialism, liberalism, and, if I am right, Eisenstein’s own notion of “preventing future catastrophes” are all “idolatrous,” in that they all make the contextualizing, historizing move whereby a “transcendence” is made into an “object,” to use the Kantian language Eisenstein himself does.  They all make God into an idol.

Eisenstein himself elsewhere in the same book all but sees and says the same thing, when he argues, contra contemporary American historian Dominic LaCapra, that what the latter calls “structural trauma” is actually the very “precondition” for “historical trauma,” and that it is only by remembering or 
”repeating” the former that we can lessen the frequency of the latter.   But what does that entail, if not that the very focus on “preventing” “historical” trauma engenders, against its own apparent intention, more and ever more of the very trauma it struggles to avoid?  It is only, as Eisenstein argues, by remembering “structural” trauma as such (as “structural,” in a “transcendental” sense) that we can stop keeping on doing deadly repetitions/recollections of it in the form of “historical” trauma, acting the unacknowledged structural trauma out again and again.  Just so, to use an example that is of concern to Eisenstein himself, the contemporary Israeli oppression of the Palestinians can be seen as a re-enactment of the Holocaust itself, with new victims and with the old victims now become victimizers.

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