Again and Again: On the Nature of Trauma and its Connection to Art

The Ouroboros, a symbol of repetition and eternity (artist is unknown; if you can find the source, please let us know so we can make a proper attribution.)

In the piece I wrote on Night in the Woods, I mentioned that three of the themes that we consistently return to on this website are masculinity, nostalgia, and trauma. For the first two I had ongoing series (the masculinity one will be returning shortly; we're planning something special and the logistics are complicated,) but for the third I didn't. I honestly don't have it in me to do an ongoing series on the issue of trauma, I don't think. I'll be talking about it here, but I have no intention of inaugurating a new series at the moment.

Part of why this is coming up is that Edgar and I are rewatching True Detective season 1 – as we have just about every year since it came out (fundamentally, we find Carcosa a more interesting subject than Cthulhu; once again, a topic for another time.) This series hits a lot of buttons for us, and much has been written on it as a meditation on toxic masculinity, however I think that what it has to say about trauma would be a good starting point for us here.

According to Matthew McConaughey's Rust Cohle, previously referenced on this website here:

I don't want to know anything anymore. This is a world where nothing is solved. Someone once told me, 'Time is a flat circle.' Everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again. And that little boy and that little girl, they're gonna be in that room again and again and again forever.

This is a reference to the Nietzschean idea of the eternal return, which is originally used as a part of a vital and life-affirming philosophy, but when considering that not all of us have agency at all times, it hints at something darker: if you're going to relive every part of your life, you need to make decisions you're comfortable making again – but you're also doomed to re-experience the worst things that happened to you innumerable times.

This doesn't need Nietzsche's whispering demon, though: the human brain does the job just fine on its own. We recreate in our minds our past experiences. When you remember something, your mind recreates it, and to an extent, you re-experience it. So when you remember something unpleasant, something that is damaging to experience, the nature of memory forces you to – in a sense – relive it.

Repeated exposures to a stimuli lead to new behaviors. We've all heard of Pavlov's dogs – part of that legion of canine sacrifices to scientific advancement – but the rule holds true for people, too. So as you relive traumatic experiences through your memory, it shapes your behaviors.

For example: twice in my life before now, I've lived places with infestation issues. The first time was in graduate school. The whole building was overrun. I had a neighbor further down the hallway who woke up to an insect crawling into his ear, and I waged a losing battle against the infestation until I left New Mexico in December of 2011.

Instead of being gross and putting a picture of a bug, here’s how you deal with infestations (in my experience) — get a bag of this stuff and a sprayer. Take your pets somewhere else for a few days. Spray this on everything. Go away for a day or two, and then vacuum it all up with a shop vac. Trust me.

To an extent, this prepared me for the first apartment that Edgar and I shared. There was another, worse, issue there that I will spare you the details of. But due to my experience of living in New Mexico, eight hundred miles away from the closest person who would be willing to help me in a situation like that, I was able to be the stable part of the equation in this situation, and I managed to handle it without resorting to toxic chemicals.

But since then, Edgar and I have been on edge: a moving speck in the corner of our vision will draw intense scrutiny, even if its just a leaf in the wind. This is because our brains have been trained by circumstances to check, to see is it as bad as…?, and so we do. And when we do we remember the prior experience. This is what trauma does to your brain: it trains you to relive the traumatic – the human equivalent of the programmer's infinite loop.

With programming it's an issue of finding and fixing a typo. With people it's a bit more difficult.

Here's the real messed up portion, though: some people desire a brush with the traumatic.

By this, I mean that privileged sections of the population often seem to desire a traumatic experience as a brush with something “real.” Perhaps it's the death-drive; maybe its a thirst for annihilation, or an appetite for destruction, but it seems to me that everyone who has it easy wants the validating stamp of a traumatic experience. The experience of something big and traumatic will give their lives meaning, they feel. Of course, they're imagining something other than an infestation in their apartment.

and who are we to question the greatest literary mind of the 20th century? (Don’t @ me.)

Of course, a traumatic experience isn't really something to search after – it's just viewed as a shortcut past all of the other things one has to do to be an expert. This is getting past something else that other thinkers have commented upon: that aforementioned death-drive, or whatever it was that led Borges to profess that “Hitler wanted to be defeated.” Perhaps there's some fault in the human psyche (or perhaps it's hiding in the Indo-European language, or in some substrate of it,) that hungers for self-destruction, possibly as a route to transcendence.

There is evidence of vast temple-complexes built by paleolithic peoples, incredibly elaborate structures that were used for a time and then pulled down and eradicated. Maybe the memory of this is hiding in the back of our minds, and we're just engaging in the most elaborate form of this practice, and one day it will end, we'll pull down our cities, and we'll return to a life of hunting and gathering. Probably not, though.

The social dimension of trauma is fairly interesting – as I noted, the shared trauma of the Second World War led to the emergence of post-modernism. We can draw a line between the trauma of the first world war to the boom in dadaism, surrealism, and Italian Futurism, as people grappled with the apparent collapse of meaning at the end of the monarchist order that had reigned for centuries. Though I maintain that generations are socially constructed, it's fascinating that people define their period by the moment of trauma that most marked their maturation – Pearl Harbor, the JFK assassination, the Challenger disaster (to an extent), 9/11, the financial collapse – and these moments form a kind of obsessive refrain for the people who grew up with them. These traumatic moments become not just benchmark experiences, but the lens through which everything else is viewed, just as my own brain was reformatted by the experience of dealing with an infested apartment. My eyes are drawn to movement at the edge of my perception, and children of the forties look for sneak attacks; children of the sixties look for lone gunmen; members of my generation hold their breath, waiting for the markets to collapse and wash everything away.

I’m given to understand that this documentary deals with this idea; I’m trying to find a copy of it, but it’s difficult.

And to an extent, I think that people, weirdly, long for the moments where the world that they knew was destroyed, where the temples are dragged down and the veldt opens up around it as a vast empty space through which they can wander unconstrained by the laws that they invest so much time and energy to maintaining.

This is supposed to be aesthetically useful. What, then, is an artist to take away from this?

It's often been suggested (including, implicitly, on this blog,) that great art processes the traumas of the artist. It is true that many great works of art do this. It is equally true that there are many artists that didn't suffer some world-shaking trauma. The most tragic figures are the artists who think that they have to seek out suffering to make their work valid.

This is the same impulse as arguing that you have suffered a trauma and are thus an expert on the source of it. What makes art good isn't the effort that you put into it, but the care you take in constructing it. Processing your trauma in art may lend authenticity to what you are doing, but there are other routes to authenticity.

As an artist, you should always develop the tools you have available to you, but trauma is a way of getting at authenticity. If you don't have a traumatic event in your background, cultivate that authenticity by other means. If you do, work through it as you see fit: your pain doesn't have to be for public consumption.

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