The architecture of softening
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here… The way to not suffer it is to seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, and make them endure, give them space.”
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
I write this on my way back from Europe for my third cancer therapeutic peptide vaccine. I’ve finished five out of six of the traditional systemic treatments, a monthly cocktail of multiple chemotherapies and immunotherapies, and I feel the familiar sensations of my body crumbling. My feet are stiff and cold, I’m losing sensation in my toes, I walk amidst waves of nausea, amidst the ruins of my digestive system. But, unlike this spring, and I cannot emphasize this enough, I am walking!
What is most disorienting is not my physical disintegration, but the elimination of a narrative arc. There is likely no moment in my future where I will not be at the hospital monthly in the chemotherapy suite receiving an infusion of some sort. It’s neither good nor bad, it just is. I have summited a peak in hopes of climbing the mountain, only to realize the mountain isn’t a single ascent at all, but an endless range. Yet, somewhere in there, the sharpness, the fear, and the trepidation of this spring have given way to the clarity of a still morning rowing on the river, each of my oars smoothly gliding. Catch, pull, release. I pray for clean scans next month and no recurrence, but I also recognize the odds of both are low. No bodies are meant to last, but I pray mine does long enough to let me get all I want to share with the world out.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the body metabolizes trauma. How collectively we metabolize it. Or perhaps, sometimes, how we don’t at all, letting it accrete and fossilize.
The Germans have a word, Vergangenheitsbewältigung , which translates poorly as “coming to terms with the past” but means something closer to “wrestling the past into submission,” “overcoming” or “mastering” what has already happened. The natural defense when something bad happens is to harden, to lock down, to keep it from happening again.
But perhaps the goal is not mastery of the past, nor transcendence of it, but cohabitation. To let the body be porous enough that life can move through again.
Each month, my mother and I anchor my treatment trip to Europe with a different city. I reread Invisible Cities on each flight, thinking about which memories each city will activate and which versions of myself will surface inside them. “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
Before I learned I had cancer, I took a solo trip to Kyoto. I found myself drawn to a temple on the outskirts of the city, outside of the range of most tourist tours. It was the most beautiful garden I had ever seen in my life. I sat in contemplative awe, savoring a cup of matcha and reading the temple guide, basking in the stillness of the space.
The guide mentioned a battle had taken place there, and the bloodied floorboards had been rearranged to the ceiling out of respect. As I looked up to find myself directly below the outline of where a man had been slain, his bloody fingerprints pressed into the wood, I felt an overwhelming wave of emotion. Why do we hold onto so much grief when life is so short? Why do we hold onto anger when there is so much beauty in this world? I lay my forehead down on the tatami mat and cried.
This trip, the weight of the trauma stored in Berlin overwhelmed me. I used to refuse to cry out of defiance until I realized that flowing tears are better than hardened ones. I found myself in tears throughout the entirety of a tour in an avant-garde show housed in an old World War II bunker.
I had collapsed this spring at a nail salon, inside the weight of my medical trauma, when the lighting flickered like a hospital’s LED, but this was different. This was not my pain to hold, but I was an occupant in the space, moving through architecture that didn’t want to let go.
This is the fallacy of hardness, isn’t it? We build walls thick enough to withstand bombs, and then we’re trapped inside of them. Why do we preserve bunkers? Why do we continually pick at a scab that will never heal? They are architecture built on trauma, and in preserving them, we preserve the psychological imprint that created them. To quote Arne Schmitt, “Trying to preserve a ruin is one of the hardest ways of not letting go.” Does remembering protect us from repeating history? Or does remembering trap us inside?
In Paris, I saw the Richter retrospective, rooms and rooms of canvases where the past is dragged, blurred, scraped, made into something new without ever becoming untrue. The bunker insisted that trauma must remain intact; Richter suggested that trauma can change state.
There is a poem by Averil Stedeford that I return to again and again:
_My grief was a heavy stone, rough and sharp.
Grasping to pick it up my hands were cut.
Afraid to let it go I carried it.
While I had my grief you were not lost._
_The rain of my tears smoothed it.
The wind of my rage weathered it,
making it round and small._
_The cuts in my hands have healed.
Now in my palm it rests,
sometimes almost beautiful,
sometimes almost you._
To lose your pain, you have to be willing to lose your self. You have to recognize that your defenses no longer serve you. You have to eliminate a bunker mentality.
I learned this foundational truth through EMDR to smooth the calluses I had built up from medical trauma, the oscillation of sound between my ears taking down my defenses. Trauma is not the event itself, but rather how it is stored in our bodies. “Why are you still in the past even though it’s over?” my therapist, Uri, asked as I shared the recurring visuals I couldn’t get rid of in my mind’s eye, “What belief structure are you holding onto that is keeping you there?”
Last year, all I wished for was freedom. Freedom from the past, freedom from constraint, freedom from need. The fantasy was invulnerability, a life so sealed off that nothing could get in. Berlin is the capital of freedom, but on the flip side, as an art dealer in Paris said offhandedly, “it is a city where no one cares about you.”
This year, I’ve been thinking about what it means to surrender. To lay down my arms without knowing what will happen next. To stop bracing for impact. I wish instead to soften in the face of all that used to scare me, to stay open in a world that closes as defense, to discover that loosening from formation doesn’t mean falling alone. To live my life in a rhythm of catch, pull, and release.
Not freedom from the world, but freedom in the world. Not the absence of danger, but the presence of something that holds.
I appreciate your reading and any thoughts you may have. I may be slow to reply right now, but I read and cherish everything I receive. And if any part of this resonated with you, please pass it along to a friend (or two!). These words are meant to be shared.
