Primeval Fears /Re-Visited
Irrational fears that appear to have no real substance in the reality of our everyday lives. They linger deep within us. Holdovers from days long gone. As though we inherit ancient memories inspiring fear deep within us unrecognized until we dream them. Homeless, bereft of familial, group or social support. Speechless, unable to communicate. The familiarity and comfort of our everyday life eluding us.
For me it's variations on a recurring dream cycle. That I am wandering in a city I know fairly well, but everything looks slightly different. I seek out the streets familiar to me searching for the one that leads to my home. I may find the street, but my home is no longer there. Fear, panic set in. That's my particular and not well understood nightmare. I have no idea why my psyche should be obsessed by fear of losing my way, an inability to connect with my home, my loved ones.
Alternative of that dream is someone whom I love whose life is inextricably woven into mine is absent; here one moment, gone the next. And I search and search, endlessly, fruitlessly. Then wake up, force myself actually to wake up in my subconscious realization that this is fear, not reality, and I need not endure it. But why does this fear visit itself upon me time and again?
For my husband there is a similar experience, but his has its genesis in experience lived and deplored. His nightmares revolve around his memories of too many business trips taking him often and far from home. He is by nature an adventurous soul, curious about the world around him, the kind of person who goes out of his way to snatch experiences out of life. Yet his dreams reflect a deep frustration and worry that evolved from his experiences and worries of missing flights and connections and the deep distress of postponing arrivals home.
Is there an ancient, deep-seated and unconscious vestigial memory that we inherit with our genetic make-up? Might that be partially responsible in explaining why people cling passionately to the ideals of their ethnic or clan groups? Is that the deep and abidingly-real meaning of cultural tribalism? The fear of loss, of separation, of aloneness? We are a communal animal by nature. In aeons gone by survival was contingent on being part of a group, fending with adversities communally.
This is quite separate and apart, quite different from the nightmares which haunt people who have survived actual physical and mental trauma on a very personal scale during the course of their lifetimes. People who have somehow surmounted sure death through war, internment, torture, or through any of nature's many natural disasters inflicted and visited upon human areas of habitation.
One hears of people who have been missing for decades suddenly reappearing. Some having temporarily lost their memory, perhaps regained it and returned home. There's that old French story about Martin Guerre; a cautionary tale of a man who goes away to war, is presumed dead, then returns decades later to resume his life but his identity is denied by family and neighbours. There are the stories that come to light occasionally of WWII Japanese servicemen living in isolation and fear as hermits in foreign countries, finally revealed.
And then there's the dreadfully touching and frightening revelation of a woman named Jaeyana Beuraheng, mother of eight children who left on a casual bus trip to conduct a normal shopping expedition crossing the border into Malaya from her home in southern Thailand. Unschooled, unable to read or write, having no knowledge of the Thai language, speaking only a dialect spoken by Muslims in southern Thailand, she was incapable of communicating her dilemma to effectively find assistance.
Meaning to board a bus travelling back to her home in Narathiwat, she instead boarded one travelling to Bangkok, about 1,300 kilometres north. Upon arrival there, and the frightening realization she was nowhere near home, the noise and traffic of the capital city further disoriented her and she boarded another bus in the hopes it might take her home. Instead she ended up in Chiang Mai, close to the Burmese border, another 640 kilometres further from her home.
She was lost. Unable to explain her dire predicament, she spent 5 years begging on the streets of Chiang Mai where her dark skin was taken as indication she was a member of a hill tribe. In 1987 police rounded up beggars and she was arrested on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant. Officials forwarded her to a social services hostel where she remained ever since. The director of the hostel thought, like everyone else there, that she was incapable of speech; functionally mute.
This illiterate peasant, mother of eight children became irretrievably lost. I cannot imagine the panic that must have overtaken her as she eventually realized she would not be returning home to her children and her life in her smalll community. Irrespective of her dislocation and fears for herself, she must have been consumed with worry and fear over the plight of her children left motherless and uncared for. A living nightmare, fulfilling amply all the instinctive fears we harbour deep within ourselves. Unable to communicate, she must have withdrawn into an unrevealing shell.
A month ago three students from her home province speaking her language arrived at the hostel on a training mission. They met the woman and she was able to finally recount to them the tragedy of separation that had beset her 25 years earlier. The students, on their return, made their own enquiries and contacted her youngest son, now 35, sending him her photograph by cell-phone. Her children, making their own frantic enquiries in an effort to find their mother, had been informed she had been run over by a train in Yala.
What a Kafkaesque tale of confusion, loss and a wasted lifetime.
For me it's variations on a recurring dream cycle. That I am wandering in a city I know fairly well, but everything looks slightly different. I seek out the streets familiar to me searching for the one that leads to my home. I may find the street, but my home is no longer there. Fear, panic set in. That's my particular and not well understood nightmare. I have no idea why my psyche should be obsessed by fear of losing my way, an inability to connect with my home, my loved ones.
Alternative of that dream is someone whom I love whose life is inextricably woven into mine is absent; here one moment, gone the next. And I search and search, endlessly, fruitlessly. Then wake up, force myself actually to wake up in my subconscious realization that this is fear, not reality, and I need not endure it. But why does this fear visit itself upon me time and again?
For my husband there is a similar experience, but his has its genesis in experience lived and deplored. His nightmares revolve around his memories of too many business trips taking him often and far from home. He is by nature an adventurous soul, curious about the world around him, the kind of person who goes out of his way to snatch experiences out of life. Yet his dreams reflect a deep frustration and worry that evolved from his experiences and worries of missing flights and connections and the deep distress of postponing arrivals home.
Is there an ancient, deep-seated and unconscious vestigial memory that we inherit with our genetic make-up? Might that be partially responsible in explaining why people cling passionately to the ideals of their ethnic or clan groups? Is that the deep and abidingly-real meaning of cultural tribalism? The fear of loss, of separation, of aloneness? We are a communal animal by nature. In aeons gone by survival was contingent on being part of a group, fending with adversities communally.
This is quite separate and apart, quite different from the nightmares which haunt people who have survived actual physical and mental trauma on a very personal scale during the course of their lifetimes. People who have somehow surmounted sure death through war, internment, torture, or through any of nature's many natural disasters inflicted and visited upon human areas of habitation.
One hears of people who have been missing for decades suddenly reappearing. Some having temporarily lost their memory, perhaps regained it and returned home. There's that old French story about Martin Guerre; a cautionary tale of a man who goes away to war, is presumed dead, then returns decades later to resume his life but his identity is denied by family and neighbours. There are the stories that come to light occasionally of WWII Japanese servicemen living in isolation and fear as hermits in foreign countries, finally revealed.
And then there's the dreadfully touching and frightening revelation of a woman named Jaeyana Beuraheng, mother of eight children who left on a casual bus trip to conduct a normal shopping expedition crossing the border into Malaya from her home in southern Thailand. Unschooled, unable to read or write, having no knowledge of the Thai language, speaking only a dialect spoken by Muslims in southern Thailand, she was incapable of communicating her dilemma to effectively find assistance.
Meaning to board a bus travelling back to her home in Narathiwat, she instead boarded one travelling to Bangkok, about 1,300 kilometres north. Upon arrival there, and the frightening realization she was nowhere near home, the noise and traffic of the capital city further disoriented her and she boarded another bus in the hopes it might take her home. Instead she ended up in Chiang Mai, close to the Burmese border, another 640 kilometres further from her home.
She was lost. Unable to explain her dire predicament, she spent 5 years begging on the streets of Chiang Mai where her dark skin was taken as indication she was a member of a hill tribe. In 1987 police rounded up beggars and she was arrested on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant. Officials forwarded her to a social services hostel where she remained ever since. The director of the hostel thought, like everyone else there, that she was incapable of speech; functionally mute.
This illiterate peasant, mother of eight children became irretrievably lost. I cannot imagine the panic that must have overtaken her as she eventually realized she would not be returning home to her children and her life in her smalll community. Irrespective of her dislocation and fears for herself, she must have been consumed with worry and fear over the plight of her children left motherless and uncared for. A living nightmare, fulfilling amply all the instinctive fears we harbour deep within ourselves. Unable to communicate, she must have withdrawn into an unrevealing shell.
A month ago three students from her home province speaking her language arrived at the hostel on a training mission. They met the woman and she was able to finally recount to them the tragedy of separation that had beset her 25 years earlier. The students, on their return, made their own enquiries and contacted her youngest son, now 35, sending him her photograph by cell-phone. Her children, making their own frantic enquiries in an effort to find their mother, had been informed she had been run over by a train in Yala.
What a Kafkaesque tale of confusion, loss and a wasted lifetime.
Labels: Memories
posted by Pieface @ 11:14 AM
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