the ink dark sea

A VIOLENCE

How does one write from within an absence of memory, from within a loss that is less remembered as a story or an image or a thought than as a mood, an existential void, or a sense of annihilation? Writing is performed in the shadow of a lost object. Writing is the shadow of an absent voice. Writing assembles an undergrounded body's fragmented speech.

“In the center of the shipwreck, there. / There the invention of one’s own body.”

I was an animal, howling on all fours. With every movement, an uncontrolled, ugly wail escaped my body. I was an animal, no room for any human in my ugly pain.

“There are people who appear to think only with the brain, while others think with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life.”

Where are you, Sad night owl, giver of infinity, Who walks in the forest with dreams?

“We know that the modern world is a violently disenchanted swirl shaped by the speculative flux of money that presses in on all sides. Yet, when we listen to the music that we love, the world seems reanimated, bursting with sense, utterly alive. The only proof of animism I know is music. When we listen, it is as if the world falls under the spell of a kind of natural magic. In music, the cosmos feels divinely infused.

I dont think things can be treated with that kind of duality. For Japanese who don't think that way, the gods are in the darkness. They may come out into the light at times, but they are usually deep in the forest or mountains. When a holy spot is created, the gods drop down onto it. That is why, in the shrines that are closest to their original form that still exist in Okinawa . . . the image of the god is just a tree or a stone. And such a shrine isn't in a bright, shining place, it's in an overgrown dark area where the silence is deep—a butterfly may flit about, but it's a bit eerie. When I went there . . . it felt as if something were there. This sense of dark awe is the sort of veneration that Japanese have toward certain forests and natural objects.

Trauma evacuates memory in that it perpetually disturbs one’s sense of being settled. Memory is poised to take flight whenever it is threatened, when there is a sense of a trauma returning or of a new trauma that is about to happen. This sense of impending catastrophe is an illusion, however, because the trauma never quite arrives. It never arrives because it has already happened; it is already in the present as an effect of some persistent past. The traumatized subject is continually uprooted. She might seem to be in a familiar place, in the sense that she has been there before, and she will most likely return there again and again through the force of repetition. Yet this place is neither an origin nor a final destination, keeping her suspended between a failed remembering and an incomplete forgetting. If trauma is understood as that which is in excess of frames of understanding, it is often impossible to positively speak one’s memory of a traumatic event or to know what really happened. Yet memory is also not bound by the subject who forgets. It materializes in the most unlikely places or fixes itself to things with no logical connection to the traumatic event. It yields an overvaluation of objects, as Freud called it, the condition in which something becomes so full of desire and longing and fear that it is hardly recognizable.