Camera Obscura
The distortions of trauma
I live in Seattle, and this week the smoke from the fires ravaging Spokane and other parts of the Northwest are reaching my neighborhood. My friend Mary Virginia, who lives in Eastern Washington, and I compare the pollution measurements the way others might compare temperatures.
Today we are at 124 AQI which is, the app AirNow from the EPA tells me, “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups.” The pointer is in orange on the dial which ranges from green to a deep purple.
Mary Virginia is currently at 166, a solid red “Unhealthy”
The air here is a bit murky, like a social media filter in a muddy beige, obscuring the sun. When I walk outside, my eyes burn. Inside, the air filters are running.
We’ve done this before. In Sept 2020, at the end of the first pandemic summer, the air was an apocalyptic, turgid brown, dense as fog. I couldn’t see to the end of my driveway. It lasted for weeks, in the height of the late summer heat, and of course it was the pandemic so we couldn’t escape to the gym or a movie theater, or someplace that might have filtered air.
The experience of your environment being entirely obscured by smoke has been shared this year by people across Europe as well as North America, the East Coast and the West. Social media feeds and news outlets teem with the eerie sepia toned images of familiar sights filtered through heavy smoke. We also see the images of the destruction wrought by the fires themselves, homes, neighborhoods, and forests destroyed, blackened burnt timbers leaning crazily over empty spaces where someone’s home used to be.
Seeing the fires and smoke make the concept of global warming come alive in a different way, especially as the experience is shared across Europe. I feel it in my body, the stark realization that the climate in which I grew up is altered profoundly. I spent almost every summer of my life in the Pacific Northwest, and never needed an air conditioner in my house or car until the last decade, and I don’t remember any summer during that time with smoke like this.
Camera Obscura
A camera obscura is an ancient device where a small hole is used to project an image onto another surface. The only time I ever used one was to try to view a solar eclipse, using a small box with a hole which was meant to project the image of the eclipse onto the far wall of the box.
I don’t understand the mechanisms of the camera obscura, described here, except for the part that what we assume is fixed – light beams reflecting an image so we can see it – is, in fact, mutable, bendable, not fixed at all.
In a camera obscura, the projected image is reversed and upside down. You see the thing, but it is altered. You have to reorient your body or reimagine the perspective to see it as it exists. And it exists over whatever it is projected onto.
My son, RJ, had a traumatic brain injury. For the two years between the car accident and his death, he tried to regain some function. We helped him try. Therapists, my daughter and I. He worked hard at it. He was always a hard worker.
As most of you know, my friend Eugene had a stroke. His brain injury is very different from that of my son, and his recovery is moving much more quickly. I watch the updates from Kasia, his wife, that June, our shared producer, sends out.
I watched a video where Eugene is in speech therapy, practicing saying his name. I recognized the focus, the concentration, the fierce determination to regain something that was once so easy. It was a camera obscura moment. The reality of watching my friend work at his speech therapy was overlaid with the distorted reflection of my son working in therapy.
Seeing it brings the memory to life, it embodies it in a way. Because being intellectually aware of the fact that many years ago I went through a series of experiences is entirely different than being reminded of the clenched focus RJ had when he was sitting in his wheelchair, trying to work on his manual dexterity, picking up one smooth stone from a bowl of stones and putting it into a cup.
I know he was frustrated, and would have preferred to swipe the whole thing from the tray in front of him. But he was always a hard worker. He practiced the drums like that, paradiddles for hours from age 10, and it was that same intense effort at 18 in a wheelchair with a tray full of smooth stones.
But the effort wasn’t to learn something new. It was to recapture something once effortless, something he learned to do when he was a very small child. It is an odd regression to be the mother of a child who becomes disabled later. To watch your child return to the time when they could not do the things they once did with mastery, the dislocation of your role as mother to go from navigating the teen years to caring for someone who cannot feed themselves, or walk or talk or go to the bathroom. It is like walking the same street in an apocalyptic fog.
Only in the case of the caregiver, often you are the only one experiencing the fog, you are in your own personal apocalypse.
I know it is an image projected over another image. I understand it is not real, or happening now. But in my body it is still happening. It lives there. And I must account for the energy that requires.
Years ago, I was watching a television show where a character played by a famous actress was transferring a character playing her father from the passenger seat of the car into a wheelchair. A wheelchair transfer is a very specific movement; you have to do it right to keep the disabled person safe while protecting your back from injury. They taught me how to do it when I brought RJ home.
When I watched this scene RJ had been dead for over a decade. I’d entirely forgotten about how to do a wheelchair transfer. Until I saw this actress do it on television. She did it correctly, with the same practiced ease I developed, and as I watched her I felt my legs tense in sympathy. And my body remembered exactly what it felt like, the weight of my son in my arms, the lift, pivot, set down, over and over. I was watching a screen, but on that screen was the image of my son, and my body reacted as if it was still then.
Anyone who has any experience with trauma or therapy around trauma knows all of this. I worked with my therapist for years on differentiating the now from the then. But what about the ways in which our reality is being bent and inverted where we are not aware of the real emotional, physical and spiritual impact the old memories bring up? What if we are told this is the new normal, how it is and always has been, upside down and backwards?
We hold memories and trauma on an individual, communal and cultural level. It’s never just one Black person being shot to death by police, one Latina being wrestled to the ground and arrested although she has committed no crime. It is all of the others who have come before and will follow, all of the state violence which is not punished or addressed, all the perpetrators walking free.
The same personal and communal cameras obscura exist around so many terrible things happening right now, current events which echo our own personal conflagrations.
At least, with the smoke, we all see it. It is inescapable. There may be people who say this has nothing to do with global warming, but it is harder to believe them with the undeniable choking reality in front of our faces.
But for those of us with our individual wounds, our own strong reaction to a reality which transports us back to our specific tragedy or loss, it can be isolating. While my social media feed swarms with content from people who want to tell me about their five-step plan for healing, I find social media to be more pinholes, more projections, until it becomes a threatening cacophony, an insane trauma tower of Babbel.
The camera obsura is a pinhole that reflects an image close by. Which means if you remove the pinhole, if you face the actual thing itself, you can see it in its entirety, right side up, in the proper orientation. When it’s grief, or trauma, you might need some help, the metaphorical sunshades you would put over your eyes if you wanted to see a solar eclipse.
But for me, my spiritual curriculum is to sit with the memories of what happened, the physical sensations, the reality of my loss. It’s hard, because it’s been so many years and I think I should be over it. I hate that this grief is buried in my body, my mind, like so many IEDs so an unexpected image can take me right back there. And yet, that is the reality. Pretending otherwise does not help.
It is difficult, but there is a clarity to it, a relief. I can perceive what is right in front of me, without distortion. And, again, it brings me to some compassion, realizing how many old losses, injustices, tragedies and destruction are projected for so many of us on the walls of our everyday reality.