Excerpt:
Perhaps the condition of phantom limb isn’t so strange after all. We all live with something that’s no longer present in our lives, but still seems to be with us.
Could phantom limb be itself a meaning? A marker, a trace of what has been?
I shared this idea with a therapist friend of mine who said she spends her entire day listening to people who are suffering from phantom pain. I’m not certain she and I are talking about the same thing. There’s a difference, I think, between repetitive neurotic suffering — the kind that stands in your way for no good reason, so you work to get rid of it — and another kind of suffering that it may not be possible to lose. It just might be the human condition — what Nadezhda Mandelstam found herself wishing for in the midst of Stalin’s atrocities: “a peaceful life with ordinary despairs.”
In a book on the former Yugoslavia, refugees in Croatia were likened to amputees: “they can still feel their homeland, even though it’s gone. It tingles.” When the condition of phantom limb is experienced by an entire people, and then recounted, it becomes history.
In a recent documentary film, a survivor who had avoided capture by pretending to be Catholic, tells of standing in a crowd on the sidewalk as Jewish prisoners were herded through town on what was unmistakably a death march. Not long afterwards, the camps were liberated and the townspeople, including many who had stood in the crowd with her, claimed they had never seen the march. By then, the inmates had become refugees, their homes and families forever cut off. They were gone from sight, dispersed. The townspeople who had witnessed them were able to deny their existence. Like scoffers at the suffering of phantom limb, they said of history, “It’s not real. It’s all in your mind.”
Another survivor interviewed in the film speaks about going back after his release to the city he’d grown up in, hoping to find traces of his life before he and his family had been deported. The people living in his former home refused him entrance, so he knocked on a neighbor’s door where he was greeted warmly. “Gerhardt’s come back!” the woman called to her husband. A half-century later, the survivor tells of his shock when the neighbor came out to greet him wearing a suit that had belong to his own father.
As he speaks to the camera, he warns that he may be approaching too close to what he calls “a hole in the ice”, a place where his numbness might give way and he could drown. For him, the amputation called forgetting is life-saving. Better the ice than a phantom who might crack it. Nonetheless, his condition won’t go away; he cannot deny the existence of that limb, not only because it causes such pain but because it has made him who he is, as much a part of his identity as the suit once seen on his father’s shoulders.
Phantom limb – the press of history on the nerve of the moment.
I WENT to the dictionary to look up amputate and found that it’s derived from the Latin word amputatus, to be pruned, or trimmed.
Phantom limb then is proof that while the leg can be amputated, it can’t be annihilated. Annihilate, fro the Latin nihil, meaning nothing.