bookdotworm’s Reviews > A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma > Status Update

“But that made me feel better about trying to feel better. Knowing that one foot would always be able to drop right down, like a swimmer in the deep end, and touch the floor of the flat place. The skin of another reality, one which I could revisit when I needed to, even if it stopped feeling like the only surface of the real.”

“Flatlands seem to promise us a steady footing. We take this, as we often take our mothers, for granted. Both are expected to offer what the psychologist John Bowlby called the ‘secure base,’ a predictable environment on which one can build—a house, a city, a sense of self—and from which one can safely explore.“

“The flat place is the place of grief, but also the place of the real. It’s real because of that grief: it displays itself starkly, and you are beside yourself in the face of what can’t be denied. But at least you are beside yourself. You have that consolation. You curl your fingers into a fist and pretend you are holding a hand.”

“People are drawn to Orford Ness because the ruins suggest stories. The fragments are like a dot-to-dot; brains leap instantly to join them up. It’s the Gestalt theory of perception. Given only a few disconnected traces on a page, we automatically fill in the missing parts, and see the shape which we’ve been culturally primed to perceive.”