Dark have been my [waking] dreams of late.

"Man is the indestructible. And this means there is no limit to the destruction of man."

--Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 135

This is basically my thesis. Man, in being man, cannot be destroyed, but only infinitely afflicted in the attempt to obliterate him. However, despite the endless use of force and torture which forces him into non-existence, no one can undo his existence-- you can never make him un-be, and therefore he is indestructible. However, the seas of pain and endless anguish can force a split within the mind/soul/heart/whatever you want to call it, which is the only thing that allows one to perhaps survive in some small way if indeed your body is not dismantled. In order to have some relation, some sense of being human, one must have a relation to another, literally an other, and in times of extreme and prolonged trauma, the only one available to bear witness is the afflicted themselves. And so we create our own other, remove ourselves from the explicit situation. But if we do survive, how does one go about reconciling these two selves?

The only option is Language. (Yes, Language with a capital L.) If one can find the place of speech, the act of speaking will engender a re-living of a trauma that was sectioned off in the radical other self, and perhaps bring about an experience in the present of the past, not necessarily healing-- you can't heal some wounds, just not going to happen-- or reconciliation with it. Things like the genocide resist to their core these obscene efforts of rationalization and contextualization, the smoothing touch of history. Instead the raw pain and unending anguish must be felt, again and again, and bleed onto the listener, the attentive receiver of the words of the other, so that the wails of that tortured, mutilated other don't fall on barren ground.

This, and all the pages recounting first-hand testimony from on the ground in Hiroshima, comprise the multitudinous hues of my nightmares.

And I'll be doing this non-stop until Monday, but it's not like the Ph.D. is going to be any more cheerful. Le sigh. Still, I think this is really, vitally, critically important to the human condition, the contemporary plight of the wounded many. So, there's nothing else I could be doing, really.

And that is a heartening thought.