Disquieting

Essays on Silence

Cynthia Cruz

• Publisher: Book*hug Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781771664769
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Essays in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

How do our bodies speak for us when words don't suffice? How can we make ourselves understood when what we have to say is inarticulable?

In Disquieting, Cynthia Cruz tarries with others who have provided examples of how to "turn away, " or reject the ideologies of contemporary Neoliberal culture. These essays inhabit connections between silence, refusal, anorexia, mental illness, and Neoliberalism. Cruz also explores the experience of being working-class and poor in contemporary culture, and how those who are silenced often turn to forms of disquietude that value open-endedness, complexity, and difficulty.

Disquieting: Essays on Silence draws on philosophy, theory, art, film, and literature to offer alternative ways of being in this world and possibilities for building a new one.

The Afterlife of Trauma

afterlife (n.)
also: after-life, 1590s, a “future life”⁹⁷

Everyone who helped to popularize the philosophy of montage was interested in one thing: the third meaning. That somehow when things collide, two opposites collide in this dialectical way, some sort of synthesis is engineered, or brought about and in that a new form, a new meaning, or new way, emerges.⁹⁸

— John Akomfrah

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Over the years I have become more and more attuned to the gesture. In particular, I am interested in the way in which the anorexic or depressed body can be read as an act of gesture — her body performs what she is unable to speak. Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia can be read as a film construed of such gestures. Justine, the protagonist, descends into melancholia and escapes from her own wedding to hide out in her sister’s study. There, finally alone, she searches frantically through the monographs of various artists, rifling through pages until she comes upon an image that suits her. She places the book back on the display shelf where she found it, open to the image, and continues searching for more. Only after she’s found and displayed a number of images that match her internal state does she abandon the room, leaving the images to be rediscovered. Among those she’s chosen to display are Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Land of Cockaigne and The Hunters in the Snow. In The Hunters in the Snow, three hunters stand at the edge of a precipice with dogs. All appear depleted, exhausted; it would not be a stretch to say they seem to be trudging back home. In a scene that occurs later in the film, Justine uses this word — trudging — to describe her experience of melancholia. In The Land of Cockaigne, three figures lie on their backs on the earth, apparently sated from food and drink. It’s interesting to me that the figures are lying on their backs on the ground — as if ill or near death. Certainly, in this position, they’ve lost agency. The image shows the afterlife of gluttony and excess. Bruegel’s painting of the hunters parallels Justine and her sister’s forays outdoors with their horses earlier in the film, while at the same time illuminating the extreme lethargy Justine experiences as melancholia enters her body.

Throughout the film, Justine has both embodied depression’s various symptoms (lethargy, extreme sorrow, dissociation) and attempted to describe to her sister — in painstaking precision and to no avail — her experience of depression’s onslaught. Unable to make herself understood through words, Justine has been reduced to the act of gesture, leaving the images for people to find.

Lacan’s theory of trauma offers some insight into Justine’s actions. Trauma occurs, he asserts, when there is an encounter with what he calls the Real — that which defies signification. He writes that encounters with the Real are experiences with trauma where the “link between two thoughts have succumbed to repression and must be restored.”⁹⁹ In the study scene in Melancholia, Justine attempts to find a language for her trauma through the use of image. Image becomes the link between thoughts.

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I’ve been researching and writing about the topic of collecting, clutter, and the archive for the past eight years, assembling work that has resulted in a number of projects, including art reviews, essays, poetry collections, and public talks. And yet I myself am not a collector. Or, I should say, I am not a collector of material objects. Instead, I collect other collectors’ collections; I also collect ideas and writings. I then assemble and display these collections, ideas, and writings within my own work. I make constellations, reconfiguring and curating these various works into new collections.

By placing disparate works next to one another, I strive to make links between unconscious thoughts and to find a language to express these links. I attempt to make a new language — a language that can symbolize trauma, an encounter with the Real, which currently has no symbol or language. A language that illuminates what cannot be otherwise articulated. In the same way Justine gestures to images to relay something within her that she can’t articulate, I attempt to create a separate language that can convey what can’t be communicated through words. And I try to do this with words — to fracture them, break them into bits, surround them with ruptures, drop them into gaps. I try to create a representation of the language of trauma or the otherwise incomprehensible. Our desire to translate what can’t be conveyed into words is, in itself, a refusal to acknowledge that which cannot be brought back to the conscious level and/or can’t be explained in words. I want to reflect this inability, to explore the experience of it, while respecting incomprehensibility itself as a valuable experience. Sounds can also do this work — as can dance and other forms of movement, as can visual art, film, and poetry. Space on the page, hesitancies, repetitions, and stutters in the form of writing; cuts and splices in film; collage created from words cut from newspapers and magazines and pasted into new configurations; and conceptions of space, void, and fragment in architectural design all do this work.

I believe there will always be a remnant that remains unsayable in our shared language.

My sense is that the Real — the trauma that cannot be articulated by language — can be illuminated by combining disparate texts and images and by the gaps that occur between them. The Real defies symbolization through language, but it is possible through the gaps that occur between texts or images to convey aspects of the Real.

Lacan believed the Real to be a placeholder for trauma; trauma is experienced only belatedly, through repetition. It is the experience of coming up against something that shocks, and in this shock, the traumatizing experience is fractured. In many cases, it’s wiped entirely out of the conscious mind of the traumatized, settling into her unconscious. The shock of trauma, the small space of blackout that trauma creates, these tiny moments of shock, also manifest in small bubbles and spaces and ruptures and interruptions, in which nothing occurs. In this nothing, we might pause and listen.

To work through the trauma, to move it from the unconscious to the conscious, the trauma sufferer finds herself repeating acts or behaviours, mostly unconsciously, in an attempt to bring the Real to the surface (without necessarily reaching it). In my case, and in those of the collectors who fascinate me, the compulsive nature of repetition can be seen as an attempt to find the original, incomprehensible trauma floating beneath its placeholder, the collection. This work is incremental in nature. Neither the works nor the work I am describing have an end result in mind. Instead, their aim is process, movement, regardless of how slow.

As she frantically finds images to match her internal, pre-verbal, and visceral experience of trauma, Justine attempts to find a language for her trauma. At the same time, she moves nearer to locating its original source. If we are to continue in this line of metaphor and metonymy, I am Justine as she collects and displays her found images in an attempt to say the unsayable.

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But before moving further, I want first to think about the inverse of collecting — not-collecting. If collecting is a form of ecstatic engagement with aspiration and hope, then not-collecting can be a form of negativity, of lack of hope. Not-collecting is a form of saying No.

Not-collecting, not bothering to collect, is, for me, akin to anorexia. In not-collecting, in resisting collecting, I do not consume, or I consume Nothing. Interestingly, this not-­consuming or the consumption of Nothing also involves, like collecting, a form of anticipation; in the case of not-collecting, though, the non-collector appears to be waiting in anticipation for something worth collecting. Like the anorexic’s not-eating (eating Nothing), the non-collector consumes Nothing — and this Nothing is a placeholder for the something that has not appeared.

Not-collecting is necessary to recognize the emptiness of the not-consuming, the not-having, in the same way not-eating creates a physical space — both the anorexic’s body itself and the space between what she wants (Nothing that is being offered) and what she is being offered. In my case, I am aware that the few things I do collect are, indeed, placeholders for something else. They hold the space until that “something else” — that which I actually need — arrives. What that needed thing is remains unknown to me, just as, in Lacan’s account of trauma, the original site of trauma always remains out of reach. Both the collector and the non-collector are, therefore, caught in a seemingly endless pattern of locating replacements or blank spaces — nothings — to stand in for that which remains both incomprehensible and elusive.

I wanted, at first, to begin this essay with a list of objects I collect as a way to shadow my own lived experience of collecting. And then I realized I don’t collect much. I have one small, lovely object that I’ve held on to my entire life: Sparkie, a brown-and-white Steiff stuffed cocker spaniel that my grandfather gave me when I was a year old. Sparkie is in near perfect condition: its short, soft pelt is still white and pale brown, and there is none of the usual matting that occurs from hugging and holding a favourite plush animal. Even as a child, I knew that were I to hold this beloved object, sleep with it every night, it would be ruined. In essence, it would die, and I could not, even then, stomach the idea of Sparkie’s death. Today, it sits on my table wherever I travel. I rarely touch it. This tendency is anorexic.

And yet I do collect books. It’s a compulsion, an addiction, really, this hoarding of ideas and information. When visiting a new city, the only places I want to visit are bookstores and libraries. Often, I will purchase three or four books, which sit on a shelf for years without my attention. But then, one day, I notice the book again, pull it off the shelf, and read it. Reading has been a compulsion for me since I was a child. Quite literally. There is nothing I would rather do than read. And my tastes are eclectic: I read mostly books on political theory, continental philosophy, cultural criticism, and psychoanalysis; I also voraciously ingest cookbooks, contemporary German literature, books on architecture, photography, film, and the visual arts. In the same way I frantically search out images and objects from others’ collections, I also ravenously seek and then take in the words, ideas, and experiences of other writers.

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In 2010, as a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, I began work on my third collection of poems, Wunderkammer. I’d become interested in German-speaking writers and artists who utilized aspects of the archive in their work.¹⁰⁰ I’d been thinking about clutter, desire, collecting as compulsion, and how this kind of archiving is often a means to deal with trauma. “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories,” Walter Benjamin writes in “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting.” He continues:

I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth. This is the childlike element which in a collector mingles with the element of old age. For children can accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways. Among children, collecting is only one process of renewal; other processes are the painting of objects, the cutting out of figures, the application of decals — the whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to giving them names. ¹⁰¹

Collecting, then, according to Benjamin, is a means to bring about a rebirth, by magic, by ritual. By collecting, by placing your hands on an object that carries a memory or its trace within it, you might be able to reconfigure the past, refigure your history — and perhaps even renew your collection of memories.

Reading is a kind of death. One exits one’s life, is gone from the world. If my telephone rings, if my beloved calls out my name, I’m no longer here. I don’t exist. Dead to the world. And reading erases the world. When I’m deep in a book, my life no longer exists. The city I live in, the people I love, all vanish as soon as I open a book and begin to read.

And let’s not forget what Emily Dickinson said about reading poetry: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”¹⁰² And Kafka: “The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of a person we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation — a book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us.”¹⁰³

A book is a seduction, a dark promise, a passionate affair lived entirely inside one’s mind. My retreat into books had begun by the time I was five. In kindergarten, I had already separated myself from the other children. While they were outside playing in the warm sun, I was lying along the huge maroon Indian rug, my face hidden inside the covers of a book. So heartbroken was I when I finished the book, when that world came to an abrupt end, that I cried uncontrollably. It was the exact same pain I felt each year when, at the tail end of my birthday parties, all my friends left to return home. A small death. It takes time to recover from the end of a book. The only antidote I know is to quickly pick up another.

On Saturdays when I was a young girl, my mother would drive me downtown to the Santa Cruz Public Library. Often, she would drop me off, leave me there for hours. And I was completely content to wander aimlessly, pulling books from the endless shelves. I would get myself into a small spell, walking and gathering. Then I...