Post by ekswitaj on Jul 4, 2008 14:27:19 GMT 2
Trauma, Art, and Poetic Knowledge - Anne-Marie Levine
Author’s note: The following remarks were made at Maale-Hachamsha, just outside of Jerusalem, in March 1996 to an audience of Israeli, American, and German clinicians, scholars, and artists. The conference was organized by the Israeli Ministry of Health to discuss new ways of helping 800 chronically hospitalized Holocaust survivors in Israel, using video testimony as therapy as well as documentation. Special attention was paid in this presentation to the often-expressed concern of the group that these survivors might be unable to use language coherently enough to bear witness to their own experiences.
Trauma, Art, and Poetic Knowledge
I understand my subject to be the process by which art, or meaning is made out of witnessing. How is art made out of trauma? How does art “know” trauma? How does trauma become art? What can clinicians learn from artists about trauma? These are most probably the questions. I can’t answer them, but I can give you some ideas.
You have a powerful partial answer in the film we saw Thursday night, a film made from a marathon thirty-two hour group therapy session with Israeli-born children of survivors. I think that what the members of that group did is what artists do-- they testify. At any rate, that is what traumatized artists do; and it is a question if there is such a thing as an artist without a central trauma. But the artist in that film, the person who made art out of trauma, is the director, by virtue of the choices he made in editing those thirty-two hours of film.
I want to read you some lines from Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright/poet who chose to live in France and who wrote sometimes in English, sometimes in French, often serving as his own translator.
This is a description of survivor art, or of what drives survivor art, and it has some relevance, I think, for the situation of the 800 individuals whose fate we have been discussing.
Here are two other statements, by or about Beckett, which seem to me to bear upon that situation as well:
and this:
In my view one becomes an artist not only because one has the ability, but because of a kind of pressure, what Beckett calls “obligation;” a drive, a sense that one has something to say, a message perhaps, that one must deliver. Even if one is not aware of, or clear, verbally, what it is that one must say.
Here I want to quote a painter, Mark Rothko, the great Jewish Abstract Expressionist artist, who came to the United States from Russia as a child:
And remember that Rothko painted completely abstract canvases. His view arises from trauma. Here are some lines from Aharon Appelfeld:
These lines from Beckett, Rothko, and Appelfeld, are statements by
artists about art which address, equally, the situation of the survivor.
Now: what about art? Is it a home for trauma? I say yes. Art closely parallels the workings of the mind and the subjects on which the mind dwells.
For instance:
Art frees one of the obligation to be consistent, the obligation to be logical, to “make sense.” It frees one of the tyranny of cause and effect.
Art encourages forms of expression which do not include facts, may not include story or narrative, or even words.
Art is a language
It is the language of the unconscious
It is a direct link to the unconscious
Art can bypass the conscious
Art can bypass the anecdote, the story, and thus express a more profound range of feeling
Art can bypass sequence, logic, cause and effect, factual memory, even fear
Art may express the unknown
Art is a balancing act between unconscious (that is, the source)
and conscious (discipline, the editing self)
Art may express trauma in a way that makes it intelligible to the rest of us
Art presupposes a dialogue
Artists are not necessarily aware of what they know. But they transform it into something others can know. Art is a way to tell, even if you don’t know what it is that you are telling.
We know that silence is toxic. Art is a way of breaking the silence.
Now I want to speak to you as a poet -- with poems. The first of these poems, “Dreams, Fragments,” is made of fragments and the spaces between them. The second, “Kinderszenen” is a narrative with many details and anecdotes. They are both autobiographical in completely different ways, and both come from trauma, silence, and exile.
Dreams, Fragments
A baby lies in a man’s hand
It does not breathe
we try hard to revive it
I jump up and down
We fail
I cry and cry
The baby is mine
It is I
We are the baby
It is the aborted twin
The hand is yours
“I can’t go on, I’ll go on”
I make an appointment to have my vocal cords cut
“Everyone possesses in his own unconscious an instrument
with which he can interpret the utterances of the unconscious
in another”
There is a record in the body of what happened
Memory muscles out invention
May one loose one’s Holocaust memories on another,
or must one keep them oneself?
If you had been clear-headed we could have gone farther
If you had been clear-headed I could have stayed longer
“You are my son. Your book will be the child of my book.”
*
Kinderszenen
1.
A giant palm tree marked the house Flora and I would lie by the side of the kidney-shaped swimming pool dropping seedless green grapes into our mouths while my springer spaniel from one of Jerry Lewis’ litters chased shadows about the garden She was liver-and-white and had a pedigree Calla lilies and
Shasta daisies, tended by our Belgian cook, Gaby, lolled in the flower beds next to Mrs. Meinecke’s house Her given name was Bird and her husband’s Ferd On the other side, Mrs. Regnier’s mimosa tree cast a giant shadow that became a dragon every night in the corner of my room when the light was extinguished I dreamt then of witches or of colored choo-choo trains that crossed a blue ocean to Europe
2.
I read Photoplay and Modern Screen and Maurois’ biography of Disraeli I appropriated young Benjamin’s motto, “Learn not for pleasure but for action,” though I could not have told what actions I was preparing I read Archie and Wonderwoman comic books, and Christopher Fry’s verse play, A Phoenix too Frequent
“Nothing but the harmless day gone into black is all the dark is, and so what’s my trouble. . .” I knew great chunks of it, Doto’s lines, by heart I followed the adventures of Cherry Ames and Sue Barton, student nurses, and the poems of Dylan Thomas kept me awake at night I studied the dialogues of Plato because I thought philosophy might provide answers to my profound but inchoate questions When I won the Book Week awards at school they gave me a children's’ book called DOWNRIGHT DENCEY for a prize
3.
There was oil everywhere on the property of the Hillcrest Country Club where my father played golf where the return on their oil rights paid the members’ dues on the Beverly Hills High School land where I attended school where a man working high up on the oil rig was shot in the neck by a member of the girls’ archery team I was good at archery At college I had an archery professor whose doctoral dissertation correlated girls’ archery scores with their menstrual cycles She read it to us on rainy days on fine days she liked to put her heavy
arms about me, body pressed against my back, to show me the proper form
4.
We were asked to memorize a poem upon graduation from the eighth
grade at the El Rodeo school We recited, from Sir Walter Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel:” “Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned As home his footsteps he hath turned From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well; For him no minstrel raptures swell. . . . “
5.
Arnold Schoenberg died in Los Angeles, having failed to produce viable movie music Many great musicians lived there in the days of the Second World War and after European refugees and Americans too One ran into them here and there, on the street (Isaac Stern coming out of the Rexall Drugstore in Beverly Hills in his undershirt) or at a concert (Igor Stravinsky confiding to a younger composer, “J’aime vos mains”) Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin played tennis together Heifetz, Piatigorsky and Rubinstein played trios Only slightly less renowned musicians provided the talent pool for the movie studios’ orchestras
6.
There were exiled writers too Brecht Werfel Thomas Mann
Adorno Leon Feuchtwanger I didn’t know about them
I didn’t know I was one of them My parents found this futile paradise when I was small They brought their books and their paintings and their language and their music to a place where only other exiles would recognize them But they were happy in the seasonless sunshine I was the displaced person, the inheritor of exile, the refugee who didn’t know it As the children of survivors are said to dream the nightmares of their parents, I inherited nameless fears My parents wanted to forget I dreamed of transcendence My dreams made them afraid
again Their child was born on Krystallnacht, night of the shattered glass Will her voice be heard?
References
Trauma, art, and poetic knowledge:
1.Samuel Beckett, Disjecta(London: John Calder, 1983), p.139.
2 Mel Gussow, “Samuel Beckett is dead at 83; His ‘Godot’ Changed
Theater,” The New York Times (December 27, 1989), p. A 1 and D
17.
3 Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett, A Biography(New York and London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 640.
4 Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, letter to The New York Times
(June 13, 1943), in James E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko, A
Biography(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
1993), p. 193.
5 Aharon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair(New York: Fromm International
Publishing Corporation, 1994), p.35.
6 Lawrence Weschler, “Inventing Peace,” The New Yorker (November
20,1995), p.59.
Poems:
“Dreams, Fragments,” Anne-Marie Levine Bus Ride to a Blue Movie,Pearl Editions, 2003), p. 10. The quotations in this poem are from Samuel Beckett, Sigmund Freud, and Edmond Jabes, respectively.
“Kinderszenen,” Anne-Marie Levine, Euphorbia, Provincetown Arts Press, 1994, p. 15.
This article was published in appreviated form in Provincetown Arts Magazine, 1997
Author’s note: The following remarks were made at Maale-Hachamsha, just outside of Jerusalem, in March 1996 to an audience of Israeli, American, and German clinicians, scholars, and artists. The conference was organized by the Israeli Ministry of Health to discuss new ways of helping 800 chronically hospitalized Holocaust survivors in Israel, using video testimony as therapy as well as documentation. Special attention was paid in this presentation to the often-expressed concern of the group that these survivors might be unable to use language coherently enough to bear witness to their own experiences.
Trauma, Art, and Poetic Knowledge
I understand my subject to be the process by which art, or meaning is made out of witnessing. How is art made out of trauma? How does art “know” trauma? How does trauma become art? What can clinicians learn from artists about trauma? These are most probably the questions. I can’t answer them, but I can give you some ideas.
You have a powerful partial answer in the film we saw Thursday night, a film made from a marathon thirty-two hour group therapy session with Israeli-born children of survivors. I think that what the members of that group did is what artists do-- they testify. At any rate, that is what traumatized artists do; and it is a question if there is such a thing as an artist without a central trauma. But the artist in that film, the person who made art out of trauma, is the director, by virtue of the choices he made in editing those thirty-two hours of film.
I want to read you some lines from Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright/poet who chose to live in France and who wrote sometimes in English, sometimes in French, often serving as his own translator.
“...there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”1
This is a description of survivor art, or of what drives survivor art, and it has some relevance, I think, for the situation of the 800 individuals whose fate we have been discussing.
Here are two other statements, by or about Beckett, which seem to me to bear upon that situation as well:
about Waiting for Godot: “Waiting in Beckett’s sense is an alternate activity. Waiting becomes a way of living; waiting for inspiration, recognition, understanding, or death.”2
and this:
Beckett was asked why he wrote. He said, “I couldn’t bear not to leave a stain upon the silence.”3
In my view one becomes an artist not only because one has the ability, but because of a kind of pressure, what Beckett calls “obligation;” a drive, a sense that one has something to say, a message perhaps, that one must deliver. Even if one is not aware of, or clear, verbally, what it is that one must say.
Here I want to quote a painter, Mark Rothko, the great Jewish Abstract Expressionist artist, who came to the United States from Russia as a child:
“There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.”4
And remember that Rothko painted completely abstract canvases. His view arises from trauma. Here are some lines from Aharon Appelfeld:
“...right after the war...there arose, inchoate and inarticulate,the first efforts at expression...later...the desire to keep silence and the desire to speak became deeper; and only artistic expression, which came years later, could attempt to bridge those two difficult imperatives.”5
These lines from Beckett, Rothko, and Appelfeld, are statements by
artists about art which address, equally, the situation of the survivor.
Now: what about art? Is it a home for trauma? I say yes. Art closely parallels the workings of the mind and the subjects on which the mind dwells.
For instance:
Art is a home for: silence
space
fragments
juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated fragments
accretion of details
layering
collage
dislocation
gaps
leaps
repetition
lists
Art frees one of the obligation to be consistent, the obligation to be logical, to “make sense.” It frees one of the tyranny of cause and effect.
Art encourages forms of expression which do not include facts, may not include story or narrative, or even words.
Art can work by exclusion, the “conspicuous exclusion” Lawrence Weschler finds in the painting of Vermeer -- the notion of themes that are “saturatingly present but only as felt absence -- themes that are being held at bay, but conspicuously so.”6
Art is a language
It is the language of the unconscious
It is a direct link to the unconscious
Art can bypass the conscious
Art can bypass the anecdote, the story, and thus express a more profound range of feeling
Art can bypass sequence, logic, cause and effect, factual memory, even fear
Art may express the unknown
Art is a balancing act between unconscious (that is, the source)
and conscious (discipline, the editing self)
Art may express trauma in a way that makes it intelligible to the rest of us
Art presupposes a dialogue
Artists are not necessarily aware of what they know. But they transform it into something others can know. Art is a way to tell, even if you don’t know what it is that you are telling.
We know that silence is toxic. Art is a way of breaking the silence.
Now I want to speak to you as a poet -- with poems. The first of these poems, “Dreams, Fragments,” is made of fragments and the spaces between them. The second, “Kinderszenen” is a narrative with many details and anecdotes. They are both autobiographical in completely different ways, and both come from trauma, silence, and exile.
Dreams, Fragments
A baby lies in a man’s hand
It does not breathe
we try hard to revive it
I jump up and down
We fail
I cry and cry
The baby is mine
It is I
We are the baby
It is the aborted twin
The hand is yours
“I can’t go on, I’ll go on”
I make an appointment to have my vocal cords cut
“Everyone possesses in his own unconscious an instrument
with which he can interpret the utterances of the unconscious
in another”
There is a record in the body of what happened
Memory muscles out invention
May one loose one’s Holocaust memories on another,
or must one keep them oneself?
If you had been clear-headed we could have gone farther
If you had been clear-headed I could have stayed longer
“You are my son. Your book will be the child of my book.”
*
Kinderszenen
1.
A giant palm tree marked the house Flora and I would lie by the side of the kidney-shaped swimming pool dropping seedless green grapes into our mouths while my springer spaniel from one of Jerry Lewis’ litters chased shadows about the garden She was liver-and-white and had a pedigree Calla lilies and
Shasta daisies, tended by our Belgian cook, Gaby, lolled in the flower beds next to Mrs. Meinecke’s house Her given name was Bird and her husband’s Ferd On the other side, Mrs. Regnier’s mimosa tree cast a giant shadow that became a dragon every night in the corner of my room when the light was extinguished I dreamt then of witches or of colored choo-choo trains that crossed a blue ocean to Europe
2.
I read Photoplay and Modern Screen and Maurois’ biography of Disraeli I appropriated young Benjamin’s motto, “Learn not for pleasure but for action,” though I could not have told what actions I was preparing I read Archie and Wonderwoman comic books, and Christopher Fry’s verse play, A Phoenix too Frequent
“Nothing but the harmless day gone into black is all the dark is, and so what’s my trouble. . .” I knew great chunks of it, Doto’s lines, by heart I followed the adventures of Cherry Ames and Sue Barton, student nurses, and the poems of Dylan Thomas kept me awake at night I studied the dialogues of Plato because I thought philosophy might provide answers to my profound but inchoate questions When I won the Book Week awards at school they gave me a children's’ book called DOWNRIGHT DENCEY for a prize
3.
There was oil everywhere on the property of the Hillcrest Country Club where my father played golf where the return on their oil rights paid the members’ dues on the Beverly Hills High School land where I attended school where a man working high up on the oil rig was shot in the neck by a member of the girls’ archery team I was good at archery At college I had an archery professor whose doctoral dissertation correlated girls’ archery scores with their menstrual cycles She read it to us on rainy days on fine days she liked to put her heavy
arms about me, body pressed against my back, to show me the proper form
4.
We were asked to memorize a poem upon graduation from the eighth
grade at the El Rodeo school We recited, from Sir Walter Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel:” “Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned As home his footsteps he hath turned From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well; For him no minstrel raptures swell. . . . “
5.
Arnold Schoenberg died in Los Angeles, having failed to produce viable movie music Many great musicians lived there in the days of the Second World War and after European refugees and Americans too One ran into them here and there, on the street (Isaac Stern coming out of the Rexall Drugstore in Beverly Hills in his undershirt) or at a concert (Igor Stravinsky confiding to a younger composer, “J’aime vos mains”) Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin played tennis together Heifetz, Piatigorsky and Rubinstein played trios Only slightly less renowned musicians provided the talent pool for the movie studios’ orchestras
6.
There were exiled writers too Brecht Werfel Thomas Mann
Adorno Leon Feuchtwanger I didn’t know about them
I didn’t know I was one of them My parents found this futile paradise when I was small They brought their books and their paintings and their language and their music to a place where only other exiles would recognize them But they were happy in the seasonless sunshine I was the displaced person, the inheritor of exile, the refugee who didn’t know it As the children of survivors are said to dream the nightmares of their parents, I inherited nameless fears My parents wanted to forget I dreamed of transcendence My dreams made them afraid
again Their child was born on Krystallnacht, night of the shattered glass Will her voice be heard?
References
Trauma, art, and poetic knowledge:
1.Samuel Beckett, Disjecta(London: John Calder, 1983), p.139.
2 Mel Gussow, “Samuel Beckett is dead at 83; His ‘Godot’ Changed
Theater,” The New York Times (December 27, 1989), p. A 1 and D
17.
3 Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett, A Biography(New York and London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 640.
4 Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, letter to The New York Times
(June 13, 1943), in James E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko, A
Biography(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
1993), p. 193.
5 Aharon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair(New York: Fromm International
Publishing Corporation, 1994), p.35.
6 Lawrence Weschler, “Inventing Peace,” The New Yorker (November
20,1995), p.59.
Poems:
“Dreams, Fragments,” Anne-Marie Levine Bus Ride to a Blue Movie,Pearl Editions, 2003), p. 10. The quotations in this poem are from Samuel Beckett, Sigmund Freud, and Edmond Jabes, respectively.
“Kinderszenen,” Anne-Marie Levine, Euphorbia, Provincetown Arts Press, 1994, p. 15.
This article was published in appreviated form in Provincetown Arts Magazine, 1997