Words, images and sounds are ridiculously inadequate for conveying certain experiences.
So far, I have managed to write down only one such “hell” but the link between ICU and delirium is unfortunately much too common.
This recent article in the NYTimes describes how unhealthy it is to go “there” – and how preventable it could be. Do read the many comments following the article.
Even if some of us are lucky enough to be able to speak and be understood, silence looms over all of us.
In that sense the words of Fernand Deligny, the French writer/educator who specialized in autistic children and was read attentively by Deleuze, have a particular resonance:
Le language nest pas innocent. Le moindre mot a une densité idéologique dont on ne se rends même pas compte quand on l’emploie.
Il nous enferme dans une convention dont l’histoire-même nous échappe et qui nous semble toute naturelle.
Le language tends a prendre sans cesse le pouvoir absolu.
L’humain est ce qui échappe au language.
Language is not innocent. The smallest word has an ideological density that hides itself as it is used.
It traps us into a convention whose history escapes us and appears completely natural.
Language has a relentless tendency to seek absolute power.
The human is what escapes language.
(my translation)
Most people, when things are not perfect, would love for a change to take place. Unfortunately for many of us, the changes are minimal to the point of appearing non-existent. In French we use the expression”faire du surplace” – moving without creating any change.
It is in that spirit – and that of the film L’Amour à Mort (Love Unto Death) by Resnais – that I hope to write a short text to be called On n’en revient pas (a French expression meaning both “from there one does not come back,” and “hard to believe”).
Here the falling will always be gentle… Water is that ancient friend that reminds us of our original body, all the way to before our birth.
And now… elegance, grace, and efficiency can be combined!
What U.G. Krishnamurti (not the famous one) said over and over in his books already made a lot of sense before my surgery.
Now, would anyone be able to hear what he said, it would save a lot of my efforts in explaining the particular distance I started describing in my earlier posts (Brecht, Herzog…).
If you are willing to enter his realm – not a matter of arguing with him – there are many texts/sites that could challenge your self.
The two main sites:
U.G.Krishnamurti.org
&
U.G.Krishnamurti.Net
And books (composed primarily of interviews):
My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody.
–U.G.
We’re not in Kansas anymore…
The weeks spent in I.C.U. were like an eternity in hell (more in another entry).
Later in rehab I was shown “Encounters at the End of the World,” Werner Herzog’s masterpiece. To my amazement, it was as if someone was describing the universe I had barely escaped from.
Just like those divers going through massive layers of ice with only one hole to come back to the surface,
while it had been all about life or death, there had been absolutely no road map.
I had been submerged too and was still gasping for air.
http://youtu.be/MImYM87jOtU
APPEARANCES
Because I can speak and interact normally*, most people assume that I have made a complete recovery… but the exhaustion endures (hands or knees shake at times) and very often there is a fog to be pierced through to interact with others.
The best way to express this is to say that my eyeballs don’t feel completely aligned with my eye sockets. I can look but am I looking, am I seeing?
Taking a warm shower or sitting in a hot-tub seem to help this discomfort – this simple trick provided my first sense of relief from feeling utterly “out of it.”
Similarly, if I move my head upward/downward or sideways too fast, everything spins around me. Doctors and rehab personnel have called this symptom a vestibular issue and tried in vain to manipulate my inner ear crystals.
DISTANCE
Earlier I have brought up my sense that much of life seem to be populated by “stuff” (as if I were floating in the intergalatic space described in the classic film “The Powers of Ten” [a link]).
There is also my persistent way of being disconnected from the (mundane) busyness of regular life.
As a doctor remarked astutely:
just to be there, present interacting with eyes, ears and one’s body and mind, IS a lot of work.
Normal sound and visual stimulation, even in their more quiet forms, are plenty to process. Handling the intensity of a sunny day with the wind bristling through the leaves, or an excited crowd, is too much.
I used to value the distanciation/alienation (“Verfremdung” in German) that Brecht had advised for his epic theater. I had looked for it in theater, film and art.
Now I live with this distance on a daily basis. Even if I decried fluff in past writing, now fluff surrounds me everywhere (cf. Resnais’s film mentioned earlier).
And so, the small, the quiet, are much more appealing… I am reminded of this “Auto-Interview” by Primo Levi which I had always appreciated:
… we must be cautious about delegating to others our judgment and our will. Since it is difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it is as well to regard all prophets with suspicion. It is better to renounce revealed truths, even if they exalt us by their simplicity and their splendor, or if we find them convenient because we can acquire them gratis.
It is better to content oneself with other more modest and less exciting truths, those one acquires painfully, little by little and without shortcuts, with study, discussion and reasoning, those that can be verified and demonstrated.
*more about that later
The introduction, and the link to the text…
La vie est âpre, mais belle/Life is harsh, but beautiful. A.K. (a friend)
The following short text – which characteristically seems to inspire no response – was written after my brain surgery and the loss of my mother, both of which are not mentioned in the text and totally irrelevant to it. To pay attention to this would be a reductionist way to avoid the content of the text. Life is not digestible, so why lie through writing and why lie to each other?
Yes indeed, the text may appear nihilistic, but as all die, that perspective is neither positive nor negative, just a form of realism…
More to the point, tabula rasa was something I grew up with: I was born a Jew in post-war Europe. My non-existent grandparents had not survived the Shoah. Whether praising peace or culture, all speeches seemed greatly farcical. My father who had fought in a Communist Resistance unit in France (cf. “L’Affiche Rouge”) died around May 68. Most of those who remember that period recall a celebration of freedom, but for me it was also the shock of witnessing the unfurled violence of the status quo – comparable to the military apparatus displayed around any presidential debate in the US.
Fortunately, I was not alone in perceiving most of the pretense around me. I was reading A.S. Neill, Reich and Artaud, Daumal, Michaux, Debord. Later Beckett, Porchia, and U. G. Krishnamurti (not the famous one) verified my perception of the surrounding vacuum.
Such a life-changing experience leaves traces. Most concepts become just “stuff.”
Reminds me of the joke about those five Jews:
Everything is one (Abraham). Everything is love (Jesus-Christ). Everything is economics (Karl Marx). Everything is sex (Sigmund Freud).
Everything is relative (Albert Einstein)
Un branle-bas de cette nature change tout et laisse des traces. La plupart des concepts apparaissent comme des “trucs machins.”
Ça me rappelle la blague des cinq Juifs:
Tout es un (Abraham). Tout est amour (Jésus-Christ). Tout est économique (Karl Marx). Tout est sexuel (Sigmund Freud). Tout est relatif (Albert Einstein).
2011
Common Era/Safety, Faith and Hope in Numbers ©Marton 2011
2012
Creative Juices 2012 ©Marton 2012
Done for a couple of presentations around The Holocaust in 1,000 Years.
(done “after” my surgery)
The Living & The Dead ©Marton 2009