Words are tricky. Sometimes you need them to bring out the hurt festering inside. If you don't, it turns gangrenous and kills you. . . . But sometimes words can break a feeling into pieces.
The idea of a physical stigma is quite appealing. When I wrote the book of 'Bodies,' there was a lot of that in the book about how there are physical manifestations of psychological problems - I think it's described as 'Narrativizing The Body.'
Suppressing your hurts is like not tending to a bullet wound. Eventually you will bleed out. Dont numb pain, express it.
Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.
I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we articulate what has happened to us through the kind of people we become.
Negotiating with memories isn't easy: how to choose between those panting to be told, those still ripening, those already shriveling, and those destined to be mangled by language and come out pulverized?
Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.
One of the things that got me thinking during therapy is that they say that fear is only thoughts, and nothing will happen because thoughts will never be real. And my thesis, or joke, in film Antichrist, is that they really do become real.
A psychiatrist once asked me to draw a picture of my family. This is when I was a member of a family of four. I drew the three other people in the family first, bodies and heads. And then, last, I began to draw myself - but gave up.
The acting served as an outlet for my emotions for some time because I was doing it under the guise of someone else. And that can only be therapeutic up to a point until you truly deal with it and can express it to someone directly. Acting was a helpful outlet for me as a child. In some ways, I can say it saved my life.
