The Feeling of Trauma: An Investigation into Real Time Travel

A recent essay; the next step in the process of theorizing time travel...

Time travel exists. People are doing it around you all the time, slipping in and out of time warps and black holes. The mechanism of memory is in some way distorted, and it allows for altered states of consciousness. Time travel can be terrifying, confusing, jolting, and dissociating. This essay will explore states of suspension (dissociation), rupture (hyperarousal; caused by triggers), and simultaneity (flashbacks/intrusion), within the specific context of traumatic memory.

Antonio Damasio writes:

But there is another kind of time altogether. “Mind time” has to do with how we experience the passage of time and how we organize chronology. Despite the steady tick of the clock, duration can seem fast or slow, short or long. And this variability can happen on different scales, from decades, seasons, weeks and hours, down to the tiniest intervals of music – the span of a note or the moment of silence between two notes. We also place events in time, deciding when they occurred, in which order and on what scale, whether that of a lifetime or of a few seconds.[1]

Such “mind time” is not fixed. There is no way to measure it, except for noting affect. “Mind time” is unique to the individual and represents the spectrum in which we experience time. Affective states such as sadness, grief, and trauma greatly affect our experience of time. These experiences also destabilize our relationships with truth and reality, as memory (a mechanism of recalling real events) becomes elastic.[2]

This essay serves as the conceptual framework for a visual project about the experience of traumatic memory. How might a partnership of theoretical and scientific ideas lend itself to more authentic representations of lived traumatic reality? My interest in the project is twofold, combining an interest in perceptions of time with the urgency with which I feel issues of trauma must be dealt. However, many people have no idea how to relate to traumatic memory unless they experience it themselves.

The experience of traumatic memory is rooted in physiological changes, in addition to psychological effects. This means traumatic memory feels different. Symptoms alter consciousness.[3] They can’t be turned off; they can’t be lessened (except with medications). Even if the response is dulled chemically, the memory of the feeling remains, which can be just as disconcerting – the body remembers even as the mind seeks distance.

Affective states influence our experience of time and memory. In a study conducted by Alessandro Angrilli, Paolo Cherubuni, Antonella Pavese, and Sara Manfredini at University of Padua in Padua, Italy, researchers concluded that time estimation was affected by affective valence or arousal. In a study titled The International Affective Picture System: A Cross Cultural Validation Study, Bruno Verschuere, Geert Crombez, & Ernst Koster, paraphrasing an earlier finding by Lang, Bradley, and Cuthbert, note that “valence determines the direction, arousal the intensity of activation.”[4] Specifically relevant to this essay is the finding that if subjects were shown negative images (something that made them anxious, sad, afraid, and so on) during a high arousal state, the slide’s duration was overestimated.[5]The images that evoked these affective states distorted the viewers' experience of time to perceive it more slowly.

STILLNESS/SUSPENSION

It was as if time stopped

Time isn’t moving

No time has passed

Time goes on forever

Time stood still

Sometimes it’s as if we exist in Jell-O, suspended but able to see the world around us moving by. What does it mean for time to move slowly? How does this affect the experience of day-to-day living? When in a state of suspension, one experiences the utter stillness of time; catatonia; the restless rest. A deafening silence; incommunicable horror. Awake during anesthesia. Floating through space. Stillness overtakes everything, swallowing it whole. With stillness comes a degree of inaction, a dark resignation. Or perhaps it is more like a paralysis.[6] In this state of stillness, a person might feel utterly stuck; petrified; bound to the past and unable to move from it.

RUPTURE

Rupture is the moment of broken tension, of explosions, of intrusions. It is the moment one goes catapulting from stillness into simultaneity. Rupture is the moment that one becomes aware that today is not just today but it is also then, whenever then was. Then is the time that you were very afraid, very threatened. Then is the time that isn’t now, but is happening, anyway.

Flashbacks are a component unique to traumatic memory. They function as an overwhelming crescendo of sensations. Judith Herman writes, “The intense focus on fragmentary sensation, on image without context, gives the traumatic memory a heightened reality.”[7] What causes flashbacks has no rhyme or reason, ranging from the totally banal to the actually threatening. Because the nervous system is already heavily taxed due to hyperarousal, a flashback is never just a memory of a bad event – it is a full-on assault to any sense of present safety felt by the individual. The flashback is the rupture of the now.

SIMULTANEITY

Time travel is simultaneity, the experience of two time-places at once.

Overlap.

Continued existence fraught with terrors of the past.

Last night, last year, when you were five, right now.

If the way we live life normally is based on the narrative of chronology, what happens when that narrative is crudely interrupted? I will refer to this state as simultaneity, wherein an individual exists in two realities simultaneously as traumatic memories creep into daily, ongoing present life.

Simultaneity creates a unique reality, forcing unpredictable exposure to the past while living in the present. Trauma survivors experiencing this facet of memory are ghosts of and in their own past and present, living in a sort of purgatory. In this stage, memory is staccato, but also fluid, combining startling flashbacks of an unresolved past with the struggle to maintain in the present. It is the task of the survivor to negotiate these realities and bear their burdens. Because of the image-based nature of traumatic memory, it is very easy to succumb to this “alternate” reality – flashbacks can indeed be so vivid that they overtake present time and transport the survivor back to the traumatic event.

It is impossible to totally encapsulate the experience of traumatic memory within one essay, so the discourse must continue. Walter Benjamin writes, “Empathy with the past serves not least to make the past seem present.”[8] Ideally, such an attitude would become culturally pervasive. At the root of this work is the desire to create more spaces where empathy is present, where histories are not ignored nor forgotten. On a small scale, this means project spaces that show work steeped in, among other things, the ideas of this essay. On a large scale is political change that gives voice to survivors. Whether or not that is realistic is debatable, but the work will continue, for without it, survivors of trauma are that much less visible.

---

[1] Antonio Damaso, “Remembering When,” Scientific American Special Edition 16, no. 1

(2006) : 34.

[2] This is not to say the events did not occur. I mean the question of if they are happening now, in the present, or not.

[3] Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992, 1997), 34.

“The ordinary human response to danger is a complex, integrated system of reactions, encompassing both body and mind. Threat initially arouses the sympathetic nervous system, causing the person in danger to feel an adrenaline rush and go into a state of alert. Threat also concentrates a person’s attention on the immediate situation. In addition, threat may alter ordinary perceptions: people in danger are often able to disregard hunger, fatigue, or pain. Finally, threat evokes intense feelings of fear and anger. These changes in arousal, attention, perception, and emotion are normal, adaptive reactions. They mobilize the threatened person for strenuous action, either in battle or in flight.”

[4] Bruno Verschure, Geert Crombez, and Ernst Koster, “The International Affective Picture System: A Cross Cultural Validation Study,” (Ghent: University of Ghent, Date Unavailable), 3.

[5] Alessandro Angrilli and others, “The Influence of Affective Factors on Time

Perception,” Perception and Psychophysics 59, no. 6 (1997) : 978.

“At low levels of arousal the duration of negative slides was underestimated, while the duration of positive slides was overestimated. At high levels of arousal, however, positive slide duration was underestimated relative to the duration of negative slides. As seen in the HR results, negative slides, regardless of the arousal level, elicited a stronger orienting reaction from the subjects. This result suggests that more attention was paid to negative slides than to positive slides.”

[6] Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery…, 34.

“Traumatic reactions occur when action is of no avail. When neither resistance nor escape is possible, the human system of self-defense becomes overwhelmed and disorganized. Each component of the ordinary response to danger, having lost its utility, tends to persist in an altered and exaggerated state long after the actual danger is over. Traumatic events produce profound and lasting changes in physiological arousal, emotion, cognition, and memory. Moreover, traumatic events may sever these normally integrated functions from one another. The traumatized person may experience intense emotion but without clear memory of the event, or may remember everything in detail but without emotion. She may find herself in a constant state of vigilance and irritability without knowing why. Traumatic symptoms have a tendency to become disconnected from their source and to take on a life of their own.”

[7] Ibid, Trauma and Recovery, 38.

[8] Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, 2003), 401.

thoughts from the field

some thoughts about some stuff.

i'm always interested in the active relationships we develop with pop culture, be it music, fashion, television, and so on. though i don't typically write about pop culture (there is obviously not a dearth of research or opinion that exists), sometimes i'm struck by something because of my own attachment to it. and so i write.

so last night in my history and theory seminar, we were discussing ways in which familiarity with an item of another country's pop cultural economy -- in this case, Japanese women and the Korean tv drama, Winter Sonata -- can spur potentially rich and meaningful engagement with that country (Mori 2008). where once there may have been a total unwillingness to explore a culture (this is present in the given example, as the Japanese have a history of reviling Korean culture), a newfound curiosity may develop. and while this is BY NO MEANS a cure-all for things like xenophobia, racism, and other types of prejudice, i do think it's a really important step in the process of overcoming said issues. it points to the fact that pop culture can sometimes make the world a slightly smaller place.

but i digress. the aforementioned Japanese women are not just watching Winter Sonata, but creating more tangible bonds to Korean culture. Yoshitaka Mori, author of Winter Sonata and Cultural Practices of Active Fans in Japan: Considering Middle-Aged Women as Cultural Agents, writes, "The Winter Sonata phenomenon goes beyond just watching a TV drama. It created more social and cultural practices in its fans' everyday lives. As we will see, many fans have started to show a general interest in Korean culture, to organize fan meetings, to participate in Winter Sonata tours in Korea, and even start studying Korean language and culture," (Mori 2008, p. 131). that's right -- people are traveling to another country because of their active engagement with that country's pop culture. brilliant!

examples exist of this kind of transnational cultural flow surely exist in many places, but i'm taking this as an opportunity to write about a dear love of mine: britpop. it's common amongst US britpop fans to be totally and completely enamored with Manchester (madchester, anyone?), London, Wales and other hubs. for as long as i can remember, i've dreamed of making the cultural pilgrimage to to the Glastonbury or Reading festivals, and i know i'm not alone -- this has been a topic of conversation between myself and fellow fans for years.

i'm not fanatical, but i know folks who are. i know girls who scream and cry at the mere mention of any number of britpop idols, from brett anderson and jarvis cocker to noel gallagher and damon albarn. these are the artists (and sex symbols!) who produced anthems of our time, which embodied its zeitgeist. britpop is a sort of cult whose members possess loyalty that spans decades. the aura of these bands and the scene they created sparked the desire for direct participation, such as a pilgrimage to the UK, by their fans.

i'm aware this example doesn't carry the same political weight as Mori's, but it excites me to think about how we, as global citizens, access culture from around the world. the notion that one might want to experience a new place "simply" because of a band, for example, is amazing -- what if there was an explosion of interest in Iraqi or Congolese pop culture in the US?

will something like britpop or a Korean soap opera save us from xenophobia, terror, and war? probably not. but the curiosity and affection embodied by these transnational cultural flows are reasons why we shouldn't dismiss pop culture.

TMI//in case you ever wondered

some of my fields of research are: how affective states (specifically trauma, grief, and sadness) effect our experience of time; how such experiences of time inform memory; the structure of memory; the “unreliability” (and politicization) of emotion; how the body remembers and at times refuses to forget

i can’t stop thinking about the first. as some of you know, i started to write about time travel last year, particularly as it relates to traumatic memory. but i think it happens on a smaller scale, too, just when we are in less extensive states of sadness. i’m fascinated by my own sadness, and the paralysis that it can cause. my body seems wholly uncooperative when i’m anything less than exuberant. i find myself almost hallucinating at times to particularly stressful moments during the recent past. i wonder if other people realize that i exist in two worlds.

In Memory Through Seeing

This is my talk from the School of the Art Insitute's Symposium for BA Visual and Critical Studies students. Please read through and contact me with any comments at emedof@saic.edu. The full text of my thesis will be available for public viewing at Flaxman Library (37 S Wabash) beginning in Fall 2010.

*Note: I can't seem to properly format paragraph breaks so *** will indicate where each new one begins.
For full text with citations, please consult the printed version.

IN MEMORY THROUGH SEEING
***Like the archetypal image of the time traveler, who leaves the present to revisit the past, so too does the traumatized person. However, that person is at times unable to leave the past as such and constantly finds memory and reality colliding in alarming ways. The task of the traumatized time traveler is to build bridges to safely and fluidly transport him from past to present. By learning about this kind of emotional and mental seesawing, we enable more authentic representations of trauma and recovery to come to the fore. But what happens when we try to reify experience? How can visual culture respond to the complex issues surrounding traumatic memory? Many important caveats exist with regard to understanding this topic, but it is impossible to cover or even be aware of all of them. However, of particular interest to me is how the experience of traumatic memory informs and is affected by visual objects such as monuments and other instruments of collective memory.
*** Problematic victim/survivor binaries exist, much to the detriment of people who experience traumatic memory. To binarize such a complicated experience is to say, in effect, that one cannot be a survivor if he or she is suffering, and conversely, that healed is the same as restored. Since traumatic memory requires the individual to constantly exist as both victim and survivor, as it were, there is no distinction to be made between either – lived traumatic memory is a composite experience that combines aspects of reliving trauma with existing in present time and reality. A potential way to get past the binary is to theorize the concept of the traumatized individual as time traveler: this person must constantly negotiate his or her unresolved past – lived memory – with the ongoing present.
***The trauma narrative is constructed from the survivor’s ability to connect with and articulate the past into the present. However, traumatic memory bears the burdensome characteristic of transporting those who experience it back into the occurrence of trauma – everything from sexual assault to surviving a plane crash – effectively taking them “back in time.” In trauma theory parlance, this is known as intrusion. Traumatic memory haunts, as it follows one constantly, even while asleep. Flashbacks unseat the survivor from his present reality and place him in an unpredictable, fluctuating relationship with his memory. By functioning as accessible visual markers of time and experience, monuments may be able to explore a variety of the complex issues associated with traumatic memory.
***I have made the argument that a monument is most effective when it occupies space indefinitely. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. is effective in this way. In 1979, a group of Vietnam veterans, who dubbed themselves The Memorial Fund, sought support for “a tangible symbol of recognition from the American people." By 1981, after raising more than $8, 000,000.00 from private sources, the project came to fruition. A call for entries was announced for the design of the memorial, and 21 year-old Maya Lin’s design was unanimously chosen. Construction was completed a year later.
*** I visited the memorial as a child, before I had opinions about trauma recovery and public memory. However, that may give me the best lucidity, as I can still remember being affected by its stark grey form that seemed to go on forever. The memorial is imposing, physical, and real. It is trauma and loss reified to monumental proportion. Looking through all the names gives the sensation of scrolling through an endless document on a computer screen, yet the names retain their humanity. Instead of getting lost in the sheer volume of textual information, each name seems to stand out and present itself as a singular being indeed, one that is gone forever.
***There is significance in the idea that the Memorial Fund sought the creation of a tangible monument to symbolize the suffering and general war experiences of veterans. The Vietnam War was one of the most divisive in history and left many people in a position where their histories and experiences were not necessarily welcomed in the public consciousness. The power of a physical monument, then, lies in its ability to invade the visual landscape and demand attention. The Vietnam Memorial exemplifies the way these visual objects can function in a space as markers of varied lived experience.
***And what of monuments that change over time? Some monuments are particularly effective because they change, existing in time as well as space. It could be said these monuments live on as those they serve to commemorate cannot – a willful reminder of the necessity to publicly remember. In these instances, the trauma of the community, or its empathetic response to traumas of individuals, is explored.
***A living monument, as it were, is one that responds to the constant organic growth of memory. Memory is itself a living creature, separate from and at times in opposition to us, with which we are forced to interact. Intrusion, as previously mentioned, is at the core of traumatic memory. However, the need to commemorate is strong, perhaps even stronger than the desire to forget. Michael P. Levine writes, “[memorials’] significance is to be found largely in their capacity to represent or convey certain meanings…and perform certain necessary psychological tasks. It is their meaning, or how they are interpreted and function, that counts in terms of the memorial’s success." A memorial fails if its visitors cannot connect their own histories and memories to it.
***One example of a successful monument-maker is Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko. His work explores the intersections of critical thought, aesthetic values, and emotional depth necessary for a monument’s success. Wodiczko himself acts as conduit of experience, reified object-maker, and trust-gatherer as he, very sensitively, dialogues with the survivors his work elevates. In doing so, he creates realistic yet refined representations of their realities. His work is crucial to the future of public memory as it posits victims, survivors, and perpetrators of trauma both within the context of critical discourse and the daunting public sphere.
***Wodiczko dutifully identifies issues of trauma, memory, and public space. In 1999, after receiving the Hiroshima Art Prize, he created a work about the bombing. The resulting piece is heartrending in its simplicity – projections of survivors’ hands moving across the A-Bomb dome as they recounted their stories. The dome, which sits atop the Aioi River, provides the context of physical history and destruction as it is one of the few buildings not obliterated by the explosion. The river itself is an essential component to the aesthetic success of the piece and also to the intangible weight of its meaning, signifying past and future, tragedy and hope, through the movement of the water.
***Wodiczko’s Hiroshima project is not unlike Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial in that both are contested objects around which subjectivities and memories collide. In the case of the Hiroshima project, Wodiczko has received criticism for “memorializing an act of war” as a means to commemorate peace, and the oxymoron therein.2 Wodiczko has said, “…if there is any contribution to peace here, it is to bring to the surface what is hidden." Like the Hiroshima project, the Vietnam Memorial functions in this way, as it commanded attention for a war that people wanted to bury in the past. Notions of visibility with regard to monuments commonly cause conflict in the public consciousness because of a society’s unwillingness to confront.
***As Michael Levine pointed out, the success of a monument depends on its ability to be not only seen, but felt. By deepening our culture’s understanding of tragic events vis-à-vis visual objects, a curious effect is thereby produced – the ability to understand triumph. Monuments to trauma do not simply acknowledge the darkest parts of experience, but also the capacity for endurance, survival, and rebirth. In fact, it can be argued that these monuments, though somber in nature, are actually celebrations of life and spirit, and have the potential to rejuvenate public spaces in ways other public works cannot.
***However, the politics of space being what they are, it is unlikely to see a proliferation of work like Wodiczko’s anytime soon. Western culture has had a tremendous delay in matters of expressing knowledge of its ills. For example, how can the trauma of rape be understood when the social climate is still mired in the misogynist mythology that sex crimes are crimes of passion? In order to acknowledge trauma on a large scale, the society has to begin to come to terms with its failures. It must be understood that in order for trauma to exist, there must also be the production of perpetrators of trauma.

older drawing

sketchy sketch