Healed to Pieces

“My grim little play needs another ending – one that is real, and therefore satisfying and healing.” – Annie G. Rogers
 
With trauma there is a horror that cannot be seen head on, fully formed. The mind protects us from seeing too much, all at once. One should not, supposedly, see the face of the Gods or even speak their true names, so too with trauma, we cannot afford to know it for what it was. Not exactly, in every unbearable detail. What it is, what it has become, however, allows hope to emerge in an otherwise completely shattered world. Because the creativity it took to dissociate can also, in time, become the vehicle of the soul’s repair.

It isn’t only a matter of specific memories that are the work of working through our trauma, more importantly it is the understanding that with every traumatic event is a concomitant traumatized state of mind, a trauma nucleus, a dark winter of the body and mind, an affect state where sounds, smells, tastes, colors, all carry certain experiences which were developed under duress in a great and early shattering.

Poet Paul Celan carried too much horror, head on. The unbearable details of the holocaust, for him, would not go away. He fought so hard to stay in this world, but in the end flung himself into oblivion “They’ve healed me to pieces,” Celan once wrote, because for him, as for so many other survivors, the war can never truly be over.

“In the air, there your root remains, there, in the air” it is as if, with trauma, there is no place from which one comes. Roots are planted in the air, where nothing can possibly take hold and make a home for itself in the world. Trauma is also a state of homelessness, an exile from a body, the first of many homes from which we are evicted when trauma strikes.

Yet language also carries with it an impossible hope, a light without a switch, a place where “you’re rowing by wordlight”. Celan knew that there was one thing that could house us in the midst of the full faced horror; “Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.”

One wonders if trauma cannot also warp a language. The way one holds and uses words could be entwined with the unspeakable inner dark shatter. The words not used would be as important as the one’s used. In a shattered place, a simple goodbye turns into a loss that cannot be tolerated. For some, goodbyes are never just goodbyes. For some, there is a certitude that with every departure is an abandonment.

Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas attunes himself to these slight gestures as clues into an environment that every traumatized person brings with them into the room. To attempt to listen close enough to hear a mother or a father’s voice through a person’s recounting of their lives is to listen to what trauma must have sounded, felt, smelled and tasted like as it happened so long ago and as it still lives on in the suffering body trying so very hard not to fling themselves into oblivion but instead to communicate and share their shatter. It is not only language that can become warped, but a body’s posture, the timbre of the voice. Roots are planted in air and there is a nuclear winter afoot.

As Bollas says of his work with autistic children, even beyond language we are clued into one’s breakdown; “An autistic child may not utter a word, but his cries, dense preoccupied silence and his mimetic use of people is his language. He lodges himself inside the other, compelling the other to experience the breakdown of language (and hope and desire).” Not only can language be warped, for some, it can also disappear. If language is the road toward repair, what happens when it evaporates from use?

“The autistic child taught me how to attend to this wordless element in the adult,” continues Bollas. Every human records his early experience of the object (the other) and there is a shadow that falls upon one, leaving a trace of what happened in the traumatized adult. And in every shadow there is wordlight, there is unactivated hope.

“The object can cast its shadow without a child being able to process this relation through mental representation or language… While we do know something of the character of the object which affects us, we may not have thought it yet... (We are able, one day, with much work) to relive through language that which is known but not yet thought; the unthought known.”

Such work is a perilous journey into the depths of our inner shadow, across a mental River Styx, in a boat, a body, that has not always fared well or safely with such crossings. “What are the sounds we will whisper to one another in this new territory where nothing is certain,” asks Annie Rogers. Because to live out from under the terrible shadow cast on us from trauma is to live an unknown and unknowable future. We risk what we can in the place of our “deepest wounding and loss.”

For those who’ve been cast into the world of deep and abiding trauma, magical thinking is one way, among many, that serve to save us from total mental collapse, for who can admit to themselves that those who love them can also hurt them so terribly and so early. Even the worst of homes is not without its love, which makes things more confusing. We need the future to be unknowable in order to exit the place of shadows. It is wordlight we hunger for and do not always know where to find.

“When your father is tearing your insides apart and your mother is attacking you from behind, you’d better be able to imagine that you can get them to do what you want. You’d better be able to believe that you can do the right thing and it will make all the difference!” Annie Rogers

We had to believe we could fix what someone else broke in us, with a magical and perfectly placed word, with an eloquent child’s plea perhaps we could call down our parents hidden angels, and when none arrived disaster truly struck, we split our inner worlds apart in order to survive the nuclear fall out.

“The future has already been laid down in the vanishing tracks of the past. It is as though I have forgotten that those tracks were laid down someplace within my child’s body. This child could already foretell the future through the past…All my life it becomes clear, I’ve been living within a particular play in the endless past…The pain of it is so unbearable that it surrounds [one.] When there are no words for this, no thoughts, then it can only be lived out… My fear of being abandoned, a terror in my body like the terror of immanent death, is the play I have lived all my life trying to escape… Fleeing my own terror, I created a play of vigilance and waiting – waiting for the appearance of my (remembered) mother and father, or waiting for their surrogates in later years. To stop this vigilance is to know the terror of “I will die.” Perhaps if I could play my part just right, I could magically find the feelings and gestures that would conjure up the mother who sometimes comforted me, the father who swept me up off the floor and sometimes danced with me. Who has ever loved and not learned to do this – to conjure oneself and others with the most loving gestures?” -Annie Rogers

And what if they were both, loving and cruel? What if they obliterated and comforted us, in that great and eternal cleavage of our soul, where would we find our wordlight? Surely not every home is also loving. As Paul Celan knew all too well, one could be nothing but dark, a holocaust-home where there is only destruction. How does hope survive there, if at all? Even then Celan struggles to stay afloat on words, words that carry a broken man like a raft, and that sadly fall apart in cold, cruel waters. Celan’s words flickered with light for as long as they could. They sustained him for a while. Could he have dug for more? It is not right to ask this. I think when a person goes there was truly no way for them to stay, in that moment. Wordlight went dark. But Celan left us with the very real possibility that language could sustain us even after the worst of human cruelties.

“I wonder if the basic tragedy of trauma is not so much the fear of dying as it is the denial of death itself. Ironically, this denial does not work, because it sits beside the grindingly repetitious (and sometimes dangerous) plays we create to transform mortality into invulnerability. The denial of death sits beside a repeated fear of unexpected annihilation for those among us who know fear much too intimately… I might learn to live with an unknowable future, unknowable in all ways except for the certainty of death. Knowing that “our little life is rounded with a sleep,” I might be free to live fully and to love again.” -Annie Rogers

To rework a Greg Brown lyric, perhaps we are never so far that the unknown cannot once again find us, and in finding us, set us free. But I believe, when it comes to trauma, we are never fully free or fully whole. But we are also not entirely shackled. Our shadows are stitched to our heels, as it were, but wordlight might also undo some stitches that are no longer needed, bits of skin that have healed and are ready for all that it cannot know, even for the angels that it cannot call down from on high, for the terrifying and mighty disappointments which must find their part in our new, eternally unfolding play.

Perhaps it is something like that place in the air Celan describes:

“To stand in the shadow
of the scar up in the air.
​
To stand-for-no-one-and-nothing.
Unrecognized,
for you alone.

With all there is room for in that,
even without
language.”

To stand for you alone, even when wordlight seems to have forsaken us. We wait for its return.