Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, refers to the role of inscription [i.e., writing] in helping a person fundamentally separate from traumatic context: “The way inscription on a tombstone allows leaving the dead – and the trauma leading to the death – because now one knows where to truly find them.” – M. Gerard Fromm, Traveling Through Time: How Trauma Plays out in Families, Organizations, and Society.
This is the closest reflection I’ve had yet of why I have needed to write. Years ago when I was getting my MFA at Vermont College, I had an instructor say that art was about making order out of chaos, and this made sense in a general way. But if trauma is about fragmentation (of self, of memory) with all its silencing and immense confusion and disembodiment, then people don’t know where to find themselves. Writing has been a perpetual tool for me to do this work, so I can “find the dead,” locate what still haunts, and reclaim a story.
In college I had an unhelpful creative writing professor tell me writing was “more than just therapy” in what I now feel was Grumpy White Male dismissal of “confessional style” – of poo-pooing the fraught realities of women (ET AL!) on the page. He probably thought Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath were just whiners. But the comment stung, felt like an invalidation, made him unsafe.
I mean, agreed that to truly write and to chose to make it an art from over simply “keeping a diary” you have to be willing to fall in love with craft, with painstaking discipline, with a willingness to set aside huge chunks of “normal life” and be, to paraphrase Rachael Kushner from The New Yorker, the first to leave the party. In that sense, too, it’s sacrifice. Hmmm. What makes it whole (holy – same word root) by doing art is also a sacrifice. There is surely more to say about that. I leave it to stir around on the back burner for now, as, to be blunt, I don’t understand other forms sacrifice (Jesus, scapegoats, animals) and the apparent human need for it.