Poetry as Survival

8. The Dangerous Angel

CHAPTER EIGHT The DangerousAngel The gods I created from my sweat but mankind is from the tears of my eye. The "Universal Lord," in the Egyptian Book of Time Ways According to Genesis 32, Jacob encountered a "man" on the banks of the Jabok River. This "man" was almost certainly a supernatural creature whom God had sent. Jacob and the stranger fought all night, wrestling in a violent and intimate embrace. At a certain point, his antagonist touched Jacob s thigh and threw his hip out ofjoint, but Jacob held on until the creature demanded to be freed because day was breaking. "I will not let you go unless you bless me," Jacob replied. And the creature did bless him and gave him a new name, "Israel," because, he said, "You have striven with God and with men and have prevailed." In a sense,Jacob wrestled with the unfathomable mystery of existence in its darkest form—the mystery of unprovoked violence and evil. A mystery that sought to destroy him but that, when resisted heroically, could be transformed into a sort of blessing. It might seem odd, even offensive to use the word blessing in proximity to the terrors of traumatic violence. But "blessing" itself is a strange word. In French blesser is a verb meaning "to wound." "Blessing" in modern English is the bestowal of spiritual grace and power through a gesture. Often, in the Christian ceremony of baptism , this gesture involves the sprinkling of water on the person. But the original Anglo-Saxon origin of blessing is blestein, which meant "to spatter with blood." The history of the word itself enacts an uncanny overlapping of violence, wounding, and spiritual grace, 117 Il8 TRAUMA AND TRANSFORMATION as if it wishes to hint at some connection deeper than logic can penetrate. Often, as a survivor of trauma, I wonder: why did I survive? How could I have stood so close to the scene of violence as to have been spattered with blood (and for some survivors of trauma, the blood was their own)? How could I have been that close and not been destroyed by it? Why was I spared? Why am I still alive? These questions, which are unanswerable, have the power to initiate a quest for meanings and purpose. But this quest born out of trauma doesn't simply lead the survivor forward. First it leads him or her backward, back to the scene of the trauma where the struggle must take place with the demon or angel who incarnates the mystery of violence and the mystery of rebirth and transformation. (We might think of this angel as the duende described in Federico Garcia Lorca sbrief essay: a demonic presence his beloved Andalusian gypsies felt was essential to any important art, from poetry to flamenco dance to bullfighting. Without duende, poetry could be beautiful, but it could not transform the soul.) Wrestling such a creature, we may, if we prevail, receive its blessing: a new name, a new self, a new purpose. Trauma and the Shattering of Self I can connect Nothing with nothing. T. s. ELIOT, The Waste Land Trauma is a Greek word meaning "wound." In medicine , it usually refers to bodily injury caused by violence or some other external agent, and in psychiatry it refers to any startling incident that has a lasting effect on our mental life. The kinds of events that can precipitate trauma vary enormously, though some occur with disheartening frequency. Among the most explored causes of trauma in American culture are sexual assault against women and children and, among men, prolonged exposure to heavy combat . The latter diagnosis has become familiar to us as the posttraumatic stress disorder that emerged into public notice after the The Dangerous Angel 119 Vietnam War. But trauma can also be caused by family and urban violence; by natural disasters such as earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods; and by mere proximity to sudden deaths. These experiences are profound and destructive manifestations of disorder that challenge some of our most basic beliefs. As Judith Herman puts it in her remarkable book Trauma and Recovery (1991), "To study psychological trauma is to come face to face both with human vulnerability in the natural world and with the capacity for evil in human nature" (7). For the purposes of our discussion of trauma and poetry, nothing could be more pertinent than Herman's description of how a traumatized...