The University of the Self #25
Content warning: discussions around trauma, violence and fear.
i
Writer’s block can be a stubborn creature. Imagine a curmudgeonly, pulsating,
malicious blob has decided to sleep slap bangin front of your door., blocking all
exit routes in. Or so I imagine. I’m one of those annoying people who never seems
to suffer from it. It’s been me and poetry in ♥ 4EVA, skipping hand in hand down
grassy hills. I call and Poetry comes running. We stay up talking all night and we
never exchange a cross word. I’ve grown quite spoilt, what with poetry offering me
word-flavoured lollipops and pandering to my every whim.
I have grown used to poetry attending to my needs. It was the friend
who never grew tired of my obsessive, oppressive, demanding, troubled,
relentlessly enthusiastic presence.
Since I discovered my voice within it, my expectations of poetry have
evolved thusly — I encounter an emotion or idea I wish to articulate,
so I flick open a notebook or laptop and fix my fluency there.
Through poetry, I have processed vast areas of past trauma and will,
in future works process more, as I continue to excavate
‘…the boneyard of the past…’ (Nicolson, A, 2019, p 44.)
ii
In the winter of 2021, an unexpected incident of trauma locked me down tight.
As I opened our front gate to walk the dogs at about eleven p.m. one night, I stepped
straight into two men running full tilt, carrying weapons and making dreadful
whooping noises.
They bounced away from me and continued their macabre flight. It was a raw,
monstrous moment.
The smell of adrenaline hit my brain like a lobbed brick. There was a taste of steel
and ice on my tongue. I almost collapsed from shock at the impact. I felt in my bones
something terrible had transpired. Next morning, a back lane 100 yards from our home was cordoned off with police tape. Pointers were placed at intervals to mark the locations of evidence. Officers in white plastic over-suits appeared everywhere.
Local gossip spread the news that a murder had occurred. Horror and fear confounded me. I had this dread instinct that it must be connected to the scene I witnessed the previous night.
Had one or both men I had seen been killed? Was I the last person to see them alive?
I discovered that there had indeed been a terrible incident, which mercifully did not lead to a death, but a serious injury had occurred.
I found it almost impossible to leave the house. I remained in a state of unbearable anxiety. I couldn’t sleep. Hyperarousal filled each day with spikes. My hands refused to grip a pen.
I was in communication deficit. That dreadful night had become an inarticulate jumble in my head. The comfort of the page, usually so willing to soak up my pain could not, this time, be claimed.
iii
I told nobody. Told myself that giving this experience a name would increase its power
over me. I doubted I’d be believed; doubted my reactions to it, allowed past stigma
to influence how I thought my ordeal would be perceived. The crucial synergy between trauma, self and poetry was sundered.
What had made the difference this time? Why couldn’t I think? Why couldn’t I write?
I did not recognise this trauma; it was a stranger. I had personal cognizance of male violence, but previous incidences had been directed specifically at me, rather than, in this case, around me — I had not ‘mattered’ in the scenario. Did I have the right to my trauma? I had blundered into it as one might bump into someone on a crowded street.
There was situational unfamiliarity, which arose from the absence of catastrophe at my current residence; it had been trauma devoid till now. My safe place had been whipped out from under my feet. Past instances of trauma were mass-triggered.
Trauma present annexed trauma past to imagined future-trauma repercussions.
I could not untangle my emotions on this subject.
Life began to move me forward, ready or not. I still had to be a parent, had to scrape
a living. The housework wouldn’t do itself. Other poems began to nudge me in their
direction. Time relaxed trauma’s grip upon me enough to move onto other works,
but the frustration and sadness at my failed attempts to give it voice stung.
It wouldn’t give me peace. It woke me during the night. It lodged in my throat
like a stone.
iv
Saying 70 from the Gospel of Thomas goes along the lines of (paraphrasing here),
‘stuff we hold within can be brought out in order to help us or be kept in at our peril.’
It's better out than in. A problem shared is a problem halved and all that. Gordon Gates in Trauma, Stigma and Autism writes;
‘In cases of anxiety, we may want to move towards the very things
we have been avoiding. Any movement at all is preferrable to hopeless
inaction.’ (Gates, G, 2019, p.154)
Inaction was indeed where I had remained when it came to processing the trauma.
It had been a year, yet still it moiled inside. I was angry with myself for not finding a way to articulate the experience. I did find this quote from David Shields’ Reality Hunger (p.59, 2011):
‘To fill in the holes, we turn our memories into specific images…
The images we store in our memories are not exact replicas of what
we experienced; they are what our minds…need to recreate the story…’
The quote made me realise that I might be missing crucial, beneficial connections between poetry and art. I am both a poet and an artist, so it is a connection I perhaps ought to have made at the time. The issue in this case was my use of art to express life’s pleasures, and my use of poetry to contain what I find more difficult. Why couldn’t the two ways of interacting be mixed?
I spent time with my thinking cap on. I recalled an episode concerning my son,
back in 2015. He was finding the leap from primary to secondary education incredibly difficult and was struggling with the increasingly challenging workload.
He began to scribble with a biro on a piece of paper. He scribbled so much he ripped the page. We had meetings at school and sought the help he needed. The scribbling stopped. It had been a coping mechanism for him—a way of translating the darkness inside, of letting pressure out. It was a lightbulb moment. I am an eternal doodler—it’s a way of stimming I find beneficial. If I find doodling so helpful in many aspects
of life, then could it help me now?
v
I made some online searches around this subject and discovered a process called neurographic art. Neurographics is a methodology developed by psychologist Pavel Piskarev. It is
‘…a creative method of transforming the world…graphic solutions to
complex communication problems…’ (Metamodern, n.d.)
It is a way of releasing the unconscious through drawing. It reminded me somewhat of asemic writing. Perhaps art could act, in this case, as interlocutor, mediating between trauma and the self. I sat down and suffered the wound’s reopening.
I felt, then I drew, resisting the temptation to think my way between. Indeed,
‘[w]hy ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged
by its presence and mysterious means?’
(Hirshfield, J, p. vii, 2nd ed., 2017)
I was astounded by the result. The centre of the picture had become a representation of my home, how trapped within its area I was. It was a tangle, with red pools dotted throughout like a grotesque Hansel and Gretel crumb trail. The red areas were also reminiscent of the men’s laughing, baying mouths I remembered so vividly from that night.
Flashes of moon, streetlamp and window light offered appearances of potential sanctuary. As the drawing moved away from the labyrinthine nucleus, the tangle loosened; space appeared, and the oppressive sensations eased. What the exercise demonstrated was that the experience I was processing needed a pathway out of my head. I had drawn several possible ones that I could potentially take, disappearing into a new unknown, an escape at the top of the page.
This was the beginning of a story. My trauma’s story.
‘…any story leaves behind an uneasiness… Literature’s work, and
particularly poetry’s, is in part to take up that residue and remnant,
to find a way to live amid and alongside the uncertain.’
(Hirshfield, J, p.122, 2nd ed., 2017)
I don’t want to give the impression that this is an easy, quick-fix, one-size-fits-all procedure. What worked in this instance for me, may or may not work for you.
The only thing I’m certain of is the elusive enigma of creativity. I am not ‘healed’
and I do not believe one ought to approach art and poetry with the expectation
of such guarantees in mind. Poetry is a great awakener of the unanticipated —
we must navigate complex emotional terrain—therefore self-care and caution
are watchwords to which we all must attend.
vi
My neurographical drawing had become a mediator, actualizing new distance,
a crucial amount of space between trauma and self. Words began to colonise space,
as dandelions, through fractures, will bloom on concrete. These are the most important spaces, for, as Leonard Cohen sings in his song Anthem,
‘There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.’
It has been two years since the incident. Though I can now manage to leave
the house to walk the surrounding streets, there will always be a moment
of tension. This trauma has been fixed into my psyche like a scar but in finding
a way into fluency, and progressing from scene, to stalemate, to drawing, to a poem has meant that trauma and articulacy have found, in this case, a way to co-exist.
Perhaps there are some who would question the methodology that allowed the eventual poem to work its way into existence. I worried that I had become absurd
but, as Adam Nicolson writes, a
‘…mixing and transmigration of forms [allows us] to move outside
the received way of doing things.’ (Nicolson, A, 2019, p.259)
After my neurographic representation, I did manage to further translate my drawing into a poem. The drawing helped me pinpoint the trigger areas in my mind. It helped me untangle the jumble of emotions and fears. It became just a small poem — a highly distilled work of intensity. I was suprised to see all that massive, complex trauma rendered, in the end, in only fourteen lines. I do believe the poem very much echoes the tight, intense centre of the drawing, and I find that to be an incredibly interesting observation. I apologise that I cannot reproduce the poem here, as it is awaiting publication shortly in the wonderful Strix magazine.
Sources
Metamodern.ru. NeuroGraphics - do-it-yourself positive changes. Method author: Pavel Piskarev. https://neurographica.metamodern.ru/n.d.
Gates, Gordon. Trauma, Stigma and Autism. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London, 2019.
Hirshfield, Jane. Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. . Alfred A. Knopf, 2nd edition, 2017.
Nicolson, Adam. The Making of Poetry. William Collins, 2019.
Shields, David. Reality Hunger. Vintage Books, 2011
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Thanks, Jane! What a creative response to trauma. Very readable and kind piece.
Thank you so very much for this. Thank you for your strength <3