The Other Side

by Lacy M. Johnson

  The term’s deep history can be traced back to the Spanish conquest of Mexico, to La Malinche, a Nahua woman who translated for Hernán Cortés, who bore him a child, who helped him enslave and annihilate the entire Aztec Empire. To the Spanish she was known as Doña Marina, a helpful, obedient woman. But over time, especially among Mexican nationalists, her name became synonymous with treachery; to this day the term malinchista refers to a disloyal Mexican. In popular folklore, she is often placed in stark opposition to chaste women: Mary, mother of Jesus, the Virgin of Guadalupe. More recently, she has become known as La Chingada, the woman who is fucked.

  Page 52: Another memory comes back. In normal everyday situations, the brain turns experience (impressions, perceptions, observations) into information, which is encoded for processing and temporarily stored. Synaptic consolidation, the first step toward making experience a memory, begins with a series of cascading changes and communications between and among molecules, triggering protein reactions and changes in genetic information and gene expression, which in turn leads to the permanent alteration of certain synaptic proteins in the brain. All of this takes place within the first few minutes or hours of an experience. System consolidation, on the other hand, takes up to two decades, and involves the gradual process of reorganizing and transporting the memories, temporarily stored in one part of the brain, to another part of the brain where the memories can be stored more permanently.

  In traumatic experiences, however, stress hormones trigger a significant narrowing of consciousness, which means there is increased memory retention for certain details, and partial or total amnesia for others. This altered memory gets passed throughout the brain where it is processed differently from other memories by using much more synaptic energy and requiring that the energy be distributed across many more encoding neurons. This makes the traumatic memory more engorged with sensation and perception than other memories, which means it gets consolidated differently. Or, in some cases, the traumatic memory may not be consolidated at all. Because the traumatic memory often does not fit into the flow and structure of linear time and narrative, it may detach from normal events and memory. This detachment can take many forms, including event-specific amnesia, which may last for hours, weeks, or years; dissociation, which refers to a compartmentalization and fracturing of experience; or the memory may completely lack a semantic component, which is to say, it can’t be spoken. Without a narrative, the traumatic memory splits off from ordinary consciousness, and elements of the trauma may begin to intrude into consciousness: as terrifying perceptions, obsessional preoccupations, and anxiety reactions. Without a narrative, the experience cannot be fully absorbed by consciousness, which is not to say it is not remembered, but that the memory enters a liminal realm in which it is both acknowledged and unacknowledged, consolidated and not consolidated, part of you and not part, perhaps even indefinitely. See Pierre Janet (1919, 1925), and Bessel A. van der Kolk and Rita Fisler (1995) for a detailed discussion of the relationship between trauma, dissociation, and memory consolidation.

  from four

  Page 55: Two armless chairs face one another. Samuel Beckett, Ohio Impromptu. The actual line in the stage direction reads: Two plain armless white deal chairs.

  Page 56: He wants me to achieve mental balance. The official diagnosis, as I understand it, is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which, in 2000, was still a relatively “new” category of mental disorder. This particular diagnosis first appears in the DSM-III (1980), which includes 265 diagnostic categories, 82 of which did not appear in the DSM-II. As one of the “new” diagnoses, PTSD is classified as a sub-category of anxiety disorders, a stress response precipitated by a catastrophically traumatic event that is outside the range of usual human experience. This particular diagnosis initially evolved as the result of the combined efforts of researchers, social workers, and psychiatrists to describe a combination of symptoms particular to combat veterans, and its inclusion in the DSM-III is considered a watershed event. Whereas “shell shock” had long been considered a weakness of the individual to handle the rigors of war, for the first time experts seemed to agree that a stress response was not the result of a defect in the individual, but rather a normal reaction to an abnormal experience. Over time, mental health professionals began to remark on similarities between the symptoms manifested by combat veterans and those manifested by Holocaust survivors, civilian victims of war, abused children, and raped and battered women. Eventually, researchers began to say that traumatic events might be so endemic and pervasive that catastrophic trauma isn’t really outside of the realm of normal human experience at all.

  Page 59: The sunlight lynched in the blinds. Lucie Brock-Broido, “How Can It Be I Am No Longer I.” The lines read:

  . . . How flinching

  The world will seem—in the lynch

  Of light as I sail home in a winter steeled

  For the deaths of the few loved left living I will

  Always love.

  Page 64: Even though they’re more troubling to look at. See Susan Sontag, On Photography:

  To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more—and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.

  from five

  Page 69: How is it possible to reclaim the body. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” the last essay he published before his death:

  The mirror emerges because I am a visible see-er, because there is a reflexivity of the sensible; the mirror translates and reproduces that reflexivity. In it, my externality becomes complete. Everything that is most secret about me passes into that face, that flat, closed being of which I was already dimly aware, from having seen my reflection mirrored in water.

  Page 72: It’s the kind of job a girl like me has spent her whole life training for. See Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, especially chapter three, “The Same Subject Continued”: Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

  Page 73: Everyone in the club gets to see. In “The Sexual Aberrations,” collected in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud argues that the “history of human civilization shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct.” The connection is so intimate that “the sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness—a desire to subjugate; the biological significance of it seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing.”

  Page 73: That image, of the self. John Berger, Ways of Seeing. Also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.

  Page 74: I cry out each time in pain or mock pain. See Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: “If a woman’s sexual sense of self has centered on pain as far back as the record goes, who is she without it? If suffering is beauty and beauty is love, she cannot be sure she will be loved if she does not suffer. It is hard, because of such conditioning, to envisage a female body free of pain and still desirable.”

  Page 75: Which is certainly not . . . I meant to become. Denis Johnson, “The White Fires of Venus”:

  I’m telling you it’s cold inside the body that is not the body,

  lonesome behind the face

  that is certainly not the face

  of the person one meant to become.

  from six

  Page 84: It’s possible I’m not remembering right. Memory, in this case, means not only the power of the mind to remember things, but also the mind itself, insofar as it is regarded as the total sum of things remembered. By memory I do not necessarily mean any specific recollection, remembrance, impression, or reminiscence, but rather the relationship or association
among impressions, sensory perceptions, and thoughts that arise out of lived experience. That is to say, human memory is relational, and fallible, and is not so much an accurate accounting of events as it is a set of processes by which we encode, store, and retrieve information. These processes depend on reinforcement, which moves the memory relationship from short-lived categories (immediate memory, working memory) to longer-lasting ones (long-term memory) by bringing together certain sensory information and discarding other information. The main feature of this process, of converting short-term information to long-term memory for storage, is loss, the forgetting of distracting information. It is no coincidence, then, that the word itself, memory, comes from the Anglo-French memorie, something written to be kept in mind; from the Latin memoria, a reminiscence; from the Old Norse, Mímir, the name of the giant who guards the Well of Wisdom; and from the Old English murnan, to mourn.

  Page 87: Slouching toward oblivion. W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”:

  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  Page 89: Do not refute who I am! Paul Celan, “O little root of a dream”:

  even

  here,

  where you

  refute me,

  to the letter.

  Page 96: I look over my shoulder and see him. Michel Foucault discusses the relationship between spectacle and surveillance and power in “Panopticism”:

  He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjugation.

  from seven

  Page 101: As if relief might flow from unfamiliarity. Samuel Beckett, Ohio Impromptu: “Relief he had hoped would flow from unfamiliarity.”

  from eight

  Page 122: At first, I have a body. Anthony Synnott, “Tomb, Temple, Machine and Self: The Social Construction of the Body”:

  Plato believed the body was a “tomb,” Paul said it was the “temple” of the Holy Spirit, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught that it was a “corpse.” Christians believed, and believe, that the body is not only physical, but also spiritual and mystical, and many believed it was an allegory of church, state and family. Some said it was cosmic: one with the planets and the constellations. Descartes wrote that the body is a “machine,” and this definition has underpinned biomedicine to this day; but Sartre said that the body is the self.

  from nine

  Page 129: All I want is someone to fuck me senseless. The headline of a recent article by Katie Roiphe in Newsweek announces, “Spanking Goes Mainstream: From the steamy bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey to HBO’s Girls, sexual domination is in vogue. Katie Roiphe on why women’s power at work may be fueling the craze.” Roiphe quips, “Even though fantasies are something that, by definition, one can’t control, they seem to be saying something about modern women that nearly everyone wishes wasn’t said.”

  from ten

  Page 139: In a variation of Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment. My description is, again, admittedly, a drastic oversimplification, this time of the work of noted quantum theorists Hans Moravec, Bruno Marchal, and Max Tegmark. See Wikipedia, “Quantum Suicide and Immortality.”

  Page 144: I wish you all the best. This e-mail, dated October 31, 2007, begins like this:

  Hi,

  I’m sorry to bother you with this message. I’m sure the last thing you want to be remembered of is our whole break-up [ . . . ] though it’s sad that that one incident probably erased in your memory and for sure overshadows the wonderful almost storybook time we had together for three years, traveling through Europe and Mexico, and well you were there, you know what we had.

  Years later, I finally respond to him—You better run, mother-fucker—but the message comes back as undeliverable.

  Page 147: What was the word there for silence? In “October,” Louise Glück writes:

  I can’t hear your voice

  for the wind’s cries, whistling over the bare ground

  I no longer care

  what sound it makes

  when was I silenced, when did it first seem

  pointless to describe that sound

  what it sounds like can’t change what it is—

  Page 147: In the transcript of the Venezuelan extradition trial. Translated by the author from the Spanish.

  from eleven

  Page 170: You should be scared. James Boswell, writing for London Magazine in 1777, offers this:

  Of all the sufferings to which the mind of man is liable in this state of darkness and imperfection, the passion of fear is the severest, excepting the remorse of a guilty conscience, which however has much of fear in it, being not solely a tormenting anguish of reflection on the past, but a direful foreboding of the future; or as the sacred scriptures strongly express it, “a certain fearful looking for of judgement.”

  from twelve

  Page 175: I write everything I can’t say out loud. One of my students at my first-ever real job is a doctoral candidate in the Child Language Acquisition Program. I ask her about what I understand to be the links between memory and narrative. She tells me about Genie, a girl who was kept in such isolation by her parents that she never learned to talk. For most of her early life she was locked in a room and tied to a potty chair; thus restrained, she was forced to sit alone day after day, and often through the night. She was discovered in 1970 at the age of thirteen, uttering only infantile gurgles, wearing only a diaper.

  A team of researchers worked with Genie for years, and they eventually taught her a few simple words. She could communicate her needs and desires through gestures and ungrammatical phrases, but could not form sentences. My student explains that this case reinforces the theory that we’re born with the principles of language hardwired into our genes but that there is also a deadline for learning them. If a first language isn’t acquired by puberty, the theory goes, it won’t be acquired at all.

  My student tells me about Genie because though she lacked language, and had no chance of acquiring it, she found ways to describe her experience. When researchers tried to elicit memories of Genie’s past—such as where she was sitting when she used to eat cereal—Genie could respond with language—In the pot, she’d say. It was clear that these memories distressed her, but more importantly, it was also clear that she could use recently acquired language to describe events that had happened before words were a part of her world. The events were not integrated into a narrative but constituted memory just the same.

  Unfortunately, my student tells me, the story did not end well for Genie. When the research grants gave out, the researchers working on the case abandoned her, and while some believed she could have continued to learn, others dismissed her as “mentally retarded” (their term), at least functionally. For a while, she returned to live with her mother, who quickly found she was incapable of caring for the girl. For years she was passed from foster house to foster house, where she was abused, beaten, ridiculed, eventually finding her way to an adult foster home. As of 2008, Genie was confined to a private institution for the mentally undeveloped.

  One of the saddest things about this case, my student says, is that she was treated as a science experiment. Maybe if she had gotten supportive therapy, instead of being used as a test case for the latest theories. Maybe if they had just kept teaching her to speak. Maybe if she could have spoken. Maybe even just one story. Maybe. Maybe.

  Page 177: You don’t get to write about me. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Frederick Douglass writes about the repeated beating of his Aunt Hester. Whatever the supposed occasion—usually some order disobeyed—in every case, the master strips her nearly naked, ties her to a hook in the wall or a joist in the middle of the room, and beats her with a thick leather whip until her blood drips to the floor. There is
nothing she can do or say to stop him. No prayer. No speech. No entreaty will save her. The louder she screams the harder he whips. Decades later, as he commits this memory to his autobiography, Douglass has no words to describe the feelings with which he watched this.

  When Douglass is sold to Mr. and Mrs. Auld of Baltimore, his new mistress takes it upon herself to teach Douglass to read and write. Just as Douglass begins to make progress, Mr. Auld learns what is going on and forbids his wife from teaching their slave, insisting that “learning would spoil the best nigger in the world” (emphasis in original). If you teach slaves to read, he insists, they become unmanageable. There is no keeping them, and they grow discontented and unhappy, since education makes men forever unfit to be slaves. These words awaken Frederick Douglass to a new purpose: “From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.”

  Page 177: There’s the story I have. See Charles M. Anderson, “Suture, Stigma, and the Pages That Heal.”

  Page 183: In the story I have. See, in particular, Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, and Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille.

  Page 183: Am I not endlessly circling? “What did we do,” asks Nietzsche’s madman,

  When we detached this world from its sun? Where is it going now? Where are we going? Far from all the suns? Are we not just endlessly falling? Backward, sideways, forward, in every direction? Is there still an up and a down? Are we not being borne aimlessly into an endless void?

  See “The Parable of the Madman.”

  Page 186: This cave of making. Gordon Van Ness writes in “Remembering James Dickey” (Dos Passos Review 2, no. 1):