I’ve been reading Lucy Easthope’s remarkable reflection on a life in disaster planning, after blogging recently about pandemic trauma. Her calling has involved working with trauma in contexts of immense logistical challenge, trying to create conditions in which human support is possible amidst astonishing disruption which inevitably requires the affordances of bureaucracy. Early in the book she describes the ending involved in surviving traumatic events:
You wake up with a set of hopes and expectations but then, later that same day, something big and terrible happens and bang, nothing is ever the same again. As a survivor of disaster, even if you are not physically injured you might lose your sense of safety, your trust in the authorities and you may encounter a number of mental health challenges that can cripple you. You are not the person you were before.
Pg 22
I suggested in my earlier post that living with trauma involves inhabiting the beginnings made possible by that ending. Unless you accept that end has taken place, it simply won’t be possible to ‘move on’. Reading Easthope’s book through this lens makes me think about scale of causation here: the difference between a trauma caused by, say, a private act of violence between two people and trauma with its roots in a novel pathogen circulating through the globe. The sociologist in me thinks this distinction seems fuzzy at best, because interpersonal violence always takes place within conditions which have created that tendency. But it’s not a senseless distinction, not least of all because it will shape the potential community of reference and solidarity. Both its potential scope but also how opaque its existence will be to any one person within it.
At any point in the spectrum there will be a “terrible mourning for the life before” (pg 123) but how that mourning is lived out, the degree to which it is communalised or privatised, will be shaped by its origins. Easthope introduces the Welsh word ‘hireath’ which she first encountered in relation to the Aberfan disaster. It conveys, as she puts it, “a longing for a place to which there is no return, an echo of something that can never be found, a heartsickness for something that no longer exists and a time that can be never be gone back to” (pg 124). It’s not possible to “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time” in Eliot’s words because ‘that place’ is gone for good. There’s only something which resembles. There’s a cut, a rupture, an ending which cannot be overcome.
Perhaps this is part of the reason for “the most common behaviour of all in disaster response – the act of forgetting” (pg 240)? The collective dynamics of this are complex, visible in how we memorialise (and sanitise) wars while forgetting and suppressing pandemics. But there’s an obvious psychodynamic imperative to evade what cannot be symbolised, to avoid looking at the hole in the real which we feel incapable of expressing. I’ve always thought the 9/11 memorial captures this sense of trauma as ontological rupture, a void into which the coordinates of sense and meaning are inexorably pulled, in spite of my initial expectation this would a jingoistic reflection. However I found it telling how difficult it is to find a video of this which isn’t narrated, contextualised or accompanied in some way. There’s something unsettling about memorialising a wound in the fabric of things:
There's a hole in the earth here
And we're walking round the edges
This illustrates a tension I think between symbolisation as a route towards healing, creating the conditions in which beginnings can arise from endings, as opposed to a neurotic impulse to close a wound which will never heal. The former can arise from the latter but it can also be foreclosed by it, as a ceaseless imperative to discourse becomes a form of suture which ossifies rather than integrates. This suggests to me that narration is a necessary but insufficient condition for healing, with the potential to actively impede it if taken as a end in itself. But that it’s simultaneously an antidote to forgetting, which rendering healing impossible.
(It occurred to me later this final paragraph is inconsistent because if the “wound will never heal” it leaves us in the register of better or worse sutures rather than facilitating or frustrating healing. What I was trying to suggest, I think, was that symbolisation is necessary for suturing but a purely discursive suture will be a fragile and fleeting thing)
I know you're holdin' on
And it won't be long
I'm so tirеd of being strong
I found you exploding
I found you beautiful
I don't know a thing that could feel morе heavy
Babe, I'm ready
Mark Carrigan 