While avoiding packing for my trip to Greensboro tomorrow (though – crap – it’s now 4:11 AM, so let’s call it “today”), I ended up watching a movie called Heaven which I found interesting enough to look up on IMDB, leading me to a distracted series of link-clicks until I ended up at a completely unrelated (and true) story from the late ’60s, which completely blew my mind.
Speaking of my mind, here’s a (rather embarrassing) glimpse at how mine operates – I am drawn to stories involving high-stakes adventures, wherein one seeks catharsis after experiences of trauma, from the (actually fairly implausible) story told in Heaven, to the story at which I finally landed later on, through this chain:
- IMDB listing for Heaven, to
- IMDB listing for co-leading actor Giovanni Ribisi, to
- Wikipedia listing for the same dude (who, it turns out, is a Scientologist), to
- Wikipedia entry for Scientology, to
- Section on the organization’s past illegal activities (where I read about how they tried to ruin the life of a journalist named Paulette Cooper, whom they’d targeted as a so-called “Suppressive Person” for her 1970 book, The Scandal of Scientology), to
- Wikipedia page for Paulette Cooper (where I was interested to note that she’d gone from fairly intense works, like the one that got her into trouble with the Scientologists, to “fluffier,” co-authored books like The Most Romantic Resorts for Destination Weddings, Marriage Renewals & Honeymoons), to
- A story by Cooper about the Scientology fiasco, hosted on her own site, to
- A story hosted at the website for the Ocean Liner Museum about how she’d once been a stowaway.
Paulette Cooper, in 1967
Here, finally, is the paragraph from that story that grabbed my attention (in light of details I’d read on Wikipedia about her early life, to which I’ll return momentarily):
In retrospect, I often wonder why I did it. Sometimes I think I did it not just to prove that it could be done, but to prove that I was the one who could do it. Sometimes I think I did it just because I knew it would make interesting cocktail conversation afterwards. (“Oh, so you’re the girl I read about.”) Occasionally, I have a sneaking suspicion that I did it just to save some money. But now, as I stand at the foot of the pier, looking up at the giant luxury ocean liner, I wonder again why I was about to do such a strange and silly thing…
…And now, for some armchair psychiatry (aka “projecting”):
Why, indeed, did she do it?
As someone who knows some of the more bizarre contours of intergenerationally as well as directly acquired PTSD, it’s impossible for me to discount another aspect of her story, mentioned in the ‘early life’ section of her Wikipedia page: that she was born in Auschwitz, where her parents were murdered. She is compelled to act out a high-stakes drama involving intense hypervigilance and hiding, passing among others, surviving without access to basic resources, etc – as her parents may have attempted, but failed to do (while her own life was spared, so she has that ‘survivor guilt’ thing happening as well).
On that cruise ship, though – a site of incongruous splendor, for its being – possibly – a site for a Holocaust survivor’s subconscious exercise in re-enacting trauma – she could at least feel assured that even though she faced certain dangers (indeed, her risk of being sexually assaulted is a primary focus of the piece), she could never be in the same ‘neighborhood’ of risk that she was, on some level, remembering.
This, then, is the only interpretation that makes any sense to me: That her adventure was a creative, albeit risky way of scratching at the lingering ‘itch’ left behind for years – sometimes for decades, or even generations – following extreme trauma.
I could be wrong, of course – hers is not my experience to judge, whatever (wildly uneven) parallels I may find between certain aspects of our experiences.
Of course, it is not lost on me here that I strongly prefer to analyze others’ traumas, rather than my own. (Distancing, anyone?) Or that I went from compulsively watching a film about one kind of catharsis-seeking-after-trauma, through a random assortment of links, until I found a completely separate story of catharsis-seeking-after-trauma: lather, rinse, repeat – ad infinitum.
What is most sad, here, is that on any given day, I go through scenarios much like this. Maybe I’m reading a book instead of watching a movie, or talking with a friend about his past trauma rather than compulsively clicking through link after link until I find some random trauma narrative online to which I can, on some level, relate. The stories are different, but they always repeat some element of the catharsis-seeking-after-trauma script.
Obviously, the more constructive thing for me to do would be to get back to writing my own stories, because they will either corrode me to death from the inside, or they will be allowed out, and perhaps even be permitted to do “good” of some kind out there in the world.
In my defense, I have been doing that much more lately – but the closer I get to the really, really difficult material, the more I have these episodes of freakout behavior, wasting hours upon hours soaking in the variously helpful and distracting narratives of strangers.
I’ll close with some especially apt George Orwell:
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows, that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.
(qtd. in The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, and Reportage, p. 395)
