The other day, I was reading the paper and I came across an article about Elie Wiesel, the author of
Night. Wiesel was assaulted a few years ago in an elevator while he was speaking at a peace conference. A strange man pulled him aside, roughed him up, tried to drag him into a hotel room for an "interview" in which the assailant fantasized Wiesel would admit that his Holocaust memoirs were fiction. The assailant was caught shortly after – he had posted some sort of rant on his blog site that described the encounter in so much detail that he essentially indicted himself.
Wiesel is 79. I think he was just 14 when he was interned and moved about between concentration camps in Eastern Europe. So about 65 years have passed since his death camp experiences.
At the trial of his attacker, Wiesel was cross-examined by the defense, asked if he'd had any permanent damage from the encounter. He said he hadn't. But he said something about the attack that struck me.
"Personally, it hurt me," he said. "It aroused a certain fear in me that I thought was gone."
I turned that one over in my mind for a number of days. His words stayed with me, and they both comforted me and made me uneasy for reasons I didn't understand completely.
You see, when I was a kid, my parents were violent. My father beat the hell out of everyone. Fists, belts, the occasional choking episode. My mother had a milder temperament, although not a good one. She slapped, kicked, used the telephone cord from time to time. When I was about 5, my older brother routinely got me alone and took advantage of me. I don't think I need to elaborate on what that means. He was 14.
When I got to graduate school, I took a look back at the earliest part of my life. At 25, I was a chain smoker, I was having nightmares, and I weighed all of 100 lbs. I tried to talk to my younger brother about our family because I actually wondered if I had imagined several episodes. I hadn't. In speaking to my brother, I learned that he was having nightmares as well; my older had brother had gotten him alone, too.
I am nearly 46 now. I've been married and divorced, had two kids, moved cross-country a few times. I've learned that you don't forget that kind of stuff. You can try, but you get to a certain point and it always catches you. The article about Elie Wiesel caught me.
It aroused a certain fear in me that I thought was gone. Those are powerful words. I lay awake in bed for several nights in a row, just wondering about them. What is it about fear that doesn't die? Awake at 3:00 am, my mind jumped from beating to beating. Sensations ebbed and flowed, from the top of my scalp, to the soles of my feet. Asleep and dreaming, I floated between friends and acquaintances, above people I had never met, and then to people I had only read about. In my sleep, they touched me, stroked my head and shoulders.
I have two children. I've shared lately on this blog how I've had trouble with them hitting me. Their small hands slap me, their little feet kick me. I find myself nauseated and panicked by the sound of flesh striking flesh. I cannot bear it. It has been so bad lately that I recently asked my ex-husband, a man who did all he could to destroy my spirit, to move back in with us and "help" me. I was making yet another deal with the devil, you might say.
I thought of a close friend who served in Viet Nam. For years, he told me, he slept with a knife under his pillow.
I thought of my father, who served in WWII. For as long as I can remember, he never slept through the night. He took catnaps, and catnaps only. There was no waking him from up close; you had to call him from across the room, or risk having his thumbs pressed down across your windpipe.
I thought of still another friend who served in the Civil Rights movement. He told of a Black colleague who kept his hands on the dashboard of his car during routine traffic stops; the friend prefaced every movement with an announcement ("I'm reaching for my wallet. I'm moving my right hand."), so he wouldn't get shot in the face by an officer of the law.
Awake and asleep, I dreamed of others: Minh Khan, the little boy from Cambodia; his sister, who, at 7, had still not learned to speak; Karen Francois, who escaped Haiti in a rubber raft. Her father used to stare out the tenement window and chain smoke unfiltered Camels.
In particular, there was one lady who kept coming to mind, an elderly woman who sat across from me at a party in Boston. She stared at me all evening, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out what she was looking at. At the end of the evening, as she tucked her scarf into her collar, she leaned forward and looked in my eyes.
"Don't suffer so much," she whispered in a thick accent. Then she disappeared out the front door.
When I asked the host about her, he just shook his head. She was Spanish. She had spent a lot of time in prison, in Spain, for critisizng General Franco.
In my sleep, they all touched me, stroked my head and shoulders. "Personally, it hurt me," Wiesel said. "It aroused a certain fear in me that I thought was gone."
By the fourth day, I remembered an article I had read in graduate school. I was doing some research on long-term memory and I had run across the term, "phantom pain."
From Wikipedia:
"Phantom pain sensations are described as perceptions that an individual experiences relating to a limb or an organ that is not physically part of the body. Limb loss is a result of either removal by amputation or congenital limb deficiency (Glummarra et al, 2007). However, phantom limb sensations can also occur following nerve avulsion or spinal cord injury. Sensations are recorded most frequently following the amputation of an arm or a leg, but may also occur following the removal of a breast or an internal organ. Phantom limb pain is the feeling of pain in an absent limb or a portion of a limb. The pain sensation varies from individual to individual.
Phantom limb sensation is the term given to any sensory phenomenon (except pain) which is felt at an absent limb or a portion of the limb. It has been known that at least 80% of amputees experience phantom sensations at some time of their lives."
In summary, long after the loss of a limb, a person can still feel pain in the appendage. It can be very intense; it is real, and the brain, the body, the viscera of the person experiences it. It is not a psychological pain – it is a real agony, in a body part that is no longer present.
Breathe deeply now.
I have phantom pain. So does Elie Wiesel. So do a lot of people, I would guess. We hurt in parts that we no longer have. We pain for things no long press us.
It makes no sense, but sometimes, when I connect with something like that, with someone like Elie Wiesel, I feel blessed and cursed at the same time. That is, I don't feel so intensely alone any more, but I know that his kind of light is dying in our world. It just is. And sometimes, I think about what it will be like when that happens, when that light finally goes out.
We won't get it back.
Sometimes, I think, I would like nothing more than to stroke his head, to thank him for his humanity. It's a dying thing, humanity. And in me I feel a kinship, I don't know why, with him and everyone like him. When he is gone, I know I will want to lie down and die, too.
Phantom pain. It makes sense to me. It also makes sense that I understand it for what it is; something from the past that I thought was gone. But it's not gone. It never will be gone. It leaves our bodies, flees our psyches and circles the earth, searching for another to afflict. That is, unless it is loved and tamed. But that's another essay.
Be that as it may, I am resolved to live with it. It is fine, I think. I seem to be in good company, after all.
Furthermore, what I possess cannot possess me.
