Trauma is a complicated beast but lately I’ve been contemplating one aspect particularly. That is, the point at which anticipation/excitement/fear, amongst other even less tangible feelings, become fused. It’s a walk at the very cusp of life and death - where things fall into place and seem to acquire an exhilarating sense of harmony, unification even. The world is whole and so are you, in mind and body - not because you’re at one with anything really but because you are as fragmented as the air we breathe and the light that passes through us. Body, mind, soul fall away at that point. Almost without thought you stand, and there are only the distant sensations of the instinctual mind to guide you. Trapped at the pinnacle of disbelief and beyond the reach of anything save dreams and nightmares, that which is left of yourself is poised as it has never been before and frozen simultaneously.
It is the feeling I get looking at Salvador Dali’s clocks. Those melted, twisted depictions of no state and all states, of distant thought and the rushing in of everything to overtake time and space. Replacing it with what, though? Perhaps with the feeling of release, one inch from death but always in the back of the mind the churning of emotion that must rise again.
Can there be any full return from such a state?
I do know there isn’t anything that compares to it except maybe the pure beauty of an intellectual thrillride. At any rate I feel tied to those moments, drawn even. Not because I want them to happen - obviously they’re at the extremes of life and there is, by definition, a base level of terror there - but because I am trying to understand how to stand in relation to the process of it all.
If I can understand how you get there then it feels like I could let go more easily because I’d have some understanding of the structure of the event/s. Not design or purpose precisely but rather the relationship of the force of my nature as it collides with traumatic experience. Otherwise my instinctual physiological responses overwhelm any sense of control or hope of wisdom I might draw from the situation - no matter the outcome.
Even in situations where I have ‘won’ there remains this pull between states which are constantly in flux. They are attractive even though you know they’re dangerous. They are Greek fire - all magic and formed of wonder but all too eager to devour you if you aren’t very, very careful. I know I ‘push the envelope’ sometimes just to see what happens because if I can predict the outcome then I begin to understand the nature of the experience which is often more important to me than spot fixing the symptomatic results. It seems like that makes it a very long journey but I hope I’m getting somewhere. I’d like to think so anyway.
Trauma is a complicated beast but lately I’ve been contemplating one aspect particularly. That is, the point at which anticipation/excitement/fear, amongst other even less tangible feelings, become fused. It’s a walk at the very cusp of life and death - where things fall into place and seem to acquire an exhilarating sense of harmony, unification even. The world is whole and so are you, in mind and body - not because you’re at one with anything really but because you are as fragmented as the air we breathe and the light that passes through us. Body, mind, soul fall away at that point. Almost without thought you stand, and there are only the distant sensations of the instinctual mind to guide you. Trapped at the pinnacle of disbelief and beyond the reach of anything save dreams and nightmares, that which is left of yourself is poised as it has never been before and frozen simultaneously.
It is the feeling I get looking at Salvador Dali’s clocks. Those melted, twisted depictions of no state and all states, of distant thought and the rushing in of everything to overtake time and space. Replacing it with what, though? Perhaps with the feeling of release, one inch from death but always in the back of the mind the churning of emotion that must rise again.
Can there be any full return from such a state?
I do know there isn’t anything that compares to it except maybe the pure beauty of an intellectual thrillride. At any rate I feel tied to those moments, drawn even. Not because I want them to happen - obviously they’re at the extremes of life and there is, by definition, a base level of terror there - but because I am trying to understand how to stand in relation to the process of it all.
If I can understand how you get there then it feels like I could let go more easily because I’d have some understanding of the structure of the event/s. Not design or purpose precisely but rather the relationship of the force of my nature as it collides with traumatic experience. Otherwise my instinctual physiological responses overwhelm any sense of control or hope of wisdom I might draw from the situation - no matter the outcome.
Even in situations where I have ‘won’ there remains this pull between states which are constantly in flux. They are attractive even though you know they’re dangerous. They are Greek fire - all magic and formed of wonder but all too eager to devour you if you aren’t very, very careful. I know I ‘push the envelope’ sometimes just to see what happens because if I can predict the outcome then I begin to understand the nature of the experience which is often more important to me than spot fixing the symptomatic results. It seems like that makes it a very long journey but I hope I’m getting somewhere. I’d like to think so anyway.