29th March 2025
I loved the movie A Streetcar Named Desire of the play by Tennessee Williams, but I’ve been re-assessing it recently through the character of Blanche DuBois. She is a faded Southern belle who has been through traumatic times which continue to echo forward in her actions and the perceptions of her. The film is dark and so I won’t reveal the finale, but let’s say it has imprinted on my psyche in an upsetting way.
However, my point was not to reflect on the movie but the essence of echoes.
An echo is broadly repetition requiring certain conditions to be met in order to materialise. Aspects such as medium, surfaces, distance, nature itself affect the path or intensity of an echo. At it’s most conventional we are used to echoes in sound where reverberation or repetition returns to us that which we throw, or at other times fading the same into obscurity. But in a starry eyed perspective, echoes- repetition, in nature becomes a broader church swirling around us to include fractals – sustained patterns we find in flowers; planetary motions nonchalantly ploughing the same indistinguishable path; the ceaseless tides and the recurrent seasons. Echoes are part of the wily toolkit of a Bat and Dolphin where the emitting of a sound and its bounce back is used to hunt and navigate a pitch dark environment through a process known as echolocation; essentially a form of sonar. And we sense that history has a cadence – not quite repeating but rhyming or echoing through the decades as we are subjected to a deja vu of similar portents and events. Though perhaps more accurately it is not history that repeats through time, but people.
But I come back to Streetcar and another type of echo. That of inherited trauma.
This is where the effects of trauma can be inherited or to follow the ribbon, repeated in future generations well after the original damage has dissipated. It can reveal itself in both or either mental health problems (anxiety, depression) and physical health issues (mortality, chronic diseases).This inherited trauma weaves through time emerging when a prior generation has suffered violence, acute hurt or extreme hardship such as in wars and famine. For example, studies supporting the existence of this effect have been observed in the descendants of POWs and holocaust survivors who were exposed to extreme malnutrition and starvation. There are even studies demonstrating heightened sensitivity to a scent associated with a previous generation’s trauma.
Yet how? It is still research in progress, but there are thought to be multiple pathways. The first is parental behaviour and environmental factors which mould the conduct of the next generation. This could include for example coping mechanisms, beliefs, levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) or the uterine environment.
Another pathway straggles through how our genes perform. We know our offspring are shaped by the genes we bequeath. But this avenue suggests it is not the actual DNA which transmits trauma; that the experience of an elder does not mutate the DNA passed on. But instead their experience can ‘change the way their DNA is expressed [functions] and how that change is passed onto the next generation’ (BBC). This is Epigenetics; akin to switches (for example chemical tags) that alter the way a gene behaves. I have written a longer piece on Epigenetics here but we are still researching how it operates.
My first thought on hearing of this effect reverberating through time was why is it necessary? Scientific American put it into these words: ‘Epigenetic influences might [nonetheless] represent the body’s attempts to prepare offspring for challenges similar to those encountered by their parents. As circumstances change, however, the benefits conferred by such alterations may wane or even result in the emergence of novel vulnerabilities’. That is, nature deems employing echoes useful except even nature can get it wrong.
Echoes are a curious phenomena. They suggest nature follows particular laws which delivers a combination of continuity and change in the world around us. We can but observe particularly at the macro level, but these echoes are not always obviously useful for our survival when it comes to the individual. It seems helpful to be mindful that echoes carry information which can inform us about the past, present and future and therefore being dismissive of history and how it can prepare us for what lies ahead may come at a cost….
Curiosity and the rascal 