I’m struggling not to write about the torture-porn
attack on The Handmaid’s Tale (Season Two) from viewers who found the violence
too hard to stomach. Too dark, too complicated. There must be a lighter,
funnier take on the week. But it won’t
budge.
Exposing
egregious wrongs and dangers, which is what Margaret Atwood’s book and the
first series, did is not only laudable but essential. Yet there are risks.
Psychoanalyst Dori Laub talking about witnessing Holocaust survivor stories
said: "The fight against the obliteration of the story could only be won
at the cost of the obliteration of the audience."
When the
mind reaches the limits of what is tolerable to experience it has various
mechanisms up its sleeve (apologies for mixed metaphor.) Shut out the darkness
and bring in the light, turn away from horror towards flowers, beauty, colour.
The blackly-comic Danish movie Festen skewered such a moment in the scene at
the father’s birthday party when the eldest son accused him of sexual abuse.
The dead silence that followed was broken by an aunt saying ’Why don’t we have
some music.’ Sweep it under the carpet, pretend it never happened.
Another
psyche trick is to sugar-coat the pill and wallow in the mud, becoming
perverted by the cruelty and pretending to enjoy it rather than be destroyed.
Which is what, I fear, may be happening in The Handmaid’s Tale. With the best
of initial intentions, it has turned barbarity into entertainment.
These are
both manoeuvres to fend off implosion and preserve a semi-sanity by deception
and fraud. Terence Malick’s Vietnam war
film The Thin Red Line found another way, using luscious imagery of the natural
surroundings, to mirror a young soldier’s spiritual struggle for wisdom and
emotional truth in the midst of carnage.
He focused on the butterflies not the bombs and blood.
Is there
an answer? PTSD-suffering ex-soldiers and sexual abuse survivors wrestle with
the damage caused by overwhelming trauma. And the media, in news and drama,
bombard audiences with relentless tales of savagery. No one is immune.
A search
for meaning often comes out of agonising experiences as a mind, threatened with
fragmentation, has to find a narrative that makes sense. And not just a false
construction that nails a few planks of wood over damaged foundations. What can
emerge is a deeper sense of purpose which embraces the random chaos of the
world and the individual’s place in it. The law of unintended consequences can
have a good outcome. Donald
Kalsched in Trauma and Soul describes the “inner sanctuary to which the
beleaguered ego repairs in time of crisis is also a world that opens onto
transpersonal energies.”
Spirituality means different things to different people and I’m no lover
of orthodox religion in any form. Though it used to help Christian believers
cope with the ‘vale of sorrow and tears’ to which our sinful life had condemned
us. Urgh, not my story line of choice. In Carl
Jung’s terms it’s a quest to connect with the soul or the inner self which has
a miraculous capacity to withstand buffeting by the storms of the unconscious.
Soul is a
taboo word in our atheistic world, embarrassing to own, though glimpses of it
do occur in the hinterland of most lives. Unspoken and inarticulable, it
provides a lifeline in times of high crisis and stress. In desperation I’ve
prayed, though to whom was never clear, certainly not the grey-bearded,
angel-adorned patriarch of my childhood. More a howl into the universe pleading
for an answer. Which oddly enough usually came, making me think I must do it
more often. 
In my
wandering youth I dabbled in Taoism, the Chinese philosophy of harmony with
nature – ‘infinitely wise, infinitely complex, and infinitely irrational. The
Tao is a divine chaos, not a random accident, fertile, undifferentiated, and
teeming with unrealized creation. It is the mother of everything in nature; it
is a great darkness that operates spontaneously to give birth and life to all
things.’ Which would put a framework on all of the above.
Although
private beliefs are personal - many paths to one goal – it is indisputable that
nature is a great healer. Gardening helps sufferers from mental illness and
PTSD regain stability. In Freudian terms, fostering the life force keeps the
death instinct at bay. Wilderness walking, even watching wildlife documentaries
(not the savage tooth and claw ones), looking at nature photographs does bring
a sense of inner peace. A relatedness to a wider world, which has survived
chaos for billions of years. Worth pondering
and pursuing.
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