Tag: trauma

BR#Seven – Waves

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

It was only a few days ago that I wrote about the last graphic novel I had read and it appears the theme has very quickly continued. The same night I finished Red Rosa, while looking at others books I stumbled upon a story called Waves about a couple struggling to conceive a baby before losing it when they finally do. It seemed liked an interesting concept for something that is ultimately a comic. It’s a very short novel. I thought I would have a quick look at it before going to work, but had read it before I’d even finished my coffee. It is eighty six pages but this is a graphic novel so that doesn’t really mean anything. Like plays I enjoy the satisfaction of not taking weeks to read something. There is certainly an importance to committing time and effort to a good book of prose but I am prone to getting distracted by other books and wishing I could get stuck into them. I love reading but it can still take discipline. To read this whole story then in twenty minutes was probably a little too quick but then that’s not the point. Time should never be a denominator for appreciation with a book in any form, or at least the appreciation of whether it was worth it.

Waves deals with the trauma of losing a baby and the author at the end explains that the story was based upon her own experiences. Whenever you discover something is based on real events it adds another layer of appreciation for what you have just read. She explained that writing the story was in itself part of the therapy required to process the trauma. She is ordinarily an author of children’s books and this was her first attempt at the graphic novel. I imagine there will be an element of short text and pictures in her children’s books too though. It’s a powerful introduction to the genre to say the least and knowing the emotional importance of what you’re reading, knowing this is someones personal journey; adds an immeasurable value. I have read three graphic novels now and all three seem to be based in different ways around women and femininity. This is entirely accidental but also a theme which I suspect may continue in some form and quite revealing to see that graphic novels are not just story books revolving around superheroes. There’s certainly a lot to be said for language and art being combined as one. When the story and the book itself has an emotive quality it’s not something to be scoffed at.

Humane Rats

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Today has been a day of discovery, I learnt a little about rats. These little critters seem to provoke the most remarkable terror and fear in people. Understandably this probably dates back to a time when we died of bubonic plague, or for those unfamiliar, think of a coronavirus that wiped people out, gave you boils and was spread by rats. However now the chances of catching anything from a rat are rare and you’ve got more chance of being eaten by your cat. Saying that I do remember as a fifteen years old opening the bin in the dark and one jumping out at me, I’m not ashamed to admit I screamed and ran away. Doesn’t make it any less irrational though.

It appears though rats are pretty cool once you get over yourself and get to know them. They laugh when tickled which comes out as a type of ultrasonic chirp. Apparently they bond with their ticklers and search them out to continue playing with, they’ve even taught them how to play hide and seek. They enjoy themselves. They’re capable of reliving past memories and planning routes for future use. They reciprocally trade goods with each other and have a system of favours in which the favour need not necessarily be repaid in the same currency. They respond with something close to regret when they make the wrong choice, have been taught how to use tools to access out of reach food and have been able to outperform humans in some learning tasks.

Remarkably they have shown signs of empathy too. They refused to press levers to access food if it resulted in another rat getting an electric shock, as well as walk down certain tunnels in a maze if the result was an electric shock to another, this became extra prevalent had the mouse experienced the shock themselves already and knew what was coming for the other rat. Similarly if they themselves have experienced being drenched in water they’re more likely to rescue another rat from drowning and will rescue a trapped rat when they themselves can escape to safety. Even humans don’t do that, maybe we need to readdress this word humane we seem to have elevated onto a pedestal. Rats seem to care about each other more than we do.

In a time long past now, we as a species used to commit the most heinous of experiments on chimpanzees until we realised they are incredibly similar to us. There are now laws protecting them but there are still none protecting the rat. They have decided they didn’t learn enough from experimenting on chimpanzees and have now replicated many psychological experiments on rats too. They have raised some rats away from their mothers and in social isolation, the result being a shrinkage in the area of the brain responsible for emotion and affiliation. They managed to create mentally ill, traumatised and emotionally suffering rats. While we admit they’re close enough for us to use as models for human psychopathologies, the accepted wisdom is that they’re far enough away for us to relate to them and empathise, unlike chimpanzees and other primates who remind us of humans.

The rat genome has been fully sequenced for fifteen years now which has led to major advances in our understanding of how genomes work. We have made breakthroughs in our understanding of cardiovascular disease and obesity, and because their social nature mimics our own, behavioural and psychological studies too. Researching on rats clearly has benefits and many people would use this as justification for the continuation of such work. We understand the moral argument otherwise we would just do this testing on humans, we don’t even use chimpanzees anymore. We may have learnt to fear rats and I’m in no rush to cuddle one but they’ve been shown to be sentient beings with rich emotional lives. If we are such an advanced species why do we continue to suppress our own emotional bond with other sentient beings. Maybe that’s what advanced is, the ability to switch it on and off when it suits us. Perhaps it’s time for a new and updated definition of humane.

Death’s Eternal March

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I was thinking today about death. It is one of those things I find myself contemplating. I have heard it said that we start reflecting on death more often when our own is drawing in but I doubt the validity of that on numerous levels, especially because it would suggest everything is already written and I’m not quite willing to accept that yet. I don’t worry about death, the idea of it coming for me is not necessarily something to fear. Of course the manner of ones death needs to be taken into consideration and despite the bravado; when death feels a long way away, we never know how we will react, if we have the time to react. In regards my own, I worry more about how it would affect others, I can imagine it would destroy my parents for example. Equally my only fear of death is that of my family and the reality that I will one day have to deal with that terrifies me. To know my dog, who is five now, has perhaps ten years to live is also a scary realisation.

It is this knowledge that the life of other’s is finite that helps me to understand the whole phenomena in a way that my own potential death doesn’t. I have already experienced the death of my grandparents, as well as the trauma of losing my childhood dog, but parents are another issue and I’ve invested such an emotional bond with my dog now that I don’t know how I would deal with the loss of her either. It is scary. It also makes you realise how temporary everything is. We’re all going to die one day. That is the only certainly in life we face and it’s the one thing that can give our own lives a true sense of value.

If you’ve ever been back somewhere that you had an intense and memorable experience; let’s say a place you worked, lived or travelled through, if this has happened a few times you start to notice the only commonality is that it’s not the place you remembered anymore. The faces are different, the energy has changed and it is not the same place, other people are now experiencing their own version, as will others after them. We can’t long for the return of moments from our past because they don’t exist anymore. Just like events in time, life is transient, it is an event, it is impermanent.

Your grandparents were your age once, they experienced what you experienced, they felt the same intense emotions and sensations and now it’s you turn and soon it’ll be someone else’s. It is undeniable that there is a deep sadness to this but there shouldn’t be and this is what I am trying to get beyond because supposedly it is beautiful too. Of course understanding how temporary life is allows you to enjoy it and embrace what comes, it helps us lead a full life. The knowledge of the inevitable though makes it feel pointless, if we’re going to die one day then what is the point. The nihilists recognised this, Camus did too and called it absurdism.

Like deaths sadness when felt deep down though, this feeling of pointlessness is surely something to be overcome. The ever present knowledge of death may be what makes the human condition but so does our innate ability to overcome adversity. While death is one thing we cannot overcome, the feeling of life’s intrinsic pointlessness is one we can. Death need not be sad, we can understand this end point, it’s getting there that seems the impossible part. Let’s just hope we have the time to do so but really does it matter one way or another if we don’t.