When I first read the term ‘zerrissenheit’, I forgot about everything else — where I was sitting, what I was reading, what I might have been thinking about doing next. It was as though a trap door had opened, dropping me into a torn and twisted landscape, composed of my own memories and experiences. Suddenly, I was navigating the shards of my parents’ divorce, while in the background, patient technicians, working in an enormous unheated Quonset hut, tried to piece together the wreckage of an airliner — and all around us fluttered down countless pulverized scraps of what used to be the mundane accouterments of thousands of offices that had just vanished in twin rushes of toxicity and grief.
‘The state of having been torn apart’ — not the aftermath of an accident or an error or a miscalculation, but the post-traumatic shock of somehow having survived a deliberate action — and not being in a coma, or under sedation, but, implicitly, squarely facing one’s own dismemberment.
So. Gradually, somewhat tentatively, but with a growing sense of conviction, I find myself embarked on an improbable creative venture — to recreate, to the degree possible, this dizzying experience; to set out, not to cover up or to excuse or to mend, but to examine how it feels, facing a shattered identity — how one confronts, either to honor or to discard, a pulverized cell phone, a shredded sweater vest, a splintered birthday cake…
This may take a while.