I’d like to start by quoting four lines from Seamus Heaney’s poem, Rilke: After the Fire (in his collection, District and Circle):
To make them realise what had stood so.
For now that it was gone, it all seemed
Far stranger: more fantastical than Pharaoh.
And he was changed: a foreigner among them.
“ . . . what had stood so. . . . it all seemed far stranger . . . and he was changed: a foreigner . . . “
And those last two lines, I have to repeat them, to taste them more fully: “Far stranger; more fantastical than Pharaoh./And he was changed: a foreigner among them.” Here we have the sense of coming up against a boundary, a border, and beyond which lies a new land, a foreign territory of loss and bereavement.
Borders are breaks in the onward flow of life. We ask ourselves, what am I going to find on the other side? The traveller, the refugee, even the tourist, must have moments of greater or lesser anxiety about what lies beyond the border. What is this new country going to be about? What (mis)adventures await my arrival?
Last year, on a train journey London to Istanbul passing from Serbia to Bulgaria, from Bulgaria to Turkey there was the ritual of crossing the border. The train came to halt on one side of the border, police, passport and customs officials made their way through the train, looking for reasons to prevent our ongoing journey, then after about forty minutes the train trundled across the border and stop once more for the police, passport and customs officials from the new country would make their way through the train. All these officials were armed of course. The final border Bulgaria/Turkey came at three o’clock in the morning, so we were woken and had to pile on clothes over pyjamas and make our way to the border control where we had to purchase a visa (fifteen euros I think It was) and have our passports checked and stamped.
Borders are breaks in the onward flow of life. Seamus Heaney is writing into the experience of breaks; breaks that lead to a loss of continuity. The thread is broken: maybe a fracture that can be mended, maybe not. We are invited into the world of trauma. Traumatic events have the effect of significantly ‘breaking’ the flow between past and future, events from which endless questions flow and proliferate. Questions such as:
What are the rules of trauma?
How does the psyche heal?
How do defences, toughness, inner strength and networks of support, conflict or work together?
How does the psyche, the self, rework, reconfigure, expand and develop new patterns of thought and behaviour?
What are the necessary raw materials?
And will I survive?