Malleable Skin

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, as if it wishes to hint at some connection deeper than logic can penetrate.

SURELY, WE WOULD be right to say that trauma is, by definition, among the fiercest and most destructive forms disorder can take. Trauma, either on an intimate or a collective scale, has the power to annihilate the self and shred the web of meanings that supports its existence. And yet, the evidence of lyric poetry is equally clear— deep in the recesses of the human spirit, there is some instinct to rebuild the web of meanings with the same quiet determination we witness in the garden spider as it repairs the threads winds and weather have torn.