“The Universe as a Primal Scream” is a poem by Tracy K. Smith featuring a short-lived but faddishly popular alternative form of psychotherapy in the title. Thanks to certain high-profile celebrity advocate, primal scream therapy became one of the most popular psychiatric treatments of the early 1970s. The therapy was conceived on the hypothesis that only through direct confrontation with repressed childhood trauma can the long-term consequences of that be reconciled. Since that confrontation inevitably produced profound emotional pain, the result of the treatment often culminated with inarticulate expressions of extreme emotion. Or, in other words, a scream embodying the most primal of emotions for which there have not yet been invented any words.
The children upstairs from the speaker are engaged in just such screaming, and she has no access to understanding why. Thus, the entire narrative proceeds from the point of sheer imagination. The screaming could be the result of almost anything, ranging from the mundane efforts of kid simply wanting to annoy their parents to reasons which even the kids themselves do not fully understand. It is the narrator who takes his unknown quality and builds something out of it. That the narrator is intelligent and knowledgeable can be gleaned from references to the Biblical story of the prophet Elijah to allusions to 2001: A Space Odyssey. That the narrator is interested in metaphysical ideas is clear from her considerations of the possibilities of the afterlife which extend far beyond the conventional notions of heaven and hell. In fact, she castigates these old-fashioned ideas with her snarky reference to heaven being the ancient portrait of a bunch of dead people in black robes and the idea that heaven may actually be a place that swallows humanity like a hellish furnace. It is therefore not unlikely that she would be family with primal scream therapy. In fact, it not only seems likely she is familiar with it but views it in a positive light. This would explain why she settles upon the unlikely explanation in which the sound of the screaming itself unleashes transformative change as the one she pursues.
She imagines that perhaps there is something in the sound the children screaming which will cause the entire building to suddenly lift into space toward the heaven like a modern-day version of the chariot of fire Elijah rode into heaven. The afterlife is the great unknown but something which humanity constantly attempts to unlock. This obsession is something akin to psychotherapy in reverse. Rather than trying to lock the mysteries of the past which have been repressed in the subconscious, it is the attempt to unlock the mysteries of a future which hasn’t even happened. This is the path the speaker takes for much of the poem as she considers various possibilities of what heaven may be like. Ultimately, the message being put is that without knowing for sure whether there is something waiting for us after death, the meaning of life cannot help but be diminished. Simply by virtue of not knowing for sure whether anything one does has any meaning or not has the effect of creating a self-defeating attitude.
The recognition of this fact is what the speaker finally decides is the likely cause of the screaming upstairs. In referencing the opening scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the speaker compares the screaming children to the apes in the film howling at the sudden appearance of the black monolith which alien life has installed on ancient earth to kickstart the evolution of the human species. This evolution, of course, eventually brought to the lineage of these creatures all the intellectual advancements of a bigger and more complex brain: everything from the wheel to metaphysical philosophy. These are all great things to possess, but the evolution also gave humans a certain knowledge some might not term a gift. The knowledge of their own eventual expiration. The foreknowledge of death is the one thing that truly seems to separate humans from every other life form on earth. This knowledge is deeply traumatic, and we are conditioned from birth to repress it, but everyone still has to find their own way to get up every day and live despite knowing it is a future carved in stone. This is primal scream issuing from the human being sector of the universe.
