ABSTRACT
The chapter presents the latent potential within the silence that follows the arrest of a powerful or novel experience. When the author stops by a fresh assault upon her senses, she also wildly alive and the repercussions can be physical, psychic and transformative. In this gap, this arrest, this shakeup, this silence, a seed is planted. The Symbolic kingdom is made possible by culture, language and narrative and is supercharged by personal desire. In contrast to the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the Real, because it resists representation, can feel frightening and incomprehensible. Words fail. The Real is unnamable, unknowable and lives outside of language, out of reach and out of our consciousness. It puts us into a state of arrest. The Real returns to arrest us in the moments when the Symbolic and the Imaginary begin to crack. The sight is usually overwhelming and precipitates physical, emotional and intellectual arrest.
