Piecing Together the Looking Glass

Basel Baghal

Severe trauma will shatter a person’s consciousness like a glass that is smashed to pieces.  In order to protect these pieces, certain parts, most often “the part of consciousness that we nearly always conceive of as the ‘self’ may not be there for a few moments, for a few hours, and in heinous circumstances, for much longer” (Stout 587).  In her essay, When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday, Martha Stout calls this absence of the self “dissociation.”  She explains that under certain circumstances, a human being can dissociate from his or her immediate reality.  When this happens, “a human can be psychologically absent from his or her own direct experience” (Stout 587) and, therefore, never form a conscious memory of the experience.  The memory, however, exists in the less aware parts of consciousness as unlabeled, unconnected fragments of our sensations and images that occurred at the time of the original event.  These shards of memory pierce through one’s consciousness at moments even tenuously related to the traumatic event, launching him or her into a dissociative state.  In this way, the very psychological defense that is meant to protect our consciousness reinforces the splits and fissures that were made by the trauma.  Reconnecting with the memory of the original trauma would mean connecting the parts of consciousness that were present during the trauma—which contain the memory and the pain of the trauma— with the parts of consciousness that were absent, the “self.”  This is precisely what Annie Dillard attempts to do in The Wreck of Time.  Dillard demands that we remain fully conscious in the face of trauma on a global level.  She attempts to connect us with the pain of past and present catastrophe, genocide, war, and poverty.  She wants to reconnect us with our society’s trauma in order to help integrate all the parts of our consciousness, our global consciousness.   In this way, Dillard helps us to be conscious, present, and alive.  And when we are conscious, we can choose to care or not to care, choose to help if we want to.  Individuals who are fully present and conscious are better able to connect with and help others to be conscious, thus exponentially contributing to global consciousness.  Furthermore, on a more basic level, to understand global issues we must first take hold of our personal experiences and memories and integrate our consciousness, know our “self” in a complete manner.  Only then will we be able to have even the most basic understanding of global events, for it is impossible to understand millions of people without first understanding our own self.

Individual consciousness contributes to and constitutes global consciousness.  In a simple manner, one conscious individual plus another plus another adds up to a collective or global consciousness.  Each individual consciousness adds to global consciousness in a way that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.  Humans who are fully conscious of the emotional magnitude of global trauma, such as a devastating earthquake or a gruesome genocide, and who are fully present to witness another’s pain and suffering are able to connect with others and help them to be conscious of their own anguish.  Such a person must first be conscious of his own pain by integrating all parts of his consciousness. Dillard writes about Jeremiah, a man who is conscious: “Jeremiah, walking toward Jerusalem, saw the smoke from the Temple’s blaze.  He wept; he saw the blood of the slain.  ‘He put his face close to the ground and saw the footprints of sucklings and infants who were walking into captivity’ in Babylon.  He kissed the footprints” (Dillard 126). His reaction is that of a fully conscious and fully aware being. We do not maintain our global consciousness, instead we dissociate in order not to feel emotionally devastated, as Jeremiah did, because we all have our lives we want to carry on with.  We may have all heard the story of the nagging little boy, whose father, in the interest of getting his work done, rips up a map of the world that he finds in a newspaper and distracts the boy with resembling it.  Like a puzzle.  Within no time the boy excitedly calls his father to see his accomplishment.  The astonished father asks his young son how he was able to put the map together so quickly.  The boy responds, “Easy.  There was a picture of a person on the back.  I just put the person together and the world came together.”  Similarly, integrating our individual consciousness will result in the integration of global consciousness, first, in an additive manner and, more importantly, second, in a convergence of individual consciousness like waves that amplify when they come together.

The main problem that emerges in the attempt to integrate consciousness is dissociation.  When dissociation occurs, our consciousness is disrupted and, as Stout explains, the human “self” is capable of dissociating from reality to different degrees in many different circumstances.  “As a result of a daydream, this mental compartmentalization is called distraction.  As the result of an involving movie, it is often called escape.  As the result of trauma, physical or psychological, it is called a dissociative state” (Stout 587).  These are all forms of dissociation that only vary in degree.  Global dissociation lies somewhere on the gradient of the general human ability to dissociate from reality.  Global dissociation is quite common, for it requires less effort to dissociate one’s self from a reality that is more removed from one’s life than personal trauma.  Dillard demonstrates this in her diatribe:

Stalin starved 7 million Ukrainians in one year, Pol Pot killed 1 million Cambodians, the flu epidemic of 1918 killed 21 or 22 million people…shall this go on?  Or do you suffer the sense of being ‘an atom lost in the universe’?  How about what journalists call ‘compassion fatigue’?  Reality fatigue?  At what limit for you do other individuals blur?  Vanish? (Dillard 125).

Confronting us with severe global trauma, she tests the point at which we psychologically and emotionally tire from being conscious of reality.  She asks, at what point in the face of global trauma do we dissociate from reality, “transport [our] awareness to a place far enough away that” (Stout 586) others blur and vanish along with their pain and suffering?  Do we remain grounded, present in reality or do we experience “the sense of being ‘an atom’” (Dillard 125) “lost in the dissociated space” (Stout 594)?

While individual dissociation is introverted in that its negative effects are turned in on the individual, global dissociation is extroverted.  The negative effects of global dissociation are the same as those of individual dissociation except in that they more directly impact others, society.  This is apparent in the examples found in Stout’s and Dillard’s writings.  Stout describes one of her patients: As an adult, Julia is cut off from that part of her consciousness which contains the memory of her brutally abusive childhood and, so, has no conscious memory of almost her entire childhood.  Julia spends so many years dissociated from her painful childhood reality that as an adult she is also split apart from the part of her consciousness that feels pain.  This means that she is unaware of pain that her body may be experiencing.  When her appendix erupts, for example, she does not realize that her life is in detriment because she does not feel the excruciating pain.  The fact that she is psychologically and emotionally absent during the experience of physical pain is also demonstrated by Julia’s slow, painful, torturous method of attempted suicide.  (She attempts to freeze herself to death in the surf on a winter day.)  Stout writes, with some degree of astonishment, that at their first therapy session, Julia “spent thirty minutes telling me in cinematic detail about her recent attempt to kill herself…  Taking her omniscient narrator tone, intellectually intrigued by the memory, she described the circumstances of her unlikely accidental rescue…  At our second session, and in exactly the same tone she had used to describe her suicide attempt, Julia began by giving me an interesting account of her new project” (Stout 584).  Julia’s disregard for her life, apparent in her nonchalant, emotionally detached description of her suicide attempt sounds similar to Ted Bundy’s disregard for others’ lives in general.  “Ted Bundy, the serial killer, after his arrest, could not fathom the fuss.  What was the big deal?  David Von Drehle quotes an exasperated Bundy in Among the Lowest of the Dead: ‘I mean, there are so many people’” (Dillard 121).  Julia is as unemotional about her attempt to kill herself as Ted Bundy is about the numerous, heinous murders he committed.  When a person is divided from the part of them that fears death, or the part of them that feels pain, or remorse, for example, it eventually impacts society in a negative way.  Julia and Ted are both dissociated from a part of their consciousness.  Julia from the part that feels pain, which could lead to her death through either suicide or negligence.  Ted from the part of his consciousness that feels remorse, thus he is able to brutally kill other human being without experiencing sorrow, pity, or remorse.  Both Julia and Ted would not be able to survive their actions and speak about them with such lack of emotion were they not divided from one part of their consciousness or another.

In a similar, yet less extreme manner, a human being would have to dissociate from reality to some degree, compromise his consciousness in order to continue about his business in this world of catastrophe, war, and suffering.  A person who hears the news about others’ devastation, yet is not moved to help in some way suffers from a type of dissociation, global dissociation.  Dillard asks, almost sarcastically, “What were you doing on April 30, 1991, when a series of waves drowned 138,000 people?  Where were you when you first heard the astounding, heartbreaking news?  Did you weep?  Did your anguish last days or weeks?” (123).  Maybe you were not here, maybe you were somewhere else, safe, away from reality.  Maybe you were separated from the part of your consciousness that would feel anguish.  Dillard asks, “You were not tempted to forget or ignore these deaths, were you?” (Dillard 126).  In a dissociative state, a person might not form a strong, conscious memory this incident and 138,000 deaths would remain in the periphery of one’s consciousness.  A person might become distracted with a problem at work, paying the bills on time, taking the kids to soccer practice and inadvertently ignore the deaths of 138,000 people and the suffering of the survivors these people left behind.  “In this case, a person [is] distracted, and the part of her consciousness that would normally have perceived [anguish] was split apart from, and subjugated to, the part of her consciousness that was goal-directed” (Stout 588).  When Julia experienced abuse as a child, she would “dissociate [her] self from what was going on around her, transport her awareness to a place far enough away that, at most, she felt she was watching the life of a little girl named Julia from a very great distance.  …  Simply put, Julia was not present for [her childhood]” (Stout 586).  When we watch the news, we witness the suffering and devastation of others from a very great distance, from the safety of our TV room.  From a distance, we can easily dissociate our self from what is going on.  We split apart from the part of our consciousness that would feel full empathy for the people who suffer and subjugate it to the part of us that is directed towards going on with our own lives.  But we do not realize that stifling a part of our consciousness, being psychologically absent for portions of our life means that we are not fully alive.

Dissociation is a kind of death.  A person who is absent for large portions of his life is more dead than alive.  In a dissociative state, the body becomes an outer shell, a corpse that continues to walk, talk, and act, but the “self” imprisoned inside is not present for any of this.  The self is unable to participate in the doings of the body, is unable to live.  In the face of trauma, the self is unable to choose to be present or absent.  Like jumping off a cliff in order to escape death and forever falling, thus not dead but without the will to choose to fall or stand and face the trauma, to choose to be or not to be, to choose to care or not.  Julia says, dissociation is “the illusion from hell.  I mean, if it’s supposed to save me, it’s not working.  In fact, it’s going to kill me one day.  And even if it doesn’t kill me, what’s the use of living if I can’t feel anything?  Why should I be alive when I lose big parts of my life?  I mean, really, how can you care about anything if you can’t even know the truth about yourself?” (Stout 598).  Dissociation is a defense mechanism intended for survival but destined for destruction.  Julia realizes that, one way or another, dissociation is going to lead to her death.  She refers to her inability to feel pain, which put her life in physical detriment when her appendix ruptured.  But she is also referring to the fact that if she cannot feel pain, then she is not really alive.  If she defends herself against the pain and trauma of life then she also defends herself against the joy and happiness of life.  If one shields her self from experiencing the pain of others then she also shields her self off from connecting with others and the joy of relationship, companionship, and brother/sisterhood.  Julia goes on to say that she must know her self, be conscious of her personal reality before she can be conscious of the global reality, before she can care about others, about anything.  In order for one to be capable of global consciousness she or he must first be personally conscious.  If a person is divided, she or he cannot be fully present to witness others’ trauma because parts of his or her consciousness may be absent.  In a way, consciousness is like a looking glass through which we reflect the world.  A broken looking glass would reflect the world in jagged little pieces that would miss the whole picture.

The greatest obstacle to overcoming personal and global dissociation is facing the trauma of reality and learning to prefer an imperfect yet integrated reality to the safety of the unhealthy defense mechanism.  The key is the choice to know, to be conscious, to actively choose life in the world.  Julia makes this choice when she says, “I want to know.  Because I want to live” (Stout 598).  Stout, as Julia’s therapist, helps her to face the trauma of her childhood and reconnect with the parts of her consciousness which contain the memory and the pain of that trauma.  Similarly, Dillard helps the reader face the trauma of the real world and reconnect with the parts of consciousness which are capable of feeling pain, anguish, and empathy for others’ devastation.  Dillard does so in the hope of developing global consciousness, which would lead people to connect with and help others.

In her essay, Dillard quotes an English journalist, who observes, “Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other” (128).  Every single life counts.  Humans should be conscious to the reality that everybody’s life is sacred, whether they are victims of a natural disaster, fighting on the opposite side of a war, or dieing of hunger on the streets of some cold city.  Someone who is globally conscious is able to behold the true magnitude of 138,000 individual people drowning in a wave.  But resonating deeper in one’s conscious, is the revelation that one’s individual life is sacred always and all circumstances.  Life is worth living in times of pain and suffering as well as in times of joy and pleasure.  It is inconceivable that life is worth being conscious for, worth remembering in some cases and in some of no account.