i saw beloved on friday and i can't stop thinking about it.

earlier this month i was trying to explain to ricardo about ptsd. about how certain kinds of trauma leave a mark on the mind; about the way that neural pathways get disrupted, become circular, twisted. where once it was possible to go in a clear line of thought, it becomes necessary to take a long and winding path.

and about flashbacks. about the spiral that comes with being attacked; at first you are just there. then you are there every week. later you are there every month. the spiral goes outward, but the flashbacks continue; they do not go away; it may take longer, it may be less intense; but always you come back to that place, there is that moment when you have always been there and there is no way out.

difficult to talk about, this stuff.

i told him about my amazement when i first saw someone catch it; a novel of faulkner that didn't describe the thought process, but captured it in text, embedded the twistings of a damaged mind between the covers of a novel. the only other person i've known to do it, to catch it, toni morrisson. about how she takes the rupture that is slavery, and shows how it twists a mind, a family, a community, a country. i told him i was afraid of this movie, because if it failed it would be very very bad. and if it succeeded, it would be worse.

beloved is the story of a woman and her family. it is also a story about how slavery rapes time itself.

i want to fall back on abstract language. i want to talk about ruptures, dissonances, my god i even want to throw in the word discourse. this shit is scary. i want to hold it as a distance even as i describe it, i want to make myself safe from it. instead i think i'm going to say that last bit again.

beloved is a story about how slavery rapes time itself.

this is a movie about an event so deeply wrong, about a system so unnatural, that nature itself rebels. the boundaries between the living and the dead no longer apply; the boundaries between humans and insects no longer apply.

the only way to approach something so deeply unnatural as slavery, so destructive to all that is good and sane, is through the supernatural.

beloved does this.

there is a powerful rhythm at work here, and it is the rhythm of ptsd. this movie begins with utter confusion. i literally did not understand the images that were flashing across the screen. as disorienting as a flashback, a dog flies across the screen.

you start out right in it.

the movie becomes a process of understanding, of seeing things unfold that you have already seen. the rhythm is ptsd; is being surprised once again by what has always been there; the rhythm is a spiral of seeing again and again, in different ways, until you understand.

i feel like an idiot and a mystic, trying to talk about this.

go see the movie. write to me about it.