Last night I had an odd interlude where I was puzzling if the “room” where my infant self is confined has time within it, and I found myself reasoning my way through it aloud.
For most of us, primitive traumas are encased in Amber. They are motionless museum exhibits. But sometimes they come to life, when a situation calls for it. But they can only run from A to B. It is a one way path which resets again at the beginning. I hesitate to call it a loop, since the reset is instantaneous, or at least unconscious. It is always new, again.
And this part, being sealed away, but containing a part of self, of our soul, affects by gravity everything we do. It is a weight we carry which cannot carry itself. Healthy emotions EXPRESS energy. That is their nature. They carry us. They make life easier.
An unhealthy emotion must be continually suppressed. Most people do this. I remember an acquaintance talking with barely suppressed glee how a person was flayed alive in a Game Of Thrones episode. I remember someone telling me the audience cheered at the end of Silence of the Lambs when Hannibal said he was “having an old friend for dinner.”
It is tiring, you see, suppressing suspicion and anger and authentic spontaneity, as too many of us are taught to do. It makes you mean. It is in my view the hidden root of sacrifice.
Imagine if we began the public sacrifice of cows, lambs and chickens in all our major cities at high noon on every Friday. Ponder the spectacle. Everyone pissed off about anything could go watch something die, and feel better.
Are heros the point of horror films? Of course not. The VILLAINS are.
What I am attempting to oppose are the gradual and conscious exhibition of internal wounds, and their gradual healing and integration; and in the other a cyclic reenactment, in which the frozen content circles the center of our consciously, with a clear perigee and apogee. When stress becomes too much, it circles in and has its effect. When you have raged at someone, been mean–or been willfully self-destructive–it moves out again. It is frozen hard and gone sometimes, and nearly melted and fresh sometime, which is when movement enters, which is when you feel more alive but more ambivalent about who you are. This is when Satanists telling you “this is who you are” feels liberating, despite the fact that you are actually reidentifying with your tightest bonds.
There is something here. There is something to the notion of periodicity.