Peter Cushing as Van Helsing in The Brides of Dracula.
There is wild work to be done.
–Dr. van Helsing to Jonathan Harker as he proceeds against the vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
The business of love is cruelty,/which,/ by our wills,/ we transform/to live together.
–William Carlos Williams
To tear ourselves away from the everyday, from habit, from mental laziness which hides from us the strangeness of reality, we must receive something like a bludgeon blow.
–Eugene Ionesco, quoted in Maggie Nelson’s On the Art of Cruelty(2011)
In Tommy Orange’s novel There There, young Octavio reflects after killing a mourning dove for sounding sad, “I didn’t feel sorry for the bird [I’d just shot] because of how sad it made me feel ever since my dad got shot, when I had to look down and see my dad’s eyes blink in disbelief, my dad looking back up at me like he was the one who was sorry, sorry that I had to see him go like that, with no control over the wild possibilities reality threw into our lives.”
Unaccustomed as I am to dealing with Octavio’s sort of “wild possibilities,” the darkness now besetting once safe ( for me and those like me) white liberal reality leaves me feeling mainly helpless. Malcolm X called it the chickens coming home to roost. Apparently I’m not alone; this extreme end on the spectrum of vulnerability is being experienced by many. Pundits are calling it “learned helplessness.” The phenomenon hit a new high among liberals up until Joe Biden’s announcement he’d step down. (Kate Greenberg, Will Election 2024 Traumatize us?) Though I understand the panicked desire to swallow the antidote (i.e., Kamala’s top-down anointing), past experience tells me we ought not be o’er hasty. Since when has the messiah turned out to be as billed? Since when has our president not been qualifiable as a war criminal?
To gain some perspective, play for time, we could allow ourselves to speculate: might the helpless feeling have a cause deeper even than the obvious horrors? Is it possible the threats that leave me feeling helpless are not the worst possible horror, but a trigger for the memory of prior trauma that taught me helplessness in the first place? I ask this not to encourage either preoccupation with self or defensive protest, i.e., White people suffer too!” But locating personal trauma may be the door leading out of normal neurotic self-preoccupation into identification with the in-common. If there’s something we might learn from Native people, who carry ancestral memory of systematic genocide – or from black people who’ve endured 400 years of white supremacy – as to how might one carry on with hope, or just carry on, period, even if convinced one is helpless – the place to start may be in a place where we don’t want to go: long-buried personal memory.
Even an educated white liberal who’s never gone hungry for more than a day unless on a diet, or been subjected to racist abuse, whose collective reality, though containing horrors of Holocaust and Hiroshima, agent orange and glyphosate, is officially “too safe for trauma” may, in fact, already be a survivor of trauma. It is highly likely, due to childrearing practices that no longer are based in the child’s non-negotiable physical need to feel safe, that there exists in your body memory, as in mine, an experience that taught you the horror of helplessness, long before the outer world showed you its brutal side! If, in fact, hope of real political possibility is being aborted by this collective “learned helplessness,” which is what it feels like to me, then is it not time we learn we can refuse belief in the false hopes (i.e., the DNP alternative) offered? Is it not better if we can learn to live without that kind of hope that feeds the needs of Empire, not of human beings or the planet?
In There There, Octavio’s grandmother Josefina responds to her grandson Octavio who declares, hopelessly, following two violent deaths in his family, “I can’t get them back. I don’t know what the fuck any of this is about.” She replies, “You’re not supposed to. That’s the way the whole thing is set up. You’re not ever supposed to know…That’s what makes the whole thing work the way it does. We can’t know. That’s what makes us keep going.” She explains this to him just after taking him on an excursion to locate a badger, catch it, and rip off some of its fur to make a kind of protective badger medicine. Having no choice but to live with wild possibilities outside their control, people turn to imagination, not because it fixes the situation but because it alleviates helplessness – makes it possible to keep going..
Learned helplessness is a mainstay of smiley-face totalitarian liberal reality. Fear is planted so early, at psycho-spiritual depth, by such indisputably good and caring people as our parents are, that denial of any experience that contradicts benign reassurance – basic honesty – is not simple. Working invisibly, the “agents” of compliance, greatly enabled by mass media, bring about the individual’s consent to a tolerant kind of governance impossible to recognize as tyranny.But tyranny it is, a banal one that cannot be engaged with solely on the streets or in the legislature, and certainly not in the voting booth, its power greatly enhanced by one’s desire not to know awful truths made more awful by universal denial. These “agents” cannot be “outed” except by a clear, simple, true and strong heart whose perception – truth – will not be shaken. Wild work indeed!
Thus, it is to possibilities and potentialities for personal transformation that we must turn in dark times.
In vampire fighting the first rule is that one must take the risk upon oneself to stop denying their real existence! Vampire lore has been with us for so long; can it be time to find its roots in a place closer than Transylvania? And in a reality that is not so much supernatural as simply repugnant, or abject?
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I thank Maggie Nelson’s book The Art of Cruelty(2011), which I came across by chance on the shelf of discards at the public library, for introducing me to the use of the terms abject and abjection in relation to art, art unfamiliar to me for the obvious reason that it insists I look at things I don’t want to look at! I gave the book a try on the off-chance that there was a connection here to my constant theme of the role of trauma in transformation. ( As I read, it came to me I did have some prior connection to art that disturbs: Orin’s sister Mary’s paintings, she a whip-wielding dominatrix, fit the category in a way. Our film maker friend Lech Kowalski’s art, too, can be disturbing, is often “abject-focused,” for example, his best known work filming NYC’s crash-and-burn punk scene in the late 1970’s.)
According to psychoanalyst, literary critic Julia Kristeva, author of Powers of Horror (1980), the abject is, “part of oneself…that exists independently of oneself – pieces that were once categorized as a part of oneself or one’s identity that have since been rejected.” Further, “Since the abject is situated outside the symbolic order, being forced to face it is an inherently traumatic experience, as with the repulsion presented by confrontation with filth, waste, or a corpse – an object which is violently cast out of the cultural world, having once been a subject.”
Might this fact that I endow some aspects of life such repulsiveness that I will not grant them their real existence, hold a key to a different way of social being that does not depend upon the abjection of others, as our best-of-all-worlds liberal reality – does? Liberal blindness to “unintended cruelty” is tied to our collective refusal of the abject, to the communal consensus that underpins our social order. Thus, must not our common goal be to disturb that consensus, with something like the “power of love?” (Garlic or crucifix anyone?)
Nelson’s book brought me to understand – though she’s not accountable for my misinterpretations – that implicit in the art of cruelty is an assertion that trauma may function to awaken consciousness to something that otherwise, for many, or most people cannot be experienced. Not the horror itself, but something horror breaks through to. That is, acknowledging the vampire’s real existence brings rewards of spirit: i.e., one’s personal possibilities for transformation, transcendence, strength of purpose and character, an awakening of heart that has been slumbering for a long time, perhaps one’s entire lifetime.
Personal confrontation with subjective horror (trauma) allows one to know crucially something otherwise hidden to normal consciousness: that is, my personal suffering is real; I participate in the reality of suffering common to all beings. I can now discern between the surplus horror of denial, which has made me helpless, perhaps all my life, and the real horror – trauma – one has faced and now knows to have been real. Bringing that which was abject to consciousness is liberation for that which was abjected. It changes sympathy-at-a-distance to active involvement; I need my power of creativity which until then, in imaginatively barren liberal reality, is largely spent fecklessly struggling against my phantom neuroses. The truth of the abjected frees me from the energy-sucking necessity of repression that keeps me – my soul – abject.
Once having found this zone in which I am free from denial I can rouse myself from helplessness. I can make a human, honest response – my own – (i.e., write, make art, start a coffeeshop, build an arts-centered nonprofit) to the thoroughgoing evil of my time. It’s no longer either I jump on some activism toward which I feel no attraction or sink back into my customary depression and helplessness masked by various preoccupations and distractions. Now my situation is closer to that of the native grandmother: I must “swim or sink;” i.e., deploy my creativity or sink back into the “ learned helplessness” which I know is false but against which I am powerless without my art! This awareness, thus, is predicated in danger, but “keeping going,” one then finds, is more and more a process of imagination – looking for badger medicine – anything but accepting false hope for truth! It is, possibly, the first experience of delight one has ever known! And thus, for those who make art “as if their life depended on it,” practicing it like a true religion, art-making will gain its transformational possibility. It will make meaning where otherwise none is.
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Thanks to the work of Drs. Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Maté, Judith Herman and others we not only understand the reality of childhood trauma but also the fact that it is far more widely dispersed in society than the social and mental health gatekeepers would admit; denial of it is the norm. Denial has enormous consequences for society; failure to recognize the dark dimension of reality means we can only keep repeating the mistake of war, violence, cruelty, exploitation, plunder, etc. On the individual level is where the cycle can be interrupted: the dark unclosed hole in every traumatized soul that must be closed – can only be closed – by the individual her/himself recontacting that trauma so one’s soul – not Kamala’s messiahship (she who, as Chris Hedges asserts, is professionally a “cop”) – can make us keep going.
The leader we await is a leader, willing to speak as if she means it, a fierce Mama based in the unshakeable truth of her own heart and its loves, about restraint from unnecessary use of force and violence in all interhuman, and international relations, in a politics of generosity, as Rabbi Michael Lerner called it.
This fierce Mama would have to speak just exactly as if peace and social justice were not out of fashion but the truth lying right the hell in front of you. To be “that person” one has to first interrupt business as usual in the more intimate terrain of one’s soul, its learned helplessness. By and large, educated liberals give over our consciousness to domination by neuroses, not realizing that the accustomed lack of agency is tyranny that needs no threat of beheadings, crucifixions or burning at the stake to keep me in line; I’m doing that just fine by myself. (Barbaric punishments still used of course, but reserved for the real threats to power – the poor and the oppressed). Not only do we, in our torpor of helplessness, not “hit the streets” in protest. More importantly we dare not come near the real power in ourselves, which is the power of one’s voice, one’s personal expression, of knowing/being receptor for and confessor of the conviction in one’s soul.
Where else would such a Mama come from? In what kind of culture could such a canny politician arise? For it’s not as if we don’t know that the process by which one is forwarded in U.S. politics necessarily weeds out men and women with moral conviction. Such a dread Mama could come only out of a culture that expected no less from her, a culture of the cultured. Making that culture is the collective project for our times.
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The loss of our Cafe is, for me, loss of the spiritual “warp” from the fabric of my life. Without its “vertical” mediation, the threads of my on-the-ground life threaten meaninglessness:
