Poison For Poison

trauma diary

Tonight I pulled into a parking spot in front of Stater Brothers and into headlights of a parked car where a woman in her thirties sat smoking a cigarette. Dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, alone in the blue-black inside the car, one arm dangling from the open window. Her face was still but her brows pulled together. Weeks ago, I was smoking in a parking lot, windows down, when a guy waved and approached. “Can I buy one of those off you?” He wore a suit and tie. I gave him a few cigarettes and watched him walk toward his car. At work, a co-worker leaves the building at break and brings the waft of Marlboro Reds on his way back in. Driving, I see a neighbor pulling on a cigarette in his red family car. When my youngest child and I walk the dogs in the evening, a middle-aged man and and woman sit on the curb between two trucks, talking and smoking.

During the Covid lockdown, my youngest and I walked daily. Our suburbia has canyon lots, trails by water lined with trees and tall grasses, parks that blur into wildflowers and trees. I remember seeing no one smoking. At the time, Covid was worst in Italy, and my oldest son and his new wife were in Milan, hibernating in her family apartment while down the street, a large freezer truck held the dead bodies the morgue had no room for. I read some initial Italian research showed that smokers had less chance of dying of Covid. I thought maybe cigarette smoke is so poisonous, it kills the virus dead right where it breeds, like black fog rolling over a swamp full of water snakes.

At night when the memories roll through me, teeth-chattering, stomach-sick fear breeds in my mind, and I roll the black fog over it, soaking in poison. I am alone now, and alone is where I come from. I have a memory of myself sitting in a bush. I am six, or seven, or five. I have already a whiff of disgust or shame about my self as a person in the world. I sense that I am not like other people or other children. When I bury myself in the bushes, eat dirt, crush the tiny berries between my fingers, pull the sweet from a honeysuckle, I feel integrity. I am part of these things and they are a part of me and in nature, disgusting things exist without judgement.

Yiyun Lee’s memoir is titled In Nature Things Merely Grow and although it is about the suicide of her two sons it is about the absolute sheer abysmal abyss of disconnection which is to say trauma which is to say loss of all meaning. Her heart is broken and her already tenuous belief that life might be worth living has been evaporated. Like nature, she lets herself ‘merely grow’ after the deaths of her two children, without meaning, a vine along the fence. Reading this book opens horror. Not just because the two boys killed themselves, but because of her exquisitely acute description of the abyss of trauma. Because I have been like a boat in Gatsby’s tide, borne ceaselessly back into the current.

When Faulkner wrote “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”: there is the DNA of trauma, and there is the nervous system of trauma, and those horror forms, one of science and one of the arts, are expressed in the human experience. The flip side of the horror forms are the life forms, calling ancestral strength and wisdom, nourishment through connection. To believe that it is always possible to choose to heal, without a guide, is cruel, wrong. To reverse engineer a black hole. Yiyun Lee writing her memoir, the second book she has written about the suicide of a son, the second, is in itself an incredible act of life. I kept thinking, reading it, of the ‘cold light of the mind.’ How awful intelligence can be, how unsparing and brutal, without spirit. This is what trauma feels like inside of my body: cold. unsparing. brutal. alone. horror.

As far as I know Yiyun Lee does not smoke cigarettes. I wonder how her mind holds Perhaps it is something to do with the black hole. She is both on this side and the other side of memory. My oldest son told me that if you jumped into a black hole, observers will still see you frozen at the lip, while you will also be ‘in’ the black hole, in another place entirely. The past isn’t even past.