Signifying Pain Chapter Eight

Chapter 8: God Don’t Like Ugly: Michael S. Harper’s Soul-Making Music

In this chapter, Harris explores the writings of Michael S. Harper. It is likely that I have read something by Harper somewhere in my readings but his name does not come to mind when I list poets. Harper writing from the African-American experience much as one of my favorite poets does—Patricia Smith. As I read this chapter I ached to grab my books of her poetry, of relating what Harris is saying to what I have read between the lines of Smith’s verse. But time is precious and demands other things of me.

Harris shows how, through the rhythms of jazz and tradition, Harper exposes the too fresh scars that America too often ignores:

America has a wound; the wound is self-inflicted. A sutured wound will heal but may leave a scar. The black man who is subjected to humiliation and servility is another refrain in the long epic of a country’s progress bridled by prejudice and oppression. One cannot wash one’s hands of it or make it clean by liberal mind-set or proxy. The infection must be gradually cut back, defiled. And so it is true with the legacy of segregation that continues to plague democratic ideals and fills urban ghettos. Indeed, America needs a witness. Sorrow is not borne alone, but is toiled through, creeping its way into sound. (155)

America needs a witness. And America is not alone. Everywhere there are atrocities conducted on a national level. In every neighborhood atrocities are condoned on a community level. And behind many closed doors, the scream of abuse is heard, ignored, or silenced in sobs.

America needs a witness because America is a nation living in denial. We self-help our way through life, hoping to become better. We numb ourselves with narcotics—drugs, alcohol, television.

Indeed, memory and pain are at the heart of Harper’s poetry whether writing from
personal experience or from collective experience (158).

Why the “or”? Why “from personal experience or from collective experience”? Is not the reason Plath’s poetry is so powerful deeply embedded in the fact that although person other women recognize themselves in what she wrote? Is not the deepest personal writing not also the collective voice crying out? Or do we still want to believe that this is the exception, each time an exception, this one the exception?

Recently I watched a brief interview with a father of a boy who had raped a girl, the father saying how the girl had gone around boasting about being sexually active, claiming that she had had some sort of party that . . . justified? Dare I say it? Isn’t that what I inferred? That he was somehow blaming the girl for what his boy did?

And what is wrong with a world in which an eight-year-old boy is accused of raping an eleven-year-old girl?

Pause and really think about this. Eleven. Eight. Children. Rape.

America needs a witness. And it is still tempting, so damned tempting to shut my eyes and ears to eleven and eight year old children living in their world of violence. Denial. Or witness.

All it takes is one voice.

Signifying Pain Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven: Rescuing Psyche: Keats's Containment of the Beloved but Fading Woman in the "Ode of Psyche"

Harris writes deeply and beautifully about Keats’s poetry and about how the estrangement and loss of his mother, his own abbreviated life experiences, inform his poetry. She comes to her exploration through his use of the Psyche mythology, something that is common in literati circles. Find a theme, a common image, then weave a meaning around the single thing until you can argue a more profound truth than even the interpreted author could have imagined.

Once again I feel compelled to break away from an in depth exploration of what Harris has written and go into my own written world. So, Judith Harris, I beg your forgiveness but I thank you for your inspiration.

Aphrodite, being capricious as were all of the Greek Gods, tells her son Eros to cause Psyche to fall in love with a monster because of Psyche’s mortal beauty. Eros, however, falls in love with Psyche and hides her away in his palace where he comes to her at night, making love to her, asking only that she not light a lamp when he is there.

Here we are, unenlightened, willfully ignorant, and beautiful. We are loved by a god, but unaware. Our lives are what they are, confined to a palace, seemingly well attended and secure. At night the truth comes to us, in those subconscious moments of unguarded honesty. What we know is there, drifting into our dreams.

Psyche’s sisters question the arrangement, suggesting that Psyche is married to a monster. A seed of doubt is planted; Psyche wonders if she has what has is her best. One night she lights a lamp, prepared to kill the beast with whom she is sleeping, only to see that he is beautiful, more beautiful than she could have imagined or hoped. She bends to kiss him but a drop of oil spills, awakening Eros, who flies off leaving his beloved wife behind.

We know something is not right. We could settle for what we have, live on in our palace. Or we can listen to those voices that say something is wrong, warning us to open our eyes, to look fully into the face of the beast. There is something fearful about looking into a painful experience. It was dangerous the first time. How can we know it won’t be traumatic again, to look at it again? Nevertheless, we turn on the light and prepare ourselves to see the worst but catch a glimpse of the best. We fall in love with what we see but it flies away. And now the work begins.

Psyche first gets angry and avenges herself on her sisters. Wandering, she goes to one temple and the next until she is eventually forced to go to Aphrodite’s temple after first being told to do so by Hera, the mother goddess. Aphrodite, still jealous and spiteful, sets tasks for Psyche to complete, typically impossible tasks one of which actually leads to a moment for Psyche in which she is prepared to die in order to succeed.

Waking up to what we have lost, somewhere, and not knowing how to face our loss, we first feel rage. How could this have happened? Why me? And we demand some restitution. We must first sort through the memories, not avoiding any one for another, accepting the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful. Then we must patiently return and find the gold within each—find the awareness that we are what we are because of, not in spite of, these things. And finally, we must be prepared to die to who we think we are to become what we have always been, what we already are, to dare to look into our own beauty and fall asleep in order to be awakened. This is where the frustration and the pain begins, an arduous birthing process, and at the end our eyes are opened to the truth of our always having been . . .

And Psyche is given immortality by the gods, allowing her to live eternally with her beloved Eros. Had Psyche never lit the lamp and looked upon her beloved, she would never have had to suffer the tasks that Aphrodite set for her. Had she never lit the lamp she would have aged, become less beautiful, and perhaps suffered the loss of Eros’ adoration. At best, she would have died, a mortal. Instead, because she dared to light the lamp, to look upon the possibility of love, she became immortal, living eternally beautiful.

The gift of self-enlightenment is not immortality so much as an eternal awareness. The work is painful, sometimes terrifying, often seemingly impossible. In the end, what we give ourselves is a knowledge that we can come through anything, that we are willing to face anything, even the beastly in ourselves. In the end, what we earn is our own immortal beauty that lies far deeper than the body and its life of experiences.

Read about Psyche for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros_and_Psyche

Signifying Pain Chapter Six

Chapter 6: Giotto’s Invisible Sheep: Lacanian Mirroring and Modeling in Walcott’s Another Life

Memory is as fixed as any object, and as easily lost. Although the object may be gone, however, it will not be abandoned: language is wrought by shaping words, as an object is shaped by the hand that it hollows (132).

I have recently been invited into my past, seeing myself and my life through the eyes of others who had disappeared and then returned, surprising me with the details that I do not carry any longer. Not everything they remember is something I have forgotten but I realize that much of it has been lost.

And then there are the details I recall. The curve of a lip. The shadows over an eye. The thing that embarrasses. The part that inspires pride. Above all else, I remember the dreams. Fingers on bass strings. Frustrations over expectations thwarted. The simple need for hearth and home. The urge for freedom.

Each person seems to come with a different aroma. Some more pungent, spicy, while others are mellow. Curry or cream, mushrooms or melon.

What is most remarkable is the timing of it all. Stirring up memories when I feel like I am letting go of so much in my life. I am making room in my life for new relationships because the old ones do not serve. And this is the time that even older ones come back to me; people I had thought were lost forever find me.

One in particular, whose name I sought after 9-11, desperate to not find anyone I knew “once upon a time.” There was another mutual person and I have asked after her. But what is so remarkable about this one person’s returns are the memories. So much more sweetness than I could have hoped for. Knowing that this person knew me at my absolute worst and can share some of my goodness with me is surprising. Precious. And makes me wonder if I have filtered others from my past through a haze of time and forgiveness.

And grace, because I think that has so much to do with it. When this person first approached me it was with an apology. I was flabbergasted. Not only did I believe I was the one in need of forgiveness but I had forgotten the injury. Not the facts of it so much as the hurt of it. Perhaps there is some numbed scar tissue there. Or maybe I have been hurt far more deeply since then and no longer consider this the greatest loss in my lifetime’s experiences.

More likely it boils down to this . . . I remember the places we ate, walking together, running into my cousin and making introductions, sharing drinks and cigarettes. I remember time alone, conversations. I remember the rooms we spent most of our time together, hiding from the world, listening to music, and closing our eyes to the truth.

And I remember love. Tears. But whatever pain seemed to me to be always mutually shared and I am so grateful to know that I was not wrong, that we both made mistakes, acknowledge these things, and have forgiven. Not each other, but ourselves.

For so long some memories were excruciatingly painful to hold. Eventually the pain lessened and the memory was dropped. Now, through the sharing of stories, some forgotten memories are being returned to me. Perhaps gilded but still welcome.

Signifying Pain Chapter Five

Chapter 5: Carving the Mask of Language: Self and Otherness in Dramatic Monologues

There is a challenge I face in responding to Harris’ work. Her literary allusions, quotes, citations, are thrilling because they are familiar. When she discusses Plath’s Lady Lazarus I am reminded of a time when I read it at an open mic, of memorizing the lines, and of knowing Plath’s own history and where the poem overlapped with and digressed from her life.

This is the mask that language allows. To use the “I” but to see differently yourself. The façade, the face, the mask—that which we present to the world.

I am always and have ever been uncomfortable with my confessional poetry. I feel that even my most intimate and honest poems have never been deep enough to be honest. “I” can write about myself in a particular moment but I am not longer in that moment, I am no longer experiencing it. As I write about it, I do so through a filter of time, that relentless 20/20 hindsight that knows better, and hopefully some grace of forgiveness.

Still, I learned early that others would read what I wrote and make assumptions. I could write about Person A and when Person B read the poem he would think the poem was about him. Or I could write a love poem to myself, about making love to my body, and know, when I am done, that someone else reading the poem would someday question my sexuality.

And when I write a poem of fury at someone I can just as easily sit down and write a poem of love for them. Emotions simmer in the same inferno, fire up and flare creativity in the same way. A love poem will have lines of doubt and apathy. A poem of anger will have pain and hope. There is no one “I” inside about which I can write.

Harris suggests, “[t]his fictional speaker expresses emotions that are not directly attributable to the author himself or herself. Such dramatization, or ‘play,’ can be a therapeutic aid to self-understanding and self-reconciliation” (109). I cannot but agree. When I was not in counseling, I used poetry as a means of journaling. I found ways to express my confusion, anger, desire, hopes, in the safety of poetry. What I could not expose in a journal, I could disguise in the “I” of a poem.

Harris further contends that “[t]hrough adopting a mask, poets find a representation for volatile emotions in order to master them” (120). I think of the dreams I’ve had in which I have murdered someone I love. Not through some passive means like poison or even disconnecting a lifeline plug. I have dreamt of cutting flesh from muscle, then muscle from bone. I have dug my hands elbow deep in the viscera of a lover and then run their blood over my face, masking myself in red heat. I have held a throat in my fingers and looked unblinking into the slow dying of light in their eyes and not let go until I could no longer hold my breath after they had stopped breathing.

Such rage enters my dreams and lodges there. Some of these dreams find a new life on the page, either in a poem or story. But what doesn’t ever quite make it onto the page is my real “I,” my complete “I.” Like Walt Whitman’s self-contained millions, as soon as I stop writing I have not already become some other but am not even sure I have managed to write about myself at all. It’s all so fragmented and incomplete. I don’t have time to do more. I don’t even aspire to do more. I just wonder sometimes, when I am dead, what will others think about me when they have read what I have written. Wonder and pray that they have the sense to know that this is just a small piece of who I really am, who I ever was, and far removed from the “I” I hope to be.

Signifying Pain Chapter Four

Chapter 4: Fathering Daughters: Oedipal Rage and Aggression in Women’s Writing

How does the daughter respond to a chapter about the conflict between father and daughter when she never knew her father? How do you respond to something that is not a part of your experience?

As I read this chapter, I kept wondering where my rage was. Why am I not angrier? Should I be angrier?

I never met my father. My mother says I look lke him. I don't look much like my mother although we share so many of the same mannerisms that it is hard not to recognize the relationship. What I've been told by those few who eer saw my father is that I look very much like him. His relationship was brief but intense. Then he was gone.

Do you grieve for a loss you never had? How do you experience a hole in your life that was never there?

Is this why the anger I have in my poems towards the few men in my life who have inspired my ire often focus so closely on a single person that they cannot be seen as feminist rage? When Plath writes about her father, it is her father and men and the patriarchal society. When I write about my father, it is about a phantom. A man who owned an ocelot, who painted, who sold Good Humor ice cream from an ice cream cart on the streets of Manhattan, who had a Purple Heart for a wound he received during the Korean War. Random details, dna, and supposedly his face in the mirror.

I just don't know that for me it is unhealthy not to be angry with a man who holds no meaning in my life. It would almost take more energy for me to find a way to be angry with him that is healthy than it does to just be . . . what? Apathetic? Ambivalent? Not angry?

There is no denying that I had moments of missing the idea of him. I would see my friends whose fathers would come home from work, would sit at the head of the table, would buy their little girls gifts. I would also see the fathers who were angry, who were neglectful, who were too busy to be there.

Sometimes these men were one and the same, both loveable and loathesome. I was also selfish, an only child who did not share easily so maybe not sharing my mother was more a blessing than a curse. Or perhaps it was an insult added to a personality injury. Had I had to share her would I have been less selfish? Possibly.

It is all hypothetical. As are my feelings towards this idea of father. I could speculate about how my life would have been different had he not disappeared from my life. I could dig down and stir up some hostility towards him for not being there. I could judge and jury him for abandoning me, us. But to what end?

When I think of my father I feel a vague absence, something not there. I remember a friend of mine once asked me what it was like to look so young. How would I know? When I look in the mirror, I see a 45 year old woman. How do I feel towards a man I've never met? I don't know. Mostly I feel like I probably deserved better but it could have been worse. And when I look in the mirror, I like what I see, even if I don't see my mother clearly stamped in my face.

Satia

Signifying Pain Chapter Three

Chapter 3: Breaking the Code of Silence: Ideology and Women’s Confessional Poetry

Once again, I am breaking away from any sense of organized approach to this book. How I have written about De Salvo and Pennebaker is not at all how I am approaching Harris. I hope she can forgive me. I’m going to blame my lack of sleep on why I can’t seem to pull myself into focus.

The victim never deserves the perpetrator’s crime; he or she is rendered powerless by an overwhelming forced, an atrocity. It is only the survivor who can tell a story of his or her own victimhood; some victims do not survive. It is the responsibility of the living to make certain that their outrage is not only justified, but also the only appropriate response to the extremities of helplessness and terror and to confront the past as past (60).

This ties in so obviously and so well with what I was saying about how the survivor is the one who writes the memoir, who confesses the truth, who speaks out on the page. Or on the internet, as I seem to be doing. The need for the survivor to speak is so necessary. In the previous chapter, Harris wrote about how Freud thought that any sexual memories from childhood were merely wishful fantasies (on which he inevitably built his theory of the Oedipus Complex). In not being able to imagine that maybe some of these patients were actually recalling memories, by relegating them to false memories, the survivor’s voice lived on in denial. But this is no longer the case. When enough people raise the flickering candle of what happened, eventually people will stop and see. It may take time but it does have a certain imperative implication. If you have survived, you must speak. If not you, then who? The one(s) who did not survive?

Writing is a significant way to master trauma and complete the work of mourning (60).

One of the things of which I am repeatedly reminded as I read these books is how beneficial writing is for the person who is trying to heal. When I was struggling with my marriage, trying to discern for myself what would be best for myself and my children, I journaled a lot. My counselor often observed that I would take what little work we had done in her office and run with it in my journal, exploring and digging deeper to try to get to my own answers. My work was mostly a form of mourning. I had to let go of the fantasy of saving my marriage and come to terms with the fact that the relationship was dead, lost, and not something I could salvage. I had to cry and scream, beg and question. These things were done most easily between the pages of my journal.

[A] few of the original members of the confessional school . . . have been belittled and even demeaned for writing poems deemed as exhibitionistic, self-indulgent, narcissistic, or melodramatic (61).

I can only imagine what these same critics are saying about bloggers. The truth is, my step-sister and I discuss this often—the narcissism of writing. She has her memoirs and poems. I have my blogs, my poems, my . . . well, the list is rather endless. And exhibitionist. And self-indulgent. And narcissistic. I don’t think it’s melodramatic but I can only hope that these critics of the confessional school of poetry never stumble into any of my writing.

The victim should feel not guilt, but shame. Shame is the painful feeling of embarrassment or disgrace, a feeling that something unfortunate or regrettable has happened; but unlike guilt, shame does not blame and condemn its own heart, although shame, like innocence, is still in darkness. Shame repeats the question “why?”—and unfortunately, guilt is all too anxious to provide the answers (62).

I took exception to this. I don’t see how shame is empowering. I don’t think that it is very different from guilt, frankly. But then, I confess I am rather shameless. There may be a power in shame of which I am personally unaware. It may be a part of the healing process. And perhaps there is something here to consider—that the process of healing is not the same for everyone. Perhaps shame is necessary for some but for others it may not be. Pennebaker pointed out in his book, atehiet, that some people who survive trauma not only do not seem affected by it but may not be less emotionally healthy than those who struggle hard to make meaning of their experience. There may not be a right way and who am I to say that shame is not appropriate in some circumstances?

That is Job’s ultimate salvation: not guilt, but the love and the courage to live and love with unanswered questions (63).

My heart leapt at this. I often remind others because I need to remind myself that it is okay to ask the questions but it is crucial not to get stuck needing an answer. It is understandable to want to know why (see the previous quote) but it is not always necessary to have an answer. In fact, I have seen many people get stuck in needing to know why rather than finding a way to let go. Job is never really told why the events of his life happened. And in the end, he didn’t need to know why. Sometimes it is enough just to ask the questions.

Like the Holocaust survivor, the female confessional poet who has endured a traumatic experience is not untouched by shame for having been there to witness, present to terrible acts. The female confessional poet must break the code of silence and overturn the imbalance of power relations (65).

This reminded me of something I read in the introduction to the book Treblinka by Jean Francois-Steiner. The author suggested that the Frank family (as in The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank) were very naïve, even self-destructively so. To hide in an attic with no means of escape was foolish enough but for them not to have any means of self-protection, no guns or weapons to speak of, showed no real foresight. There is a shame implied in bearing witness to something as impossible to imagine as the Holocaust was. That the Holocaust became a metaphor around the time that the confessional poets were emerging is contextually and historically inevitable. Just as the events of September 11 have become a focal point for our contemporary society, the Holocaust had a repercussive resonance for these writers. As nations faced the truth which was gradually unfolding in Nuremberg and other trials across the globe, these confessional poets were trying to face and put voice to their own truths.

Had they [the Nazis] not know the difference between right and wrong, here would be no reason to hide it (70).

My first thought was about the children who are told to be silent, to hide the truth, to share in the secret. The minute the abuser says not to say anything, the child knows. If this were right, if there were nothing wrong in what we are doing, then I would not have to be silent. Like the Nazis who destroyed files to hide what had been done during World War II, the child knows, intuitively, that destroying the truth suggests something is not right.

Therefore, the language of confession is torrid, descriptive, and often brutal. . . . Silence only sustains suffering, but the artist breaks the silence by giving up suffering to speech and writing (72).

I have to agree that this is a brutal practice. This need to dig and then expose, to take what was secret and no longer remain silent. It is brutal on an experiential level and that brutality is bound to find itself in the words used to say “This is what happened to me!” There is nothing gentle about this and the reader who doesn’t feel somewhat brutalized by what they have read has not read closely.

And that’s okay, too. Sometimes it is safer and easier to not look brutality in the face. There is a time for these things. Now is not always the time.

Signifying Pain Chapter Two

Chapter 2: Violating the Sanctuary/Asylum: Freudian Treatment of Hysteria in “Dora” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”

Before I go any further with this response to Harris’ work, I have to say that I have a particular interpretation of Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” that I have never seen discussed anywhere. I approached this chapter hoping someone else would see what I had seen in the text but, like the protagonist in the story, I am apparently alone in my understanding of what is happening in this story.

In this chapter, Harris describes a parallel between Freud’s “talk therapy” and writing as a means of healing, a sort of self-therapy, using Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a cautionary tale of what can happens when one does not find a way to put into words their experience, their truth.

What follows is a rather stream-of-consciousness response to this chapter. It is not intellectual. It not revised. It is raw. It is immediate. Subjective rather than objective. It is what I want to offer in response to this chapter.

What happens when we are forced into silence?

I grew up in a home where honesty and transparency were encouraged. I married into a family that had secrets. Layers. Walls. I thought that words were enough to break through but I learned that, where silence is habit, words are not welcome.

I lost myself in silence. I literally lost my self. I was lost.

My husband did not understand communication. His comfort was in silence. To begin speaking would have meant staring in a mirror and seeing things he had learned to forget.

Silence allows the memory to fade.

What nightmares did he not share? What horrors he did share are still enough to make tears come to my eyes long after my marriage dried up. Knowing how many layers of denial there were, I cringe to ask: How many nightmares never saw the light of day?

And what? What if he had dared to stare into his truth? What if he had not blinked into silence? What then?

I know that others have spoken their truth and not been heard. Is it enough to say, “This happened” when nobody wants to believe? There are still those who deny the Holocaust because it is easier to believe that these things didn’t happen, couldn’t happen, never happened.

If I believe that anyone is capable of this then doesn’t that imply that there but for the grace of God go I?

Easier to deny than to believe.

The abused child sublimates, forgets, is taught to be silent. Shhh . . . mustn’t tell. And when you tell who will listen? The abuser?

The abuser denies. I never, would never, could never. Easier to deny than to believe because to believe means to be responsible. Confession may be good for the soul but denial feels safer.

You broke through the lies
and burned yourself in truth
You carry these scars
to the abuser who looks away
unable to bear the pain
of flesh rebuilt and the scar of yourself.
Now you walk dark
marrying yourself to the lies
again and again hoping someone
will love you enough to listen.

Is it a copout? I want you to hear what happened to me. I need you to acknowledge that yes this is true. Not my truth. Just true. Hear me!

What happens when my truth is not heard? Denial?

In my case—divorce. Don’t listen. Goodbye. You silence nearly killed me. I had to leave. Truth is, you wouldn’t listen.

Toxic parenting. Mother poisons child through abuse and lies and silence. Child runs to mother—Do you see what you did to me?

No.

Now what? Is it really better to have faced the truth when you must face it alone?

Platitude answer—yes. Blah blah blah. Better to live the truth than live a lie. Denial is not just a river in Egypt.

Here is the mirror. My face is washed. No mask nor makeup behind which to hide. Look at me. Look at the scars, the discoloration, the wrinkles. Look but do not blink. I dare you.

I dare myself, hand twitching to flinch, to apply first a false foundation, a layer of mascara, slick of lipstick, and a line around my eyes. Mask myself from being seen, hide my vision, and silence my voice.

SCREAM!

A mirror shatters against my truth. I cannot break unless I forget to own my perception.

Validation is a bitch. Denial is a bitch. Which is the bigger bitch?

I don’t know. I think I blinked.

Signifying Pain Chapter One

Chapter 1: The Healing Effects of Writing about Pain: Literature and Psychoanalysis

I am struggling with some of the truth in this chapter. Not because I presume to argue the point or suggest that Harris is not presenting a valid argument. On the contrary. I am resistant because I know it is true and yet I am powerless to help someone I know to see the truth.

Some people are compelled to repeat what is most painful and, yet, what is not remembered (32).

What do you do when someone you care about repeats these mistakes? What if they are not ignorant but very well aware of the truth, of the past that is not forgotten but clearly remembered? What if they even wrote about the trauma and yet return to it, time and time again?

Nothing. You listen. You wait. You hope. What more can you do? I keep returning to this idea of detachment. That is what I suggested was true about the relationship between the writer and reader, that there is a certain awareness, a detachment even, that the reader carries. The writer is clearly a survivor. If not, the words would not be on the page, not published, not dissimulated. Although there are memoirs that come to mind by writers who do not, in fact, survive, these are the exceptions to the over all rule.

When I hold your words in my hand I know that no matter how painful these words may be you survived and were strong enough to write about what you survived. What I don’t know is if I am strong enough to read the memories.

Victims and survivors of political oppression or domestic abuse exorcise their pain through art, confession, or testimony. Because art demands a certain amount of detachment (even if this detachment is subordinated to the exigency of communicating something meaningful in the rendering of qualitative elements), artistic activity perhaps accelerates the therapeutic process (31).

The truth is, I know this is true, that writing/verbalizing trauma does accelerate the therapeutic process. I also am not so naïve as to believe that anyone can take pen to paper and heal their psychic and emotional wounds. There are times when professional help is necessary.

I am beginning to wonder how to know when this is true, when it is not enough to write in a journal but time to find someone objective and educated in the ways of healing. How do we know when we have dug deeply enough, have reenacted the trauma, and are now ready to move beyond to something integrated and meaningful (13)?

I don’t know.

I don’t know and this whole chapter is about confessional writing and all I can confess is I don’t know. I went to a doctor today and he didn’t know why I have vertigo. I don’t say to my friend what I think I know is best because I don’t know what is best and I don’t know how to tell her that yes, writing helps and heals but sometimes a person needs more; that you need more. I don’t know.

I know I started writing this blog to be both objective and personal. I thought I would respond to what I was reading in an objective manner, I would compare and contrast, I would insert my subjective experience, and would ultimately focus on the how, the way, the rational. I thought that personal responses like this would not be applied to what I was reading but more to what I was experiencing, perhaps even writing myself, writing my way into some surprising epiphany or enlightenment.

Instead, this chapter reinforces how frustrating it is for me to know someone I care about has confessed but not found clarity. Instead, I find myself confessing that I feel inadequate to the responsibilities implied in my own healing. And instead I confess something that I cannot confess to this other person—words are not always enough. Sometimes, you need to go beyond your self because others can see things, have an objective perception, which makes it easier to fully comprehend what’s really going on and show you the way to go.

I cannot.

In fact, the words confessor and confesser are, by definition, interchangeable for there is a mutual identification between the priest who lifts the burden of the “sins” and the sufferer who expels it through a reciprocal relationship of transference and forgiveness. The confessional poet or writer has acquired the power of articulation to amend or confess the past. But “sin” and suffering also may be accompanied by blame. Where does guilt end and suffering begin? How is the intensification of the memory diluted by a conscious awareness that the past is merely a reflection, not an actuality of the present? (23)

Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing by Judith Harris

Having read Judith Harris' poetry in The Bad Secret (which I enthusiastically gave to my mother after I finished), I knew I would approach reading Signifying Pain eagerly. I did not know, however, how exciting it would be for me to read. Because it is a more academic type of writing, the reading goes slowly. The density of ideas and suggestions gives me much reason to pause and here I am hoping to try to write some meaning into what I am reading.

All writing that deals directly with suffering is already meticulously working through it. Failure to work through grief or pain fully only aggravates traumatic reaction (13).

Reaction versus response. This is something I have thought about often. One of the gifts that writing in my journal has offered me is the ability to respond to my life’s circumstances. In the pages, I also can react. I can rage. I can complain. I can accuse. I can judge. And as the words begin to flow a subtle change occurs. Gradually the words shift to something more sympathetic or at least less accusatory. I find myself responding in a more compassionate manner. If someone hurts me it is tempting to react. Spite or anger can fire out some very vicious words. I could react to some perceived hurt by trying to hurt the offender. Instead, writing gives me just enough distance to respond in a manner that is both more honest, that will promote healing.

And this is such a surprising gift that writing has afforded time and time again. But there is so much more implied. Harris suggests in the introduction: “As Santayana forewarned and Freud concurred, if we choose to forget the past, we are condemned to repeat it—and this is true for both the individual and collective society. Hence we are bound by an imperative need to express, to witness, to tell the story of what it’s like to endure” (13).

I like that word: endure. I know that there is this odd drive to make meaning of experiences. The child who is abused will abuse. The spouse of an addict will leave one marriage only to build a relationship with yet another addict. Of course, counseling helps and why? Because the patient is forced to do what journaling does for me—stop and pay attention. Listen to the lessons. Learn from the past. Look for the patterns and try to make different choices.

And the word of caution: "In accounts by writers, we learn how arduous a task it is to draw strength from introspection and how one must be willing to admit the dark power within that works for good or for ill" (xi-xii). I consider this to be like looking in a pool of water that is somewhat muddy. You are looking and you see a problem. You can look away, ignore the muddiness of life. Or you can reach out and try to remove the muddiness. This stirs up the water—the memories of the subconscious. Now the water is dirtier. What was the point? It is worse now. Hurts more to try to make meaning through words than just melting in front of the television for another hour or day. But eventually the water settles again and that part of life’s past becomes clear, what you see begins to be something you recognize.

Then it is time to move to the next detail, the next experience. It doesn’t ever end, a spiral staircase of constant self-exploring that gradually elevates you even if you are merely going in circles. And that is the resolve, because climbing up takes more energy than standing still, than descending, than falling.

There is choice. Take one step. Then another. Let yourself feel these things, relive them, and heal. It sometimes feels like you are not making improvements. Too often it is darkest before the storm. And climbing upward is tiring.

As I write this, I am relapsing. My vertigo has taken a more solid hold on my body. I feel frustrated. I want to cry. I want to scream. And I am here. I am writing. I am responding to what I am reading, to my life. I feel dark, trying to write my way to some light.

Dickinson, Steinbeck, and Hope

Emily Dickinson wrote that hope is the thing with feathers.

Have you ever tried to hold onto a bird that is not trained to the hand? It is not easy. They fight. They flap their wings and puff themselves up. They scratch and bite. They are vicious and will try to attack rather than allow you to hold them gently in your hand.

This is hope, the thing with feathers. If you hold onto it when it doesn’t wish to be held it scratches and claws, it bleeds you painfully, it pecks and bits until you let it go to fly away.

Hope for a cure. Hope for an answer. Sometimes you have to let it go. Right now, I still hold on, painful as it is. But my hand is loose. I don’t hold quite as tight as before. Next week I’ll see a new neurologist. He may or may not give me a reason, an explanation. Right now, knowing I have the appointment gives me hope. Knowing that he looked at a friend’s test results that were inconclusive and said that inconclusive was not a good enough answer gives me hope.

But I’m at the edge of my hope. I’m scared that if I hold on too long it will die in my hands, fighting for freedom as I fight to hold on. Like Lenny, crushing the fragile thing’s life until it is no more.

Hope is the thing with feathers that sometimes kills you in trying to make you let it go before you kill it by holding on.