Trauma & Art

The walls

“All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are ‘sides,’ and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.” Virginia Woolf

Over this last decade I have re-appreciated the power and value of many ideas in Virginia Woolf’s book: A Room of One’s Own, which I read in my twenties. As I have picked up brushes again this month, the ideas have become more salient. In terms of women’s experience  across time Virginia Woolf writes: “Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics…”  And elsewhere, “There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” What if we could all live from this place of inner freedom, where the walls that kept us locked out of ourselves had collapsed, while simultaneously having a physical room of our own to retreat to, to be and to do.

More quotations:

“Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.”

“I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young—alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross–roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to–night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting–room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky. too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would he impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.”

And a recent podcast

I’d also like to share a podcast I listened to a few days ago with Dr Rick Hanson, his son Forrest Hanson, and their guest Frank Ostaseski, who is an advocate for mindful and compassionate end-of-life care-giving at: https://www.rickhanson.net/being-well-podcast-living-and-dying-well-with-frank-ostaseski/. The discussion covers topics and experiences like: Frank’s own recovery from multiple strokes; what death can teach us about living well and ourselves; our fear of our own death, and mostly, the death of those we love, especially, our children; bringing wisdom to anger and courage to the world; the coming together and the falling apart and accepting each other as is.

The lampshade

I love rice paper lampshades. They’re beautiful in their simplicity, and they’re totally inexpensive. They last for years and they look good both when the light is on and during the day. I’ve always had a few hanging around the house. This last week I took down the old ones, which were disintegrating and hung some new ones. As I was going about it I remembered a vintage ocher yellow glass lampshade a high school teacher had gifted me. She was close to an old school friend’s mother, and also, lived in the same block of flats with them. While visiting this friend a few years after we had finished school I met her again. As it happened she had been trying to hang a ceiling light without success and so had come upstairs to ask for help. My boyfriend managed to put the light in place and she had gifted me an identical lampshade that she had picked up at a flea market. I never met her again, because she moved to Brussels, but I carried the lampshade with me from house to house even though I never used it, until I eventually gave it away in a decluttering spree.

The lampshade has been used as a metaphor to describe our layered human nature and how our different identities, individual aspects of self, as well as, our experiences can obscure our true self or our deepest essence.  Bharati writes: “We humans are like a lamp that has five lampshades over our light. Each of the lampshades is a different colour and density. As the light shines through the lampshades, it is progressively changed in colour and nature. It is a bittersweet colouring. On the one hand, the shades provide the individualized beauty of each lamp. Yet the lampshades obscure the pure light”. In a webinar I recently listened to on self directed neuroplasticity Dr Joan Borysenko used the metaphor of the lampshade to describe a similar theme. She talked about how experiences and stories cover our true essence or light like a lampshade. When there is a lot of trauma the lampshade becomes thicker and more opaque, but our true essence or core self is always there below all the lived experiences, the different identities, the brokenness, the woundedness and the defenses.  As Rea Rashani writes in her poem The Unbroken: “as we break open to the place inside / which is unbreakable and whole…”

The Unbroken by Rea Rashani

There is a brokenness / out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness / out of which blooms the unshatterable.
There is a sorrow / beyond all grief which leads to joy
and a fragility / out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space / too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness / we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside
which is unbreakable and whole,
while learning to sing.