Reflections on an Amish Childhood
by: Billy Collins
I was a little square
in a round hat.
As I've said before, Collins gets himself in trouble with poems like this one. It's a dad joke in disguise. Smart with great wordplay. I actually laughed out loud when I first read it. There's nothing very deep or revelatory in it. Collins is simply having fun, and I think the world could do with a little more fun and a little less hand-wringing.
For the past two days, I've attended a trauma-recovery writing workshop led by a good friend of mine. Now, I'm sure that doesn't sound appealing to a lot of my faithful disciples. It was VERY heavy at times, touching upon personal stories of sustained loss and abuse. However, there were also moments of beauty, laughter, and intense connection.
It's not my place to share any of the details of the workshop because most of those details belong to other people. Yet, I will say that humor is one way that individuals cope with ongoing trauma and trauma recovery. It's either that or you curl into a fetal position and never get out of bed.
And, of course, there's always writing. Dealing with the large, hairy, and difficult things in life can be overwhelming. Because they are so large and so hairy and so difficult. However, writing can provide a feeling of control somehow. It's sort of like caging a wild animal. A lion running free can pretty much do anything it wants--stalk, hunt, roar, attack, kill. A lion in a cage is controlled; it can't harm anyone or anything.
The same is true of traumatic experiences. If they are free and wild, they can fuck you up, over and over and over. However, if they are written down, described, anatomized, those experiences lose some of their power. Because they are contained in words and sentences and paragraphs on a piece of paper. Imagine the lines on the paper as the bars of a cage. The trauma can charge or howl or fling itself against those bars, but it can't harm you in any way. It's controlled.
That's what we did in my friend's writing workshop--we talked about trauma and wrote about trauma, thereby rendering it a little less powerful, a little more manageable. We also laughed a lot, which, as I said, is another way of weakening the hold of trauma (sort of like using a Riddikulus spell against a Boggart in the Harry Potter universe).
So laugh. Share. Write. Enter the mansion of trauma through the front door or sneak in through the back door, as my friend said in the workshop.
Saint Marty has always believed that reading poetry, listening to poetry, writing poetry can be healing in many ways. The last two days has proven it to him.
A poem written during the workshop:
Cough
by: Martin Achatz
I tell my five-year-old daughter
to do it into her elbow, So you don't
make anybody sick, I say.
She nods as if she's just received
the 11th commandment from God:
"Thou shalt not cough into air
and spread thy germs." She gets
it without knowing the mechanics
of biology and microbes and
contagion. For all she knows, she's
trapping some pixie that lives
inside her and is trying to escape,
become some rogue piece of magic
flitting, flurrying around from body
to body, creating new constellations--
one person, a nose; another, an antler
tip; the person across from her, a dolphin
dorsal. She thinks of her universe like this,
a web of starry connections without design,
each new person brimming with panache,
cells colliding into wonder, breaths
and griefs and laughters coalescing
into something that can't be mapped
or contained. She gets all of that
in an instant because she trusts without
me having to explain why: why
water is blue, why her grandma
can't remember her name, why
she has to wash her hands before
she eats. She shouldn't trust
so easily. The world is full
of shocks and earthquakes, sharp teeth
that sink into your arm and won't let go.
Don't do it, I want to shout, drive
into her ears, her DNA. People
will hurt you, over and over.
Maybe these words, this direction
about coughing will save her,
as every father wants to save
his child, from the bright gala
of heartbreak that is this world.
She turns her head, coughs
into the crook of her arm,
then smiles at me. I feel
myself breaking open,
a germ of hope and sadness
taking root, spreading, infecting
my heart's fragile immune system.
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