Trauma and time
As the first waves of COVID-19 crashed upon us (I'm writing from a UK perspective, and conscious that, for me at least, the virus has felt more and more 'real' as it has come geographically 'closer to home'), one of the most profoundly helpful insights into what was happening came from the discipline of trauma theory. Even before our national death toll here starting rising exponentially, the tsunami of information, and the rapid progression of 'lockdown' measures created a sense of collective shock resembling trauma: that which 'begins with an event or series of events that are too much to bear' (Arlene Audergon). The experience of trauma, Audergon goes on to say, 'is beyond the "edge" of what is possible to perceive and respond to, beyond what we are able to include in our identities, as individuals or communities'.
Like many others, I think, I've found it really hard to find the concentration to read, think or write in the last few weeks. I've been immensely grateful to those who have done so - but my capacity to receive, let alone digest, the wisdom of others has been frustratingly minimised. My brain has stubbornly refused to 'make the connections' in the way it is normally reasonably adept at. And that has not just been about the intense demands of the job - working with colleagues to radically reconfigure our community-building work and our ways of 'being church' here - or the fact that I've been sharing my house 24/7 with the three other humans I love most dearly but away from whom, as an introvert, I also normally value my 'quiet spaces'!
The one thought that began to 'join some dots' for me was this (from theologian of trauma, Shelly Rambo): traumatic experiences cause a disruption - a rupture, even - in the way our bodies, our words, and time work.
The 'overwhelmings' of traumatic experience affect our bodies in ways that escape our cognitive functioning and awareness. In extreme stress, areas of the brain shut down, especially those parts responsible for language- and meaning-making. Trauma literally refuses to let us 'make sense' of it. Our bodies themselves 'hold' and respond to trauma, then. Numbness, exhaustion, a racing heart, headaches, loss of appetite, trouble sleeping, and more... All are possible bodily responses to traumatic experiences, beyond what we're conscious of.
To state the obvious, the mundane trauma - for the majority of us, at least - of this particular traumatic experience, of infection-control-induced 'lockdown', has also ruptured our experience of space. Our habitual, much-loved gathering places are shut - erased from our everyday map - and all our normal practices of building and sustaining community through gathering people together - to eat together, talk together, make friends together, walk together, pray together, garden together, etc - have been put on hold. The physical world of the everyday has shrunk to the size of our home, with the exception of perhaps a handful of well-trodden routes 'out' (as a family we currently have a few variations our daily walks that can take us to one or other of two local bits of woodland) and a weekly trip to a supermarket. And on those rare occasions when we are out and about, that unfortunate phrase 'social distancing' (which means to emphasise physical distancing, but risks disconnecting us socially) is shaping our bodily habits to 'steer clear' of our fellow humans, focusing our attention more on our 2m-radius protective circle than on our 'ordinary time' rituals of making contact and interaction with our passing neighbour. This sudden reshaping of space has had profound effects on how we understand 'neighbourliness', 'presence' and 'community', which I'm wrestling with alongside my friends and colleagues in community-building on the Firs and Bromford, and which our Street Connector Mentor Paul Wright has begun to articulate in lucid ways in his Street Connector blog.
But it's the ways in which trauma disrupts our usual sense of time that I want to dwell with here. As Shelly Rambo explains, we normally relate to time in quite a linear way: 'the past is behind, the future ahead, and the present is the viewpoint from which we relate to both'. But with trauma, 'the past does not stay, so to speak, in the past. Instead, it invades the present', presenting us with experiences that were barely comprehensible in the past, and in the present might still escape comprehension. Rambo, following Jacques Derrida, plays with the word 'survival' ('survivre' in French - 'over-living', or 'living on'). The radical dimensions of trauma are like a death. And surviving 'is not a state in which one gets beyond death; instead, death remains in the experience of survival and life is reshaped in light of death - not in light of its finality but its persistence. Persons who experience trauma live in the suspended middle territory, between death and life' (Rambo, Spirit and Trauma, p.25).
Shelly Rambo invites us, then, not to look for ways of 'getting over' or 'moving beyond' - but rather to attend to 'what remains': both in terms of the traumatic experience and its ongoing effects, but also in terms of a persistence, a survival, of life, of hope, of love. She calls us to a 'witnessing from the middle': dwelling in the midst of the experience of trauma, attending to 'what remains', and seeking to articulate something of it, while knowing that the fragmentation of trauma 'makes it impossible to see, hear, or touch clearly'.
Politics and time
One of the struggles in our more political conversations right now is between treating our current times as a 'ground zero' - an entering into a state of exception, a newly 'blank sheet', where reference to anything that has gone before is irrelevant - and paying attention to some of the pre-existing conditions that have left us in this place. It's interesting, if not surprising, that the powers-that-be are currently pushing back strongly against the latter, claiming that the urgent pressures of the present mean we can't afford to spend time attending to the past. The sheer inadequacy of the NHS' capacity to tackle the crisis right now, for example - whether it's testing kits, or beds, or ventilators, or personal protective equipment - is a direct result of a recent history of under-funding, competitive tendering, refusals to cooperate with multi-national purchasing schemes and to learn lessons from countries affected ahead of our own 'infection curve', and so on. Rambo would name these political failures as being among the multiple dimensions of the violence that enacts trauma: communal, institutional, national, and international.
As BBC journalist Emily Maitlis reminded us in a widely-acclaimed introduction to Newsnight last week, Coronavirus 'is not the great leveller, the consequences of which everyone - rich or poor - suffers the same'. Rather, 'those on the front line right now - bus drivers and shelf stackers, nurses, care home workers, hospital staff and shop keepers - are disproportionately the lowest paid members of our workforce. They are more likely to catch the disease because they are more exposed. Those who live in tower blocks and small flats will find the lockdown a lot tougher. Those who work in manual jobs will be unable to work from home.' If, as Alastair McIntosh reminds us, the roots of poverty are to be found in 'a form of violence that comes from a deficit of empathy between those who have much and those who have little', then COVID-19 has both exposed and exacerbated that violence, however many of us go out of our houses to clap every Thursday night. The way our society has been ordered and dis-ordered over many years, profoundly shapes the ways in which our society is now breaking down. The current, traumatic crisis cannot, must not, be an excuse for forgetting the past, our political pre-history 'before' COVID-19.
At the same time, we are already discovering amid the infection that some things that were previously unthinkable appear now to be possible. Holding up care workers, shop workers, public transport workers and refuse collectors as valued, essential 'key workers'. Taking steps towards a universal basic income for all citizens (and, in Spain, committing to it as national policy). Self-organised mutual aid networks at local, grassroots level - neighbours on a street communicating with each other in WhatsApp groups to offer shopping, medicine pickups, and a friendly chat; corner-shopkeepers delivering to people's doors and being generous with credit; neighbours donating thousands of pounds in just days to a neighbourhood mutual aid fund to support fellow neighbours struggling financially; spontaneous exchanges of skills, seeds, cooking ingredients and more; a resident repairing a waterlogged path, and others setting up rope swings, bird-feeders, a tree-house and a 'thankful jar' in the local park... and all of these are examples only from my immediate neighbourhood, stories echoed and multiplied across the country, across the world. There is talk, already, of how the world should look different 'after' COVID-19 - of 're-imagining' society, politics, economics - and beginning to live that 'after' in the present. Amid the flood of information, and stories, and ideas, and creativity that we're currently swimming in - a flood that can itself be as overwhelming as the isolation, the suffering, the death and the grieving - we need to be intentional, disciplined even, in our communal and societal efforts to notice, remember, treasure those things that should remain, beyond the present.
At the same time - and here we need to be attentive to those who have lived through comparable traumatic events before now, not least the inhabitants of New Orleans after storm Katrina - Shelly Rambo cautions us about a 'post-storm push for fresh starts': 'the rhetoric of "re" - rebuilding, restoring, recovering - comes at a cost'. To explore the cost further, and the possible alternatives, we need to get more explicitly theological, and think about resurrection. And that's where I'm going to turn in the next instalment...
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