Wounds, there are many types, are like cracks.*
Some are visible, some are not. From the outside, one can misjudge the situation.
Only since the concept of “PTSD” became a reality, the remnants – what remains of trauma – can be considered “devastating” (i.e. complete “destruction” is present).
If its presence is felt, nothing normal makes sense: conversation seems trivial and is of no use.
In certain circles, it is often discussed that you can take the Jews out of slavery, but you cannot take slavery out of the Jews.
Maybe Cervantes’ “giving time to time” does not apply here?
*Please don’t give me Leonard Cohen’s “and that’s where the light comes in” – the crack is a break.
As I said in 1975 or so in a video piece: “what you see is not…”
My dear mother said, after learning two more languages besides her native language, that she spoke “only foreign languages.” Even her ties to the language of her childhood had faded away.
The state of being estranged is hard to convey to people who expect language to be used in the most conventional way.
Distance becomes the only way to communicate at those times. As the surrealists pleaded back in the 1920’s: Let the infinite in!