Anchored

"But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day. Exactly like that afternoon in the wild onions -- when one more step was the most she could see of the future. Other people went crazy, why couldn't she? Other people's brains stopped turned around and went on to something new, which is what must have happened to Halle. And how sweet that would have been: the two of them back at the milk shed, squatting by the churn, smashing cold, lumpy butter into their faces with not a care in the world. Feeling it slippery, sticky -- rubbing it in their hair, watching it squeeze through their fingers. What a relief to stop it right there. Close. Shut. Squeeze the butter. But her three children were chewing sugar teat under a blanket on their way to Ohio and no butter play would change that" (83). 

Joie de vivre / feeling of exuberant enjoyment of life. 

We are immersed in the passage of time. Sometimes we can feel the current moving. Sometimes we forget it's there, only to be reminded again. Another in a series of passing moments. A moment is defined by its momentum, it keeps moving. But we think of a memory as somehow dead, a memorial anchored in its own time and place. A half-buried reminder of what was once here. We cannot just hang onto things. We have to let go. We have to move on. Its hard to imagine that certain memories are still alive, still fighting against the current, struggling to keep up. That certain images still have the power to leap back into the present.

In this moment, Sethe is consumed by horrific images and memories of her past. When she hears Paul D tell the story of her husband watching her in the barn, her "rebellious" brain immediately begins to imagine it. She cannot imagine the future, but the stories of the past are vividly imagined in her head. So she sees her husband watching, impotent, while she is abused, and then she sees him by the churn, realizing that he was putting the butter on his face because he was remembering the milk that the boys took from Sethe. She dreads hearing the rest of Paul D's story.

Although she identifies herself largely by the work of her children, she cannot help but also be identified by her sexuality, both in the matter of love and sexual activity. It stops her from feeling the exuberant enjoyment of life, to delight in the minutes, the cheap raw material of ordinary time. In her own reflection, previous to the above passage, Sethe even calls her brain "greedy" for wrestling with woeful truths instead of blocking them and turning her focus toward her children. She feels deeply hurt and then hates herself for allowing the pain to be felt.

The text reveals that unlike other people, Sethe cannot stop herself from imagining and reliving the horrors of her life. Most people give in to their defenses and give up trying to talk about an experience because others are unable to relate to it, whether through envy, pity or simple foreignness; which allows it to drift away from the rest of your life story, until the memory itself feels out of place, almost mythical. Sethe however, cannot make her brain "stop" and move onto "something new". Her brain cannot "refuse" and say "No thank you" to the evils that haunt her. They are too big a part of her identity to let loose her grip.