I don’t know how else to process this
I
Under circumstances of pain, pain which may span the reach between discomfort and trauma, it becomes that much more important to have a fitness of distinguishing between “what is real” and “what is felt”. Feeling deep and appropriate emotions may be the first step in processing a life-changing event, it might even be a very important step. But part of what happens in this deep storm of emotion is that (inaccurate but necessary) feelings towards others may emerge under a guise. Dr Dan Siegel talks about how children do this, where they may say something that sounds like a logical statement, but reasoning with them is not an appropriate response because what is really being communicated is deeply felt emotion. I know speaking about feelings in rational terms is a coping mechanism I sometimes use. The feeling becomes too much to bear and the other capabilities of my brain rush in to help. Sometimes this becomes a pervasive intellectualisation of the problem, but other times it’s simply that when the words come out, they’re overly logical in an attempt to stagger through my feelings — which I happen to do rather clinically. This is where the fitness becomes important. It’s my work to learn how to interpret these feelings and thoughts that surface and act upon them benevolently. What then of reality?
My concern is that when we should be feeling pain, the instinct is to reach for anything else, be it numbing or rage or compulsive information gathering (doom-scrolling). All of these can be adaptive measures of dissociation, trying to protect or soothe our Selves, but that’s also all they can amount to. Little by little, when the capacity arises, we have the invitation to return to the experience of pain (however uncomfortable it might be). Even if you are avoiding it, the pain has already arrived, and it is too late to opt-out of feeling it without there being grave consequences. My caution is to not believe every thought that surfaces during parts of pain — especially those relating to other people, for at times these thoughts are filled with too much grace, in other moments there is too much vengeance. The feeling is not hinged on reality, though both may be vital.
II
This discipline or practice of discerning between what is felt and what is real is bound by our access to information about what we see and how much we understand ourselves. An anchor or guiding principle we could use could have to do with acknowledging the sheer amount of information we don’t yet know and letting it turn us into sceptics of what we want to believe as real. On the world stage, I feel we don’t have the luxury of designating a villain and a victim the same as we have in a courtroom or in the witness of assault, or in a story. Even if only due to there being more people and voices, it is infinitely more complex. Feelings of hatred, anger, and injustice are operative indicators in our processing but not always evidence of what is real. I also think that when there is the capacity to do so post-immersion (in pain), there is an unfortunate responsibility to ask questions like: “Who benefits from me thinking about this situation in this way” or “What could be some of the reasons why this person is taking this particular action”. This application of rationality and logic to the clues we get from our feelings can help to filter out some of the intensity. Disengaging from feelings would not help us get closer to what is real either. I believe it is our ability to feel and understand the feeling that gives us a better idea of truth.
Amanda Palmer received criticism for her poem on the Boston bomber and what has stayed with me from her subsequent interviews about the piece is her belief that even perpetrators should be examined with empathy. That is a dignity afforded to them for being something with life, being something that simply exists in this shared world. Empathy does not justify or negate evil actions, but I think it is a better way to approach the asymptote of truth, even if for no other reason than to seek a more holistic truth and prevent future harm. For this reason, empathy must be anchored in a self-empathy for it to not run reckless and boundary-less — this empathy is another fitness that we will need. It is our immersion into the feelings of pain that might give us the best chance at being able to make out what is real because that which we use for sensing and feeling is active and known to us. With empathy, we may tiptoe with trepidation and attempted benevolence into a helpful doubt.
It is devastating that these pain-filled situations require of us a more cautious sense of belief, one that is measured by facts and a vast array of sources. It seems foreign and uncomfortable, given that I live my life in relative ease. I get into a stranger’s car regularly and trust that I am going to arrive at the right place; I press a few buttons on a computer and trust that items will be delivered to my door. We live in an economy that in some ways is based on trust, albeit with hedging and management of risk. How jarring and inhumane it can feel at times to be required to question and remain curious about voices we really want to trust. How complex it is to navigate the feeling of pain amidst a culture of consumption that generates a bottomless pit of energy, some of which seeks to exploit our fears and curiosities; how strange to live in a world where not everything seen with our eyes can be trusted?
Making sense of “what is real” can become overwhelming, especially when there is a threat to the very existence of how I understand the world to be. The marked changes and subsequent shock that many of us have felt over the past few years is only beginning to settle into something known and manageable. As I write this there is also significant turmoil being discussed, questions asked, and grief expressed as we see shocking imagery and threats and violence. There is so much tension and uncertainty that hangs heavy in the air — it’s difficult to know what to do, what to say, or what to think. I don’t know right now, and I might never know. I do still believe navigating between feeling what we know and knowing what we feel — that pain-related fitness — is important, and I’ve been visited by thoughts that call me back to my teachers, that which I’ve read and seen and rise to the surface at this time. I turn to these recollections (of what I’ve seen and read of those who know better or have seen more) to help me tread lightly in my feelings of confusion, unrest, and concern.
III
What first comes to mind is East Coker (the second of Four Quartets by T S Eliot), with its mentions of cosmological scale events played out in earthly reflections, grave changes, and the ever running mill of commerce that persists (At the start of Part III). Here there is a quiet sought (line 112), one stilled in the trembling beyond the nostalgia that wells up in the first movement (part I). When this stillness and darkness is allowed to finally come upon you and rest on your skin, there are roots that sink deep into values and beliefs that drift, only as though illusory buoys, along the river that must run its course inevitably (Eliot’s own beliefs and religious text references surface here and are not to be held to in avoidance of feeling the “emptiness deepen”, I think specifically of lines 123–128). The urge and impulse is to hold onto anything that could help me avoid pain, be it rationalisation, avoidance of feeling, or mantra-esque scraps of text I can repeat until I no longer have thoughts or feelings of my own. Eliot has already unravelled these for me. I must wait in the terrible never-ending present Gestalt psychology speaks of, for any virtues, I would reach for are not ways of avoiding the current pain, all my points of return for now come down to the slowing of my breath.
“But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.” (line 126)
It’s during this emotion, when the transient waves of grief are permitted to pass, that there can be the stilled water that runs deep. In Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf speaks about this as a body of water that stills enough to slip down into the depths, or that the depths surface, or that the depths can be seen, but it must become calm first. (Some of Moments of Being was written in London, I believe, during the war — this is important for me to think about when looking at the patterns of thought in the face of grave circumstances, as I wonder what to feel or think when confronting these possibilities). When this stillness and surfacing is allowed to take place in the midst of you, I believe the caution of East Coker should remain: “Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:” (line 128)
Perhaps when this discipline and practice (of waiting, feeling, and employing what curiosity can be mustered) becomes part of that fitness we may develop, then we can walk that path which people of great peace and wisdom have walked before us, mystics and spiritual teachers alike. As we approach those virtues we previously sought out to soothe our suffering, we may find that as our reality fractures or falls apart, we can still hold together — though holding together might look different to what we thought. TS Eliot draws from St. John of the Cross (lines 133–136), but these concepts of non-attachment have resonated most deeply with me in the writings of Pema Chödrön (Welcoming the Unwelcome, When Things Fall Apart). This non-attachment is not something I think of as non-feeling or the dissociation of feeling, but consoling the parts of you that are scared and grieving until that wave has passed. I know here that I am not the body of water but can see myself through its mourning storms or quiet depths. Thereafter, I can sit at the table of my Self where the fear and the grief get a seat and a voice but are not permitted to throw a tantrum or jump on the table and start screaming at the others. Fear, grief, and pain exist within me and are allowed to make in me a home but the space they take up is not all-consuming or overwhelming. (These ideas are similar to Dr Siegel’s concepts of Mindsight as well).
IV
I stay close to Eliot’s East Coker because of its resolve (moving to Part IV):
“Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art”
These lines remind me of Khalil Gibran’s thoughts on Pain from The Prophet which speaks of the pain as “the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.” It is a beautiful treatise on the virtue of pain and echoes ideas of suffering being the product of attachment, but more so, it personifies this pain as an agent of healing, which though not a definite outcome is a possible one. It’s not a penance paid or a purgatory for goodness, but it acknowledges the truly human nature of pain whether it is a bitter cup moistened with the sacred tears of the unseen, or the wounded surgeon in Eliot’s poem. Where I diverge is this concept Eliot alludes to in some of his writing about suffering producing morality as though we require trauma to become refined (from Selected Prose, on War). I would prefer to reinterpret this (usefulness of pain) as an invitation to feel the inevitable pain, knowing that the only way out is through.
There is this burgeoning awareness I find within myself, some of which is merely a function of age and the notion of “learning what loss means” in the way I price out my insurance, determine how recklessly to drive, or measure out other types of risk. In other ways, there does seem to be an approaching inevitability of the beyond that is in striking distance — it rings out in our VUCA world talk, in the emerging transience of identity and belonging that has outgrown the society of our grandparents and perhaps most alarmingly in our concerns over the climate. These times feel unprecedented, and I increasingly feel like a stranger in a land unknown to me. In Eliot’s words: “Home is where one starts from,” (line 190) which makes the imperative to come home to oneself so much more difficult, as home cannot become a refuge to hide away in. It now must become myself. I must find or craft my own anchors that will be heavy to carry but keep me from withering away in the tumultuous weathering of time. To come home to myself requires me to feel, to have that all-important fitness of letting myself feel what emerges, and to be able to distinguish between that and “what is real” as best I can. Eliot wrote East Coker before 1944 (when it is published), that and his earlier writing (The Wasteland, 1922) all carry the echoes of pain that sit upon the water of a place and spill into the hearts of those that will carry this grieving — a picture I associate with Elif Shafak and The Island of Missing Trees, though I cannot find the reference. It is a remembrance of a nation’s pain, though it is pain obscured and mixed in with the waters of past and everyday life.
I consider that being allowed to forget gives a people dignity or relief in pain, both a point raised by Shafak and by Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others. To come home, to have an anchor, to remember; this isn’t necessarily the opposite of forgetting. The best illustration of this (for me) is in Alfredo Jaar’s The Rwanda Project where The Silence of Nduwayezu (1997) holds a few magnifying glasses and a million slides of a slightly blurry set of eyes with. The quality of this kind of memory — the photographic, exact, frozen, repetitive — is unresolved and akin to the memory of trauma; it stays with you like a ghost. While seemingly unrelated to the artist’s intent, I appreciate that the exhibition ends with Six Seconds (2000), a blurred image of a woman in a blue dress walking away over wintered grass towards a shrub with orange flowers, in the way it tends towards indifference. The slight contrast even in these colours is so much softer and less invasive than the rest of the body of work. To me, it offers an obscurity, anonymity, the ability to walk away from the shock and pain of the incident. This is why I like the imagery of water.
Pain, trauma, terror all come like a bitter poison, and the taste lingers in trace amounts maybe forever. Shocking and immersive at first, these images and experiences work their way through you until you can feel all that is within that cup. In my experience, all this feeling is already there as soon as the event happens, even if I don’t have the resources or capacity to let myself feel right away. The break, like that of a bone, has occurred even while the adrenaline is still going, so the break is unfelt. There are ways to promote healing, but not ways to undo the break. When this happens to a community or a people group, this pain may linger in the ‘water’ for generations. It may take decades for it to resolve and soften from a million breaking eyes into remembered obscurity.
V
While Eliot’s writing is hung between the hallways of those wars, there are still tremors that live in our nerves even now. The inheritance of pain (Shafak) or collective trauma (Thomas Hüebl) and lack of empathetic fitness to process this (or to let this cup of pain work its way out in us with all the tolerance for expressions of grief we have lost in cultural landslides born of imperialist erosion) is something we are invited to develop even now. ‘The Wasteland’ asks about the “roots that clutch” and denies any ability to answer, asserting that all one knows is a “heap of broken images.” The battered water of pain works by similar methods to that of poetry, at least in the way Eliot describes the difficult poem (from Selected Prose). You experience it even if you do not yet understand it, even if you never understand it, even if it only grows some meaning after years of tending, it still does its work upon you and is able to carry you down the steep crags in the mountainside to the rest within the valley.
Even when I can let myself feel, my mind still shouts out in scores of violence; I assume, surmise, and try to piece together artefacts of sense as a protection against the desolating void. I shan’t stop it, but I shan’t believe it fully either; I shall lay it out like fragments gathered from the wayside, remnant shells that have held my feelings. It is not mine to say what is, but it is mine to keep asking. It is not granted that there will be a home to return to, but it is mine to try. If Eliot is to be believed, trying is all there is and “The rest is not our business.” (line 189) I will continue to look, but know that I see with eyes that hold some fear of the unknown, eyes with pain, and what I see may hold mirages as well as the pain of others (especially photographs). I will continue to listen, but try to remain grounded as I do, so as to not forget myself or become stuck in places that are unwelcoming, knowing that all that is said carries some of the water. The water that comes from that cup of collective pain. I hope that I continue to ask myself whose perspective I am looking from, who stands to gain from this perspective, whose perspective is being overlooked or oversimplified, and as far as possible cling to virtues of empathy and the honouring of pain — above all else, continuing to ask what dignity for living things truly means. But this is a lofty, noble ideal. I hope I don’t forget how to feel and how to know that I am feeling; I hope I don’t forget that the most I know is that I don’t know and everything else is only a fragment, which will take time to see fully.
And if there is something to return to on evenings where the news is all bad (lines 99–101:
“The houses are all gone under the sea
The dancers are all gone under the hill
III
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,”
When we seek a place of return, when would have some comfort to nestle into and believe in, let it be this (lines 93–98):
“ …Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to god.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”
