In economic strife, I love all the little attempts to assuage this new trauma. If trauma is the inability to comprehend what one witness and the repetition of this event through dreams and other acts...in the current economic crisis, we need a trauma triage.
We never seem to grasp what passes before us. We always miss it. Because of this we mindlessly use words to try to figure it out, try to luckily hit the right sequence of words to discover for ourself the right narration so that we can build a monument and forget about it.
Funny isn't it? We are always trying to forget these events. Allow the truest history, the history that defies narration, to pass into narration to allow us to forget it. We have monuments so that we don't have to remember. Build a monument for the World Trade Center, so the memories i have of my teacher cursing and pulling down the radio fade into some sort of physical manifestation of the glass tower. Make a monument to World War II so that I don't have to think about the sacrifice. Make a monument, or just a ton of commercial movies, about the Holocaust so I don't have to have that trauma passed to me.
The problem is, when you whack a mole, another comes up. All these attempts to forget, cause a new remembering in another place. If truth is not forgetting, aletheia, then what is a culture that wishes to forget everything?
So how to forget an economic tragedy? How did we forget the old ones. Time, monuments, cliche photos, books. It is easier to read Steinbeck than to experience depression, or talk to a relative. The untold stories, where the madness and the history resist narration are exactly those traumas that can't be expressed. But we need them. They constitute our being, our ethics, our memory.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Perhaps we're trying so hard to remember that we end up forgetting? Maybe we focus on building monuments to the past so much that we forget the past itself. What passes before us passes whether we want it or not and I often feel that the only thing to do is to simply watch it go by.
Any action makes us miss the present? But don't you think that reading Steinbeck allows us to experience the depression to a greater extend? Or am I attempting to comment on something that I don't understand.
I think the monuments themselves allow us to forget. They allow us to externalise our own strife, our own trauma. They give a face to it. A physical manifestation to it that you can direct your feeling toward, but at the same time represent a forgetting. A PTSD sufferer could not build a monument to the events that so plagues him or her. This trauma evades characterization, it is remembered, it can't be forgotten and this is the bad thing. Freud would say that reality is too much, that in the light of this "too muchness" we build our own illusions to come to terms with the trauma of being.
I admit, Steinbeck might have been a bad example. I think that there is a trauma within the letters themselves that force the reading. We read and read, each time we find something new, or are touched in a different way, each time searching for a meaning, but our own reading, the repeatititve act of searching is precisely indicative of the trauma of the text. Perhaps we read Shakespeare over and over because we can't boil it down. I know humanists would like to think that it tells us something about the human conditions, but perhaps we read because we can't figure it out, we can't turn it into something that we can forget...that's just my reading. I also just think that Steinbeck is cliche and so kitschy....
Freud, I think this will forever be a repetitive pattern.
Y River/Red Eyes....yes it must be a forever repeating pattern--without it we are lost, we get overpowered. Once we get over it, or comes to terms with it, then it passes into forgetting. The trauma is a source for ethics, the ethics of memory. We remember precisely because of this trauma, we pass on our trauma, our memories to our children and to others...so trauma isn't a bad thing, but a necessary condition.
Post a Comment