The Evil Hours

by David J. Morris

  Interesting, also, is the degree to which these mythic shamanic journeys seem to parallel the cycle of death and rebirth that so many traumatic survivors describe today. (Recall Alice Sebold’s feeling her life had ended after her rape, only to feel “reborn” later.) Thinking about the question of trauma mythically for a moment, it is tempting to wonder if, on a certain level, what we call PTSD doesn’t represent an incomplete passage from the underworld of death and darkness back to a more fully realized consciousness of one’s role in the universe, a knowledge of the hugeness of existence and of the value of safety and comfort and social connectedness. Modern medicine, like any other culture, has its mythologies, and who’s to say that this mythology doesn’t have its blind spots, its failures of imagination, its false gods, just as the Huichol mythology does?

  The soldier turned writer is something of a cliché in American culture (Norman Mailer, for instance, complained that everyone in his World War II rifle company was working on a novel), but most of the veterans I know, in addition to finding major parts of their war surpassingly awful, also found a lot of it to be sublime, and more than a few of them woke up after being home for a few months and were suddenly consumed by a need for answers to life’s great questions. It was as if the war had deeply unsettled them, forcing them to confront aspects of themselves that had been ignored for too long. This contemporary yet ancient way of looking at trauma is almost completely absent in the clinical literature on the subject.

  War is always ironic, the literary historian Paul Fussell observed, and something similar is probably true of trauma, because the first glimpse we get of post-traumatic stress in the historical record comes from the land of Sumer, an ancient civilization that existed for around a thousand years in a place that we today refer to as Iraq. Four thousand years before the United States invaded Iraq, ostensibly because of weapons of mass destruction, two converging armies, those of the Ilamites and the Subarians, invaded the Sumerian city of Ur looking for booty. (Some scholars think that the land of Ur, or Uruk, is where we get the place-name “Iraq.”) The aftermath of this event is recorded on stone tablets in an anonymous account known as the Lamentation of Ur.

  The city they make into ruins; the people groan.

  Its lady cries: “Alas for my city,” cries: “Alas for my house.”

  In its lofty gates, where they were wont to promenade, dead bodies were lying about;

  In its boulevards, where the feasts were celebrated, scattered they lay.

  . . . At night a bitter lament having been raised unto me,

  I, although, for that night I tremble, fled not before that night’s violence.

  The storm’s cyclone like destruction—verily its terror has filled me full.

  Because of its affliction in my nightly sleeping place,

  In my nightly sleeping place verily there is no peace for me.

  Obviously, the author of this account isn’t available to be interviewed about the nature of this “affliction” and why exactly there was no peace in their “nightly sleeping place,” but it’s fascinating to note that the author of the Lamentation of Ur did, apparently, see a relatively direct cause and effect relationship between “terror” and subsequent “affliction,” linking such an event with a lack of sleep. Today, encountering such an ancient fragment, it is tempting to look at it as a case study in the history of science—one gets the sense that one is observing the birth of the clinical mindset, the ability to observe a phenomenon in the abstract, connecting a physical event to a resultant pattern of symptoms. At the very least, from this archaic example we gain proof of the existence of perhaps the most vexing of post-traumatic symptoms, insomnia, which is a problem that remains largely unchanged today. As one VA psychologist, who has treated hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, told me recently, “Sleep is one of the last areas to resolve in PTSD.”

  The Greeks, by contrast, took a notably unclinical approach to war’s effect on the psyche. Some contemporary researchers have even gone so far as to look at the ancient Greeks, with their encompassing mythology, as representing something of a dark age in the study of trauma. And yet, as with so many things relating to the mysteries of life, the ancient Greeks have a lot to teach us about terror and loss. In his pioneering studies on The Iliad and The Odyssey, books which helped launch a renaissance in classical trauma studies, retired VA psychiatrist Jonathan Shay argues that “Homer saw things that we in psychiatry and psychology had more or less missed.” Homer’s epic poems are virtual warehouses of knowledge about war-born psychological injury, yet as the poet himself proclaims in the opening lines of The Odyssey, his intent is to celebrate, to sing of the deeds of Odysseus, not to educate or to provide a clinical taxonomy of any kind. For the Greeks, the heroic ideal was literally a religion, and Homer’s works focused on combat and the clashing of spears in a way that might seem juvenile to some today were it not for his very Greek insistence upon depicting the losers of such contests in great detail. (As the legendary Oxford classicist C. M. Bowra put it, “The Greeks thought victory glorious and a defeat heroically endured only a shade less glorious.”) Strife, and one could say terror, were at the heart of the Greek worldview, a belief system that is so pervasive in their writing that it is likely they viewed war in a way that is similar, in a moral sense, to the way natural disasters are viewed today—as events outside the realm of human agency, as acts of God or, in this case, acts of the gods. The poet Heraclitus described how conflict defined the age:

  Justice in our minds is strife.

  We cannot help but see

  War makes us as we are.

  To die nobly in battle was the surest route to fame and honor in Greek society, and while The Odyssey delves unflinchingly into the costs of heroism and the aftermath of war, the idea of linking such tribulations even tangentially to madness would likely have been at odds with the basic Greek view of life.

  Curiously, the Greeks had a rather sophisticated view of other forms of mental illness, such as depression. Medicine at that time was based upon humoral theory, which viewed character as a balancing act between four basic elements: phlegm, blood, yellow bile, and black bile. The ancient physician Empedocles, for instance, thought that depression was caused by too much black bile (the Greek words for black bile are melaina chole, which is where we get the word “melancholy”). Hippocrates, the father of medicine, held a surprisingly biological view of mental illness. “It is the brain which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absentmindedness, and acts that are contrary to habit.” This divide between the philosophical/religious view of madness and the psychological costs of war and disaster was clear and inviolate, which helps explain why trauma remained outside the circle of medicine for millennia. It was, for lack of a better word, a matter of politics. To treat venerated warriors like the insane would have been unthinkable to the Greeks.

  Similarly, the rather brutish politics of the ancient world help to explain why there are comparatively few accounts of rape in the historical record. Women in antiquity were treated as something like property, and while incidents of rape do appear in ancient literature, they were often recorded in the manner that one might record the theft of livestock or the damage caused by a passing storm. (Or, as in the case of the rape of Lucretia, described by Livy in the History of Rome, the victim announces that she has been dishonored and commits suicide in front of her husband and father.) To make an obvious point, rape victims were not treated as heroic survivors worthy of veneration in antiquity. In fact, in one notable instance of rape in ancient literature, the writer seems to dwell on the lamentable weakness of women as something needing correction. We see this in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the victim, a mortal named Caenis, is raped by the god Neptune. Afterward, Neptune asks what he might do to please her, to which she responds: “What I want is not to be ravished again, ever . . . I have a serious prayer that ma
tches the serious wrong you have just now done me. I want you to make me a man so that nothing like this can happen again.” Neptune grants her prayer. And as she spoke, “her voice began to resonate deeper and fuller . . . Her body was turning to that of a male and, to make it an even better gift, Neptune allowed it the further favor—that never should swords or weapons wound it. Caenis, renewed as Caeneus . . .” Thus was rape transformed into a boon in the ancient world.

  Western literature begins in strife and trauma, in the sweat and spear clashing, the agony and exertion of The Iliad. In his epic poem, written eight and a half centuries before the birth of Christ, Homer depicts Achilles, the hero of The Iliad, as the ideal warrior, a surpassingly talented soldier and stalker of men, a man capable of intense feeling who, not coincidentally, also appeared to suffer from at least two symptoms of what today might be called post-traumatic stress. (One of the biggest differences between the Greek world and our own is that public displays of emotion by men were not only tolerated but also considered highly dignified, an appropriate response to an overwhelming event.) His best friend, aide-de-camp, and comrade (and, some say, lover) Patroclus is killed in battle. Having tended to his body, honoring Patroclus in accordance with the strict martial rites of the time, Achilles found himself unable to simply put the loss behind him:

  Achilles went on grieving for his friend, whom he could not banish from his mind, and all-conquering sleep refused to visit him. He tossed to one side and the other, thinking always of his loss, of Patroclus’s manliness and spirit . . . of fights with the enemy and adventures on unfriendly seas. As memories crowded in on him, the warm tears poured down his cheeks.

  Whenever I read lines like this from Homer, I think of friends who lost buddies in Iraq and Afghanistan, men who despite having strived mightily to protect their comrades saw them die anyhow. I have watched, over the years, as these good and honorable people then proceeded to eviscerate themselves with guilt, convinced that they had somehow violated the holiest and most sacred of warrior bonds. One of the most psychologically wounded trauma survivors I’ve ever met was a Marine who lost seven of his closest friends in a single IED blast near Fallujah in 2004. The fact that he’d had an argument with one of them right before he was killed only deepened the blow. “Kevin wasn’t the same guy who’d shipped out to Iraq seven months before,” his sister told me.

  When I first met him at a restaurant, his eyes locked on me the second I stepped through the door. We sized each other up like boxers as I made my way to his table. Sitting down, I could see clearly the anxiety, the guilt that possessed his frame almost like rictus. He sat as stiffly as a man about to get a root canal. The only things that moved were his eyes, which missed nothing, and his right leg, which worked up and down like a sewing machine needle the entire meal. We got to talking, and more of his story emerged. He was in a kind of reverse basic training for the most afflicted sorts of post-traumatic sufferers. “Boot camp with smoking privileges,” he called it. He told me he’d been addicted to crystal meth, a drug he knew to be the worst of them all. “The only time my symptoms go away is when I’m high.”

  Post-traumatic stress is a slippery thing, a ghost that haunts history, but it isn’t hard to imagine what happened to Kevin. The instant that the IED had gone off, killing his buddies, the moral universe he’d inhabited for the first nineteen years of his life essentially ceased to exist. Virtually everything he assumed to be true and right and just came to an end in that moment. (Recently, a number of researchers, many of them close readers of Homer, have begun calling this sort of thing “moral injury.”) What happened next is harder to understand, but somewhere deep in Kevin’s psyche, in a dim place beyond the light of reason, an insistent voice began whispering a secret message to him until it was the only thing he heard. The message was simple and unmistakable: Bad things don’t happen to good people.

  Out of the Corps a year later, it wasn’t long before Kevin lost his way. Looking back on it, one could say he tried to make true that secret lie he heard within. Bad things don’t happen to good people. Alcohol, drugs, rampant paranoia, and the life of a shut-in soon followed. In such moments, when one’s social horizon shrinks down to a pinhole, the idea of palliative human warmth can seem untrue, wrong, like a heat on the skin. Self-damage becomes inevitable. This unnerving human impulse to reflect one’s inner pain with outer damage runs across cultures. As Homer shows us in The Iliad, there’s an immortal species of self-torture that demands physical expression. Learning of Patroclus’s death,

  A black storm cloud of pain shrouded Achilles.

  On his bowed head he scattered dust and ash

  In handfuls and befouled his beautiful face,

  Letting black ash sift on his fragrant khiton.

  Then in the dust he stretched his giant length

  And tore his hair with both hands.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Homer anticipates other ideas in contemporary psychological research that we are only now coming to terms with. In The Odyssey, for example, we find a depiction of survivor’s guilt, written 2,760 years before the term “survivor’s syndrome” was coined by Holocaust researcher W. G. Niederland. As Odysseus faces a deadly storm, which threatens to sink his ship on the way home from the Trojan War, he finds himself wishing that he had been killed with his buddies in Troy instead of dying ignominiously at sea:

  There is nothing for me now but sudden death. Three and four times blessed are those countrymen of mine who fell long ago on the broad plains of Troy in loyal service to the sons of Atreus. If only I too could have met my fate and died the day the Trojan hordes let fly at me with their bronze spears over Achilles’ corpse! I should at least have had my burial rites and the Achaeans would have spread my fame abroad. But now it seems I was predestined to an ignoble death.

  Reading these old poems, The Odyssey in particular, one cannot help but be struck by what appears to be the more than metaphorical inability of these survivors to go home. It is less the enigma of survival at stake in The Odyssey than the enigma of homecoming, the frustrated transit between worlds: the world of savage, warring nature and the world of civilization. Indeed, the entire narrative structure of The Odyssey is built around this basic fact: the Trojan War ends, and in the face of all reason Odysseus hits the road for ten years in what amounts to history’s greatest road trip, in the process bedding the beautiful sea goddess Calypso and narrowly escaping a mind-killing drug habit in the Land of the Lotus-Eaters. It is impossible to know what dark, self-destructive impulses were at work in Odysseus’s postwar heart, but it isn’t hard to imagine that after the brutality and capriciousness of war, Odysseus might not have felt fully prepared to return to a buttoned-down domestic life back in Ithaca. This deep-seated, even existential, feeling of having been cut loose in the world, transformed by the cruelty of fate into a rootless wanderer without a relational home, a theme familiar to readers of Jon Krakauer or Jack Kerouac, has little place in the modern psychiatric canon and is not generally included in discussions of PTSD. Still, one sees this theme echoing throughout the literature of trauma, predating even Homer. (In The Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, who is generally regarded as the mythic predecessor of Odysseus, looks on his dead comrade Enkidu and cries, “I cannot bear what happened to my friend. Then I was frightened, I was terrified by death, and I set out to roam the wilderness . . .”)

  This impulse to wander, to leave the awful past behind and kill time in a strange place, is written across the lives of so many survivors that it could easily stand as a literary genre all its own. It is, in essence, a form of resurrection. Alice Sebold, describing her postrape roamings, said, “Syracuse was over. Good riddance, I thought. I was going to the University of Houston in the fall. I was going to get an MA in poetry. I would spend the summer trying to reinvent myself. I had not seen Houston, never been south of Tennessee, but it was going to be different there. Rape would not follow me.”

  Trying to outrun shame, even perceived shame, is perhaps a universal human
impulse, and it should come as no surprise that The Odyssey is but an early example of what can be found in every era of human history. After the Civil War, the number of veterans, both Blue and Gray, who hit the road after Appomattox is beyond counting. In fact, once you start looking into the number of Confederate veterans in Jesse James’s gang, that roving band of gunslingers who terrorized the American West throughout the 1870s, an entirely new theory of how the American West was settled opens up. The Wild West was filled with scarred young men whose only skills in life included killing, sleeping on hard ground, stalking, and looting. Closer to home, a dear friend of mine, who was drugged and raped on Long Island as a nineteen-year-old, left America as soon as she could, cut off all of her hair, and wandered around Europe for months, eventually moving to a small island off the coast of Italy. One Iraq veteran I interviewed for this book has moved almost every year since his unit returned from Baghdad in 2003, an odyssey that has taken him to three different continents.