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I was sitting at a table in a plaza in front of San Fernando Cathedral waiting for a Meetup group of photographers. So, I had my camera and tripod with me.
Hannah walked up and asked if I was there to photograph the church. I told her that I might, but that I was waiting for a group and we were going to walk through town and do some street photography.
She said she had attended Mass at this church and it was very beautiful. Then, she apologized and said she was inebrieated and added that she was drunk. I told her that I hadn't noticed; and, I hadn't.
Hannah walked with a cane and said she was really "messed" up. She has PTSD. I asked her if she was Army and she said, "No; Air Force." I expressed my sympathy and tried to be encouraging to her. Her only comment related to her injury was that she was "slammed into the concrete." I did not question; just listened.
Again she asked about my photos and I told her about the 100 Strangers project and asked to photograph her. Initially, she said no, but as I continued to talk with her she agreed.
She was wearing sunglasses and I couldn't see her eyes, so after a couple of shots I asked her to remove them. Having had this conversation with her, I could see saddness through her eyes. I told her I would shoot her from the waist up and not include the cane. She then brushed her hair with her hand. She had a lot of glittering colored confetti in it. I told her not to worry about it because it probably won't be noticeable and if it is that it is actually kind of pretty the way the sun was glinting off it. In fact, things not very noticeable are the snuffed out cigarette, the nose ring, as well as the glitter.
Her "Boyfriend?" was waiting for her about 30 feet behind me so I couldn't see him. He said something to her and she said he was wanting to leave. She stayed a few more minutes and then said, "What should I tell him?" So, I said tell him the old man was hitting on her. At that point she laughed and said she didn't think so.
When we pass people on the street, they may look happy and normal. But, we have no clue as to what has gone on in their lives nor what may be ahead of them even in the next few minutes.
I hope Hannah deals successfully with her PTSD and regains a full and content life.
If you would like more information on the 100 Strangers Project you can get it at this location: www.100strangers.com/
Senator Cathy Osten joined Senate leadership, other legislators and municipal and state police to urge passage of Senate Bill 134, which would expand coverage to first responders who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder from events that occur in the line of duty. (February 29, 2016)
I don't know WHAT happened but something scared Dilly half to death this morning. She spent an hour behind the settee and then clung to my lap for ages. All this at a time when she's normally asleep on my bed.
I’m literally cowering on the floor behind my couch because I was woken by someone who banged and pounded on the door hours ago
I found this an interesting display paying tribute to Vietnam veterans. This helicopter was shot down in 1966 with the loss of two crew members. The artist, Steve Maloney has painted it with the American Flag, Pin-up girl, Mom's apple pie, Dad's first sports car, poker games, graffiti and hundreds of Vietnam Squadron names and nicknames. Its mission is promote healing and help raise awareness for veterans from all conflicts struggling with PTSD.It has been travelling the country spreading this message.
Before I moved the lamp (shadow shows up in the bottom right). The cat was playing with the power cord of the ringflash, and I was laughing at him because the flash went off just after he'd smacked the cord and it went off, which freaked him the hell out.
I think he's suffering from PTSD. Flash PTSD. My poor pets.
Happy flippin' Friday. Couldn't get here fast enough, but awfully happy not that it has :)
Anyway, didn't touch this image really, a little dodging and burning on the wall behind me, 1% curves adjustment, and got rid of the red eye, which apparently shows up when eyes are off axis. Used the ABR800 without a reflector and with the plastic ring diffuser, 1/4th power and, as always, triggered by Pocketwizards.
As war continues around the globe more and more veterans suffer from post traumatic stress disorder characterised by aggressiveness, nightmares, flashbacks, and feeling like one is under a spotlight in crowds (e.g. in this collection of testimonies - one can ignore the politics). One veteran characterised PTSD as generally not being able to get over certain painful images which affect ones perception of the present. If so then perhaps Japanese psychotherapeutic methods might be of some help.
Lacan argues that if we can’t express something to ourselves, because we have mixed emotions about it, or it is too shameful or painful, it returns as a symptom. So, he said, symptoms are expressions or signs. Many psychologists including Lacan tend to emphasize language, so his theory becomes “What we can’t think, i.e. say to ourselves, return as symptoms, and if we say the experiences, talk about the experiences, then we stop producing the symptoms. However, there are lots of therapies that are not about talking, and several of them are popular in Japan.
Morita Therapy
Morita therapy is a bit like becoming a hermit for a while. Morita was a psychotherapist who treated Japanese people with “social phobia”. Such people often become hermits. Rather than going against the flow, he confined his patients to their rooms. Then gradually as the patient got bored, he would give them tasks such as cleaning the corridor outside their room, or weeding the garden outside their window, and encouraged the patients to realize that in fact that want to reintegrate with society. With respect of other symptoms as well, rather than going against the flow, Morita encouraged patients to accept their symptoms -- trying to stop them makes them worse – and generally aim towards ‘a whatever will be will be’ (‘ari no mama’ in Japanese) mentality towards them and life in general.
Dohsa (movement) Therapy
Dohsa just means movement in Japanese. This therapy is defined consciously in opposition to talking cures. While many therapies proceed using words as the medium or vector between the client and the therapist, movement therapy uses movement, massage, and other bodily contact. I have a picture of people massaging the backs of people in crouched position, or getting into a sort of T-shape, with intertwined legs. Since this therapy is so non-verbal it is essentially difficult to describe. Books on Dohsa therapy contain little theory, but lists of positions and movements. I think that it may be difficult to get good Dohsa treatment outside of Japan since the therapist would also have had to have had bodily experience.
Tsubo (Pot or Potted) Image Therapy
Seiichi Tashima, a professor from Kyushu University developed this for his clients due to his in ability to use image therapy with them. Image therapy again uses not words but images, asking patients to visualize various images associated with their symptoms. Prof Tashima found that his patients would become too emotional if they did this, or they were too scared of the rush of emotions to do it. His solution was to create a controlled form of image therapy by the most direct of means. He first encouraged his patients to image a large pot with a lid – the lid being the important part. He would then encourage them to image that the pot contained certain positive images. Then the clients would practice experiencing those positive images by opening and closing the lid of the pot that they imagined in their mind. Once they had mastered this use of an imaginary pot to control images, he encouraged them to imagine another pot containing the problematic images. The clients are at first encouraged to open the lid only a little very briefly, just to take a glimpse, and then shut the imaginary lid firmly, and repeat this until they are sure that they can control the flow of images in this way. And then, alternating between positive and negative images, clients are encouraged to increase the amount of time that they can spend with the negative ones until, eventually, they are able to get into the pot with bad images, and just let them flow, like Morita therapy. Rather than a pot one might use anything with a lid or a door.
Sand Play Therapy
This was imported by perhaps the most famous post-war Japanese psychologist, Hayao Kawaii. He studied Japanese mythology from a Jungian perspective and claimed that Sand Play Therapy is Jungian, having been developed by a Swiss Jungian called Kaff who called it the sand play technique. Kawaii gave it a new name “boxed garden therapy” and it became very popular for treating children in Japan. In a box about 2 feet square children are encouraged to make a mythical world representing their own. Clients use lots of figures, trees, vehicles and the therapist just watches the client make this world. It is found that while at first the children may start by making an island in the garden surrounded by monsters, they one day add a bridge and give the monsters hats, or otherwise gradually create a new more peaceful garden. And all the while even though the therapist just watches, the children eventually express themselves to the extent that their symptoms go away. And of course, it is noted that the primary characteristic of sand play therapy, or boxed garden therapy, is its non-verbal, visual nature. Further, it occurs to me now that the “box” of the boxed garden may have a function similar to that of the pot in Potted Image Therapy – to confine the images within a physical and mental location so that the client can interact with them in controlled way. I can't image Veterans playing with toy monsters,or toy soldiers, but it is not inconceivable.
Osamu Kitayama’s Looking Together
Osamu Kitayama noted that images of women and children were a popular theme in pictures from the floating world, appearing when pornographic pictures were under strict censure. Sometimes the faces of the children resemble those of older men. The viewers of these mother and children pictures may have gained therefore some kind of libidinal pleasure from viewing them. Their prime characteristic is that mother and child are viewing something together. Generally the mother is holding up something, or pointing to something ephemeral, such as bubbles, cherry blossom, or something dangling by a string. In the above images by Harunobu Suzuki, the mother and child are watching a little bird or some fireflies in a cage. These ephemera are the quintessence of Buddhist impermanence - ‘the floating world. The child and mother are looking at this floating phenomena in wonder. As a result of his awareness of this genre of images, Kitayama moved towards attempting, rather than to talk about, to “see together” with his patients. I believe that Kitayama, his students, and their clients face the same direction and while using speech, do not attempt to rationalize but simply use speech it to call to mind images in both client and therapist. Kitayama referenced the cinema of Ozu, such as “Tokyo Story”, where family members have sparse conversations facing the same direction, seeming simply to share the same images, sunsets, and memories.
Naikan Introspective Therapy
Naikan therapy is rather like Freudian psychoanalysis in that it encourages clients to look over their past and restructure
their view of themselves as the world. It was developed from a Buddhist practice of “self-searching” where practitioners
would isolate themselves, and go over their lives, asking themselves whether, if they died now, they would go to heaven or hell.
Ishin Yoshimoto, the founder of Naikan therapy removed the Buddhist and supernatural elements, and gave clients aframework. They are to think about specific relationships (such as themselves and their mother, themselves and their spouse) over specific periods of time, and given three questions:
1)What did that person do for you
2)What did you do in return for that person
3)What aggravation did you cause for that person
Clients find that, especially in their childhood, they were in receipt of a lot of love, affection and hard work on the part of their care givers, and that they have done very little in return, but have rather caused a lot of aggravation. This is almost the complete opposite of Freudian therapy where clients are often encouraged to find trauma caused by care-givers (sometimes purely imagined, false memories). Naikan also differs from Freudian therapy in that all this process is carried out in the clients imagination. Clients confine themselves to a small space the size of a cupboard, and go through their lives from childhood to the present time a year or two at a time and imagine all these instances of kindness in images, reporting to the therapist for only 5 minutes in each hour. These reports are merely to ensure that that the client has not wavered from the task. The therapy itself is carried out by the clients. Clients generally find it difficult to call to mind the images at first, but as they learn to see themselves from the point of view of the people that loved them, the images come in waves. Clients generally cry in the realization of how much they have been loved. So while on the face of it, it can seem that Introspective therapy is very self-negating, it is conversely very positive because it is the realization of how much aggravation that one has caused that one realizes how much one has been loved.
This therapy is particularly useful in treating anti-social problems such as alcoholism (one of very few therapies to have any effect), drug addiction, and problem gambling.
Japanese people come out of a week sitting in a cupboard (or behind a Japanese screen) feeling really sunny, refreshed
and with a will to help everyone that has helped them.
Auto-Photographic Method
This therapy was influenced by my early research asking students to take 20 photographs expressing themselves. The Japanese are not good at expressing themselves verbally often mentioning others and their groups, but they are very positive and self-focused in their auto-photography. Japanese pose, stand up straight, and care about how they look. Mukoyama has her clients take photographs representing themselves, of the things that are important to them, and their issues, and looks at these photographs with her clients.
Returning to Lacan’s theory, it seems very possible that it is not only “things not said” that return as symptoms, but
also things that cannot be seen -- called to mind. And that in order to cure symptoms, both saying and seeing – or calling
to the minds eye - are effective ways of preventing or, rather encouraging, the return of the repressed, in a controlled way, with other people’s help. This sort of image therapy may ordinarily be more appropriate to Japanese but perhaps also for those who have been exposed to traumatic images.
Still on the road..... sure am anxious to get back to Northwestern PA some day. LOL In Grand Rapids MIchigan for a few days for a conference for the paying job. Was really excited when I got to my hotel and found out that it is right in the middle of an annual art contest called artprize. Art along every street and in every building. Took off with my camera for a couple hours. This piece was one of the most striking to me. It was made by a veteran of 30 years who is now an artist. It is an upside down American flag behind bars, with handcuffed hands ripping through the middle. He told me that it symbolizes the plight of the thousands of service men and women suffering from PTSD. Very emotional piece of art that you can tell the guy put his soul into. I praised him for his art, took a few pictures, shook his hand, thanked him and went on my way.
THE ALTAR OF INTERFERENCE
Rack: Ruin, Sorry to have been unresponsive. I fell off the digital planet upstate and found it delightful. Back in the city. All is well except for that gnawing post-holiday anxiety. Hope you're good and the writing goes along.
Ruin: I have been enjoying some crisis time here. Stuff to do with the sexual abuse, the neglect, and the, to be expected, self-loathing generated there. It happens every now and then, and it can be overpowering. The stuff we have been looking at, or at least that stuff I have been writing about, would more or less cause that to happen, I guess. Anyway, I have been taking a step back to look at it, the PTSD generated through abuse of all stripes. It’s sort of overarching. I want to look at it, and the idea of patterns, that ‘Wild Goose’ thing, of flight rather than fight, that permanent adrenaline rush of looking for a constant ‘elsewhere’, of heading out, or creating situations where one has to head out (like the silly 'London situation' that catapulted me to Amsterdam), that forcing oneself into constant panic-mode, left over from childhood survival tactics.
Then there is the generation of a cuckoo gene relative to all that too, that looking for parents, stealing them, even, nesting strategies that could be considered ‘shameful’, or at least might generate shame to add to the self-loathing, bolstering it up. Then there’s the slow suicide of looking for HIV, that cowardly way of doing oneself in. Anyway, these are a few of the things I am going to look at unflinchingly, going forward. I am in a sort of bracing mode, girding one’s overused, and sagging, loins for a full-frontal assault.
Once more unto that breach, and all that palaver, a cuckooed 'Wild Goose' negotiating a swansong, even.
It's difficult to write these things about oneself, and see them reflected back by you, your acknowledgment of them, suggesting that you have more than an 'understanding'. We are both aware of what we reflect back to each other, something we have done for 35 years now, that there is mutuality there. I know why you struggle with it, I do too. I suspect this might be what makes it worthwhile.
Rack: Ruin, I had a similar moment recently. It has taken this long for me to be able to recognize what is happening when I want to flee, when I feel that the sky falling on my head is imminent, when I just can't function. It is hard to acknowledge how many areas of life its tendrils have drilled their way into. I have read that Ketamine infusions can help, and I've been toying with the idea for a long time, though it is horribly expensive. Not drinking has been a huge help lately and I realize that booze just makes me more anxious, ultimately. It's alarming to think how one's life has been sculpted by such childhood events. I can't even identify what it is that happened. I can remember very little of childhood. I wonder was there additional abuse to the stuff I can remember. I suppose it's not that important to remember the details. That whole notion of healing and moving on seems like a daft impossibility to me. If anything, the symptoms of PTSD have become worse for me as I age, as if they will out, regardless. Sometimes I just feel like I'm not functioning. Anyway, I know where you are and it is a difficult and painful place to sit through. Maybe that's how you get past it. By looking it in the eye and not freezing. Maybe the writing of it will be a huge relief for you, not in the way of some perfect redemption, but a squaring of things. I am sending you much love.
Ruin: I don’t know if I scared myself to a stop or not, I don’t think I did, I think I am still writing. I am writing around it, around the theme. There were, of course, triggers. It’s difficult to get to that point of full exposure, but that’s where I think I have to go, and I have enough evidence of questionable behaviour generated in response, perhaps, both in my art and in what I have been writing all these years. Strangely, I realised that there were others in my family generating patterns, according to how they reacted to our negligent parents. The sister, Phil, who gloated over the tearing up, and burning, of that book (‘A Stone for Danny Fisher’) is the same sister who consigned my Doctoral work to the Dublin City dump. It was the same action, a refined echo, but 50 years later. I have been looking at, and thinking about, how we continue to unknowingly repeat these patterns. I assumed my victim role, and ran away, yet again. I would rather fly than fight, that classic ‘wild goose’ pattern. There is nothing there I want to fight for anyway, the place is even more sordid than I am, but I want to be aware of these patterns, and all of my siblings adapted a different variation, one that would make their lives livable. But my parents in their turn generated their patterns in reaction to their abandonment, so there’s no blame there at all. I guess the idea isn’t to blame, even not to blame my abusive uncle, I love the word ‘avuncular’, his was learnt behaviour. Of this I am sure, given that I know that at least two of his older brothers are child abusers (and priests).
So, the drive is not to ‘forgive’ and lovingly embrace family. It’s simply, through writing, to understand these patterns, and hopefully in doing so, to short-circuit the whole shebang. But I don’t want to write an abuse ‘memoir’. Anyway, there’s the challenge, and it’s still called ‘Rack and Ruin’.
Rack: Yes. I heartily agree. It’s “just” trying to understand and thereby to release oneself of ever re-enacting the same circular route. Maybe not possible. Maybe is.
Ruin: Well, I wouldn’t want to prefigure, or disallow for, any deathbed exegesis, that flash of realisation, that might, or might not, be on the cards. If it was all figured out before then it might make that climax anti-climactic. As for the rest, the writing, the art, the life, you get as far as you get, and then it all unravels anyway, and before you know it, you’re dust. There’s a cheerful morning thought. I suspect we both have them. Then there is that intervening time, and the filling of the same. Mine is very much about restoring self-worth, and I am actually glad that I am still at that. It would have been much easier just to give up and dissipate towards that void (Oh, the drama!). I wrote sissipate, accidentally. I like that, that rolling the ball endlessly up that hill, and finding it at the bottom of the hill in the morning. Just like this morning, and away we go again. Bless that dung beetle. I like that we, instinctively, continue to do this, each rolling (along the self-same route) being completely different from the one before. That release happens in its own time, or rather it’s happening constantly, until it’s spent. I like this, and have no interest in it other than the doing itself. I like putting words and images up on Flickr. I love that this represents a type of slightly cracked-open window, that one's experience, and understanding, is not completely shut off, even if there is no evidence of any response. It is enough in itself. It reminds me of that medieval Anchorite sitting by her window, carbuncled onto a remote church, entombed even. The goal is no longer to show, or publish, the goal is to make, with a small window left open, just in case. I love that 'Just in case'.
“Maybe not possible. Maybe is.” I love the ‘maybe’, like I love ‘perhaps’, ‘even’, ‘possibly’, and other words conveying lack of surety. That’s where I would love to be found sitting for whatever posterity there might be, or not. Either way, it doesn’t matter. I also love that idea of it not mattering. I saw it in a ketamine exegesis (that word again), and I know it to be true. I know, ‘dumb ass’, but I don’t care.
Rack: Yes to "restoring self-worth". Oh, that there were a short cut, but it seems there is not, probably not even Ketamine. Up and down that bloody hill, sissipating like the dung beetles that we are. We are, once again, at the juncture of ‘Labor Day’, that convenient long weekend that bookends the summer with its predecessor, ‘Memorial Day’. My panic continues as my partner sits reading with a small flashlight hanging out of his mouth, because he can no longer see without the additional light. Who does the panicking in your house? I feel like it is somebody's job in a household. A small engine of worry. Anyway, I am going to try and park it somewhere and enjoy the relatively empty city and the weather with the worst of the heat gone out of it. Could really do with a good long screaming walk with you.
Ruin: I am the worrier. I find myself wonderfully entombed with the buggering Buddha, as far as that is concerned. It’s a glorious place to be. Our Pyramid is wondrous. Time is at its undoing, and I love it all shoddying the edges. That doesn’t seem to staunch that flow of worrying, regardless. The insecurities, or the source, perhaps, of that deluge, is somewhat easily traced back.
The Mater had a type of mantra, it was in a way the pride of her arsenal, and I remember it being put to use on many an occasion. It went something like this: “You do know that you can never pay us back, don’t you? If you worked all your life and gave us every penny you ever earned, it wouldn’t even come near to what you owe us”. I have it in parentheses, but it is not really a quote. It wouldn’t have been proffered so lucidly, it would have been spat and mangled, screeched out, perhaps between thuds and flailing fists. It was harridan-like. The thuds and flailings would, more or less, always miss their marks and land on a battered table, or on the back of a broken chair. They weren’t the problem. All the chairs in the house were broken. I remember going back to help celebrate one Christmas, travelling from London, 40 years later, and sitting on a chair which immediately collapsed from under me. I roared at the power of the Mater’s mantra asserting itself, as I sat on the floor hysterically laughing whilst remembering.
So, it was set in stone. I would have to go working at the age of thirteen, in the aforementioned ‘The Laurels’ to “earn my keep” and pay into the coffers for the upkeep of the brood, all of whom had “no idea how much they owed”. At some point, during one of these incidents, I made the connection between sex and pleasure, probably around the concurrent abuse cycle with my uncle, and perhaps managed to scream out that they chose to have sex, that they shouldn’t have had children at all. My mother informed me that “sex is for men”, which only further confused me relative to her putting her brother in my bed.
Other than what my bull-uncle was teaching me, this was the only sex education that I had.
When we came to ‘Human reproduction’ in biology class, the ‘chaste’ Christian Brother announced, “We will skip this section for now, it won’t come up in exams anyway”. I was already, perhaps, a year into my anthropological avuncular education.
Avuncular
/əˈvʌŋkjʊlə/
Learn to pronounce
adjective
adjective: avuncular
1.
kind and friendly towards a younger or less experienced person.
"he was avuncular, reassuring, and trustworthy"
2.
ANTHROPOLOGY
relating to the relationship between men and the children of their siblings.
It was strangely confusing, this attention from my uncle. Nobody had paid any attention to me before.
[9:58 am, 02/09/2022] Ruin: A screaming walk would be wonderful. It would have to be a slow one though, and not too far, with rest stops along the way. The screaming wouldn't have to be slow, we could let that go from the get go. A relapse into hysteria with you would be wondrous indeed.
[9:58 am, 02/09/2022] Ruin: But we can also always do that here.
Let's sissipate side by side.
Rack: I don't think I've ever heard these stories, at least so graphically. You are approaching the very kernel here. Her fury is so furious and so energetic. I can almost relate. I can't help but think about her putting her brother in your bed, or you in his. It strikes me as some weird sacrifice she was making. Offering her brightest up to the altar of interference. Knowing and not knowing. And I suppose sex was for men. My paternal grandmother said the same thing. A thing to be endured. Your mother was going to make you endure it too. Somehow share in that forced ritual. Why did she choose you? Was it an age thing? It's horrifying and fascinating. Sending you love, as always.
Ruin: Yes, Rack, this is the crux, the kernel, that molten core. It might be other than what we expect, but this is it. It is also why I don’t want to write an abuse ‘memoir’. It’s not that. It’s not about struggle, triumph over adversity, forgiveness, and a sort of accompanying redemption. It is about ‘drivers’. It’s about innocence too, universal innocence, even. The mater’s innocence, the sibling’s innocence, the abuser’s innocence, and ultimately the self’s innocence. It encompasses the murderer’s, and mass-murderer’s, innocence. It would even include the innocence of those God botherers, those mass-manipulators who pushed their divisive theories of the divine on our susceptible forebears, those so-called priests and nuns. At a push, it might even include bank-managers and CEOs of Fortune-500 companies. Okay, I’ll go the whole hog, artists need to be forgiven too.
I would normally sit down, of a morning, and vomit out a spiel, and press the send button. I can’t do that this morning. I have to write this and be as clear as I can be, so there is no misunderstanding as to what I am trying to say.
I will just say, firstly, that my mother chose nothing. She was 100% reactive, desperately and fearfully reactive, even. She was, sadly, trapped in a pattern, rather like we all are, to a lesser or greater extent.
So, that’s where I am starting from. The rest is about getting as far as time permits.
I will answer those questions you brought up, as we go along.
Ruin: [10:44 am, 03/09/2022] It was never going to be easy, Crusty Lusty.
Rack (from sometime back in the mid-nineties, last century):
Funny you should mention staving off the SSRI pillies.†
Lately I have felt them to be an evil† necessity myself and frankly I am tired of them.†
I do need them ‘til I'm de-interfered with, but I think they† make one's character and brain sort of mushy until one reaches a state where you are oddly detached from your "self" and quite happy to be mired knee deep in your own raw sewage.†
It's not good.†
I feel impure in a way I can't quite explain, and I'm not prone to
feeling impure.†
Ultimately there is something terribly wrong about being incapable of living
without them.†
Why not just look for an honest distraction like alcoholism,
severe junkiedom, or whoredom?†
All this modern messing with chemistry.
Anyway, feeling like a reactionary regarding them and god bless you for going
cold turkey and long may it last.†
I'm sure one makes better work without them.
I'm† off to the scratcher with my oozing beaver:† ah the last gasps of estrogen as the old uterus pops an egg and screams for something to fill it up.†
Odd this biological baggage we women folk have; all this oozing and cycling and yet
no thought of acting on it.†
Modern, eh???
Much love,
Pox Bunny Beaver Rackety Crust
[10:49 am, 03/09/2022] Ruin: You were, and are, a wondrous poet.
I love your use of the crucifix. Strangely, the matrix put them there. Somewhere in the transferal from a Word document, or from an email, or whatever. They, the crucifixes just appeared. I like that their placing seems so random, though they do impose a sort of rhythm. This musky Matrix knows best, all praise our new Meta Gods on this soul-saving superhighway. I would not want to remove those religious signifiers put there by whoever is the powers that be.
The original ‘Castration Piece’ had a fourth panel. It read "I am Not an Open Beaver". I am putting the titles of art pieces in single parentheses, they refer to pieces made, and either shown at some point or other in Galleries and Museums, or on the WWW, on my only social media platform ‘Flickr’.
Rack: I always loved that piece.
Ruin: I liked placing it back at ‘The Mammy's Hearth’, that sacrosanct place of no safety.
Rack: And blurry you. How the hell do we ever individuate? I feel as if I’m still sissipating up that particular hill.
Ruin: We do it whilst sissipating, we are even doing it now. I love our new word.
Rack: Me too. Rhymes with dissipating, includes it, of course, but also suggests some progress, even if Sisyphean.
Ruin: I am still sitting with those last few questions you asked me, it's going to take time to answer them, but I will. I am worn out, off to the doctor to find out what is happening with my prostate, kidney pains, urinating every 15 minutes, exhaustion, sore groin lymph node (one sided).
Rack: Eugh, sounds nasty. No rush on answering those questions. I hope they weren’t “previous” of me to ask. But I am genuinely curious. It goes back to the innocence factor. Anyway, sorry your nether regions are bothering you. I hope it can be resolved in a simple way. All we can hope for our ailments now.
Ruin: No questions are "previous", ever. More like "about time", this doo-doo needs sorting out.
Rack: ♥️
Ruin: ♥️💩
As for the mater’s fury, he had some ideas relative to the source of that pain and anger. She was never overtly forthcoming with her sharing, regarding her ‘story’ that is, though she would on occasions over-share inappropriately. He recognized this tendency in himself, and in others he had known from the abused fraternity and sorority. This had a sort of uncontrollable Tourette’s-like quality, a certain convulsive vomiting, almost exorcism-like in its urgency to be expelled. He understood it now, but as a child this was confusing. She had been abused, she spoke a little of this later, another errant uncle working his avuncular magic, that undoing of innocence, that unwanted incursion. But she had been abandoned when she was six or seven years old, more or less left as the carer for her three younger siblings, after her mother had died, of TB, at a tender age, somewhere in her early thirties. Her father had left the four children, almost immediately, in the care of some older relatives, disappearing from their lives and remarrying a 17-year-old girl, with whom he had 13 more children. The mater did not see her father again until her own wedding day, when she was 23 years old. So, he surmised, we are talking about abandonment here, that form of neglect and abuse, before that other assault, referenced but never really spoken of. He remembered her cursing that uncle later on, but no details of what happened were ever shared. There was a gap there, another unfillable void.
Why the ‘his’? Why the ‘he’? It’s simple really, it gives a once remove, making it all a little easier. It might go back and forth, but who knows? There was also that once remove of the inadequacy of memory. Of course, he wasn’t even sure how much of this was true, even, what parts he remembered and what parts he had dreamed, or what part he had generated to find the wherewithal to forgive himself, and her. He was at a point where he couldn’t easily remember what day yesterday was, never mind familial gathering, sixty years ago, around that infinite family hole. His father’s crater was also there, inadequately filled with alcohol and anger, regrets, sadness, and neglect.
They sucked each other in, my parents, warring black holes in love, proffering impossible promises of security to each other, indifferent to everything else including their own children. Or so it seemed. But children can’t surmise all this, they can only pick up on the anger and disappointment, and the complete lack of any vestiges of stability. They each, both parents, made their oaths to be the other’s salvation, as they began quietly, at first, to fail. They stayed together for 60 years, so at least in some way they fulfilled their commitment to each other.
Meanwhile their children fell apart.
But this is not a story about aborted family dynasties, of triumph over adversity, or the opposite. It’s about another family of sorts, with nothing really to do with DNA extensions, and that striving to fit into some idea of continuity. It is about setting out, breaking away, the ‘Diaspora’, that homelessness, the ‘Wild Geese’, a certain ruthlessness, even. It is partially about recognizing the other as the same, or at least connecting with another where that sameness is sensed. It’s about the ‘Rack and Ruin’ of this fable, a chance encounter in the ‘New World’, and attempts at the rebuilding of ‘Trust’.
But the fury is somewhat easy to explain.
Downstairs was, a rented, one living room and a small kitchen behind a failing shop, the ‘Bon-Bon’ by name, another unfillable hole, as it would happen. Upstairs were two bedrooms and a box-room, shared by five children and two adults, with the addition of the new bull-interloper, a 20 or 21-year-old, testosterone-overflowing, encroacher.
Rack: Amazing stuff. Thank you for sending. I need to read again and assimilate before I respond more fully. So much here! Congratulations on facing it head on.
Ruin: I am feeling my way into it. This piece is the continuation of a conversation between you and I. Nothing is edited yet, I am not worrying about that for a while, or perhaps never, who knows? It's stuff I had written before, not in answer to your questions, but I do think it starts to address them. I will get there, though it does start to answer them, your questions I mean. I guess I am limbering up to answer, because yes, it is the kernel. But as I said, I don't want to write an abuse memoir. I want to write about 'drivers'.
Off to the doctor to have my prostate prodded. It's been about four years since there were any incursions in that region. I am not feeling great, but ho-hum, perhaps well enough to write some more. I wanted to sit still anyway.
Anyway, I am putting that text under the image of the cloud-filled sky from the window of an airplane, more or less adding to it daily. Nobody sees it, it's like a private space. It is further back in my photostream, on Flickr. Pundits tend to look at the newer images, so I can work there almost privately. I like to leave that window open a crack, as you know, just in case I am in the mood to hang my arse out of it. He said, nodding at mister Chaucer, was there no end to this man’s pretensions?
Rack: The only way to do it. Not that I would know. Hope the prostate thing is OK. It’s funny how the bits that allow us to reproduce cause the most illness: breasts, prostates, and maybe we can list the heart there too. Feeling quite peculiar, but not in an entirely bad way.
Ruin: Maybe indeed, the heart I mean, perhaps it should be even listed first. I suspect that when we get our hearts broken as children, there’s, more or less, no fixing them. I don’t like being around children at all, they feel so ferociously delicate. I never have, my whole life, I mean. This was fortuitous, in that I recognise my own capacity to brutalise, even unintentionally. I am pleased to have never found these small creatures attractive, I know that abuse can sometimes generate that reaction. Thankfully, I was one of the lucky ones, it drove me forward, instead, desperately searching for a father.
But back to the mater, back to that bed companion, back to a small room with two beds, shared by four people, 3 brothers and one uncle.
He didn’t remember much about the room other than it was small and usually cold. There was no central heating in the house, and no insulation to speak of.
Ruin: I am chasing that cuckoo theme or, at least, working my way towards it.
Rack: Worth chasing. I have lost my enthusiasm for a lot of things. But have also lost my taste for destroying myself. As if the shortening years are drumming sense into me at last.
Ruin: Queen Elizabeth is dead.
Rack: I actually have a tear in my eye.
Ruin: I understand that. It's a little unreal. She's always been there, I mean from the beginning of our lives.
Rack: My mother was enamored of her. They shared an age, both members of the forces during WWII.
Ruin: I think my mother was the same age too, at least she claimed to be. She liked her too, but it sort of went against her republicanism
Rack: I knew she was a goner when I saw her greeting Liz Truss. Looked feeble for the first time.
Ruin: Yes, her hands were all bruised. She had obviously been having transfusions.
Rack: Poor love. She really was remarkable.
Ruin: Yes, to your "As if the shortening years are drumming sense into me at last ". I am there too
Rack: It feels good (the at last). I feel as if I’m negotiating the supermarket aisles with little concern for my fellow shoppers.
Ruin: I have been writing to you, still working it out, will write it soon (as an email). I will send it soon rather, when I get a little further
Rack: I look forward. And backward.
Ruin: I appear to be writing about everything, and making images too
Rack: Happy that you are.
Ruin: anyway, I will write it out, you will see. Hey, guess what, you are writing it out here too, and I will use it all.
Rack: Hah! Work away. Might be the only way I can do it. Obliquely.
Ruin: I'll hand it over to you eventually, if you outlive me, as I said before.
Rack: One of us has to go first. YIKES.
Ruin: Yep, that's how it goes. Yikes, indeed! Unless, of course, we all go together, courtesy of Mr. Putin, or whatever. I am on a new drug for my prostate, apparently it was squeezing my urethra, making my piss flow very difficult, no pressure, slowed down, and it meant I had to pee every 15 mins. One of the side effects is possible priapism, a permanent erection, even. I can feel a series of photos coming on, that 'how to negotiate being a spent old tosser' series.
But back to that crowded bedroom, with ice on the inside of the windows and the horsehair overspilling from the mattress, that altar.
To the bloody Dickins with the whole shebang.
Rack: What a fate your mother had! No wonder she was angry. What a fate you suffered! It’s as if she had to make you endure something similar, that by effecting its repetition she was freeing herself, sacrificing you. Kill the thing you love. It is compelling to read Billy; onward! It never occurred to me that the abuse you endured happened in a crowded room. That your brothers were there. It must have added to everything.
I hope the prostate submits to the new drug and things get more comfortable.
There seems to be so much to this falling apart, and the attempts to stave it off with an array of pharmaceuticals. The latest one seems particularly unpleasant, and a balance might have to be found, some sort of compromise with the condition, where it is determined which is more livable with, the affliction or the ‘cure’. The pill-box is now full, or the complement of slots is full, those 4 notches for each day, spacing out the pills, that morning, midday, evening, and night array. This reminded Ruin of Rack’s “ramming 28 horse-pills down my throat every day”, of one of her first emails, some 25 years previously. This also reminded him that four pills a day was not that much of an infringement on his time and effort if he was going to get this ‘epic’ written. He guffawed inwardly at this notion of an epic, whilst recognizing the unwieldiness of it all, that sprawl. It could easily get out of hand, he knew this. Actually, it was already ‘out of hand’ more or less, but he felt that he just had to let this be what it was, for now.
Eventually decisions would have to be made. Again, this sounds suspiciously like ‘choices’ would be presenting themselves, but, in reality, there is no choice at all. It is simply about being able to continue, a survival strategy, an instinct. Ruin had been reduced before to a soporific state by ‘life-savers’. For five years he had been on a drug which more or less curtailed all creativity, writing, making art, or even reading. He was determined not to let this happen again. Unfortunately, the medical powers that be, the doctors he encountered, did not appear to be very good at listening, which led to five years of what felt like an anaethesised life, a time felt as though it was spent wading through a particularly dense fog, a treacle even. Eventually, after that unnecessarily extended sluggish exile, Ruin managed to convince the doctor to change the medications, and hey presto, as if by magic, the curtains rose. There’s a lesson to be learnt there, relative to doctors, drugs, and private interests in the Pharma industry, but allowing for the possible duration of a lifespan, one has to choose one’s battles. For this very reason, Ruin was thrilled to see the sterling work by Laura Poitras and Nan Goldin being acknowledged by the Venice Film Festival this week.
This is all normal stuff, we all face it at some point, it is part and parcel of growing older, and of particularly having the privilege to do that whilst enjoying last centuries, eclipsed, ‘maladie du jour’. It appears that this new century can, and will, generate its own, and it is somewhat wondrous to see, already, the machinations of science in its attempts to protect us.
Ruin believed in science; he did not believe in God. He had watched science work its preserving ‘magic’ both on Rack for 35 years, and on himself for 20 of those shared years. What was not to believe? If some billionaire or other had wanted to tag him with an electronic bugging device, he would have been well tagged already; he had given science total access years ago. He had read, digested, and discarded Duesberg's HIV conspiracy theories way back in the mid-eighties, propagated somewhat by ‘The Village Voice’, as he attempted to support Rack, and as they tried to help each other, through the early tsunamis generated by the same virus. Ruin had all he could stomach of anti-science conspiracy theories three decades before Covid eclipsed everything else in the collective imagination of the general public. Then in the eighties and nineties, Dr. Fauci was the enemy too, and we demonstrated against him and the tardiness of the CDC. We formed ‘Act Up’ and marched, demonstrated, and had ‘die-ins’ in Grand Central Station. Dr. Fauci listened, and eventually acted, proving to be a stalwart comrade in arms.
Recently Rack wrote to me (Enter those 1st person pronouns, both singular and plural):
Rack: I think we all have a lot of fear about how our behaviour is being policed. Are we racist? Are we transphobic? Are we elitist? Are we mansplaining? As you say, it’s not helpful and it doesn’t actually assist any of the issues it purports to protect. I fear we are in a very dark corner. Some days I find this very liberating. Not all days. Reading about the US government’s attitude to climate change is frightening. Also, Republican’s attitudes towards Anthony Fauci. Horrifying. He has just resigned. Bless.
Ruin: Yes, bless indeed, both Science and Doctor Fauci.
I am most pleased that we can still write to each other after 35 years of dealing with this disease. No, I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in miracles, and as far as I can see, most of those are, now, generated by Science.
A progenitorial alternative might be:
"Three drinks of water (holy) taken on three consecutive occasions from The Bishops Skull. This skull is believed to belong to one of three bishops who were murdered for their faith in Penal times. This particular skull is in a very extraordinary state of preservation and is kept at a house named Rielly (sic), near to the village of Mahera in Co. Cavan.
The skull is requisitioned from all parts of Ireland and the cure is well recognised."
The Schools Collection volume 0721 page 212.
www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5009031/4979138
Rack: Not too much. I am always fascinated to read, but will admit that there is a part of me that wonders why I am so stuck while your gates are wide open and functioning with such wild and wonderful abandon. It is a form of jealousy, but not just that because I am truly happy you are doing it. So, keep sending and forgive me if my replies are a little constipated. Thinking about your latest missive, the medicated falling apart. Much love.
Ruin: I rewrote and added there a bit. I am just shit-scared of not having time left to finish what I have started, so pushing. You are very much there too.
As luck would have it, I don’t seem to be able to tolerate these prostate pills. They cause intense palpitations at the slightest exertion. So, I will just have to get on with it, the swollen prostate and all that. It’s not cancer, just swollen, but that causes enough problems anyway, which will just have to be embraced. Yes, to what you were saying about those parts of the body to do with pleasure causing the worst, or most common, problems. It does slightly put me in mind of that red ‘Castration Piece’ I made in the eighties, that fantasy I had, for years, about being neutered. That ‘I fantasized about castrating myself feeling this could free me from the guilt and shame (and pleasure)’. I could now, with those added 35 years on top, add ‘and doctor’s appointments’ to that title. But the response has to be, and is, Yes, a resounding ‘Yes’. Yes to growing older I mean. It remains the best, and the thing I am most grateful for. (Waving at Molly Bloom here, of course).
I have never had what are called ‘Panic attacks’ before, the first one I had was in my early sixties when I was on those terrible stultifying TAF including drugs for our shared lurgy. I then started to have them occasionally, plus a host of other exhausting complaints, and that aforementioned pea soup brain-fog. These, more or less, cleared up when I changed drugs. Now, with this new prostate pill they are back with a vengeance, two in three days. These are not panic attacks; they are drug induced palpitations. They are listed as possible side effects. We are, of course, guinea pigs for these wonderful HIV drugs, and I know we are both eternally grateful for that opportunity.
Let’s live somewhat longer, let’s describe it, let’s write.
But Ruin did have to get back to his mother, and that misunderstanding, that space where some ‘intent’ might be suggested. He needed to somehow exonerate her, to say that it wasn’t her fault, or rather to prove to himself that it wasn’t. He recognized this as being virtually impossible, given his history, their ‘story’, and the reverberations through six decades, but he was going to try anyway. Her history, back story even, can’t really be delved into. There is not enough evidence there, just those initial tales of abandonment, her father, early grieving, her mother, and abuse, her uncle. Ruin could hardly remember his own story, never mind attempting to reconstruct that of the mater, but the pattern was obvious, and the repeat motifs presented themselves unashamedly. Ruin was used to looking for patterns, probably generated by a lifetime making visual art. There were also patterns in the mater’s behaviors, mirrored in his own. These he could see and understand. These were the drivers he wanted to expose. He wanted to explain these to Rack. Rack had been, for over three decades, a type of ‘sounding board’ for him, utterly non-judgmental, hyper vigilant even, with an uncanny ability to proffer solace. He had the idea that this was also mirrored back. They were, somehow, equally scabrous, wanton, lewd, call it what you will, and could laugh uproariously at each other’s coping mechanisms. This was probably central to their ‘screaming walks’ through the canyons of Manhattan in those early days of their beloved plague. Rack was very much the ‘screamer’ then, and Ruin was in awe of her ability to let one rip on a crowded avenue or cross-street, whilst quietly hoping he might be mistaken for her companion-carer. He so loved that embarrassment. He also suspected that she loved watching him attempt to deal with it.
Those walks should become legend.
Yes, it all happened in a crowded room, a dark one to boot. There were two not quite double beds. Ruin didn’t know what size they were, they weren’t standard anything. He guessed they were more single size; two double beds would not have fit in that room. But this was years before he was aware of those designated sizes, queen, king, whatever. They were old metal frames, with exposed springs, on which the horsehair mattresses scrappily floated. His two younger brothers shared one, he had the other. It was their room, the boy’s room. His parents slept in the small box-room, so his sisters could share the other bedroom, furnished with two single beds. The youngest of the brothers, Johnny, was about 4 years old at the time. He was a troubled child, if his self-rocking was anything to go by. This self-soothing swaying back and forth relentlessly would infuriate his ten-year-old brother, Tony, until Johnny managed to soothe himself to sleep each night. Tony would then become comatose, at last, having endured that rocking until exhaustion intervened. Johnny also slept with his invisible friend ‘Ibi’, so their bed was somewhat overcrowded.
Ruin, the oldest, had a bed to himself, a sign of seniority, an acknowledgement of his waxing ‘teenhood’, until that interloper arrived.
Here, let me (that personal pronoun again) interject, by way of adding a warning. It’s simple really, and I am directing it towards all parents, of all persuasions and ilks, gender preferences, and identities. It’s blindingly elementary, an iteration I know. Please, never put a mature male in bed with an immature child, no matter how much you trust this male, no matter how close the family relationship might be. But I guess if I was being both fair and honest, I would have to extend this to include all maturated individuals regardless of gender or self-identification. My, perhaps unfair, focus on the male abuser here is because this was the case, both as far as my mother and myself were concerned, those wayward uncles. But then this isn’t about me, so I apologise for any presumptions made.
Ruin did not want to share his bed.
Yes, Ruin was doing okay. He knew it wasn’t Rack’s job to take the sadness away. How could it be? Anyway, he was doing exactly that himself, and it was about time, in every possible meaning of that phrase. It was about time itself, indeed, nothing more, nothing less. So not counting on any, a godly and honest state if ever there was one, he would get on with it until he no longer could. There’s a definition of fulfilment there, that recognition of oneself as that veritable elephant surfing on the fabled edge of that infinite black hole, and writing this out made him happy, elated even. For what it’s worth, it records itself anyway, endlessly, and anything the universal you or I might choose to add is simply non-essential extra, that ‘Froth on a Daydream’ which Boris Vian liked to write about. It is written for the self, a gift. He was looking at Vian again for a reason, or at least was planning to, it having once been important to him. A new copy sat on his emptying shelves, quietly reverberating. Hum diddley hum. This hum was once beautifully described as ‘the music of the spheres’.
There is there, there.
Anyway, back to those words of advice, my abridged handbook for would-be parents.
Do not circumvent the grooming, do not make it unnecessary by placing a potential predator and a victim in a dark, and silent, bed together. Whilst I am not going to dissect what happened on that mattress, I am going to look at why a child might have erroneously projected that grooming onto his mother for almost 60 years. There’s the crux, Rack, that mistake, that almost lifelong, retarding, projection that might have turned a 68-year-old child into a storyteller.
It was almost impossible for that son to describe that mother, to find the words, I mean. But he was going to try. There was no malice there, and she wasn’t stupid. Being stupid and ignorant are not the same thing. But then the whole story is also tinged with her innocence, something which can often be confused with ignorance, but here they were intertwined, and she had no way to pick them apart. These traits were very much part of her Gordian Knot, that imponderable she had inadvertently played forward.
To go further he knew he was going to have to do it alone. He was going to have to, temporarily hopefully, let Rack go as well. He knew that it was going too far, and could even be triggering, to use a woke expression, for her. It was almost going too far for himself, even. It felt like an essential step, so he would take it. This would constitute a huge, and frightening, departure, a rupturing, after 25 years of corresponding. He was going to go back alone. She knew where he was, he knew where she was, that would have to be enough for now.
There is always that cracked open window here, letting some air in, and stench out.
That will be enough in this interim, he guffawed quietly to himself, recklessly Rackless, perhaps, but enough for now.
Rack: Have been thinking. And just tell me to fuck off if you disagree or don’t care, but I feel you should be writing in the first person.
Ruin: I will work that out, now, or soon. I write in the third person when it becomes too difficult to write about, to get some distance. I now sort of know I can write it, so I better get on with it. The first person might be more immediate, I guess, but I was trying, to a degree, to avoid writing a straight-forward memoir. Anyway, this does need sorting out before I really sit down to it. I think I have the bare bones together now, and need to work on the form it's going to take. I am feeling like withdrawing more to do it, but that frightens me too.
Rack: I absolutely get that. And the fear of withdrawing to do it too. Onward. I get so stuck on the small stuff that I cannot proceed at all, so it would be safe to ignore me. Sending love.
Ruin: I am not at all sure yet which direction it is going in, in so much as I don't really want to write a 'novel' or a 'memoir'. I am thinking of it as more of connected 'essays', than anything else. Essays on a theme, personal essays, even, perhaps lyrical essays, I am not sure. For now it's just writing. It will include these, Immediate messages, emails, stories, confused memories, and ramblings about ideas, 'drivers', and whatever. There will even be images. The person they are written in can change. I realised that in the writing to you, it should always be in the first person, directly written to you, that personal. But in my enthusiasm found myself sending you some of the 'Ruin (he) had a good wank and fell asleep' stuff. I put all that on Flickr anyway, so you know where it is. I still revolve around images, so I will continue to work there. It is my way, as unorthodox as that might be, and it's more or less private there anyway. I like that promiscuousness, that slightly ajar window, so something can creep out or in, and catch me unawares. It is my only 'Meta' space.
I say you know where it is there, but it is now quite hidden. I am working under certain images, add text most days, but these are older images. Only newly added images get attention so these more or less go unseen, as the text develops. I leave little clues but one would have to be quite intrepid to find them.
The title, 'A Less Comforting Narrative', refers to the image, and not to the exchange under it.
Rack: It’s always an act of faith and you are writing, that’s what counts. The idea of writing essays might be very freeing.
But Rack, there is another crux there too, another layer I need to look at, and that is the idea of the self as a ‘groomer’. I am not at all sure why I attack these ideas head on, but it seems I do, or have to (am driven to), at least. OK, perhaps I make cack-handed efforts at this, perhaps there is delusion there, but this is something I have to do, if I am going to be as honest as I can be. This is grooming, this writing I mean, it is enticing, and almost demanding, responses. It appears I might feed off responses, and this is somewhat alarming. As usual, confrontation seems the only way forward, not just to recognize something but to actively attempt to disempower it. This might demand another step, a sort of extension of that quarantine which I have already noted as possibly a way forward. It feels like I should write to you, and not send what I write. In short, I don’t know my own motivations, let alone trust them. I don’t even know if they are mine. I recognize a group of possibly powerful drivers, besides the common or garden ones of background, abuse and general upbringing. All these are more or less universal, perhaps the abuse aspect was more extreme. Then there are the added influences of a sexually generated plague, this we share, and the drugs needed to control that scourge/gift. There is also residual anger, perhaps, at being a ‘failed’ artist, at the aborted attempts I made to try to communicate. This is also more often the case as not, considering the overabundance of ‘Artists’ floatingly enjoying poverty and rejection globally. To attempt to turn that into a ‘La Vie Bohème’, at the age of 68, would border on the farcical, though that in itself might be funny enough to create a page-turner.
In July, Thalia wrote to me:
“Yes, It's always interesting when communication happens, but it is also alright with me when it doesn't, for any reason. Nobody can be a perfect Victorian-style correspondent now, even I can't.”
Thalia, by another name, is one of those 4 women you commented on, relative to this idea of re-building myself, those ‘good mothers’, those substitutes I have been busily generating all my life. I see that now as a type of grooming, not conscious in the doing of it, but decipherable in retrospect, that looking back I seem to be up to.
Of course, you sit there, the ‘Mother Superior’. Next question, are you getting anything out of this? If not, tell me. I will stop writing to you, in fact I won’t. I will write to you in private, but not send it, I mean. I would continue to post the writing where I habitually post it, my afore-mentioned public/private Meta space, that chink of an open-window. This would mean that if you were ever curious you could find it there.
I know how relentless I can be, and I also know how exhausting this can be. I am acknowledging this, at last. Let me know what you think so we can begin this next phase in a way that would ensure that there was no grooming in the doing of it.
Rack: I need to concentrate on my own work. As is my habit, I get too involved in other people’s stuff in order to avoid my own. It would be awful to never hear from you, maybe there is somewhere in between.
Ruin: Yes, I couldn't stand not being in contact. I just need to rein in, to control my need to share, to get approval, awful 'boy stuff'.
Rack: god we might be growing up!!!!
Ruin: you know I hang on your every word, and can generate 1,000 words from ten from you. But yes, I can do it alone. But it's better with you. But I want you to do your work, not hinder you.
It's time to grow fucking up, for me anyway, you decide when it's your time. 68, little boy lost hasn't got the same appeal. I can't help but think I can do this quicker; I have all the raw material.
‘Don't Confront Me With My Failures’.
I am so pleased to have gotten here, this plateau of seemingly controllable desire. This burgeoning hormonal hiatus, brought on by years, disease, and the medications for the same ‘affliction’. Even surviving thus far seems somewhat miraculous, from that point of childhood abuse to this unexpected seniority, an adulthood of sorts. It was almost arrived at through no obvious intervention of my own, but there may be some evidence there that could suggest differently. It would seem that all energies were set in self-destruct mode. There was so much luck involved in generating that continuance, but there were also interventions, practical ones, like the leaps and bounds made by science in this age we live in, but also the intervention of loved ones, not family, but those rather who recognized an aspect of 'self' in the 'other' along the way, and stopped long enough to develop mutual caring.
These writings are dedicated to two of these paragons. Rack, the titular, and ‘Hem Binnen’, the Dutch ‘Him Indoors’ who saved my life.
As to my failings, I know them intimately and will expose them in all their tawdriness as I continue.
"There was an old man named Michael Finnegan
He had whiskers on his chinnegan
The wind came along and blew them in again
Poor old Michael Finnegan"
Begin Again.
Fail again, Fail Better, as our fellow countryman, that other writer in Paris, would have it.
But then beginning again is just moving forward.
Ruin, Ruin, Ruin, what in god’s name were you up to? Neither of us believe in that geezer with the grey hair, on a cloud, but my exasperation needs letting out, so there he sits omnipotent. Just so you know, I was watching all those 68 years, and I can clearly see the stories you have been telling yourself. It’s almost as if I had nothing better to do than watch over you. But, I guess, someone had to, and that judgmental geezer with his tablet of ten regulations wasn’t really up to that job, now or then, was he? So, I hung around watching, and more or less saw it all, except for those times I might have been comatose in a Ketamine or alcohol haze, beside you. You may have gotten up to some shenanigans at those junctures when I wasn’t exactly compos mentis. My apologies if I missed out on any of your multitudinous ‘calls for help’. None of us are perfect, as you well know. Before we start, get going that is, I should also say that I intend hanging around, watching over you, until your sticky, or otherwise, end. I wouldn’t miss that unravelling for all the gilt bronzes in Tibet. I am in it for the long run, as they say, whoever 'they' might be. I know you are having those memory holes, those vast and growing ever-expanding black holes, but don’t worry there, Ruin. I think I can help out with this, even. You see, I kept a written record, I know, sneaky, but it’s the nature of the graphomaniacal beast, one of my own little foibles that might actually aid and abet your storytelling. I believe we might have shared that letter writing mania, that drive to communicate through correspondence, but we have never really written to each other, have we? I suspect that is about to change. I hope so anyway.
Rack, Sorcha and Thalia inspired you to write, I can see that, mostly by being able to tolerate you, it would appear. Perhaps you brought out a mothering aspect in their natures when they saw you in some considerable distress relative to that early abuse. Perhaps it was something else too, some mutual need. There were others too, mostly female others, those correspondents, with the exception of Jonathan, who would be deserving of a separate story, perhaps. Rack spoke of them as the ‘Good Mothers’, those interventional women, those lifesavers.
Which more or less takes us to the ‘invisible man’, that centre of those black, expanding, holes, those memory lapses, the ‘Good Father’, or any father at all for that matter. He was purportedly there, constantly in the background, and often used as a threat, but he was there. I seem to remember you even put some photographs of him up on your antiquated Meta site, Flickr. I do see that there might be an absence there, a vacuum, and I have seen all the extremes you have gone to fill that infinite hole. So here I am, a Nelson Eddy to your Jeanette MacDonald (I know, camp and hopelessly dated, I am sorry about that), a top to your bottom, as Jonathan would have it.
Write to me, I will write back. Just don’t call me ‘Daddy’, that’s just one step too far, and I know, and understand, your tendency to always overstep those boundaries. I am willing to play at being the ‘Good Father’, until you learn to do that for yourself. I really wouldn't do this for anyone else in this whole wide world, so hopefully this will help you begin to feel better about yourself.
Onwards and upwards as the aforementioned 'they' like to say, tomorrow being the first day of the rest of your life and all that cliched palaver. I will do my very best to rein all that corn in as we proceed, a struggle I know. I do believe we might have a job to do, and It's way beyond time to get on with it.
I've got your back, for what it's worth.
Best Regards,
Top
25 September 2022
Dearest Top,
Embracing the fear of possibly going full Ham, Shem and Japheth, I am going to have to name you. I can’t call you 'Top' for the duration of our correspondence, disregarding the reality that the Top/Bottom synergy thing doesn’t even hold anymore, now that one is post-gay, post-sex, and approaching post-everything, what with oblivion waving tantalisingly, as it is, from the border of that widening gyre (tips hat towards W.B.) of our beloved ‘event horizon’. I think I have even found a name for you. Its partially catholic, even, from that miasma of childhood memories, that “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my church, and I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom”.
Okay Rock, I am giving you the keys. You, for a while anyway, can be the designated driver, Petrus, that's you, that dependable rock, rock of the walk, even, rock of ages, my Tio Pepe port in a storm, my fellow geriatric mariner. Lash me to your, larger than average, mast, we're off.
Welcome to Rack & Ruin, and Rock! It does have a certain alliterative ring, n'est-ce pas? (TYFTC). Fasten your seatbelts, we might be in for somewhat of a bumpy ride.
Deliriously yours,
Queerqueg von Lederhosen
PS: Are you sure this device works for blocked sinuses?
PPS: Relative to the acronym used in this photoplay, please see photo below, entitled: L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.H.I.V+O.A.P
It ain’t heavy, it’s my acronym.
Dearest Wuufus Wainscotting,
Sorry to her about your troat. Don’t they be at the doing of the blessing of that same gorge anymore, at all, at all? Probably not, I would guess. Perhaps the only church what did it is now boarded up, or turned into a leisure centre where they give Irish dancing lessons to all those young, eager, coiled-springy girls, with the revolving legs and primary-colour gúnas (Gaelic for frocks), in plastic ringlets. You know the ones; they make those Dallas Cowboy’s cheerleaders girls look like vestal virgins, pushed on by their mammies, hello Bernadette Peters, to excel in all that leaping and jiggery-pokery, moving downstage like one of those roman phalanxses, putting the fear of God in every daecent catolick. Anyway, I diverge.
Talking of Catholics, no, you ain’t Rock. Rock’s his name, not Peter, or Petrus, or any of those Roman shenanigans, just clear old plain, and sturdy, ‘Rock’, as in that island lodged between the East River, and the Hudson (where I met my beloved Rack), if you get my drift, and the rock of me birth, that emerald-green one you are presently lodged up the backside of. I will admit he is partial to the odd glass of Theo Pepys, and has been known to take an occasional dash along the boreens of the Adirondacks brandishing that emblematic, blue-striped axe. That Daniel Dye Sluice could play him in a moving picture extravaganza, ‘The Last of the Tops’, or somesuch, Oscar fodder no doubt, probably to be found, eventually, in the ‘Science Fiction’ section of our favourite ‘Blokebuster’, down that windy old boreen of a bog road.
And what does every poor Irish boy need, dare I say, what does every boy need? I answer here and now, without much hesitation, other than the time it takes to take a gulp of coffee, with a slice of me iced-duck, so that I can take me slew of morning pilules; every boy needs a Rock. You can see that I am substituting, intermittently, the ‘me’ for ‘my’. I do believe I might be enjoying heading for a little regression, and sure why not, on this fine rainy Amsterdam morning? There’s neery a rock here, on this damp sponge of a low-lying place, so a lad would have to be going about inventing his own boulder to support him. And that is simply what I do be doing, as Frank S. used to like to sing.
Do be, do be, do, what were the chances?
But I regress. Where was I?
I remember. I was in Amsterdam about to take me ‘Daddy’s little helpers’, those much-loved lifesavers (said pilules). All praise science and all that palaver. I sit here pin-cushioned, enjoying the wonderful side-effects of the Monkeypox vaccine, and looking forward to when I can enjoy the same from the latest Covid update. Unfortunately, I have to wait a month for that second one, a recommended period of time between that first and second vaccine to ensure they don’t conjoin in some diabolical conspiracy to turn me into a 4G antenna, or something similar.
Pillar of salt, Lot’s wife’s lot, and how’s your mother?
I don’t think for a minute that that naughty Mr. Gates is out to chip me. As I said, pincushion here, and if he felt a yearning to chip yours truly, he could have had me eons ago. Have at it, Bill. Take me, I was, formerly, anybody’s anyway, writing bad cheques willy-nilly.
And breathe.
‘Comhbhrú na cruinne ina carraig, agus rolladh i dtreo ceist ró-mhór í’, (trans: Compress the universe into a rock and roll it towards a bloody huge question) as the plagarised ancient Irish bard might have warbled, and more than likely did.
No, it isn’t that Rack is non-responsive, it’s more that I am giving her a break from all my 'raiméis' (Gaelic for general doo-doo, shite for want of a better word). It's all been 'ri ra agus ruaile buaile', (gaelic for a gas craic) as far as I am concerned. We have chewed the cud now for 35 long, wonderful, and somewhat excruciating years. That’s not altogether true. We lived on that same rock of Manhattan for 11 years, then wrote to each other for 24 years after that. There are probably a million words lurking there. I think that you recognize that I love letter writing, or it’s modern equivalent anyway, the email. The problem is that the unwieldy words are there, and they are just a part of what lurks on my hard-drive, and I suspect it’s going to take my ‘Rock’ to sort them out. Rock has a pithy character, he takes no prisoners, that tough-love stuff, that ability to tell you when you are being an eejit. Ruin needs Rock more than I do, possibly (oops, reality check there). Anyway, Rack and Ruin could chew the cud relentlessly forever, they could easily become that universal methane generator, much feared of by the powers that do be sitting there Canute-like, holding the tide back, in Brussels.
Carraig is the Irish word for Rock, just so you know. Would that not be a great ‘secret’ name, one to make any mammy proud? “Come on over here, darling Carraig, and let me wipe your nose wit me sleeve, you’re snottin all over de kip”. It doesn’t get much better than that in my book. Did you know that kip is the Dutch for chicken?- just saying.
I used to love, back on that old Manhattan Rock, when Rack used to croon "It's not your frock my dear", then look at me as if wisdom had been imparted. Rack knew how to make Ruin laugh, it was sort of a mutual thing. It was some 'Hibernafold', sweep me into your fold my dear, understanding stranded between laughing and screaming, that wondrous type of hysteria, infectious, scary, and lovely (Oxford comma usage there, blimey). Pronouns be damned, we know who we are. A pox on all your pronouns, here's to universal interchangeability!
Mise Lemas,
Ruin O’ Carraig (Gaelic for Ruin, son of Rock)
It’s time to get back to that ‘crux’ as Rack called it. It will be slightly different this time, as I won’t be telling it to her, I will be telling it to myself, and to Rock, perhaps. Perhaps this part needs looking at, not only from Ruin’s viewpoint, but from that slightly cynical over-arching perspective that he might be able to bring to this dissection, this evisceration, this vomiting up. I guess it isn’t really about what happened anyway, I mean the details of what happened, these I won’t be telling, but rather the reactions to these stimuli on that rather delicate entity that the child, Ruin, was. He was a stammering wreck of a neglected child, and this was the first time anyone had ever paid any attention to him There was nothing in his arsenal to deal with the repercussions, and no one available who might proffer some help or even a suggestion of an explanation. It happened in cold darkness, and in silence. It happened in his gut.
It was most definitely where it happened, there, in the pit of his stomach. He still remembers that feeling, vividly. Yes, that’s present tense, remembers, not remembered. That stays forever, at least for the forever that describes the length of a life, but it can also be projected into a future, through these words, beyond that ‘life’s sentence’. Technically apparently, the hippocampus shrinks, and entombs the memory, creates an imprint that asserts itself for a life’s duration. That’s the sentence, that’s the imprisonment. And why would you want to project that into the future, that delicately butterflied stomach, the answer would be simply to give it a description, to, perhaps, proffer that absent help, or a suggestion of an explanation.
He/I/we/they needed Rock there to help explain it to him. He loved that grab-bag of pronouns, a new freedom generated by contemporary politics, which would allow him to seamlessly segue from one to another. Rock could provide the ‘You’, that objective overview, perhaps. He always loved that wonderfully funny narcissistic joke: I am getting sick and tired of relentlessly talking about myself, can you take over and talk about me for a while?
Okay Rock, do you want to take over, to give a kid a break?
Come on “Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee”
1 Oct 2022, 3.08PM CEST
Thalia,
Strange this idea of letter-writing. I do see it has been excessive, something I have always done too much of, finding some validation there, I would guess. In a way, I want to turn that around. Perhaps I have been inflicting my ‘graphomania’ on others for two long now and it’s time to take responsibility for that myself. I know it’s too easy a diagnosis, one of those that was bandied about some years ago, another over-arching description that, perhaps, doesn’t mean much. That’s something I learnt from you, the need to circumvent easy characterisations.
Your: “Yes, It's always interesting when communication happens, but it is also alright with me when it doesn't, for any reason. Nobody can be a perfect Victorian-style correspondent now, even I can't.”
That was somewhat of a turning point for me in this, that note, it worked for me. It set me of on some realisation of what I might have been getting up to, over the last few years, and how this might have been somewhat unfair. You probably saw that acknowledged already under ‘A Less Comforting Narrative, (Turku, Finland)’, as I know what a sleuth you can be, acknowledging your “I saw!”. I must admit that I like that you saw.
Yes, I guess at some point there might be editing, heavy editing, I imagine, but I am not feeling at all, at the moment, that this is my job. I feel like I am still working through it and into it, getting the substance of it all together. I am currently at that ‘abuse phase’, I have been trying to explain to Rack that my mother is not to blame, and neither was my father, they were just carrying on what they knew, their abuse and abandonment. The more I move on the more I realise I have to talk about universal ‘innocence’, and when I say universal, I mean exactly that, a forgiveness that pardons Jeffrey Dahmer and Adolf Hitler, even, those unspeakable outrages against decency and humanity. This ‘innocence’ doesn’t negate the need for absolute quarantine in cases such as these. For what it’s worth I hold no truck with death sentences, no matter how extreme the actions of the perpetrator of the outrage. It’s a strange journey, that getting around to forgiving everyone so you can forgive yourself, but that does seem to be what I am up to, so I will take it as far as I can. It feels like a good, a necessary, journey.
I have been spending the last week releasing Rack, letting go, trusting. Then lo and behold, along came Roc
This is an artwork i made for my instrumental, it's a Pop Smoke drill type beat called PTSD.
Link to the Beat : www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSC3Dyw3Ns8
Αρκούν 2 βεβαιώσεις ΙΔΙΩΤΩΝ ΓΙΑΤΡΩΝ ότι κάποιος "πάσχει" από ΜΕΤΑΤΡΑΥΜΑΤΙΚΟ ΣΤΡΕΣ και να του δοθεί ΑΣΥΛΟ, άσχετα αν προέρχεται από χώρα όπου δεν υπάρχει πόλεμος...
Αρκούν 2 (ψευδείς) ένορκες καταθέσεις προκειμένου να δοθεί Εισαγγελική Παραγγελία για Ακούσια Νοσηλεία σε Ψυχιατρικό Νοσοκομείο χωρίς το άτομο να πάσχει στην πραγματικότητα.
A series of photos for a non-proit organization created to help military veterans who suffer from PTSD. When the creator learned the staggering fact that 22 Veterans take their lives EVERY DAY due to complications from PTSD, he wanted to help. Fast forward to three years later and his non-profit organization “Countersteer” launched this past Saturday. Veterans who suffer from PTSD are plagued with constant rushes of adrenalin and look for an outlet for this massive flood of energy. Very often a high-speed motorcycle is that outlet. It’s been that way since World War l. While riding the streets at 150mph does help release that adrenaline and anxiety, the results are landing guys in jail, the hospital or the morgue. What the owner teaches is that they can get that same release on a small dirt track going 30mph, but when they fall they can just get up, laugh and dust themselves off. It was moving to watch these guys from various branches of the service get together and share this weekend. We all know these people. They are our sons and daughters who’ve gone off to fight for their country. Many have survived horrible things that we can’t even imagine. Then they come home and realize they have to fight an unexpected enemy – themselves. The best quote I heard was from one man who said: “I was out there on the streets doing 170mph and almost died, but I went back again and again because I HAD to get that adrenaline fix. I DON”T WANT TO DIE. [Before today] I’ve never spent time with guys from the Navy or the Army but I just made 15 new best friends today. That’s just how we are. These guys? They’re my brothers.”
In this video, Luis Makonza Da Silva discusses the importance of facing your truth and why we need to stop lying to ourselves if we want to get better from PTSD, anxiety, depression and trauma like car accidents, or long standing trauma like sexual abuse.
Hi, it's Louis Makonza Da Silva from Iboga Healing Experience.com. We've touched base, back in the past talking about the truth, intent and action, mind, body, and soul. We've had those conversations, but I wanted to get back to truth. And what does it mean? What is our truth? What are we going to say? Oh, I live my truth. Um, well, when you're sick you don't. Generally we're lying to ourselves. So we're generally as sick as our secrets.
We bury things... we don't want to face reality. So what does it mean to live your truth? I'm first and foremost is to be real within your reality, so facing it, not stuffing it in a bottle, let's face it, head on. So we've got to deal with things. So how do we deal with things and what happens when we don't deal with things? Well, when we don't deal with things our mind, we'll take over because you've allowed your mind to get in there and getting controlled so it will push you down.
Your mind will push you down. And what happens when you get oppression happening, you get the impression. So you have no way out because your mind is pushing down on you and you have nothing to go on. So we get depressed, we lie in bed, we feel stuck, we have racing thoughts, and we'd get into this endless loop of, oh, woe is me. Oh everyone feels sorry for me. It's everybody's fault with my own. But meanwhile we have created it all. We have allowed our mind to take over. We have our allowed other people's truths to come into our mind. We're living someone else's life. We don't even have control of our own life anymore. So living your truth is regaining your power and taking responsibility for your own actions.
PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. This is when we live through a trauma. PTSD takes about a year to come into play, um, from when the, whatever the trauma the case may be. Uh, someone gets raped. Car accident. In my case was home invasion where I had a gun put in my mouth. So how did that end up? Well, first of all, started lying to myself. I'm okay. I'm okay. You know, I'm a big guy and you know, I'm six foot two, 240 pounds. I could handle anything. I didn't bother me. I'm a big macho guy, but that wasn't my truth. It was eating me alive everyday. So I kept stuffing it up, get stuffing, gets nothing, but the more you stuff, the less you're living and then you're allowing room for your mind to come in there and when you start thinking you're going to get better. That mind keeps replaying the event, replaying the events.
So that's, that's post traumatic stress and you get stuck in this loop of racing thoughts, reliving the accident or, or the trauma every day, creating paranoia and your mind will not shut down. It will not and it will be inconsistent to keep you on your toes. So when people get into drinking more, taking drugs, having too much sex, whatever the case, whatever your vice would be for self medication, you are trying to at least stabilize your mind. So it's bearable.
In my case, I use drugs, alcohol, I worked. I was a workaholic and it was all trying to just keep it all at a certain level. Like what I cared whether it was if I was going 100 miles an hour, I'm going 100 miles an hour, but at least it's 100 miles an hour as opposed to being 120 slash 60, 80 ten five, whatever the case may be. I was all over the place. So in that type of environment you cannot get, can't get well. So once again, let's start back by living the truth. Yes, it was. It was a trauma. It was a horrible thing, but it's not my life. So we got to... We've got to rebalance ourselves.
We do this with an iboga ceremony. This is help for anyone suffering from PTSD, depression, anxiety, serious trauma like rape, or incest, or trauma from a car accident or military trauma.
Contact me. We have help you to rebalance if you're suffering with any of these things.
Iboga Healing Experience
5200 Dixie Rd., Unit #37,
Mississauga, ON, Canada L4W 1E4
+1 (855) 463-4411
Yes, that's all I had for today. Just trying to stay in the game, as I'm suffering from PTSD (post trip shooting disorder)
From my anti-army recruitment comic 'Join the Army'
More photos: www.spellingmistakescostlives.com/bethemeat/actionman.htm
Get the comic: etsy.me/14DzdyT
Darren Cullen
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Michael Clesle, NinJA999)
Image paired with the story:
PTSD Nation
www.truthout.org/ptsd-nation57797
Adapted from:
There’s been a surge in psychedelic medicine over the past decade. Ayahuasca is something almost everyone’s heard of, and ibogaine’s becoming one of the most sought ought addiction treatments there are. Psilocybin treats cluster headaches and PTSD, and MDMA is making amazing progress for treating trauma and depression. And as we move steadily into the new millennium we’re starting to see a lot more people take notice of this.
The Early History of Psychedelic Medicine
Research on psychedelics isn’t anything new. Before the 1960s, psychedelics weren’t just studied, they were respected. LSD showed great promise in treating addiction and was studied for its efficacy against many different psychological disorders. Long before this, however, psychedelic plants were being used in various ritual ceremonies and among various native tribes around the world. There’s also strong evidence that cultural use of psychotropic plants has been happening for centuries.
Peyote has been used ceremonially since 1000BC and is an integral part of Native American culture. Psilocybin is central to Aztec tribes. How long psychedelic mushrooms were used by them is unknown because Roman Catholic missionaries destroyed most records in Mexico. Rock paintings of mushrooms and temples dedicated to mushroom gods back to 7000BC, however.
The history of psychedelics is long. And if those stand behind the medicinal benefits they contain can continue to research these beneficial effects, their history is far from over.
The “Recent” History of Psychedelic Medicine
During the mid-20th century, chemists and other scientists started taking more interest in natural psychedelic substances and began to synthetically make new compounds that imitated what was found in nature. They then gave them out to their friends. The very early days of modern psychedelic research was done with private patients and friends of scientists, researchers, and chemists.
It was these friends and private patients who first dipped their toes in the strange waters of psychedelic drugs. These pioneers of psychedelic research included professors, intellectuals, research scientists, artists, writers, anthropologists, and more. The changes they experienced in consciousness sparked a revolution that is still going strong today.
The early days of psychedelics included studies on LSD in anticipation of its effectiveness to treat a list of psychological disorders. The US Navy experimented with mescaline in the late 1940s as a truth serum and mescaline was studied in the early 1950s to see how good it was at replicating adrenaline.
During the 1950s and 1960s, most of the research conducted on psychedelic medicine was done on LSD. It was made available for research based on the premise that it was helpful “to elicit the release of repressed material and provide mental relaxation, particularly in anxiety states and obsessional neuroses.” There were also a lot of psychiatrists at the time personally experimenting with LSD so they could “gain insight into the world and ideas and sensations of mental patients.”
By the time the mid-60s rolled around, over 40,000 patients had taken LSD. The vast amount of psychedelic research that took place during the some 15 years it was studied, generated over 1,000 scientific papers, several books and manuscripts, and several international conferences.
What Early Psychedelic Research Revealed
Of the many studies conducted on LSD during this time, the positive effects it showed on alcoholism were perhaps the most remarkable out of them all. In 1951, a study was performed on the most severe cases of alcoholism that could be found. Twenty-four patients who had been drinking uncontrollably for some 12 years and not responded to other treatments partook in the study. One single dose of LSD was given to each patient. Long-term results of this single dose found 25% of patients recovered completely, and another 25% who had considerably improved. This was compared to the some 10% who responded favorably to traditional treatments of the time.
Psychedelics weren’t just used to treat alcoholism. They were also studied for their effects regarding pain management. One study tested 50 patients who were critically ill and in a great deal of pain. Each patient was given Dilaudid, Demerol, and a dose of LSD so their pain-relieving properties could be measured. Results showed that the LSD not only provided better analgesic properties, but the effects lasted longer as well.
This study was at the forefront of the effects LSD had on pain and inspired many further studies that all showed promising results as well. It because of these first studies that LSD went on to show it provided superior pain relief to opiates and was used on patients to control extreme pain. These early studies on pain management with the critically ill also showed something else–LSD made them better accept (and even welcome) the impending fate that awaited them.
The Ban of Psychedelic Research
With as much promise LSD and other psychedelics held during the mid-20th century, nothing could stop the backlash against these substances that took place in the late 1960s. As more people discovered the effects of LSD (and they were made widely available by the pioneers that experimented with them) and other psychedelics, they were used recreationally…and became a symbol of the counterculture of that time.
All psychedelics were banned by the DEA in 1967, and all research on them subsequently stopped. Suddenly, the very substances that showed so much medical promise now contained no medical benefits at all. Psychedelics were instead deemed dangerous and listed as a Schedule Class I Substance. Not only were they now considered to be some of the most dangerous drugs of all, but were considered to hold high potential for abuse and no medical advantages whatsoever.
Although many people held onto the false notion that psychedelics were dangerous for decades, things are beginning to change. There’s a resurgence in psychedelic research, with well-respected institutions and scientists again studying the beneficial effects of psychedelic medicine. For the past two decades, people have been performing new research on psychedelics and the results are showing what many people have known for years–psychedelics make great medicine.
The New Psychedelic History
The new wave of psychedelic study began in 1990 when the FDA approved research on DMT (dimethyltryptamine). Four years earlier, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) was created so that MDMA could be further studied. In 1993, the Heffter Research Institute was formed, pumping some $1million into the research of the medical benefits of psychedelics.
The wave of new psychedelic research began, and hasn’t stopped for over 20 years. There are numerous different studies being performed around the world, and the medical benefits they contain continue to pour in. And the results are coming from places like Stanford, John Hopkins University, UCLA, and the University of New Mexico. People devoted to psychedelic research have revived what once showed such great promise.
Psychedelics have shown to be very promising for their medical benefits, and as more people turn away from conventional treatment, they’re looking for alternatives that can help–such as ibogaine treatment. The need for medical treatments that work largely prevails over outdated (and false) claims. We’ve seen it happen with medical marijuana, and can hope that this resurgence in research is just the beginning of a revolution of healing assisted through the many benefits of psychedelic medicine.
The post The New History of Psychedelic Medicine Copy appeared first on Crossroads Research Initiative.
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Goddess KRING podcast #23 monologue on PTSD, democratic socialism and much more about my life as a figure model etc. mental health, healing etc. improvisational speaking for 60 minutes
my Goddess KRING #podcasts are archived and free 24 hours a day on several sites. mixcloud, patreon, bandcamp and youtube. it airs once a week on hollow earth radio at a set time of thursdays 3-4pm but then it's FREE to listen any time on those other sites. all free 24/7. links below
Goddess KRING podcasts on youtube:
www.youtube.com/user/shannonkringen
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www.mixcloud.com/goddesskring/
Goddess KRING podcasts on patreon (free to listen and donate $1.00 if you want
www.patreon.com/goddesskring/posts
Goddess KRING podcasts on Bandcamp:
Goddess KRING podcasts on hollow earth radio every thursday
3-4 pm pacific standard USA time zone (west coast in the usa)
CLAY NATIONAL GUARD CENTER, Marietta, Ga., Aug. 15, 2011 – Former first lady Rosalynn Carter spent about an hour this morning talking with Georgia National Guard leaders about a possible partnership in a program designed to help the caregivers of wounded warriors better deal with problems associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).
Pictured here, from left to right, retired Army Guard Col. Don Venn, Deputy Assistant Adjutant General; Dr. Amy Stevens, Director of Psychological Health- Georgia National Guard; Dr. Leisa Easom, executive director of the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregiving (RCI); Maj. Gen. Maria L. Britt, Georgia Army Guard Commander; former First Lady Rosalynn Carter; Brig. Gen. Larry Dudney, director of the Ga. DoD Joint Staff; Air Guard Col. Dan Zachman, State Family Program director; Air Guard Lt. Col. Elizabeth Harris-Lamkin, the state chaplain; and Col. Paul Antonio, Georgia Army Guard senior behavioral health officer.
During Mrs. Carter’s visit, she outlined how the Problem Solving Training (PST) for Caregivers program – funded by her organization – is designed to educate caregivers in the treatment of wounded warriors suffering from PTSD or TBI through “in-home, tailored caregiver support intervention.” The program also helps caregivers “solve unique problems of immediate concern to each caregiver.”
"It was an honor to meet with forner First Lady, Rosalynn Carter and
discuss a topic that is near to my heart, building resiliency in our military
families," Britt said. "The RCI has asked to partner with the Georgia Guard as the main
effort for piloting a program that reaches out to caregivers of soldiers with
TBI, PTSD or both in the Columbus area. It's one more way to show our
families that we care.
"We have many families that have sacrificed so much
and are still suffering," she added. "I look forward to seeing this pilot program adopted
and offered statewide so that we can help more families."
(Georgia DoD photo by Spc. Jasmine Walthall)
VA Convenes Leaders in Brain Health to Advance Solutions for mTBI and PTSD at Brain Trust Summit
WASHINGTON – The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is leading a groundbreaking two-day event focused on brain health, Brain Trust: Pathways to InnoVAtion. The first annual public-private partnership event will take place this week at the National Press Club and the IBM Institute for Electronic Government in Washington, DC.
Building on the extraordinary leadership and trailblazing efforts of a number of distinguished VA brain researchers, VA is convening many of the most influential voices in the field of brain health – to include the Department of Defense, the sports industry, private sector, federal government, Veterans and community partners - to identify and advance solutions for mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Issues related to brain health and head trauma transcend the Veteran and military community, impacting all Americans. By highlighting the themes of collaborative research, medical technology, and sports innovation for player safety, Brain Trust participants will discuss the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation and reintegration of Veterans, athletes, and Americans in general - suffering from head trauma related injuries. The event will also serve as a showcase for many of the advancements that VA is pioneering to improve brain health for Veterans, the military and for the American public at large.
In addition to many of the world’s most accomplished brain research scientists, other confirmed participants in the summit include sports commentator Bob Costas, Gen. Peter Chiarelli (CEO of One Mind, and the former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army), Briana Scurry (former U.S. Women’s Soccer Player), Jeanne Marie Laskas (author of the GQ article that inspired the movie Concussion), Terry O’Neil (16-time Emmy award winner), representatives from the NFL Players Association, the NFL, the NCAA, DARPA, DOD, NIH, CDC, and many more.
During the summit a special announcement will be made by Chris Nowinski co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation (CLF) and former WWE professional wrestler. Joining Chris will be a former Super Bowl champion and an Olympic gold medalist, each of whom will be using this Summit to announce that they will be donating their brains to the CLF for the purposes of advancing brain health. CLF has partnered with VA and Boston University to establish the VA-BU-CLF Brain Bank, directed by VA’s own Dr. Ann McKee, now the largest sports mTBI and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) repository in the world with over 325 brains donated, and over a thousand more pledged.
“VA is uniquely positioned to contribute to the care of Veterans with traumatic brain injury (TBI),” said VA Secretary McDonald. “The work we do produces results and life changing improvements in care for Veterans — as well as for all Americans, and for people around the world who suffer from these brain related injuries.”
The following organizations are teaming up with VA as event partners: Amazon, Booz Allen Hamilton, Comcast, GE Healthcare, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Optum Health, and Philips.
To learn more about Brain Trust: Pathways to InnoVAtion, please visit: www.va.gov/p3/braintrust.asp #VABrainTrust
(VA Photo/ Robert Turtil)
Back to The World.....as we called it. Processing out of the Marines for about 3 days at Camp Pendleton. As a Sergeant, I was exempt from any 'shit details' so I had nothing but time on my hands to do what I wanted. Spent a lot of time watching the recruits at training. Ha. All the things I did three years ago, listening to the drill instructors chew people out, praise no one, pushing them and pushing them. In a couple days, I'd be getting on a Delta plane headed to ATL and start a new life....
The late Nolan Williams’ amazing TED Talk just dropped: go.ted.com/nolanwilliams
In 1756, the war on plant medicine was led by the anti-fruiters: “people who weaponize scientific skepticism to thwart new treatments from getting out to the world.”
Instead of eating citrus to prevent scurvy, arsenic tonics were prescribed for sailors. It birthed the world’s first clinical trial to determine which treatment worked. Plants won, and we eliminated scurvy. But… a million people died during the war against progress by the "anti-fruiters" as they were called.
Psychedelic plant medicines have faced the same science-suppressing scrutiny for the past 60 years, and well over a million have died from suicide who could have been saved. The U.S has lost over 20x more veterans to suicide than combat this century.
Groups like VETS and Heroic Hearts have been sending veterans overseas for psychedelic therapy, curing most of them of PTSD, depression, anxiety, and addiction (alcohol, nicotine, and opioids). Nolan decided to study them, with MRI imaging before and after. After one ibogaine treatment session, “remarkably, we saw resolution of disability from Traumatic Brain Injury, something we have not seen before.” It was the first substance ever discovered to meaningfully reverse MRI-measured brain age.
Nolan on ibogaine: “We have never seen such a broad acting CNS compound before. It’s one of the most amazing drugs on the planet. It’s the equivalent of a broad acting antibiotic that can treat all infections.”
And… we are so sad that Nolan passed this year. We have supported his work and became good friends. We could go on for pages, but let me point instead to Stanford’s new obit on this great man.
Nearly 1,000 Students to Participate in WSSU Commencement on May 15
WINSTON-SALEM, NC -- Christina Wareâs story is one of the many inspiring testimonials of the nearly 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students from near and afar who are expected to participate in Winston-Salem State Universityâs commencement ceremony on Friday, May 15, at 9:45 a.m., at Bowman Gray Stadium, 1250 South Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive.
Academy Award-winning recording artist, activist and actor Common will be the keynote speaker. There are no guest limits or ticket requirements for the ceremony.
It is conceivable that Wareâs story of work ethic, undeniable spirit and enthusiasm encapsulates the sentiment of her graduating 2015 classmates.
Ware, 43, of Winston-Salem, is quite active on and off campus as a mentor to other students, a member of the non-traditional student organization, the first president of Epsilon Chapter 130 of Tau Sigma National Honor Society at WSSU, a wife and proud mother of two. She is also legally blind. She wants to blaze trails, set examples and raise the bar for others with disabilities.
âIn 2007, I lost my eyesight. After a six-month pity party, I decided to continue my education and make a difference for others. Since 2008, I have spent every day of my life proving to society that having a disability does not mean we are weak. I am now an advocate for persons with disabilities,â Ware, a business major, said, "We are not handicapped, we are handy capable!"
Ware, who can be described as always pleasant and having an unlimited enthusiasm for life, says every day alive is like Christmas. She demands to be treated like everyone else and has been noted to say, âI may physically fall, but mentally I can get back up and pull a 4.0 semester.â After graduation she wants to start a Kosher/Halal foods business and become active on community boards.
The China Connection
From the City of Harbin, the capital and largest city of the Heilongjiang province of the People's Republic of China, WSSU Master of Arts in the Teaching of English as a Second Language and Applied Linguistics students Yaowen Xing and Chunling Zhang have found a second home at WSSU and in Winston-Salem. They perhaps have come the farthest distance attend the university.
With a population of more than five million people, Harbin is situated in the northeast region of China so close to Russia that only the Songhua River separates the two countries. Nicknamed the Ice City, the average winter temperature is -3.5 °F with annual lows hitting -31.0 °F. Itâs no wonder the students say the warmer weather here in the Piedmont Triad has not been lost in translation with them and itâs one of the things they enjoy.
âWe really love the weather in North Carolina, especially the long summer time, since our hometown is so cold with snow for almost 6 months of the year,â Xing, 30, noted. âWe also love the people at WSSU and the faculty who all are nice and it has been a really good experience.â
Xing and Zhang, 35, are in America as part of a Chinese education immersion program to help exchange the cultures between China and America. They enjoy working as cultural ambassadors to students in both the cultures. The two came to the U.S. in 2013 and have been teaching at Konnoak Elementary school during the early hours and studying and researching later in the day. âComing to America was a dream for me after learning about it through books, movies and music, and my time here it has been amazing,â Xing said.
Zhang, said she didnât know much about WSSU or Historically Black Colleges or Universities (HBCUâs), but after a short time here she knew WSSU would be was special part of life. âI have met many African- Americans who have been friendly and helpful. I now can say I truly have many black friends,â Zhang said. She and Xing have taken advantage of the HBCU experience. They have been often seen attending evening lectures and presentations, sports events, musical and visual arts events. With their WSSU master degrees they will return to China one day in the future to make an impact on teaching and the quality of education there.
The All-In Approach
Olivia N. Sedwick, 21, a political science major from Indianapolis, has taken âthe all-in approach" to her WSSU experience. The current WSSU student government president (SGA), honorâs student and champion athlete, chose WSSU over other schools she could have attended.
Featured in a USA Today article highlighting the HBCU experience released last June, Sedwick is quoted as saying about WSSU, âI fell in love with the school.â She says, âWe talked about things that I had never had the chance to before coming from a predominantly white high school.â
Liking the intellectual and social environment, she was comfortable becoming involved around campus. In her first year, a walk-on athlete for the womenâs track and field team, she was a 2013 CIAA Indoor Womenâs Track and Field All-Conference competitor and the WSSU womenâs shot put record holder until earlier this year, although she never competed in the throws until coming to college. In her second year she served as the sophomore class vice president while also being appointed to serve on many committees throughout the university. In that same year, she was a delegate to the UNC Association of Student Governments (UNCASG), representing WSSU students on a state-wide level. At the end of that year, she became the first African-American female elected senior vice president of UNCASG and served in that capacity for the entirety of her third year while being active as the chief of staff for the WSSU student government association that year also. Toward the end of her term in UNCASG, she decided to run for student body president and has served as the voice of the students for the duration of her last year. With all of her activities, she has maintained a 3.95 GPA throughout her time in college.
Sedwick has been selected as a UNC General Administration Presidential Intern, which begins in July. Upon completion of the prestigious one-year appointment, Sedwick plans to attend Howard University School of Law.
A Drum Major who will March for a Noble Cause
Willie Davis, 22, a social work major from Fayetteville, N.C., who has led WSSUâs Red Sea of Sound Marching Band as a drum major for his senior year, will now march to lead the charge for helping veterans and their families cope with typical and unique challenges of serving in military. Davis will be one of four Cadets with the distinct honor of being commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant U.S. in the U.S. Army during this yearâs commencement ceremony. Despite that professionally Davis will help vets, military and families with things like dealing with emotions, he said, âI donât think I will be ready for the commissioning part (of commencement) emotionally.â
Readiness for Davis is an understatement. The youngest of three siblings, who was age 10 when his father died, Davis has been an A average student throughout life. He was in the top ten of his high school class and the first generation in his family to attend college. At WSSU, besides maintaining high academic achievement and serving in the U.S. Army ROTC, Davis has been active with the WSSU Band, the University Choir, a Campus Ambassador, a mentor to freshmen students, vice president of the WSSU chapter of Kappa Kappa Psi National Honorary Band Fraternity, a Veterans Helping Veterans Heal intern and a member of Galilee Missionary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem.
After graduation, Davis is going to graduate school at the University of South Carolina. He plans to complete that program in one year and begin his military duties. As a clinical social worker, his responsibilities may range from clinical counseling, crisis intervention, disaster relief, critical event debriefing, teaching and training, supervision, research, administration, consultation and policy development in various military settings. He wants to specialize in helping military veterans who suffer from different traumas such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), paranoid schizophrenia and other conditions.
from 'unforgettable' tv series 2014
there is one man,
and we're really worried about him because he's been destabilising, missing sessions,
cpl john curtis, he had an appointment yesterday
he came but then he walked out.
john suffers from post traumatic stress disorder
but actually i'm not sure calling it a disorder is really accurate.
in fact i think there'd be something wrong if our troops came home and were not profoundly affected by their experience.
and in john's case, a particularly devastating experience.
My artwork used for album cover. Pharoahe Monch is a rapper from Queens, New York City. He found my photo on flickr and asked to use it and here it is. lighting; two 580mkll in soft box's left and right for the original
The Postcard
A postcard bearing no publisher's name. The image is a real photograph.
The card was posted in Manchester on Tuesday the 4th. December 1917 to:
Miss Hilda Sutcliffe,
140, Warde Street,
Hulme,
Manchester.
The pencilled message on the divided back was as follows:
"With much love and
best wishes for a happy
future.
B. Bond".
Shell Shock
So what else happened on the day that the card was posted?
Well, on the 4th. December 1917, W. H. R. Rivers M. D. of Craiglockhart War Hospital presented a paper to the Royal Society of Medicine entitled 'The Repression of War Experience' which discussed psychological problems engendered by the experience of war.
Shell shock is a term coined during the Great War by British psychologist Charles Samuel Myers to describe the type of post traumatic stress disorder many soldiers were afflicted with during the war (before the term PTSD was introduced).
It is a reaction to the intensity of bombardment and fighting that produced a helplessness appearing variously as panic and being scared, flight, or an inability to reason, sleep, walk or talk.
During the Great War, the concept of shell shock was ill-defined. Cases of shell shock were interpreted as either a physical or psychological injury, or simply as a lack of moral fibre.
In World War II and thereafter, diagnosis of shell shock was replaced by that of combat stress reaction, a similar but not identical response to the trauma of warfare and bombardment.
Origins of Shell Shock
During the early stages of the Great War in 1914, soldiers from the British Expeditionary Force began to report medical symptoms after combat, including tinnitus, amnesia, headaches, dizziness, tremors, and hypersensitivity to noise.
While these symptoms resembled those that would be expected after a physical wound to the brain, many of those reporting sick showed no signs of head wounds. By December 1914, as many as 10% of British officers and 4% of enlisted men were suffering from "nervous and mental shock".
The term "shell shock" came into use to reflect an assumed link between the symptoms and the effects of explosions from artillery shells. The term was first published in 1915 in an article in The Lancet by Charles Myers. Some 60–80% of shell shock cases displayed acute neurasthenia, while 10% displayed what would now be termed symptoms of conversion disorder, including mutism and fugue.
The number of shell shock cases grew during 1915 and 1916, but it remained poorly understood medically and psychologically.
Some doctors felt that it was a result of hidden physical damage to the brain, with shock waves from bursting shells creating a cerebral lesion that caused the symptoms and could potentially prove fatal.
Another explanation was that shell shock resulted from poisoning by the carbon monoxide generated by explosions.
At the same time an alternative view developed describing shell shock as an emotional, rather than a physical, injury. Evidence for this point of view was provided by the fact that an increasing proportion of men suffering shell shock symptoms had not been exposed to artillery fire. Since the symptoms appeared in men who had no proximity to an exploding shell, the physical explanation was clearly unsatisfactory.
In spite of this evidence, the British Army continued to try to differentiate those whose symptoms followed explosive exposure from others. In 1915 the British Army in France was instructed that:
"Shell-shock and shell concussion cases should
have the letter 'W' prefixed to the report of the
casualty, if it is due to the enemy. In that case
the patient is entitled to rank as 'wounded', and
to wear on his arm a 'wound stripe'.
If, however, the man’s breakdown did not follow
a shell explosion, it is not thought to be due to the
enemy, and he is to be labelled 'Shell-shock' or 'S'
(for sickness) and is not entitled to a wound stripe
or a pension".
However, it often proved difficult to identify which cases were which, as the information on whether a casualty had been close to a shell explosion or not was rarely provided.
Management of Shell Shock
(a) Acute Treatment
At first, shell-shock casualties were rapidly evacuated from the front line – in part because of fear of their unpredictable behaviour. As the size of the British Expeditionary Force increased, and manpower became in shorter supply, the number of shell shock cases became a growing problem for the military authorities.
At the Battle of the Somme in 1916, as many as 40% of casualties were shell-shocked, resulting in concern about an epidemic of psychiatric casualties, which could not be afforded in either military or financial terms.
Among the consequences of this were an increasing official preference for the psychological interpretation of shell shock, and a deliberate attempt to avoid the medicalisation of shell shock. If men were 'uninjured' it was easier to return them to the front to continue fighting.
Another consequence was an increasing amount of time and effort devoted to understanding and treating shell shock symptoms. Soldiers who returned with shell shock generally couldn't remember much because their brain would shut out all the traumatic memories.
By the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, the British Army had developed methods to reduce shell shock. A man who began to show shell-shock symptoms was generally given a few days' rest by his local medical officer. Col. Rogers, Regimental Medical Officer of the 4th. Battalion Black Watch wrote:
"You must send your commotional cases down
the line. But when you get these emotional cases,
unless they are very bad, if you have a hold of the
men and they know you and you know them (and
there is a good deal more in the man knowing you
than in you knowing the man) … you are able to
explain to him that there is really nothing wrong
with him, give him a rest at the aid post if necessary
and a day or two’s sleep, go up with him to the front
line, and, when there, see him often, sit down beside
him and talk to him about the war and look through
his periscope and let the man see you are taking an
interest in him".
If symptoms persisted after a few weeks at a local Casualty Clearing Station, which would normally be close enough to the front line to hear artillery fire, a casualty might be evacuated to one of four dedicated psychiatric centres which had been set up further behind the lines, and were labelled as "NYDN – Not Yet Diagnosed Nervous" pending further investigation by medical specialists.
Although the Battle of Passchendaele generally became a byword for horror, the number of cases of shell shock were relatively few. 5,346 shell shock cases reached the Casualty Clearing Station, or roughly 1% of the British forces engaged.
3,963 (just under 75%) of these men returned to active service without being referred to a hospital for specialist treatment. The number of shell shock cases reduced throughout the battle, and the epidemic of illness was ended.
During 1917, "shell shock" was entirely banned as a diagnosis in the British Army, and mentions of it were censored, even in medical journals.
(b) Chronic Treatment of Shell Shock
The treatment of chronic shell shock varied widely according to the details of the symptoms, the views of the doctors involved, and other factors including the rank and class of the patient.
So many officers and men were suffering from shell shock that 19 British military hospitals were wholly devoted to the treatment of cases.
Ten years after the war, 65,000 veterans of the war were still receiving treatment for it in Great Britain. In France it was possible to visit aged shell shock victims who were still in hospital in 1960.
Physical Causes of Shell Shock
Recent research by Johns Hopkins University has found that the brain tissue of combat veterans who have been exposed to improvised explosive devices (IEDs) exhibit a pattern of injury in the areas responsible for decision making, memory and reasoning.
This evidence has led the researchers to conclude that shell shock may not only be a psychological disorder, since the symptoms exhibited by sufferers from the First World War are very similar to these injuries. Immense pressure changes are involved explosions. Even mild changes in air pressure from weather have been linked to changes in behaviour.
There is also evidence to suggest that the type of warfare faced by soldiers would affect the probability of shell shock symptoms developing.
First hand reports from medical doctors at the time note that rates of such afflictions decreased once the war was mobilized again during the 1918 German offensive, following the 1916-1917 period where the highest rates of shell shock occurred. This could suggest that it was trench warfare, and the experience of siege warfare specifically, that led to the development of these symptoms.
Shell Shock and Cowardice
Some men suffering from shell shock were put on trial, and even executed, for military crimes including desertion and cowardice. While it was recognised that the stresses of war could cause men to break down, a lasting episode was likely to be seen as symptomatic of an underlying lack of character.
For instance, in his testimony to the post-war Royal Commission examining shell shock, Lord Gort said that shell shock was a weakness and was not found in "good" units.
The continued pressure to avoid medical recognition of shell shock meant that it was not, in itself, considered to be an admissible defence. Although some doctors or medics did try to cure soldiers' shell shock, it was first done in a brutal way.
Doctors would provide electric shock to soldiers in hopes that it would shock them back to their normal, heroic, pre-war self. After almost a year of giving one of his patients electric shocks, putting cigarettes on his tongue, hot plates at the back of his throat, etc., a British clinician, Lewis Yealland, said to his patient:
"You will not leave this room until
you are talking as well as you ever
did... You must behave as the hero
I expected you to be."
Executions of soldiers in the British Army were not commonplace. While there were 240,000 Courts Martial and 3,080 death sentences handed down, in only 346 cases was the sentence carried out.
266 British soldiers were executed for "Desertion", 18 for "Cowardice", 7 for "Quitting a post without authority", 5 for "Disobedience to a lawful command" and 2 for "Casting away arms". On the 7th. November 2006, the government of the United Kingdom gave them all a posthumous conditional pardon.
Commission of Enquiry
The British government produced a Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into "Shell-Shock" which was published in 1922. Recommendations from this included:
-- In Forward Areas
No soldier should be allowed to think that loss of nervous or mental control provides an honourable avenue of escape from the battlefield, and every endeavour should be made to prevent slight cases leaving the battalion or divisional area, where treatment should be confined to provision of rest and comfort for those who need it and to heartening them for return to the front line.
-- In Neurological Centres
When cases are sufficiently severe to necessitate more scientific and elaborate treatment they should be sent to special Neurological Centres as near the front as possible, to be under the care of an expert in nervous disorders. No such case should, however, be so labelled on evacuation as to fix the idea of nervous breakdown in the patient’s mind.
In base hospitals.
When evacuation to the base hospital is necessary, cases should be treated in a separate hospital or separate sections of a hospital, and not with the ordinary sick and wounded patients. Only in exceptional circumstances should cases be sent to the United Kingdom, as, for instance, men likely to be unfit for further service of any kind with the forces in the field. This policy should be widely known throughout the Force.
-- Forms of Treatment
The establishment of an atmosphere of cure is the basis of all successful treatment, the personality of the physician is, therefore, of the greatest importance. While recognising that each individual case of war neurosis must be treated on its merits, the Committee are of opinion that good results will be obtained in the majority by the simplest forms of psycho-therapy, i.e., explanation, persuasion and suggestion, aided by such physical methods as baths, electricity and massage. Rest of mind and body is essential in all cases.
The committee are of opinion that the production of hypnoidal state and deep hypnotic sleep, while beneficial as a means of conveying suggestions or eliciting forgotten experiences are useful in selected cases, but in the majority they are unnecessary and may even aggravate the symptoms for a time. They do not recommend psycho-analysis in the Freudian sense.
In the state of convalescence, re-education and suitable occupation of an interesting nature are of great importance. If the patient is unfit for further military service, it is considered that every endeavour should be made to obtain for him suitable employment on his return to active life.
-- Return to the Fighting Line
Soldiers should not be returned to the fighting line under the following conditions:-
(1) If the symptoms of neurosis are of such a character that the soldier cannot be treated overseas with a view to subsequent useful employment.
(2) If the breakdown is of such severity as to necessitate a long period of rest and treatment in the United Kingdom.
(3) If the disability is anxiety neurosis of a severe type.
(4) If the disability is a mental breakdown or psychosis requiring treatment in a mental hospital. Part of the concern was that many British veterans were receiving pensions and had long-term disabilities.
The Consequences of Persistent Shell Shock
By 1939, some 120,000 British ex-servicemen had received final awards for primary psychiatric disability or were still drawing pensions – about 15% of all pensioned disabilities – and another 44,000 or so were getting pensions for ‘Soldier’s Heart’ or Effort Syndrome. There is, though, much that statistics do not show, because in terms of psychiatric effects, pensioners were just the tip of a huge iceberg.
War correspondent Philip Gibbs wrote:
"Something was wrong. They put on civilian
clothes again and looked to their mothers and
wives very much like the young men who had
gone to business in the peaceful days before
August 1914.
But they had not come back the same men.
Something had altered in them. They were
subject to sudden moods, and queer tempers,
fits of profound depression alternating with a
restless desire for pleasure. Many were easily
moved to passion where they lost control of
themselves, many were bitter in their speech,
violent in opinion, and frightening".
One British writer between the wars had little sympathy for the majority of shell shock victims:
"There should be no excuse given for the
establishment of a belief that a functional
nervous disability constitutes a right to
compensation. This is hard saying.
It may seem cruel that those whose sufferings
are real, whose illness has been brought on
by enemy action and very likely in the course
of patriotic service, should be treated with such
apparent callousness.
But there can be no doubt that in an overwhelming
proportion of cases, these patients succumb to
‘shock’ because they get something out of it.
To give them this reward is not ultimately a
benefit to them because it encourages the weaker
tendencies in their character. The nation cannot
call on its citizens for courage and sacrifice and,
at the same time, state by implication that an
unconscious cowardice or an unconscious
dishonesty will be rewarded".
Society and Culture
Shell shock has had a profound impact in British culture and the popular memory of the Great War. At the time, war writers like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen dealt with shell shock in their work. Sassoon and Owen spent time at Craiglockhart War Hospital, which treated shell shock casualties.
Author Pat Barker explored the causes and effects of shell shock in her Regeneration Trilogy, basing many of her characters on real historical figures and drawing on the writings of the first world war poets and the army doctor W. H. R. Rivers.
Modern Cases of Shell Shock
Although the term "shell shocked" is typically used to describe early forms of PTSD, its high-impact explosives-related nature provides modern applications as well. During their deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan, approximately 380,000 U.S. troops, about 19% of those deployed, were estimated to have sustained brain injuries from explosive weapons and devices.
This prompted the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to open up a $10 million study of the blast effects on the human brain. The study revealed that, while the brain remains initially intact immediately after low level blast effects, the chronic inflammation afterwards is what ultimately leads to many cases of shell shock and PTSD.
The Sapper Support memorial was designed to give families and friends a place to reflect and remember those who have left us after battling with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other associated mental illnesses.
The inscription encourages people to "hold the hand of this statue, to reach out and remember those who are no longer with us".
Remember, there is no health without mental health. It's good to talk about your state of mind, please don't suffer in silence.
Or, how I almost became one at the age of 14. After about nine months of agony I managed to pass off as normal angst in 8th grade it came blowing way out of proportion when I graduated. Days before graduation I tore up my hands clawing at a wall and my desk in a desperate bid to keep myself attached to reality. I slipped into a flashback that kept me still and frozen, locked into place by horror. When reality set back in, I shook. It was like I'd been punched in the face, stomach, and golf-clubbed again. My fingers bled. The nails were ragged.
My summer should have been spent working and relaxing. While I did work, I didn't relax at all.
Days after graduating, a strange, new, and horrifying feeling took over.
I was going to die. How, I didn't know, but I knew it would be imminent. I didn't know what I had had a name of its own, but I knew that it was the most out-of-touch I'd ever been with the world. When I was normal I knew that I was safe, but when I felt I was going to die, no one could convince me otherwise.
Through the panic attacks and manifestations of PTSD I managed to maintain a somewhat stable facade. I managed to think of all kinds of excuses to stay around the house, which was the only truly safe place. But excuse after excuse wore thin and I would get dragged out to grocery shop, clothes shop, car shop, and to just get me out of the house. I hated these excursions. I hated the shower curtains, the clothes that still hung on me (I'd lost 20 pounds due to being sick), the stupid dealerships and the cars and the bags of lettuce and dressings.
All I wanted to do was stay alive.
When the first attack hit at work I almost jumped out of a window. While displaying my ever-so-stable face I shut myself in the bathroom. As my heart raced and the building seemed to crumble around me I filled the sink with water. Taking only the time to whip off my eyeglasses I plunged my head into the basin. It always worked in the movies, right?
I'd forgotten about the body's shock response. My hair flipped water all over the tiles, the ugly flocked wallpaper and the stupid matching towels. I couldn't go back to the office like this. My whole ruse would come tumbling down. And I couldn't let it - how good I looked in my little cornflower blue buttondown, cuffs turned up ever-so-slightly with the little-bit-big black jeans (negative sizes don't exist) and the everpresent black shoes. Not a hair out of place. Brand-new black eyeglasses. Earrings all lined up.
So I opened the window. It took some forcing. When I'd finally raised it enough to permit the passage of a body I perched up on the sill, anchored by my bony hands gripping the window and my rubber soles hanging on for dear life. If I could safely fall I could run out of the alley and into the street and away from death. I could feel my thin shoulderblades poking at the shirt, straining to break free. I saw myself hitting the alley below like James Bond and making my getaway.
I also saw a meaty splat in a cornflower blue shirt. I looked down and my stomach dropped. With an inward cry I fell back into the bathroom. I waited for death but it never came.
Throughout the summer I tried to subvert the panic attacks. I stopped reading the newspapers. I ceased listening to the radio. I shunned the New York Times magazine that I'd been reading since I was 12. Even the end piece - my favorite part. I even stopped watching the Ten O'Clock News with Dennis Richmond, a nightly tradition ever since I'd been young. It would be difficult to give up, but by removing triggers I could guarantee safety.
Yet somewhere, there was always a radio turned too loud. A newspaper headline staring up at me from the gutter.
The attacks would come more often. They'd last longer. I'd try to escape them. I would run. There was one day when I almost ended up in the windshield of a brand-new Mercedes. Another day I ran all through San Francisco, depositing myself by the Bay Bridge. But I had outsmarted death. I had survived for the day.
I don't think I've ever feared for my life in any situation more than I have in those four months of hell.
Eventually I couldn't take it any more. After running all over San Francisco and having strangers feel the need to check my arms for track marks and comment on my weight and getting tired of trying to outsmart death, I couldn't take it any more. I got help for what had been troubling me, though sometimes I think the lady was more interested in telling me about the plight of the girls my age in the Albany school district. She was surprised about the physical scraps I'd been in and how my friends and never spread rumors and how I'd never been reduced to a sobbing heap over something someone said about my manner of dress. Not many 14 year old girls showed a prediliction for open buttondowns over tank tops. She told me about Tony Soprano and how he told his therapist what she wanted to hear - not exactly lying, but not telling the whole truth either. Maybe she gave me ideas, but I really think everyone does that when they're uncomfortable.
Four years later, I'm about to graduate high school and I'm doing well. Bumps were hit along the way, but that's life. My nails have long since grown out and scars have long since flattened and healed, but it will always be with me. Since I lost my job I don't wear my cornflower blue shirt that much, but sometimes I take it out and look at it and feel sad, but triumphant.
Some days I still wonder if death is waiting for me behind a light pole, but for now, I've kept on walking.
sequoia took me for an all-afternoon walk on father's day, but somewhere along the line he got a wood splinter in his palm. he was enthusiastic about removing it at first; tape didn't work, and once tweezers touched his hand for the first time it was quite a traumatic experience. it only took a split second to remove most of the splinter, but it took both of us to hold him still, and a whole bowl of raspberries to restore his dignity afterwards. if the rest doesn't come out of his hand by itself, i'm afraid the whole scene will be repeated.
copyright © 2009 sean dreilinger
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