Page 27 - The Irony Board

Into the Mind

Suture self

By clamping the veins
Connecting events,
One’s memory shuts

Off any great loss
Incurred by the flow
Of blood and of guts

From slices of life
Too thin to have time
To heal between cuts.

Here is another way the mind keeps unpleasant thoughts out of
awareness. The clamped veins in Gluckman’s brutal theatre of
operations are neural chains of association; synaptic inhibition is an
effective tourniquet when injuries are multiple and spatiotemporally
proximate. The treatment, however, may be worse than the wound:
psychological repression is gangrenous when prolonged. In the
worst case, a neurotic bypass is created, linking self-protectiveness
with self-destructiveness. At minimum, parts of the past are sealed
off indefinitely from consciousness; is this too great a price to pay
for psychic survival?

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