Writing: Conceptions, Preconceptions and Catharsis
5. Examining Repair
101 Julia Kristeva links ideas of making and repair when she asserts that art or literature are
“privileged place(s) of transformation” (1986:17). For Kristeva, art’s communicative value is that it speaks to the uniqueness and irreducibility of individual experience, and in so doing acts as a place for catharsis and change. Kristeva’s ideas encompass both literature and visual art, and she believes that the role of aesthetic practice (along with psychoanalysis) “needs to be augmented” so that it may not only “counterbalance the mass-production and uniformity of the information age” but also “demystify the idea that the community of language is universal, all-inclusive and an equalizing tool” (1995:222).
Through the experience of writing a story of loss and making the imagery that sprang out of the story novella, I became transformed and passed through a deep and powerful despair. I found the performance of the writing was an enabling act not only because it helped me work through the terrible emotions (shock, loneliness, anger, victimhood) and visceral confrontation (pain, blood, small bruised bodies) but because it also allowed to me to remember those things and to acknowledge the experience. Like Kristeva, Cixous privileges creative practices (specifically writing in Cixous’s case) as practices that possess a restorative function (1997:93). Writing is a mechanism for restoration. Cixous describes “words” as “the doors to all other worlds” (1994:xxvii). My own experience bears out the idea of the healing function of writing, but only up to a point. Here I want to look closely at the idea of repair and unpick it a little, especially in relation to how the writing has functioned for me and for Cixous and others whose work is imbricated with trauma.
102 Perhaps, I began to think, this is an act of masochism rather than of integration. Perhaps, I thought, in returning to the fictional novel and reliving (remembering) the trauma of the triplets I was reopening the wound unnecessarily. Yet at the same time it was something I did not want to let go of. I felt that in the writing (its actuality as well as its performance) there was something of value. If I had felt comfortable then with Jungian terminology I might have wondered if it was an act of soul. I was already thinking along these lines when I met with therapist and poet Floss Mitchell. She and I spoke about the idea of recalling something difficult, not to get past it but to note it and to place it within the realm of possible experience (which trauma tries to elude). One of the ideas we examined was the idea of re-membering. I spoke to Mitchell about my conflicted feelings regarding the project: was it healthy or unhealthy I wondered, and why was I compelled to keep returning to it and to, in doing so, resurrect my memory of the triplets – both what I had hoped they would be and, of course, the experience of losing them.
Mitchell suggested the emphasis in my enquiry might sit on the membering part of re- membering. She recalled hearing Dr Michael White at a conference in the U.S speak about the idea that significant people who affect our way of thinking are situated in the club of our lives. These people shape and affect our thinking about ourselves and our world-view. In Narratives of Therapists’ Lives (1997) White examines the idea of re- membering, explaining that he “took up” anthropologist “Barbara Myerhoff’s notion of membered lives” (22). According to Meyerhoff, “re-membering” signifies a special kind of recollection and “calls attention to the re-aggregation of members, the figures who belong in one’s life story” (1982:111). Following Meyerhoff, re-membering “is a purposive, significant unification, quite different form the passive, continuous fragmentary flickerings of images and feelings that accompany other activities in the normal flow of consciousness” (111). White notes that the image of membered lives brings with it the metaphor of a “club” and that “this metaphor opens up options for the exploration of how a person’s club of life is membered” (1997: 22). White stresses re- membering as an engagement that provides people with the opportunity to have a greater say about the status of particular memberships of their club through life (23). He notes
103 that re-membering practices enable people to “suspend or elevate, revoke or privilege, and downgrade or upgrade specific memberships of their lives” (23). The idea of inviting or excluding such people from one’s club is one that is widely used in narrative therapy.
My subsequent reading of White and my conversations with Mitchell suggest that perhaps my desire to write the novella, and to make imagery relating to this traumatic experience, was a way of introducing the triplets as members in the club of my life and of emphasising their status in my life. This idea is of interest to me and seems to fit with my experience. Also, of course, because they only lived inside the womb, the idea of
speaking to other people about them and situating them somehow in the world of everyday conversations and contexts is quite difficult, but my creative practice and the use of imagination, fiction and imagery allows me to situate them and my profound loss in a world peopled by others also. However uncomfortable it is to resurrect lost children (for myself and for whomever I speak to), the triplets have indeed shaped and altered my world-view and because of my experience of their being (and of their loss) I have sought a way to locate them in the present, and to acknowledge their contribution to my
thinking. The novella and the prints that arose out of the creative writing form part of that acknowledgement.
As a consequence of speaking with Mitchell, I also began to read work by James Hillman (1989) and Thomas Moore (1992, 2004). Both Hillman and Moore set out a re-visioning of psychoanalysis and ask us to set aside “fantasies of cure, repair and growth, self- improvement, understanding and well-being “as primary motives for psychological work (Hillman 1989:1). Moore (1992) talks about the idea of difficult experiences, tragedies, losses, all kinds of trials, as experiences that lead to a person’s “depth of soul” and notes that what he calls “care of the soul” is different in scope from most modern notions of psychology and psychotherapy as it “isn’t about curing, fixing, changing, adjusting or making healthy” (xviii). Following Hillman, Moore notes that “we are a society hell-bent on happiness” (2004:306). Happiness is seen as a life goal and the thing for which we all should strive, and if you are not happy then you are depressed. Depression is a blanket term used to cover anything that is not happiness, and both Hillman and Moore (1989, 2004) argue that depression is a much overused and far too broad a term. Used in
104 opposition to happiness depression is always viewed as its ‘bad’ other. Yet interestingly, Hillman notes that through depression “we enter depths and in depths find soul”
(1989:153). Depression, he continues “brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight and humble powerlessness” (157).
Moore talks about how life is always complex, comprising “a mixture of pain and satisfaction” (2004:315). Both Hillman and Moore acknowledge that in the present day happiness is viewed as healthy while unhappiness is something society wants to cure, valuing as Moore puts it “the removal of symptoms over the soul’s sparkle or shine”
(315). In our conversations Mitchell and I spoke about the idea that people should strive not necessarily for happiness (happiness and health are synonymous in this formulation) but for a rich and full experience of life – of which tragedy and loss are a part. Moore encapsulates this idea when he advocates striving for “numinosity” over health (315), which implies accepting and acknowledging terrible or difficult situations for what they are and also, as Moore notes above, stands in opposition to the popular misconception that sadness and despair are emotions that persons must reject and address. This idea that searing, difficult and challenging experiences are just as valid and valuable life-
experiences as joyful and comfortable ones was an important discovery for me as it allowed me to view my Indian Yellow Project as a legitimate strategy for self-knowledge and acceptance of the deep sorrow that losing the triplets had unearthed.
In our dialogues Mitchell and I came to the idea that the profound loss of the triplets was a core part of my life’s journey that contributed to my thinking and to my world-view.
Yes, it was dark and full of sorrow, but it was also full of other experiences and feelings.
My experience of this loss was in fact a matrix of contradictory emotions. We also spoke of the idea that even if pain does not seem always a conventionally enriching experience but something that can be senseless, cruel and confusing, difficult experiences are nevertheless a part of life, and life is rich and complex. We spent some time on this idea as when I returned to the writing I did indeed find it difficult to understand whether opening up the wound was a good thing or an unhealthy immersion. My conversations with Mitchell, my reading of Hillman, Moore, Robson and Caruth, as well as my
105 experience in completing the novella, have led me to conclude that my immersion in what Moore terms “a dark night of the soul” (2004:i) has brought with it important revelations of what life is about and that “in that darkness” I saw things I “could not have seen in daylight” (315).
In their various writings Moore and Hillman’s advocacy on tempering the role of happiness and as Moore terms it “weaving the dark into the light” (307) comes as a welcome relief. Both Moore and Hillman seem to emphasize the idea of recognition rather than repair and, in a world in which everyone is at pains to fix, improve and better everything, this seems a healthy position. I have arrived at the point where I feel that writing and other creative acts can act as catalysts for growth, as mechanisms for baring the scar (and bearing with the scar), and not necessarily erasing it. Like Cixous, I have come to see that “writing is the effort not to obliterate the picture, not to forget” (1993:7).
In the present day, so often “you are told to get past your mood and get on with your life”, yet, as Moore notes, “sadness and remorse can give you depth and character” (219).