With new revelations appearing weekly about the officially sanctioned torture by our Government and its puppet in Iraq (see Meteor Blades’ diary for the latest “discovery”), it seems to me a necessity to try to understand what torture really is. And not in the abstract, but how it feels in those moments of cold reality when fear and pain operate as partners to warp the consciousness of its victims.
Most of us will never suffer torture at the hands of another human being. We will never be torn from our beds, or taken from our offices, or removed from a simple walk down the street to be thrust into the arms of cynical and merciless interrogators, willing to inflict physical or mental anguish upon us in pursuit of their goals. To mangle a phrase from Shakespeare, we see torture through a glass, darkly, if at all.
I, myself, have never been tortured. You may well ask, how then can I explain what it is to you, when I have no experience of torture, no real understanding of how it feels, and what it does to one’s soul? In truth, I cannot.
But, if I listen to the voices of those who have been tortured, if I grapple with the words they choose to describe its effects, and then try to fit recognizable elements of their stories to my own life experience, perhaps I can at least circle a little bit closer to that reality. Perhaps, I can acquire a more intimate understanding of what torture may be. And then, perhaps, I can better communicate its horrors to others.
Perhaps:
A Starting Point.
This weekend, CSpan’s Book TV replayed video from an event held at the Great Hall in Cooper’s Union in New York City, put on by PEN American Center, the American division of International PEN, an organization which is a:
. . . worldwide association of writers with 141 Centres in 99 Countries, [that] exists to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere, to fight for freedom of expression and represent the conscience of world literature.
What I had come across in flipping through the channels was a re-broadcast of PEN’s second State of Emergency event, was organized for the purpose of offering :
. . . [A] special evening of readings in opposition to current United States policies on the treatment of detainees in this country and abroad. A stellar group of writers will . . . read and bring national attention to abusive government policies including torture, arbitrary detention, and extraordinary rendition.
In brief, a series of authors, some well known and some not, took the stage to read from the works of other authors they had selected. It just so happened that at the moment I began viewing, Nicole Krauss was reading excerpts from At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities by Jean Amery. I was immediately struck by what she was describing through the words of Jean Amery. So struck, in fact, that I felt compelled to write this diary.
Amery was a French Resistance fighter captured and tortured by the Gestapo. When he was discovered to be a Jew, he was sent by the Gestapo to Auschwitz. The particular scene of torture he describes (as read by Krauss) is one in which he was hung from a hook with his hands bound behind him. The end result was that his arms were literally torn from their shoulder sockets, and he subsequently dangled from that hook beneath his twisted and dislocated limbs while he was interrogated. Those of you who wish to hear an audiofile of Ms. Krauss’ reading from Amery’s description of that episode, can find it here. I regret to say I do not have a transcript for you.
Some Quotes from Amery’s Book Regarding Torture.
After the war, Amery became a writer, and his best known work was At the Mind’s Limits, a collection of autobiographical essays about his experience after his capture by the Nazis. All of the following quotes by him regarding his experience of, and his meditations upon, the torture he endured, are from that work.
About his inability to accept what was happening to him:
The Gestapo tortures. But that was a matter until now for the somebodies who were tortured and who displayed their scars at antifascist conferences. That suddenly you yourself are the Somebody, is grasped only with difficulty. That, too, is a kind of alienation.
On the nature of those who torture:
Almost amazingly, it dawns on one that the fellows not only have leather coats and pistols, but also faces: not “Gestapo faces” with twisted noses, hypertrophied chins, pockmarks, and knife scars, as might appear in a book, but rather faces like anyone else’s. Plain, ordinary faces. And the enormous perception at a later stage . . . makes clear to us how the plain ordinary faces finally become Gestapo faces after all, and how evil overlays and exceeds banality. For there is no “banality of evil” . . . . When an event places the most extreme demands on us, one ought not to speak of banality. For at this point there is no longer any abstraction . . . that could even approach its reality.
* * *
In the world of torture man exists only by ruining the other person who stands before him. . . . When it has happened and the torturer has expanded into the body of his fellow man and extinguished what was his spirit, he himself can then smoke a cigarette or sit down to breakfast.
On his feeling of helplessness:
In an interrogation, blows have only scant criminological significance. . . . Simple blows, which really are entirely incommensurable with actual torture. . . . but for the person who suffers them they are still experiences that leave deep marks . . . The first blow brings home to the prisoner that he is helpless, and thus it already contains in the bud everything that is to come.
On its lasting effect on him:
What was inflicted on me in the unspeakable vault in Breendonk [Belgium] was by far not the worst form of torture. . . . What did happen to me there . . . was relatively harmless and it left no conspicuous scars on my body. And yet, twenty-two years after it occurred, on the basis of an experience that in no way probed the entire range of possibilities, I dare to assert that torture is the most horrible event a human being can retain within himself.
* * *
Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him, even when no clinically objective traces can be detected.
On the failure of language to describe his pain:
It would be totally senseless to try and describe here the pain that was inflicted on me. . . . The pain was what it was. Beyond that there is nothing to say. Qualities of feeling are as incomparable as they are indescribable. They mark the limit of the capacity of language to communicate. . . . Whoever is overcome by pain through torture experiences his body as never before. In self-negation, his flesh becomes a total reality.
On what torture stole from him, and what his experience put in its place:
Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained. That one’s fellow man was experienced as the anti-man remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. It blocks the view into a world in which the principle of hope rules. One who was martyred is a defenseless prisoner of fear. It is fear that henceforth reigns over him.
* * *
“It is fear that henceforth reigns…. Fear–and also what is called resentments. They remain, and have scarcely a chance to concentrate into a seething, purifying thirst for revenge.”
A personal tale of pain and suffering.
I have had several experiences in my life in which I have suffered from intense and enduring pain. The worst of these occurred during my senior year in High School, when I was seventeen years old. Avery’s words, as I heard them read to me by Nicole Krauss, brought me back to that time in my life, probably because it was the only incident I could recall that even approached what he was describing.
I was at home at the time, alone except for the presence of my 12 year old sister. My parents and other brothers were away for the day on a sightseeing trip to Colorado Springs. I hadn’t gone because I had come down with the early signs of what I thought was the flu. My sister stayed behind for some reason I have long forgotten. She may have had homework to do, she might have been grounded, or she might just have longed for a day without the presence of most of her family around.
The first sign of trouble came shortly after everyone had left. I started experiencing pain in my chest and neck when I took a deep breath. The pain was sharp, like a knife, but of short duration, similar to the type of pain one gets in one’s side after running at full speed and becoming winded. A little more intense than that, but it went away if I didn’t breath in too deeply. Initially, I wasn’t too concerned..
However the pain worsened, becoming both more intense, and more frequent. Soon each breath was sending shooting pains up my neck and down my arm. Then even shallow breathing began to be painful, a constant wave of pain across my chest, and then I could feel each beat of my heart as if a spike was being repeatedly driven into the upper left side of my chest. At this point I began to get seriously worried. Though I could not understand how it could be happening, I became convinced I was having a heart attack.
What I had instead, though I didn’t know it at the time, was pericarditis. Pericarditis is an inflammation of the pericardium, the thin membranous sac around the heart. As the inflammation worsens, what frequently occurs is a buildup in fluid between the heart muscle and the pericardial lining. The pericardium then expands like a balloon and puts pressure on all of the other organs in the chest cavity (lungs, stomach, liver, and major veins, arteries and nerves).
What I had been experiencing that day was the gradual buildup of fluid with an accompanying increase in pain as the pericardial sac around my heart expanded. Eventually the size of that expansion would exceed 3 times the normal size of my heart.
I sat on the couch in our family’s living room, and tried not to move, hoping the pain would simply go away. It wasn’t long before my sister started to notice something was wrong with me. When she finally learned the amount of pain I was in she began to panic which helped me to ignore my own anxiety as I tried to keep her calm. At some point, my parents called to check on us, and she explained what was going on to them. They immediately got in their car and returned home, a drive of about an hour and a half from where they were. Calls were made to my doctor, and I was taken to the emergency room at the local hospital where I would spend the next 11 days.
At first, the doctors were convinced I was having a heart attack as a result of taking recreational drugs. This was ironic, since I was a “squeaky clean” churchgoer and straight A student who wouldn’t have known who at our school was even “doing drugs” much take any of them, myself. Eventually a cardiologist was consulted (about my second day there I think) and a proper diagnosis was made. Thereafter, I was doped up with narcotics, until the anti-inflammatory medications began to take effect. I was released from the hospital after the fluid on my heart had been reduced by about 75%. Eventually, with further bed rest, and a limited schedule at school, the excess fluid would completely disappear.
Still, for years afterward, I had recurring chest pain, like the after shocks of a major earthquake, that would at times incapacitate me. I was told this was likely the result of scar tissue that would become re-inflamed whenever my immune system was stimulated by illness or other stressors. Only in middle age, have these episodes mostly subsided.
The limits of analogy regarding torture.
All bad experiences in life share one thing in common: we would prefer never to have to re-live them. And certainly experiences of great bodily pain, whether incurred in the course of illness, accident or harm inflicted by others share a common template of emotions and feelings that makes it possible to compare one to the other.
My experience of pericarditis certainly parallels the experience of a torture victim in many respects. The pain, for one. Enduring great pain over an extended period of days is something that I can understand, for I have felt it. Felt the excruciating bodily anguish, felt the fear of the pain continuing (or if ceased momentarily, returning). I know the sensation of being exhausted beyond reason by it, yet unable to obtain rest.
And I know the feeling of helplessness, and of anger and despair at a situation I have no control over. The feeling that my body was not mine, that I can understand all too well.
And yet, there are profound differences between what I experienced through my suffering, and what a tortured man or woman suffers. Yes, I felt helpless. I suffered pain. But I also had the assistance of doctors and nurses, of my family. I was not abandoned.
Further, the cause of my suffering was a virus, or my genetic make-up, or fate, or if you like, an omnipotent and distant Providence, whose purposes I am unable to fathom. In a sense the cause of my pain is everything and nothing. It has no face.
But those who suffer torture at the hands of their fellow beings, they cannot say that, can they? The cause of their pain stands before them, taunting them, or consoling them in turn, or simply indifferent to them in any respect at all except as a piece of meat to be manipulated. They are confronted directly with the face of the torturer, a real living, breathing, speaking human soul such as themselves. And that makes all the difference.
For what is taken from them is not just trust in the world, which we all must lose at some point, but trust in the society of their own species. For we are social animals. We need the presence of other individuals, and the help and assistance of others, even the love of others, to sustain us. That is what Amery spoke of, when he stated that the torture victim loses his or her trust in society. And that is what the torturer destroys.
Conclusion, of a sort.
We can all look into our own experiences, and find something in common with the horror that those who suffer torture endure. Indeed, we need to do just that, if we are not to let torture remain an abstract principle, one which some still argue can be applied to accomplish a greater moral good. For we can see the fallacy of that argument only if we are willing to access our own suffering, only if we are willing to risk comparison of our life’s pain with that of the pain the torturer inflicts on those he or she holds in their dominion.
But we must also acknowledge, that the plight of the tortured victim is unique, and uniquely horrifying. To destroy someone’s body or mind is bad enough, but to also destroy the possibility of ever having faith in the society to which they belong, in the possibility that others will treat them well? Destroy the faith that their fellows can ever be trusted to comfort them, and hold them again in a familial embrace? That has no parallel in any other experience of human suffering. There is no scale to measure the damage it does.
(Cross Posted at Daily Kos)
