Bodies again, but no words.
The point was our speechlessness.
Terror: when the body flees to survive.
Horror: parted lips, frozen and immobile, a spectacle of power. It almost always goes by another name, or none.
State: a verb for the creation of complicity.
The method: consistent spectacle.
What heals, then?
The opposite of spectacle is suffering. To suffer is to return from horror with a voice.
Blessed are they who––
Cry against the silence, throw shattered voices into it.
The opposite of order, this is language like broken windows.
The opposite of calm, this is babbling, wild-haired, full-bodied.
The opposite of isolation, grief demands recognition of our common breaks. Its substance is our connective tissue. It flows with the blood of a common wound.
Grief is a voice, and it sounds like the inverse of okay,
which sounds like the reverse of an answer.
Consider this moment. Against the hum of this machine, let us launch
a shattering cry. Now is the time.
Break.
***
Inspired by Christina Rivera Garza’s Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country and by Adriana Cavarero’s Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, translated by William McCuaig.
Thank you Stacey for speaking up and speaking out on this. I looked up the root on the word horror and learned it’s Latin, from trembler or shudder. When the violence here feels so commonplace let us not stop feeling that reflex, to feel this way and refuse to accept it.
Bill, thank you. I hadn’t known the root of the word, and what you share adds a new layer to my understanding.