Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing

In Dreaming in the Fault Zone, Eleni Stecopoulos investigates the concept of healing as an expansive and complex field of inquiry. She interweaves theories and practices of doctors, healers, shamans, poets, and artists—including her own experiences—from one end of the earth to the other. The book spans antiquity to the present moment, taking readers on a journey through the ways healing is articulated by anthropology, critical theory, experimental poetics, disability studies, and multimedia/performance art. In short, this is an ambitious and expansive book with comprehensive notes and a generous bibliography. Anyone interested in an account of healing that reaches beyond platitudes and maxims will find Dreaming in the Fault Zone a revelatory exposition.

The book is grounded in a cogent but evolving thesis which makes reading it like going on a philosophical excursion into winding and rarely linear paths of healing. What distinguishes Stecopolous’ project from other books about how to deal with the suffering body is her assertion of the role that language plays in the healing process. The body in pain is not a static object that is easily diagnosable and the expectations of language to easily confine suffering into a sentence is a narrative burden which causes more harm than good. The book lands squarely in this present moment when the word “healing” is being exploited by self-help hustlers and politicians. For this cultural crisis, Stecopoulos presents an urgent plea to stop looking for cures and instead embrace the possibility that there is no miracle to repair a body—including the body politic—living under the material, often cruel, conditions of late capitalism. Instead, her plea is that we become open to the subtleness of language, poetry, community, imagination, and dreams that shimmer all the brokenness into a vibratory chorus. It is difficult to critique epiphanic language and write in a way that does not alienate readers who are not well versed in experimental poetic methodologies. Dreaming in the Fault Zone, however, manages to carefully present both the theory and the practice in gorgeous prose that is accessible without being pedantic.

Dreaming in the Fault Zone is elegantly divided into short prose sections, exquisitely designed by Kit Schluter to include stark black pages as if to mark the entry into a new portal of thinking. It begins with a thorough historical recounting of the Asklepieion in ancient Greece, the clinic where supplicants in need of healing would go to be put into a ritual of sleep and receive remedies in the form of dreams which were then interpreted by the temple priests. Stecopoulos grounds her book in this ancient human understanding of incubation, which she reveals as the Latin translation of enkiomesis:

…waiting until something develops fully before birth. It can mean the phase between contagion and symptom. It is a time of development, waiting until something is sufficiently formed to emerge. In all of these definitions there is a temporal dimension as well as a sense of covering, protecting, or nurturing.

Reading is itself a kind of incubation and this book draws the reader into a web of references. Deeper and deeper we go, following Stecopoulos through her own healing journey which eschews storytelling but draws forth conversation, social practice and community. We are with her as she investigates the many realms of healing, in search not of catharsis but parataxis—closely reading the work of performance artists, healers, and poets who manifest the imperative of her poetics.

Poetry, then, becomes the instrument of re-covering psyche through myth and image. It is actually poetry that keeps us from being whole, in the sense of fully uncovered—recovered–fixed. It keeps us in becoming. In incubation.

So each book reveals the next inside it: never free of the others, never heard.

Stecopoulos elevates the importance of language to the level of medicine which holds the confusion, uncertainty, ambiguity, parataxis, and bewilderment of the body in pain, trapped not only in its own subjective experience but also in the tedium of hospitals, the sounds of diagnostic equipment, the roller coaster of emotions ranging from hopefulness to anger. As she writes in her wonderfully evocative rendering of David Wolach’s book Hospitalogy:

Beyond heroic measures and feats of engineering, beyond miracles of replacement and transplantation, the ordinary aesthetic grinds on: palpation and percussion, the tedium of chelation, the movement of repetitions of occupational therapy, the whisper of the ventilator. These also sound the struggle.

Although a formidable achievement that blends thorough scholarship with beautiful poetry, the challenge of writing into the liminal space of enkiomesis is always present. Sporadically, Stecopoulos rehashes the battle between “mainstream” and “experimental” poets over language’s efficacy and usefulness. In this current moment when language is being so abused by politicians to aggressively create alternate, harmful realities, this argument can feel trite. Yes, Rafael Campo has been candid in his critique of experimental poetry’s “deliberate antiempathetic” effects on readers, and Stecopoulos is insistent that “the easy equation of the poem with care actually denies care, because it is prescriptive; it narrows the field of affect, evacuating poetry of the complexity of aesthetic experience and, ultimately, language.” But how does continuing this now decades long tit for tat between poets not divert language from its healing capacity? Why not cast the net as widely as possible? After all, if a person receives solace from a narrative poem that communicates the heart of struggle, or an ambiguous poem which conveys the impossibility of closure, why is that a topic for constant debate when both sides agree: poetry’s great potential, if people will just read it, is that it opens up the field of listening and being heard. And that, if anywhere, is the zone where healing begins.

Dreaming in the Fault Zone is imminently useful for physicians, psychotherapists, ethnographers, and spiritual seekers of all denominations to be privy to this complex conversation which is, ultimately, about poetry’s power to reclaim and hold language’s medicinal power. This book appears as a welcome antidote to the crisis of the present moment and is a sanctuary to have by your side as we navigate what is real regarding health and healing.