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Notes -
"Trauma" As Poetry
Recently I've had cause to interact with a number of zoomers and zillennials, and on several occasions I've been asked "are you traumatized?" or "do you have any trauma?", as though this were a perfectly normal question to ask someone, and not some weird fuckass question. I respond, in all seriousness and without any irony, "no, and in fact I would dare to say that I've never felt any pain at all. My life is unreasonably beautiful, beautiful enough to think that something is amiss. What did I do to deserve this? How long will God let me continue with my selfishness before He realizes that the debt must be paid and the balance corrected?" (This usually kills the conversation.)
It's tempting to tell people that they don't know what real pain is. But the man of science seeks to explain, not to judge. When there is a psychological difference between individuals -- on the one hand, individuals who proactively endeavor to see themselves as "traumatized", who know how to take advantage of the appearance of weakness, who derive a secret pleasure from reliving every slight and wallowing in every painful memory, and on the other hand, individuals who resist the category of Trauma and who feel that the ground will fall out from underneath them if they do not project an image of strength at all costs, who are enticed by the idea of "invincibility" (regardless of the underlying material reality), who have no way of measuring their own worth without the presence of inferiors to serve as a foil (and before you draw any hasty conclusions, there are plenty of men in the former category and women in the latter) -- it is natural to wish to inquire into its origin. Why the difference? Whence?
I don't mean to deny the reality of PTSD, symptoms of which were recorded in the medical literature as far back as ancient Greece, as a mechanistic biological response to extreme injury. But the contemporary concept of Trauma is different -- it requires no specific observable pattern of behavior or disability, only the attestation of the individual. Human lives were historically filled with a great deal more famine, disease, and death than they are at present, but solemn intonations about how the weight of your personal burdens have permanently impacted your ability to lead a tolerable existence were comparatively rare. Thus we can infer that the concept of Trauma, as well as the practice of the telling of the traumatic narrative, are the results of historical and social processes -- created, not eternal.
Recently there was a post on the front page about how time seems to flow faster as you age. This, as far as I can tell, is a human universal. The author's further claim, however, that "childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that is difficult for the rest of life to match", is rather not a human universal. You find this out quickly when you start to ask different people how they subjectively relate to memory and the passage of time. For some, there is an unbroken chain of continuity between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood -- they've had the same underlying "essence" the whole time, it's all equally real and vital, all part of the same process of development (and you might naturally expect childhood memories to be particularly important under this model, since it is childhood that lies at the origin of this one chain of being). For others, the leaps and breaks are more discontinuous, salience is determined by different criteria. In my own case, the "center of narrative gravity", the center of narrative vibrancy, is a sliding window that mainly focuses on the last 5-10 years, and the further back in time you go, the more it feels like those memories belong to a different life entirely. I have been "born" several times, and probably will be born several more.
There is a great deal of individual variation in the perception of time, not only in the speed of its flow, but in its global geometry, its peaks and valleys. For some, there is a constant tension as the past and future continuously try to contract themselves into the present to form a single point; for others, no such issue can ever arise, because only the present exists. You can collect memories like documents in a file cabinet, taking great care of your ever expanding and carefully organized collection, or you can collect them like drops of water in a bucket, letting them become indistinct as they swirl around and blur together. For many individuals, there is a deeply felt sense that they just are the specific narrative weaved together by happenstance out of the various incidental concrete events of their lives (as opposed to say, being a disembodied Cartesian cogito, or a set of abstract principles for reasoning and operation, or an anointed soul with a unique destiny, or...); this is where their center of being lies. Memories, even seemingly trifling memories, or memories that would be better off forgotten, leave deep indentations and are constantly revisited and tended too, because it is just this fabric of memories that constitutes the fabric of subjectivity itself in these cases.
We can now offer the working hypothesis that those who find it appealing to organize their experience in terms of Trauma (as opposed to the menagerie of other concepts we have available for navigating suffering and dissatisfaction) are those who experience exactly this kind of subjectivity. The traumatic narrative would then be the personalized expression of a deeply felt subjective truth, a unique perspective on the world given form and made manifest in material reality -- in other words, Art. And the public telling of the traumatic narrative would be a communal art form to supplant earlier and outmoded forms like the folk song or the heroic myth. Whereas earlier communal forms, often in closer alliance with religion, focused on general abstract truths or the history and destiny of the community as a whole, the traumatic narrative places the contingent individual and his contingent narrative at the center -- and why shouldn't it? It's perfectly in line with the historical shift announced by Descartes and Kant, the transition from ancient and scholastic philosophy to modern philosophy, the abandonment of Virtue and Being in favor of Freedom and The Subject. There should be no concerns about the decline of culture; culture only changes forms, taking on new appearances that would seem strange and foreign to earlier eras. Everyone is an artist and everyone has the means to share their creations, which turns contemporary discourse into an assemblage of the bountiful fruits of the imagination.
Again quoting the author of the previously linked post:
Everyone has their own personal mythology of course, but not all mythologies are constructed in the same way. For some, everything of mythological significance is on the sensual surface of the event; for others, the event is mere material for the construction of an original narrative. And other mythologies are just stillborn. Broader theories of cultural dynamics are impossible without first getting clear on the functioning of these mechanics on an individual level.
Huh. Learn something new every day.
"An Athenian, Epizelos son of Kouphagoras, was fighting as a brave man in the battle when he was deprived of his sight, though struck or hit nowhere on his body, and from that time on he spent the rest of his life in blindness. I have heard that he tells this story about his misfortune: he saw opposing him a tall hoplite, whose beard overshadowed his shield, but the phantom passed him by and killed the man next to him." - Herodotus, "Histories"
I know "PTSD" used to be called "combat hysteria", then "war neurosis", then "battle hypnosis" and "shell shock", and with one name or another it seems to have been common for well over a century ... but I'd been told it's hard to find under any name in accounts of ancient wars. It was tempting to wildly speculate whether the reason for such a strange interesting fact might be technological (after explosive overpressure we can see physical brain bruising, not just psychological damage; we now experience most casualties from impersonal random explosions, not other humans in direct combat) or cultural (we now see a diagnosis of psychological trauma as a first step toward healing, rather than an insulting additional attack to be avoided; we now see war as a necessary evil, rather than a glorious good) or social (the ancient veterans that historians focus on were often large proportions of the upper class; modern veterans are more likely to be isolated). But it's easy to forget that often the explanation for a strange interesting fact is that false and exaggerated "facts" can go viral if they're sufficiently strange and interesting.
Interestingly this seems not to be the case, which I think perhaps raises far more questions than it closes. See my post above here for the full argument - but on Herodotus:
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