WOUNDED HEALER

BY TRACY SCHLAPP

… as a child
i wanted a scar just like my father’s
bold and appalling a mushroom explosion
that said i too was at war
Truong Tran, scars

Conceived in violence, Chiron was cast-off by his titan father Chronos. Philyra, his ocean nymph mother saw her centaur-child as a monster and left him to die. This parental abandonment deeply wounded the half-human half-horse. Golden Apollo found and fostered Chiron and under the god’s watch, Chiron studied medicine, music, and philosophy. Apollo’s twin sister Artemis trained the gentle centaur in archery and hunting. The knitting of his psychic wounds along with the gods’ careful instructions made Chiron a highly sought after mentor to young heroes, including Perseus, Jason, Ajax, Patroclus, and Achilles. Cast in the very cloak of Greek tragedy, Chiron meet his demise when he was inadvertently struck by a poison arrow shot from Hercules’s bow. The immortal healer was unable to treat his wound and suffered unimaginable pain. Chiron recognized the torturous, eternal plight of the chained Prometheus, who was sentenced to having an eagle ravage his liver every day only to have the organ regrow every night. The compassionate Chiron struck a deal with Zeus to trade his immortality to secure Promethus’s freedom and Chiron was released to the heavens.

Reading the poet and visual artist Truong Tran’s poem scars in our workshop unleashed an animated telling of stories. The room exploded as we jumped up and compared our scars. The injuries ranged from bike wipe outs to gun shots. Some stories made as laugh, yes, even when the injury was serious — DS recounted dropping his tacos after being shot which elicited whoops of laugher. We were afterall demarking rites of passage, those moments that tie cause and effect to permanent reminders — stitched, lumpy, stretched marred patches of skin. Childhood only seems dangerous in retrospect. Wallace Moreland in Pendleton told us, “I never knew I lived in a bad neighborhood.” Kids only know what they know.

Red Water by Yeyin Chin: “It was calling out to me, daring me to jump over it and I was way too confident, knowing I could easily clear it — the fish tank was only two feet tall and I was a six year old big boy who was in the trend of jumping over everything inspired by what, I could not remember now, but I do remember my foot catching the side and the salt water filling with billowing, bright red blood before escaping into the driveway.”

We shutter as he sets up the story. Our adult brains quickly add up the pieces of bikes plus glass fish tank equals, like the pause between injury and the realization you’ve been hurt.

Stressla Lynn Johnson’s My Beautiful Scars celebrates the visual evidence of healing: “Is it really a scar? Or, something more rewarding like a badge of honor, or the mark left by overcoming a real engrained fear? I wonder about that part of me left on the cold concrete of the sidewalk, where I lost my balance and momentum of forward motion, toppled over the handlebars, with bike in hand.”

Normally, I would interpret the swaggered storytelling as a kind of a competition. One person tops the next with a more dangerous situation, or a more dire outcome, but in a maximum-security prison the punchline is different. These stories … these stories follow a series of events and outcomes that point to a long road that eventually leads to unintended consequences. As the skin has knit over wounds, healing feels tight and itchy. The process is painful, or at least uncomfortable. As Stressla says, the smooth skin is replaced with “badges of honor” and those badges indicate survival.

I know a guy
If you marked each with a dot
Then extrapolated and superimposed on a ceiling
It would look like the night sky
A star chart of wounds
Jai, Scar Chart

I look around the room in our workshops and recognize the healing arts at work. These stories are not boastful or arrogant. Even in the good fun and teasing, each storyteller is honored by the attention of the group. Care is shown. I am surrounded by the understanding of Chiron. The immortal wound is healed through the compassion shown to one another. | TDS