Cartoon by Dave Shrigley
My brother called me yesterday -- one of my four brothers. Most of us siblings don't talk on the phone very much. As a matter of fact, most of us are phone phobic.
Phone phobic.
Strange, that. I've never quite understood the peculiarities of our family, but who ever really understands their own family's oddness. If you've always been in that relationship, it just feels familiar.
As my father has aged and has talked more freely openly and urgently about his experiences in World War II, I've begun to think about Post Traumatic stress and my father's generation. The 50s and 60s are really a classic PTSD scenario:
"PTSD symptoms may include: nightmares, flashbacks, emotional detachment or numbing of feelings (emotional self-mortification or dissociation), insomnia, avoidance of reminders and extreme distress when exposed to the reminders ("triggers"), loss of appetite, irritability, hypervigilance, memory loss (may appear as difficulty paying attention), excessive startle response, clinical depression, and anxiety.
A person suffering from PTSD may also exhibit one or more comorbid psychiatric disorders. These may include clinical depression (or bipolar disorder), general anxiety disorder, and a variety of addictions.
According to DSM-IV, symptoms that appear within the first month of the trauma are not called PTSD but Acute stress disorder. If there is no improvement of symptoms after a month, PTSD is diagnosed. PTSD is divided into three categories: Acute PTSD subsides within three months. If symptoms persist, the diagnosis is changed to chronic PTSD. The third category, delayed-onset PTSD, may occur months, years or even decades after the traumatic event."
Think of the ratcheting up of a high-anxiety culture ever since the 60s. We are a PTSD culture, and a great many people in the culture are affected.
This is one of Wm. Blake's paintings/drawings. Cain and Abel. The consequences of the act that pursues you.
What is coming at you from the one or ones that you have trusted?
The metaphor, the feeling, the dynamic that dooms us to betray ourselves, our deepest convictions, our friends, our loved ones.
These archetypes roll around inside of us somewhere and generate dreams and nightmares and impulses and feelings and intuitions. We share them.
Welcome to another year of EFM. I guess it's Bible Study, but not really. It's more like, opening yourself up for revelation.
We'll just call it that for now.
Or, I'll understand it , but as an outside, an expatriate, and American , living in France.
You SPEAK the language, but do you DREAM in the language?
No?
Well, you don't because you didn't grow up there. Your inner mythology has hammers and nails and ladders and ancient dirt basements and TVs with two stations that sign off at 11p.m. with the national anthem. Your inner myth making apparatus is not about the machines and the gleaming humming things that now confound you. It's more about forests and strange animals with no names.
chronology
is it the order we know
or the way we know what we order
question
versions of [time] and [space]
with no way of moving
through
identification:identity
bits
some(day) i'll write the story
still interviewing
and sifting through data
that flows as fact
somehow believable
from here
back in the other world
(not sure it's even the outside world, just another other)
collecting things to send
and about to launch the rainbowbrite dance
into public space
youtube
and here
night:
waffle house waffle
conversation+coffee customers comfort
single digit expense
southern states stretch
thread to elsewhere
lost at the end
of exit ramp from:to
here
day:
prisoners bound arriving in recycled schoolbuses
guards with guns bookend
while anonymous trash is gathered by men dressed identically
non-person. non-place
stop for fuel
rubbery corndog and fountain drink
become a meal
driving through unfamiliar land, rooster carved from a log with a chainsaw
by a man named jake. he's working on a squirrel
and his actual name is jake
down the road that narrows to two lanes
forest creeps closer to the road
only to be bound by a chainlink fence with a Y barbed wire
lest something infiltrate the military territory
or the trees begin to escape
paratrooper plane hovers and 17 small dark spots tumble from an opening
chutes appear and they drift
to the ground
taking the road to the land between lakes
once claimed by natives, then by tva
specific places posted for viewing bison and elk and i wonder
if they can read to know when
to show up
in illinois i met a dwarf
at the truck stop
not driving but accompanying the load he was
pumping gas into the tank of the dual wheeled white truck
with alabama tags
wonder if
he ever dreams of being
elsewhere
but don't we know that we're there
searching
for punctuation
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