I have noticed a pattern in my life. In times of uncertainty, I am drawn to words. But put more accurately, I am drawn to the history of words, to their evolving history and nature. Some years ago, it got to the point where I had to purchase my own etymological dictionary. It is now on my shelf, and I consult it in times of change. Another person might consult the I Ching or a sacred text. I, however, consult my dictionary.
I mention this because I have a problem. Not a problem like a leaky faucet problem, or a number problem, like what is the square root of 81 (81) (Answer: 9). I have a word problem. The word problem is the word torture. When I just wrote this sentence in manuscript, I wrote I have a world problem instead of word problem. This is an interesting slip. Something to note, I think. Now back to my problem. My problem is that the word torture is itself a problem. And those who work in the fields of advocacy and rehabilitation, I believe, experience the problem of this word in not only their work but also in how the work is or even can be presented and promoted in the world out there. I will give you an example. I am having a conversation with an acquaintance.
I tell them that because it is topical and because I want to share this development in my life, I am now working at the Vancouver Association for Survivors of Torture (VAST). After I say this, I have a complex internal experience with verbal and non-verbal, cognitive, and pre-cognitive aspects. I feel a kind of subdued personal pride. After all, I worked hard to get here, and now I have arrived. But there is also a kind of embarrassment or shame, as though I were now seeing the Emperor in his new clothes for the first time. Other times, I say the word, and the word is said, and the soundwaves travel, and the soundwaves are heard. But instead of deepening or encouraging conversation, something seems to become palpably impossible. And then it feels like we are both on the moon.
Leaving connotation behind, the problem follows us to denotation as well. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (2011) has clearly defined the word and has probably struggled to do so. The inclusion or exclusion of state-sponsored, for example. Cruel and inhumane treatment and punishment? A child who is made, as a form of punishment, to eat garbage by their parent. Of course, this is abuse, but it also strikes something more than that. One of my first clients at VAST was a woman escaping domestic violence. She used the word torture to describe her experience. And here, an interesting question comes to mind: is patriarchy state-sponsored?
Even in the plastic world of my otherwise anchoring etymological dictionary, where denotation blends to connotation, the one becoming the other, and so in a certain sense, neither, the entry for the word torture leaves me feeling disturbed (presumably a good thing), but dissatisfied as well (I’m curious). The issue is not whether the word communicates from an experiential perspective, the essence of an experience. The word torture, in and of itself, I believe, can bring us no closer to the experience of torture than, in and of themselves, can the words love or death brings us closer to those experiences. So perhaps here is where the problem lies. The meaning of the experience that it purports to mean, and that it means to mean, is in large part incommunicable. And here, despite the thermostat being turned to 23˚C, my teeth start to chatter, and my body starts to shake. And I wonder if teeth chattering and body shaking are one of its connotations.
This is not a new problem for the life of the word, or for those trying to learn more of it, more about it, or how to make it better or easier. Neuroimaging studies have confirmed that our capacity for information-processing at the level of language basically flies out the window (van der Kolk, 2014). Bye-bye language. And this is also echoed through passing reference in W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, in which he describes the artist Gastone Novelli, who, after surviving the word, incorporates into his recurring art permutations of the letter A, often “rising and falling in waves like a long-drawn-out scream” (p. 27):
A AAAAAAAA
A AAAAAAAA
A AAAAAAAA
A AAAAAAAA
A AAAAAAAA
A AAAAAAAA
A AAAAAAAA
A AAAAAAAA
A AAAAAAAA
Seeing this image now, which was first communicated to me in Sebald’s Austerlitz (p. 27), the worlds/words that come to mind are the matrix of the incommunicable, as well as the image of the Blue Screen of Death, familiar to so many Microsoft users when their operating system crashes. And here, as an expressive arts therapist, I notice myself perhaps encountering the limitations of my own bias. Maybe art can bring us no closer to the meaning of the word than the word itself.
In Primo Levi’s The Grey Zone, the author-survivor invites us to suspend our judgment of those who have fallen into the plasmic world of connotation/denotation between the worlds/words of victim and perpetrator, because, essentially, the circumference that created the ambiguous world of the prisoner-functionary, existed apart from the world in which judgment, after the fact, can be responsibly levied. Maybe, in like manner, a solution to this problem can be this: to allow the word to exist and to be used solely by those who have had its experience. Something of this sort, I believe, is implied by Jean Améry, in his essay At the Mind’s Limits. Améry experienced this word at the age of 31. In his essay, he refers to the reader as well as to another less visible audience. He refers to this second audience as his comrades in fate—those who know what he knows and what the reader may not. Here I imagine the VIP lounge at a large airport. The lights are dim. There is anonymity in the space. A large aquarium with strange fish. There are no waiters or waitresses. There is no barman. There is nothing to order or want. Only those who know the word may sit there; only those who know the word may use it. An improbable solution that does not appear, at least to me, especially helpful.
From what I understand, in the Talmudic Jewish tradition, it is prohibited to write the name of God. Instead, if there is a textual demand for representation or reference, the tetragram, YHWH, can be used instead. Reference is made without capture or captivity. Reference is humbled. Language may lose. But perhaps something in terms of our understanding is gained. Maybe it would be both an expression of the problem and a solution if we also wrote the word torture in the form of a tetragram, maybe something like this: TR/TR. That is an interesting solution, with its own connotations, one of which happens to remind me of the pre-Socratic dictum, good and evil are one.
I do not know how the etymological entry for the word TR/TR would read. But I am reminded of the last sentence in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In closing his text, he states that whatever cannot be spoken must be passed over in silence. The logical complement of this provocative statement is equally provocative. Namely, that that which cannot be passed over in silence must be spoken. We who work in the grey zone between silence and speech: may we know this word wisely.
Figure
Octoagrammaton: YHTRWHTR
