The dream world doesn't give a shit about waking life. It's not like when you're dreaming you're obsessed with what your waking life "means" - all you are is there. But "awake's" a different story, ignoring or wringing the necks out of those dreams. An archetypal sado-masochistic relationship, the one that informs the death-drive? Quite possibly, quite indeed.
And I couldn't begin to tell you what's happening down there, when I go down at night, all that life, there's no telling it, even in French. The swarms of men and women whose names aren't pronouncable, the places that I land in that give way to another continually evolving place. Faces screaming stories and how do you speak the story of a face? Even photographs fail. I'd have to create a portal between the worlds and finagle them to cross over. Like I'm going to spend my time there doing that. And if I did, why would they come? Here to where even our real's not real?
My real? If I were to judge how real it is by the world around me, well. Half the people I know don't want to know, the other half have no idea if what I'm saying is real or not, and the uncounted? Let them stumble away into leaf-covered thickets, kicking rotten apples down the hill to the cold fast creek.
I wrestle every day, every day every minute every breath and second, with how it feels to not be home. "You're just not happy in Austin," and "You can always go/come home," don't even remotely apply. The w/hole of my chest continues to sing the icy songs, shards of glass, cocoa, wooden porches and wine glasses full of plummy kisses, for what? The pouring of that voice pouring down khaki walls, staining the carpet, I'm always cleaning.
"The only thing that people living in New Orleans want to think about is snuggling in a comfy bed at night," said my brave Sister Deer, who lives in New Orleans, when we talked about the general resistance of people living in New Orleans to talk about the "hard stuff". It's either that or there's no way they want to hear how excruciating life out here is because they really honestly don't think that it can compare. It's like, if you're not there you're not anywhere. And you know? That's the very thing I'm grappling with: being now/here.
And we are out here, sisters and brothers, thousands upon thousands of aching scraping people, working to work, living to live, befuddled and frightened, or not. All I ever did, my whole life, was feel what was mine to feel. Now? I feel that the world has been irreperably damaged, the axis is off its balance, the fulcrum's slipped, there's no center anymore. I don't know who you are and you don't know me. If I didn't know better I'd say it's all just a dream.
"THE ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.
Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.
The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner which undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often, secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative, but as a symptom.
The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention away from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "double-think," and which mental health professionals, searching for a calm, precise, language, call "dissociation." It results in the protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood.
Witnesses as well as victims are subject to the dialectic of trauma. It is difficult for an observer to remain clearheaded and calm, to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time, to retain all the pieces, and to fit them together. It is even more difficult to find a language that conveys fully and persuasively what one has seen. Those who attempt to describe the atrocities that they have witnessed also risk their own credibility. To speak publicly about one's knowledge of atrocities is to invite the stigma that attaches to victims."
- Judith Lewis Herman, MD: Trauma and Recovery, p. 1-2
