Facing the Sky. Roy F. Fox
a finger, an eyelid, anything. It’s all shut down. I’m still struggling for air. I become somewhat detached from my panic and think, “What the hell is happening?” Then I’m back to panicking again. Alarms are going off in my head. Panic. I should be able to move. PANIC! I don’t know how long it lasts—twenty seconds? Three minutes? Half an hour? I summon up all the strength I imagine that I’ve got and prepare to rock myself into movement. Have you ever had a door shut on you, and when you try to open it, realize that someone is holding it closed? So you get a running start to blast the door open, but the person holding it has let go, anticipating what you are about to do, and you almost kill yourself trying to get out? I nearly fall out of the bed trying to turn over, but I am mobile.
A mixture of fear and confusion swirls in my chest as I turn on my lamp and grope for my glasses. Where is it? My nightstand is a clutter of magazines and notebooks, scrap paper and empty glasses. Fumbling, sweeping, my hands are bricks. One thought repeats itself, “I know it’s here, I know it’s here,” trying to keep obvious questions from forming. I know it’s here, but it is buried beneath more and more temporal matter. There. I locate that familiar reptilian red skin on the bottom shelf, gathering dust. I seize it, the Holy Bible. It falls open wherever it will, and I tear into it like a sinner on fire. Looking for some kind of soothing communication from the Almighty, I flutter the fragile, onion skin pages until I come across Isaiah 54:6, which reads, “‘For a brief moment, I abandoned you, but with deep compassion I will bring you back. In a surge of anger I hid my face from you for a moment, but with everlasting kindness I will have compassion on you,’ says the LORD your redeemer.” A modicum of comfort drips into my shaking skin, an IV divine. Maybe there is meaning behind this. Is this event some kind of wake-up call from God? Has my recent behavior disturbed Him? Do I need to get myself right?
When this happened I was 17, and I assumed that I had had a physical visitation from some being, benign or malign, I wasn’t sure which. This was the beginning of a sometimes terrifying, sometimes amusing, always educational journey in which I learned much about “cloth-like dolls,” night terrors, the grays, fugue states & waking dreams, God, the Devil, and me. (Course Document 2003)
Most of us would say that this piece has no discernible shape or structure. We’re not sure what the point is. Is it about Jake’s fear of dreams? His regret and/or return to formal religion or belief in God? His fear of a “visit” from aliens? (“Grays” are described on the Internet as aliens responsible for abductions of humans and cattle slaughters. Of course, the Grays are also described as a short-lived rock band and a professional, independent baseball team.) The point here is that this piece has no point. It doesn’t need to, because it’s exploratory. If Jake had begun with a clear point or thesis, then we would know that he had already made up his mind; that he had already discovered his “truth,” and he only wanted to communicate it to us. But, if you don’t understand your trauma, if you can’t make any sense out of it, then you have to “write your way there.” Exploration, then, is the first rule of writing through trauma.
Nonetheless, there is form in Jake’s piece. First, it’s a narrative; it tells a story. Stories are an ancient, durable form of entertainment; they transcend all barriers of race, class, gender, environment, and age. Narratives occur within a time frame, often chronologically. They usually serve a purpose, come from a specific point of view, and contain selected information, while leaving other information out. Narrative is fundamental to composing through trauma because it relies on specific events represented in imagery created with words, as well as actual images, such as photos, paintings, or videos (explored in the following section). Guy Allen (2000) summarizes why narratives are key to composing through trauma:
Stories, Buford writes, “protect us from chaos, and maybe that’s what we, unblinkered at the end of the twentieth century, find ourselves craving.” Buford goes on: “Implicit in the extraordinary revival of storytelling is the possibility that we need stories—that they are a fundamental unit of knowledge, the foundation of memory, essential to the way we make sense of our lives. . . . We have returned to narratives—in many fields of knowledge—because it is impossible to live without them” (279).
Rebecca Dierking puts it this way:
Siegel (2007, 308), looking at narrative from a neurological standpoint, found that narrative is not just a story, not just a distilled memory, but “a deep, bodily and emotional process of sorting through the muck in which we’ve been stuck” (2012, 50).
As crucial as narratives are for sorting through trauma, they can also help us to spin our wheels in the same old sludge. The savior, chronology, is also the culprit here. We think and live according to the iron clockworks of sequence. Chronological order forms deep lines in our psyches, and breaking this pattern can be hard. Chronology can meld us to the same ways of thinking about a trauma. Because traumatic memories are so strong and so rooted in time sequence, creating a narrative in a non-chronological order can help extract us from this rut. For this reason, much of the writing in my course does not depend on time. I suggest that students use flashback and flash-forward—and never begin at the beginning. Of course, within these blocks of discourse, narrative still prevails, but the primary chain is broken and new perspectives of making meaning often arise.
Another form or structure Jake uses is less visible to most readers, but is very common to writing about trauma. Different researchers (e.g., Wilma Bucci 2002 and Louise DeSalvo 1999) have identified this rough pattern in writing about trauma: (1) sensory detail; (2) linking these details to the event, which provoked these details; (3) blending these details and events into a narrative; and (4) analyzing and/or reflecting on the details and events. Writers do not set out to follow this form; it’s just that this rough shape is commonly found in such writing, after the fact.
Jake’s piece begins with a few intriguing sensory details: an owl circles above his head; an unknown voice sarcastically mimics him; he speaks with a young couple whom he recalls is dead. From there, he moves to the event itself—his struggle to wake up and orient himself, find his glasses, fumble through the pages of a Bible, and read a passage. He briefly analyzes why he is writing; it gives him a “modicum of comfort.” He continues to reflect briefly in the final paragraph. Like any writing process or product, there’s often a lot of recycling of elements. For instance, sensory detail often occurs throughout the piece, as it does in Jake’s writing. In all, form and structure reside in Jake’s piece, but it flies under the radar, so that it cannot stunt or hijack his ideas, distracting him from his search to identify and understand his trauma. At many stages of composing through trauma, we don’t need any kind of form or structure or recipe to follow—just a willingness to get it out, to create.
Forms and structures can be helpful but are not needed as we work to demystify a trauma. However, once we have generated an abundance of material that we have thoroughly developed, probed, questioned, offered possible answers to, analyzed relevant secondary sources and integrated them into our own thinking, casted them into different genres, and all other ways of perceiving them from multiple perspectives, then a structure can further help us gain distance and perspective on our issues.
Chih-Ning Chang is an intelligent, hard-working language expert who chose a demanding form to express her trauma, after she had thoroughly processed it in many different ways. Following is her poem, which she later converts to a video:
I am defeated
And I refuse to believe that
I can make a difference
I know it is hard but
“Dreams come true”
Is a joke and
“Nobody can change the fate”
So I told people
I don’t trust myself
My life is broken because
The monster
Is more powerful than
My strength
The monster stole my identity and hope
I would be lying to you if I said
I will have a great future ahead
Before