#1

"His normally well-fed, relaxed and rosy cheecked face looked, not frightened or worried, but extraordinarily shocked. he wore the expression found on people who have died in an accident, in a matter of seconds, without having had time to be afraid or suffer. They would be reading a book or looking out of a car window, thinking about things, or making their way along a train to a restaurant car when, all of a sudden, there they were in hell" Nemirovsky

These two images to represent our identities before trauma and during. I'm sure everyone is familiar with the scream. The style of the two pieces , the color choices, the abstract and the realistic, I think that it shows the surrealism of traumatic events.

"It took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn't always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed there stored in your eyes." Herr, Dispatches

These images represent the isolation that one feels once the actual event is over, as in our readings we see that it is never over, and sometimes does not even begin until the event has past. this is trauma, whether it is experienced by an individual or a collection of individuals, there is an inescapable pain that leaves the person feeling alone. I found the quote very powerful because by saying that we are responsible for everything we do, as we are for what we see, it shows the power of trauma, it equalizes the actor and the observer. No one can escape catastrophe, no one is left unmoved.

This may be a stretch but when we talk about abject moments and the lapse I thought about soldiers returning from war. This two images represent to be a binary opposition of glory and valor and the horror and cruelty of what war also entails. On the right is the valiant solider, on the left is a painting of Saturn devouring his son by Goya. He was told that one of his offspring would overthrow him, and so ate his children. It is an eat or be eaten mentality, kill or be killed mentality that soldiers must adopt to be effective. The terrible image shows the grotesque, the hideousness of murder, and if you look in the eyes of Saturn I think that their is a shame and a terror in his eyes, a deep fear. I think it is impossible to reconcile what becomes a necessary evil, if there is such a thing.