Time-Travel of the Near-Severed Hand

While I have spent some 1000 hours or more ripping boards on a table saw, I have not received any serious injuries (only a few minor ones). The closest I’ve been to a traumatic wound—that I shudder to think of now—happened two and a half years ago at a shop in the Brooklyn Navy Yard where I was ripping a steam-bent black locust stave that would be used in the amphitheater seating at Little Island1. It was cold in the shop and I was wearing leather gloves. I did not have ample grip upon this heavy curved stave and the saw kicked the stave back towards me so that my left hand, holding the stave behind the saw blade was dragged over the running blade which snagged my glove and pulled it clean off my hand even while shooting the stave past my body and across the shop.

I entered dream time. My glove had been sucked down into the body of the saw. I held my intact left hand up before my face turning it this way and that. There was a saw-blade-width nick of broken skin on the tip of the thumb; there was no blood. Two of my coworkers, who had seen the whole event, gaped. I shut the saw off and turned around and padded my body; was I still there? Did I exist? I became dizzy. I held my left hand with my right hand in a tender grip. The logical order of the day, those tasks that it was my duty to accomplish, vanished. What did I need to do? I didn’t know. I could still feel the twist and pressure of the glove as it had been sucked from my hand. I should have had my hand pulled by my glove into the saw-blade and shredded (this is why it is best practice to not wear gloves while at the table saw). That my hand was not mangled seems to me, then and now, absurd; a once-in-a-million chance occurrence. The fact that I still have fingers at all is inconceivable to me: an anomaly past sense. Recall of this event becomes strange and vivid; the shudder that I can feel now is the same shudder from the day it happened; time bends around it; I clutch my hand to me again.

Psychoanalysis has discovered a certain kind of non-linear time in which causality is reversed, where the future affects the past. This peculiar time is summed up in the strange and beautiful word nachträglichkeit. An untranslatable that is usually translated badly as deferred action, the word expresses what can only be known in the future. The traumatic event may be so terrible that we do not remember it at all; it cannot be assimilated into the ego and all memory is expelled from consciousness. And yet the unconscious, indifferent to time, remembering everything, retains this traumatic seed, a ghost of what we are not yet able to think. An innocuous detail in the future may retroactively animate this ghost and construct this trauma in conscious awareness when you least expect it; the trauma feels as if it had just happened and yet you do not know why. Chronology in this register is scrambled. Time itself no longer complies to the smooth linear gear-rotation of machine-time. Time runs backwards (like the bent stave in the saw). Nachträglichkeit is just this backwards-running unbearable knowledge that you (may) become aware of in the future; even while its unthought presence haunts your every now. Your inability to think this thought is a necessary defense: there is always a threat of madness in self-knowledge.

It is probably the case that we reside in a state of nachträglichkeit all the time. Immersed in the unthinkable real, we reproduce in the future what had been incomprehensible in the past. These nameless shards of the real only become legible once we develop the language with which to think them. 

While I received no wound from the table saw I was close enough to the possibility of a such a wound so that I could peer into that haunted space the severed hand would have created: the nameless unthought zone where resides that terrible vision I dare not comprehend; a glimpse into my own torn and mangled hand, as if into an abyss—the phantom-limb is the nachträglichkeit of the psychosomatic. Such experience resides beyond thought and outside of machine-time. Since no injury was sustained, my table saw accident is not truly nachträglich because there is no unthought for my future to think—that I know of. Perhaps some part of me desires a severed hand by the company saw? I’ll ask my analyst.