The Other Side (26 page)

from
two

Page 23:
Schrödinger's famous thought experiment
.
I admit that my account here is a dramatic oversimplification.
As Emma Komlos-Hrobsky, assistant editor at Tin House, has pointed out to me, a more accurate description of the paradox would involve saying that the equations we use to calculate the behavior of quantum particles suggest that the single atom of radioactive substance in this experiment enters a state of quantum superposition; that is, the psi function of the entire system contains in it an atom that both has and has not decayed, and poison that is and isn't released, and a cat that is and isn't dead. Schrödinger's point here is to illustrate that atomic indeterminacy doesn't translate particularly well to the macroscopic world. Unlike the atom, which can, at least theoretically, exist in a “blurred model” of reality, the cat can't be both alive and dead, because the act of observation forces the cat into one state or the other: the cat can be only either living or dead. See “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics: A Translation of Schrödinger's ‘Cat Paradox'” in
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
, 124, no. 5 (1980): 323–338. John D. Trimmer, translator.

Page 25:
Like something I memorized long ago
.
On the one hand, neuroscientists say that traumatic memories degrade at the same rate as other kinds of memories. One study on memory stability asked participants to describe the memory of hearing about the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and also to describe a memory from the day before the attack. Years later researchers asked
again: tell us about the day before the attack, tell us about the attack. Both sets of memories showed the same degree of narrative drift.

On the other hand, psychologists say traumatic memories don't change. Even from the moment of the trauma, the mind engages mechanisms of avoidance and denial in order to isolate and quarantine the memory of trauma. The result of this is that the traumatic memory withdraws from conscious recollection and migrates to the memory of the lived body, where it might reemerge, perfectly preserved, at any time.

Page 27:
My Handsome Friend
.
After reading about my friend's fear in the police reports, I write to him to apologize.
I never knew that had happened to you, and I'm so so so sorry. Sorry doesn't cover it actually
. My friend writes back, offers an apology of his own, admitting maybe he wasn't really there for me in the ways I needed him.
The thought that keeps me going when I remember all of that
, he writes,
is that you and I both have families . . . and we are both leading fuller, happier lives than that a-hole ever even dreamed of . . .

from
three

Page 37:
It all starts like this
.
See Charles M. Anderson's “Suture, Stigma, and the Pages That Heal” in
Writing and
Healing: Toward an Informed Practice
, Charles M. Anderson and Marian M. MacCurdy, editors, for a discussion of the ways in which subjectivity is created, positioned, and controlled by our participation in the story networks and discourses of the other. Although, as Jacques Lacan has suggested, this participation gives us access to discursive and narrative meaning, it's not without cost: “Self and all that murky term might or might not mean, is compromised, some have said, to the point of disappearance. To participate in the discourse of the other is necessarily to suffer the loss of self and to be, in a very real sense, written over or spoken out of existence” (Anderson 60).

Page 43:
This is what he wants
.
See Simone de Beauvoir,
The Second Sex
:

We have seen that in a majority of women a passive sexuality has also developed since childhood: woman likes to be embraced, caressed, and especially after puberty she wants to be flesh in a man's arms; the role of subject is normally assigned to him; she knows that; she has been told repeatedly “a man has no need of being good-looking”; she is not supposed to look for the inert qualities of an object in him, but for strength and virile power.

Page 43:
The body remembers
.
See Sabine C. Koch et al., eds.,
Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement
; Maurice
Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception
; Pierre Bourdieu, “Structures,
Habitus
, Practices” in
The Logic of Practice
.

Page 48:
He calls me Puta! Chingada!
Octavio Paz, writing in
The Labyrinth of Solitude
about gender coding in Mexico, defines this term,
chingar
, which means to
injure, to lacerate, to violate
; Paz writes:

The verb is masculine, active, cruel: it stings, wounds, gashes, stains. And it provokes a bitter, resentful satisfaction. The person who suffers this action is passive, inert and open, in contrast to the active, aggressive and closed person who inflicts it. The
chingón
is the
macho
, the male; he rips open the
chingada
, the female, who is pure passivity, defenseless against the exterior world (77).

The term's deep history can be traced back to the Spanish conquest of Mexico, to La Malinche, a Nahua woman who translated for Hernán Cortés, who bore him a child, who helped him enslave and annihilate the entire Aztec Empire. To the Spanish she was known as Doña Marina, a helpful, obedient woman. But over time, especially among Mexican nationalists, her name became synonymous with treachery; to this day the term
malinchista
refers to a disloyal Mexican. In popular folklore, she is often placed in stark opposition to chaste women: Mary, mother of Jesus, the Virgin
of Guadalupe. More recently, she has become known as
La Chingada
, the woman who is fucked.

Page 52:
Another memory comes back
.
In normal everyday situations, the brain turns experience (impressions, perceptions, observations) into information, which is encoded for processing and temporarily stored. Synaptic consolidation, the first step toward making experience a memory, begins with a series of cascading changes and communications between and among molecules, triggering protein reactions and changes in genetic information and gene expression, which in turn leads to the permanent alteration of certain synaptic proteins in the brain. All of this takes place within the first few minutes or hours of an experience. System consolidation, on the other hand, takes up to two decades, and involves the gradual process of reorganizing and transporting the memories, temporarily stored in one part of the brain, to another part of the brain where the memories can be stored more permanently.

In traumatic experiences, however, stress hormones trigger a significant narrowing of consciousness, which means there is increased memory retention for certain details, and partial or total amnesia for others. This altered memory gets passed throughout the brain where it is processed differently from other memories by using much more synaptic energy and requiring that the energy be distributed across
many more encoding neurons. This makes the traumatic memory more engorged with sensation and perception than other memories, which means it gets consolidated differently. Or, in some cases, the traumatic memory may not be consolidated at all. Because the traumatic memory often does not fit into the flow and structure of linear time and narrative, it may detach from normal events and memory. This detachment can take many forms, including event-specific amnesia, which may last for hours, weeks, or years; dissociation, which refers to a compartmentalization and fracturing of experience; or the memory may completely lack a semantic component, which is to say, it can't be spoken. Without a narrative, the traumatic memory splits off from ordinary consciousness, and elements of the trauma may begin to intrude into consciousness: as terrifying perceptions, obsessional preoccupations, and anxiety reactions. Without a narrative, the experience cannot be fully absorbed by consciousness, which is not to say it is not remembered, but that the memory enters a liminal realm in which it is both acknowledged and unacknowledged, consolidated and not consolidated, part of you and not part, perhaps even indefinitely. See Pierre Janet (1919, 1925), and Bessel A. van der Kolk and Rita Fisler (1995) for a detailed discussion of the relationship between trauma, dissociation, and memory consolidation.

from
four

Page 55:
Two armless chairs face one another
.
Samuel Beckett,
Ohio Impromptu
. The actual line in the stage direction reads:
Two plain armless white deal chairs
.

Page 56:
He wants me to achieve mental balance
.
The official diagnosis, as I understand it, is post-traumatic stress disorder (
PTSD
), which, in 2000, was still a relatively “new” category of mental disorder. This particular diagnosis first appears in the
DSM
-III (1980), which includes 265 diagnostic categories, 82 of which did not appear in the
DSM
-II. As one of the “new” diagnoses,
PTSD
is classified as a sub-category of anxiety disorders, a stress response precipitated by a catastrophically traumatic event that is
outside the range of usual human experience
. This particular diagnosis initially evolved as the result of the combined efforts of researchers, social workers, and psychiatrists to describe a combination of symptoms particular to combat veterans, and its inclusion in the
DSM
-III is considered a watershed event. Whereas “shell shock” had long been considered a weakness of the individual to handle the rigors of war, for the first time experts seemed to agree that a stress response was not the result of a defect in the individual, but rather a normal reaction to an abnormal experience. Over time, mental health professionals began to remark on similarities between the symptoms manifested by combat veterans and
those manifested by Holocaust survivors, civilian victims of war, abused children, and raped and battered women. Eventually, researchers began to say that traumatic events might be so endemic and pervasive that catastrophic trauma isn't really outside of the realm of normal human experience at all.

Page 59:
The sunlight lynched in the blinds
.
Lucie Brock-Broido, “How Can It Be I Am No Longer I.” The lines read:

. . . How flinching

The world will seem—in the lynch

Of light as I sail home in a winter steeled

For the deaths of the few loved left living I will

Always love.

Page 64:
Even though they're more troubling to look at
.
See Susan Sontag,
On Photography
:

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more—and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.

from
five

Page 69:
How is it possible to reclaim the body
.
See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” the last essay he published before his death:

The mirror emerges because I am a visible see-er, because there is a reflexivity of the sensible; the mirror translates and reproduces that reflexivity. In it, my externality becomes complete. Everything that is most secret about me passes into that face, that flat, closed being of which I was already dimly aware, from having seen my reflection mirrored in water.

Page 72:
It's the kind of job a girl like me has spent her whole life training for
.
See Mary Wollstonecraft,
A Vindication of the Rights of Women
, especially chapter three, “The Same Subject Continued”:
Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison
.

Page 73:
Everyone in the club gets to see
.
In “The Sexual Aberrations,” collected in
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
, Freud argues that the “history of human civilization shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct.” The connection is so intimate that “the sexuality of most male human
beings contains an element of aggressiveness—a desire to subjugate; the biological significance of it seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing.”

Page 73:
That image, of the self
.
John Berger,
Ways of Seeing
. Also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
Anti-Oedipus
and
A Thousand Plateaus
.

Page 74:
I cry out each time in pain or mock pain
.
See Naomi Wolf,
The Beauty Myth
: “If a woman's sexual sense of self has centered on pain as far back as the record goes, who is she without it? If suffering is beauty and beauty is love, she cannot be sure she will be loved if she does not suffer. It is hard, because of such conditioning, to envisage a female body free of pain and still desirable.”

Page 75:
Which is certainly not . . . I meant to become
.
Denis Johnson, “The White Fires of Venus”:

       
I'm telling you it's cold inside the body that is not the body,

       
lonesome behind the face