By The Landlord
“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.” – Maya Angelou
“If your heart is broken, make art with the pieces.” – Shane Koyczan
“They broke my heart and they killed me, but I didn't die. They tried to bury me, they didn't realise I was a seed.” – Sinead O'Connor
“A champion is someone who gets up when he can’t.” – Jack Dempsey
“Fall seven times, Stand up eight.” – Chinese Proverb
“The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.” – Robert Jordan
“Humankind’s superpower is diversity.
Life's superpower is plasticity.” – Abhijit Naskar
Around 15 years ago, I was cycling home after a night out on a hot summer evening, taking a slightly different route from normal, turned a corner, and was set upon by a violent gang. They'd thrown a heavy object into my front wheel wheel, causing me to crash. My girlfriend was also stopped, and her bike grabbed. While she was restrained, and screamed at the ensuing scene, my leg was still trapped in the frame of the bike, and unable to get up, I felt a sudden flurry of blows to the body and face.
Trying to defend myself, eventually I struggled free, my bike and bag pulled away from me, and after a few more blows, and a lot of shouting and swearing, the gang disappeared. I got up, blood pouring from my face, and together we hobbled away. It was a surreal few minutes. The street was eerily quiet, but I distinctly remember a woman walking by us on the other side of the road. She didn't say anything, just stared at me then hurried away, as if I was a ghost.
With bags also stolen, we’d lost phones and home keys, so it took time to get an ambulance, and then, a long night in hospital emergency waiting to be patched up. Then sitting on the doorstep for some hours waiting for a locksmith, then, after about three hours of troubled sleep, the next day back in hospital for a plastic surgeon to repair parts of my face. That was because, in the throws of violence, one of the gang decided it was a good idea to smash my D-lock at my face, akin to the size and weight of a hammer. I also had to undergo lots of dental repair. Even now I’ve still got a front tooth that’s loose, but still works, and stubbornly and resiliently refuses to drop out.
But all I wanted to do was just return to normal. To be honest, my biggest concern, being self-employed, was to get back to work to be able to pay the mortgage.
It's strange how, in times of great difficulty or sudden trauma, the mind and body can shift to a new place. Those first few moments after the incident were like a surreal dream. The word trauma comes from the Latin traumaticus, from Greek traumatikos meaning "pertaining to a wound”. But what happened, pertaining to my wounds, an otherworldly state kicked in, dream-like but also laser-focused that we were both OK, and facing practical requirements. I just didn't have time for self-pity.
So perhaps there's some connection there with the German for it, Traum, or the verb - träumen. Some mechanism in the mind turns trauma into a dream-state, to soften the blows, to protect from reality, and begin the healing process.
It would perhaps be expected, and understandable to reveal how this event caused a longer-term psychological trauma, that I'd be afraid to ride a bike in the city again. But oddly, I didn't. I just got on with it, and even with prominent dressings all over my face, within a few days I was back on my back cycling and going to the office to work. Some friends and colleagues joked that it was me being ‘hard and northern’. Perhaps there's something in that, northern at least, but I think this is the nature of resilience, that you have to get away from a chattering, worried, neurotic mindstate, and let more deep-seated, primal, animal-survival mechanism take over, and just get on with life.
And so this week, in all sorts of contexts, whether sudden or slow, mental or physical, we're seeking songs about resilience, fortitude in crisis, strength, bouncing back, being unsinkable, rolling with the punches. And in itself, fuelled by many problems of life, writing and performing songs is perhaps a symptom, and a solution to that.
We've likely all experienced sudden trauma and crisis that requires resilience, but also slow-drip long-term difficulty that also needs continual, renewed strength. Perhaps this week as well as songs, some readers might like to share some personal examples.
A few years ago, my parents died within two years of each other, going from being highly active, intelligent, eccentric, energetic people, still part-time working as teachers and musicians, and also still keen hill-walkers, but then going into a slow, then suddenly rapidly accelerating, heartbreaking decline over a four- or five-year period. It was a very painful process to witness and deal with.
But as for the experience of grief, which can come in many forms, across a landscape of time, I'm not sure whether, or how much, that has affected, or may still hit me. Resilience overcame grief, overshadowed, or maybe shored up by a huge list of practical tasks left behind after their departure. Life simply must go on.
There’s plenty of other family-related trauma to recount, but that’s enough about me this week. My anecdotal resilience examples pale into insignificance compared with the fortitude and focus of those experiencing far greater and unusual trauma, such as that of that famous survival story of climber Joe Simpson, and his book and film Touching the Void, crawling for miles after a fall in the Peruvian Andes with a broken leg, and having many moments, also dream-like, of almost going mad as Boney M's Brown Girl In The Ring when round and round in his head.
Or the various cases of survivors of plane crashes. For example, recently highlighted due to the publication of a book, there’s the Netherlands' Annette Herfkens, who crawled from a crash in the Vietnamese jungle in 1992, with multiple fractures, a jaw left hanging and a collapsed lung, unable to stand, for some time only only able to lie there listening the diminishing groans of her fellow passengers who all died after a couple of days, including her fiancé.
Her resilience weirdly came in form of just thinking about her work, and looking in wonderment at the beauty of the leaves on the trees above her in the sunlight, and concentrating on breathing, almost in a meditate state, her senses somehow suppressing the increasing stench of dead bodies around her. Then a physical requirement, slowly crawling back to plane to grab a few pieces of the broken wing's insulation material to use like a sponge for rainwater so she could take in some vital fluids. Time distorted somehow. She was rescued eight days later.
Physical pain, whether short or long-term is source of resilience. Author Karen Duffy, who writes about chronic back pain in the book Backbone, describes a similar experience to that of Herfkens. “Adversity can create and opportunity for self-discovery. When you are faced with an on-going medical catastrophe, it forces you to take notice of the little things that you may have overlooked when you were dazzled with good health. You recognise that the little moments are not so little. The appreciation of accumulated small little moments can create a happier life.” How profoundly true.
“The power of the brain is stronger than the pain,” adds another writer, Janna Cachola.
“Resilience, in a sense, is applied optimism,” says the writer Kate O’Neill. There’s a lot of practical wisdom in that.
Resilience takes many forms, tones, and contexts. The Bar is filled again, this time with writers and more, painting it in different ways.
In Dracula, Bram Stoker writes how: “It is really wonderful how much resilience there is in human nature. Let any obstructing cause, no matter what, be removed in any way, even by death, and we fly back to first principles of hope and enjoyment.”
Scottish poet Edwin Morgan describes resilience as something hewn in the school of hard knocks in his Glasgow upbringing:
“I learned both love and joy in a hard school
and treasure them like the fierce salvage of
some wreck that has been built to look like stone
and stand, though it did not, a thousand years.”
The Australian psychologist Hugh Mackay meanwhile takes another broad brush on the sources and effects of resilience: “All catastrophes have the same effect: they sharpen our understanding of our interconnectedness and mutual dependency, they clarify our values, they encourage us to rethink our priorities, they expose our prejudices, and they build our resilience.”
In writing the script for Wim Winders’s 1984 film of Paris, Texas, with its haunting soundtrack by Ry Cooder, Sam Shepard echoes that dream-like state induced by the trauma of Harry Dean Stanton’s character, Travis:
“…and he was surprised at himself because he didn’t feel anything anymore. All he wanted to do was sleep. And for the first time, he wished he were far away. Lost in a deep, vast country where nobody knew him. Somewhere without language or streets. He dreamed about this place without knowing its name.”
And taking a more comic, stiff-upper-lip like classic English tone, here’s P.G. Wodehouse, from The Mating Season: “In the circles in which I move it is pretty generally recognised that I am a resilient sort of bimbo, and in circumstances where others might crack beneath the strain, may frequently be seen rising on stepping-stones of my dead self to higher things.”
But trauma and resilience is all relative. Plane crash survivor Herfkens, has had a successful career in finance, and is now an author and TV writer. Like most of those quoted above, she’s from a white, privileged background. She’s not a descendant of slaves, or suffering from continuous legacy of social injustice, and repression.
So when it comes to trauma and resilience, few have greater or more articulate understanding of it than Maya Angelou, who among many other timeless phrases, reminds us that “bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave.”
Facing many life struggles, from life as a young mother and prostitute to becoming a singer, dancer, actress, composer, and civil rights activist and Hollywood’s first female black director, she became most famous as a writer, editor, essayist, playwright, and poet. Most famous of all, the autobiographical 1969 first book I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings recounts the trauma of Arkansas racism and more, being raped as a eight-year-old, a trauma causing her to not speak for five years, but to take refuge in reading. It’s a personal but also black history of unparalleled power. We started with Maya, so let’s finish with her too, and from one of her most famously resilient and profoundly resonant poems:
“You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise ...
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.”
So then, helping to guide and choose from your nominations for this topic, let’s welcome back to the Bar, this week’s guest guru, is the ever resourceful and resilient magicman. Place your suggestions in comments below for deadline at 11pm UK time on Monday for playlists published next week. Life, and music, must go on …
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