Listen, are you breathing,just a little, and calling it life?-Mary OliverThis article was deeply moving, as well as informative, and continued to carve away at how I relate to psychology as a science and cornucopia of variables which can be measured, observed, manipulated, and analyzed. I have always understood why people are drawn to religion - not just to faith or a higher power - because religion and religious communities (and their offspring, like AA) often engage in [faith-based] practices of radical, compassionate soul work. There is something to be said for the enduring nature of the major religions, something of merit to be found in the belief systems, and the way religions deal with grief, anger, and all manner of negative emotion is often incredibly healthy. Individualism, isolationism, pull yourself up by your bootstraps ism, "atomised individual"ity, as Pandolfo puts it, is often at the root of depression and suicide. Recent evolutionary psychology studies have pointed to the rise of suburbs and fracture of multi-generational family dwellings as a driver of post-partum depression, because the isolated, new mother with no support or emotional outlets becomes a depressed mother.This is why, in Judaism, greiving is a communal practice - it is NOT to be done alone. It is often done without words, simply through crying (read: wailing) and eating our feelings. Caring for the widow's children while she weeps, cleaning the kitchen of the widower while his children comfort him. There are prescribed periods of mourning for people of each type of relation to the deceased - a year for immediate family, 30 days for extended family, 10 days of dedicated mourning time for the bereaved during which they are released from all obligations, including prayer. Dedicated, honored time to mourn, a la the Book of Lamentations. Because what happens when we do not hold space for grief, sadness, and anger is exactly what the Imam describes, via Pandolfo's text: depression. Soul choking. A bottleneck of negative affect which strangles everything else in the body and mind. The way we process negative emotions in western society is entirely colonial - take time to be alone, "make" the person feel better, offer platitudes about how there must be a reason or they're in a better place. Get over it. But this results in nothing but repression - soul choking, slow death, war of the soul - jihad al-nafs / qirav ha-nefesh (heb.) - the strangulation of spirit under the weight of rumination. "the atomistic individuation and instrumentality of suffering...of pain can only be authenticated as standardized, psychological, and individualized suffering...when the representation of traumatic events is a central piece in the construction of evidence and cultural reality...it seems important to carve a place for reflection and listening that might drift aside...from the encompassing hegemony of these vocabularies." (28)Despite Pandolfo initial setting up the article to speak about the transformation of suffering, the "struggle for a repossession of the imaination...as transformation of pain in a space of mourning," she spends the majority of the article focused solely on the experience of the soul in this slow death, the choking, in a way that almost felt like the thesis of the text was being squashed in the process. I kept writing in the margins, "but what does the Imam/Islam say about transforming the pain? Why all this focus on how pain is bad, anger is not healthy, sadness is destructive?" The final return of this topic at the end brought some relief, like an awakening at the end of a depression spell, which both aggravated me and reminded me [the reader] what that is, exactly. Not something which can simply be described or moved from A to B, but a process, through which we make the long slog, wading through the proverbial mud."I have written...attempting to listen and letting my text, and myself, be transformed by the impact of their voice," Well played, Pandolfo (27). A nice touch on ethical research practice, as well."He describes the raced/colonized subject as constituted by the violent intrusion of the other, the colonizer, in the psychic space of the self, an intrusion that evacuates the self, and replacies it with the poisonous object of the other's fantasy, an object with which the self will coincide. The intrusion is a seizure of the imagination and of the bodily space of the other; and occupation understood in spatial, almost military terms, as a shrinking of vital space, which snatches the self and pulverizes its corporeal schema, halting the work of the imagination and producing in its place a somatic hallucination...the "attack" of the Gaze, the look of the Other...the colonial system, the white mythology...and ultimately the white symbolic," (27)."In the colony the symbolic order is maimed, for the seizing of the imagination, the intrustion, swallows both space and time, and abolishes at once the possibiity of culture and of the unconscious as the site of mediation and symbolic transformation. The raced subject, Fanon says, is 'clas in mourning', a kind of living death...which, Fanon is saying, make it an arduous yet fundamental task to 'think' death, subjectivize it as a singular experience of being, re-socialize it, think the possibility of a collectivity from it." (28)."...to reclaim the way in which a singular pain, an event of madness, addresses a collectivity...For at stake is an engagement with the alterity that makes the self...how can one repossess space and being, what Fanon called "ontological resistance", imagine exits that are not already inscribed in the instrumental logics that further and reproduce exclusion and oppression?" (28)"...the emphasis is not liberation...but on entrapment and mourning. The ethical-political task is the pursuit of...a vision that reveals through the gesture of a backward glance; a vision capable of exposing machinery of subjugation, and its relation with the alterity of desire." (28)
- (re)queering Judiasm as an act of ontological resistance, a backward glance (or glare) which exposes the reproduction of oppression through the utilization of western tool of subjugation
- to be othered by the Other, sub-Other, an alterous Other, Auto-Othering?
"it is the honing of a melancholic gaze that may become capable of interrupting the ideological secret of domination and race." (29)
- must look further into new research on nostalgia as religious practice, mourning as spiritual practice, and mourning as transformative practice / active mechanism of self-analysis, platform on which to critique our own Other world
- mourning the loss of queerness in the cultural evolution of Jewish/Semitic/Prehistoric Levantine --> White/Ashkenazic/European ideology
- harnessing that energy into a transformative practice of renewal
I am terribly curious about this imagery of burning, and wish Pandolfo had spent more time on it. She quotes the Sheikh, "violence...is consuming the youth, the youh self-consume..." and says that "he uses expressions indicating "setting ablaze or burning", or throwing oneself into the fire." (29)
- This made me think of Paris is Burning and other queer terminology used in the practice of creating new spaces for themselves
- rather than a funerary fire --> cleansing fire (grief --> resistance)
"Spiritual slaughter...is caused by the injustice of a tyranny that concentrates all wealth and power in the hands of the few...that only some have access to humanity...destroys the possibility of imagining the future, as well as of relating to the past. It freezes time, and reduces life to a flat surface without exits." (30).
- colonialism/tyranny as a villain which destroys the spiritual, and in this act, removes the humanity of its subjects, erasing also the possibility of transforming that pain into something else, of engaging reflectively and reflexively
- it is an act of self love, revolution, resistance, simply to claim I am Human, but also made possible only by access to power?
The imagery and language of "bearing witness" reappear and reappear, I imagine due to the common origins of Islamic and Jewish texts, as bearing witness is a major concept in both faiths. It is common for Jews to visit Holocaust sites and camps to bear witness, to say kaddish for the nameless dead - it is an act of love, one of the greatest we can practice, to take responsibility for remembering the dead, the ones for whom no loved ones remain to remember them, to bear witness for all of humanity, as a collective, a community, a people, a tradition. And in Judaism, this practice of bearing witness is used as fuel for transformation from grief to action, "a political-ethical work of the imagination, one that is capable of generating "action" from within a space of trauma." (31). We remember, quoth the entire history of Semitic peoples. We remember God, we remember the book, commandments, the matriarchs and patriarchs, our ancestors, genocide, resilience, joy, dancing. Not just the pain, which seems to be the cause of death described by Pandolfo's interlocutors, but everything that occurs in the spaces around and between, the reasons we bear the pain, to transform pain into action."The question concerned the possibility of ethical existence in the vicinity of destruction, trauma and madness, and in the shadow of spiritual dispossession." (32)
- Indeed, what need would there be for an ethic without these aspects of existence?
"Imam's analytic description, the work of the healther is that of a political-spiritual diagnosis. The space of the cure addresses an affliction which is singular, but which is also a symptom that speaks of a collective condition, and a history: healing, and the sickness itself, are a kind of bearing witness. The illness, the madness, decries the hypocrisy of a social life devoid of care and equity, the violence of the state, and the rule of injustice and incorruiption. It is a de-forming mirror that "reveals" a state of terror that has broken the subject. The event of madness is treated by the Imam as a traumatic awakening of the collectivity of the whole." (33)
- it is an act of resistance against the state simply to remember, to bear witness, and to not allow oneself/themselves to be erased by the pain, the acts of oppression, the desire to dwell within grief and succumb to that exit of suicide, self-assisted genocide, complicity in cultural erasure
"Untruth...injustice...and oppression are the characteristics of the world of the jinn: they are also dispositions located in the human soil. The prime cause of sorcery, and hence madness...is the absence of justice, the impossibility of an equitable recourse by the oppressed, as well as the condition of intimate terror and intimidation in which the person is thrown by that state of coercion," (33)."The event of madness, in other words, "shows" the obverse of the subjugation of the subject in the everyday unfolding of social life..."people said to be crazy, in the ordinary sense of the term, show us what was necessary to do in order to survive."" (33)
- reminds me of discourse in disability studies around mental "illness" as symptomology of a world which has been made inhospitable to heterogeneity and alterity
- illness and queerness and différance vs. health and straightness and sameness
All of page 34. Just all of it."It is anger and grief that are the first cause of illness for the soul/self" says the Imam (35). But I disagree - a la the Dalai Lama via Murakami, pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. I think, and modern psychology agrees I think, that it is dwelling in pain and rumination on pain that are the cause of suffering and illness, necessitating practices to transform pain into something productive, into action."Iman biduni 'amal la yumkin, he says; "it is impossible to have faith without work." (37).
- belief is nothing without action
"Traumatic becoming is a form of awakening, not a consolation philosophy. Yet prior to the possibility of reinstating ethical action and bearing practical witness to faith, it is necessary to guide the nafs to reposition its relation to the experience of pain, and to the “infraction”, the invasion (Fanon) that caused the soul to choke. It is a question of transforming pain: from a harbinger of destruction to an exercise for thinking/remembering, an exercise where the bodily imagination plays a pivotal role. The point is that inhabiting pain in this second sense, bearing witness to pain without succumbing to it, can engender an opening of the soul. Pain, in this sense, crosses a limit, beyond the paralysis of being, the impossibility of movement; it transforms. Such an opening onto death as a way of “seeing” and “tasting” (alGhazali) is a different modality of melancholy from the closing up of the horizon, the generalization of the death drive in the affliction of soul choking...both unbearable and expansive." (38)
- (re)queering Judaism as transformative act of justice, of bearing witness, Pride as bearing witness, inclusion/representation as bearing witness