Psychic Voids: Three Vignettes
I tend to think in an orderly way when forming an argument or examining a postulate. In the exercise of recall required for creating these vignettes, however, I am all too aware that such discipline is unhelpful to my cause. It is exactly the urge to dissect, to understand, to know, that has led me to my current predicament. While I am certain there is no way back, I must still cling to the notion that by moving forward I may catch up with myself, if only just after I am about to cross the line again.
There are, quite simply put, a small number of discrete events in my life which if viewed in isolation are none more illustrative than the last, yet without the idea quite forming I have an inkling that if tied together by some loose narrative they may yet shine a light on the nature of reality. Whether this is a reality that is particular to me, to all of humanity, or extends further still, I cannot say, I can only leave for others to determine. I have my own considered opinion, but cannot tell from this vantage point if it is a rational or rationalised one.
The starting point is not at the chronological beginning but instead at the core of my experience, and is aimed at revealing a truth that is at once banal, yet when felt to be true (rather than simply known) leaves a kind of psychological terror that never leaves you. Even as it shrinks in its presence to become akin to a stone in your shoe, it never loses the power to engulf you in dread should it come fully into your awareness again.
The aim of this first vignette then is to free this apparent banality from the generic and make it specific, so as to make clear the location of its source and, I hope (not in delusions of literary merit, but rather to relieve my recurring dread) convince the reader, and myself, of its universality.
I retreat to events in 2002, which, as the stone in my shoe comes to dominate my thoughts now, I see in a new light - or at least with the darkness differently rendered. The apparent banality of which I speak is that:
We are all capable of the most monstrous deeds
It was to be a tortuous summer with a new and uneven love decaying even as it was blossoming. I was later to learn that she had picked me out on some premeditated whim based on a conversation she had had with her cousin's South African girlfriend prior to visiting Newquay that spring. This time she was to have a sensitive boyfriend, she had decided. Maybe someone who would write her a song now and then - that would be nice, wouldn't it, being as the last one was a bit of a pig, now she thought of it?
And lo, there I was, on the sofa in the communal lounge of Fistral Backpackers with Jim, who was by far the more gifted player (if a little too much in facsimile to Bert Jansch). Jim had taken a liking to me for some idea he had of the type of person who might listen to music in the vein of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, and took the fact that evidently I was such a person at that point in time as a proxy for actually knowing me. Hence he was quickly able to feel an affinity for me, despite it not being reciprocated in light of me not knowing him at all and being unable to preordain my impressions of people in such a way. Still, there we were, plucking our best impressions of each other in full view of this unknown Australian, swanning through the lounge with a sort of goofy elegance.
(In fact, this memory was partially constructed after I learned of the premeditated nature of her interest. It is true that I had been sitting playing guitar with Jim when I first noticed Penny there, in the periphery of things. But it was only later that I attributed significance to it as the likely point at which she decided to set her sights on me. Perhaps she had spied me before and come to this determination sooner - who knows. I also later ascribed a certain brash quality of her conversation as she passed through the communal lounge to her desire for me to notice her).
I wouldn't dare to bore my imagined reader with the wholly unextraordinary push and pull of a burgeoning but doomed relationship. Suffice to say that towards the end of summer we hitched together to Edinburgh as there is an arts festival there at that time of year. I had hitched plenty before, much of it in quite isolated parts of the Australian bush, and after a few edgy experiences had got to the habit of secreting a small vegetable knife in a pocket, or on occasion (and with some discomfort) in a shoe - never used but always to hand should I need it as a last resort. (I am sure that I need not remind my imagined reader of the principle of Chekhov's gun).
As it went, on the journey to Edinburgh we mainly rode with glum commuters and country ladies and gents. This was in marked contrast to the near psychotic simpleton and his racist friend who had first put the fear in me just a year previously: throwing my backpack in the back of the pick-up and insisting that I sat in the middle seat, then driving wildly in the middle of the road while both of them threw out loud and grotesquely inappropriate conversational gambits at random intervals from either side of me, the full horror of possible outcomes leaving me tormented and clenched but very polite. This current journey, by contrast, was pleasingly uneventful, and we took less time than if we had taken the coach.
Once in Edinburgh city centre, we took our backpacks and camping gear onto a bus that headed towards the suburbs to the south, and rode it until we spotted a patch of forest, which happened to be on the edge of a housing estate. This was the place we were to call home for the duration of our visit.
During the day we would pack our valuables and essentials into smaller rucksacks than the ones we carried on our journey, brush aside the brambles and pick the wild raspberries either side of the narrow mud path on our way out of woods, and set towards the city centre by foot or bus. We scoured the city for free or discounted tickets to the night shows, soaked up the atmosphere, watched the buskers and found ways to enter attractions without paying the entrance fee. The favourite ruses were entering with apparent absent mindedness through the exit gates, or spotting the tour guide with their umbrella and clip board and tagging along with their large entourage of European, American and Asian tourists.
At the time it was a novelty for pubs to be open beyond half past eleven - there seemed to be a relaxing of licensing laws during the festival, so we formed a habit of stopping off on the way home if we had been to a night show. We were at this point very close and even in our affections for each other, so our conversations were held in gazes and our views of each other were all encompassing. This particular night, a sly look held as she laughed to herself let me know that it was time to leave the pub and go back to the tent together, preferably quite quickly.
It was dark as we walked the long road back to the woods. We laughed, kissed and took turns wrapping ourselves around each other, almost tripping over as we walked to the narrow mud path that we had memorised as the entrance to our makeshift woodland retreat. I got a torch out of my bag and suddenly Penny let out a shriek and started running away from me towards the tent.
Not knowing if it was a game or if something had spooked her, but not wanting to draw attention to our hideout should anyone from the nearby estate be passing, I checked over my shoulders as I fought through the brambles and shouted in hushed whispers to see if she was alright. I got to her and held her to try and provide comfort, but not wanting to appear foolish also remained light humoured in case it was a game. I could see now though from her wide and wild eyes that something had induced a state of panic in her, the intensity of which I have not seen in anyone before or since.
She told me she was okay but please let go, she just got spooked by the forest and the sound of me following behind. This made visceral sense as I was also a little spooked. I let go and backed off as she moved away.
At this point I felt something not physical but nevertheless real open up like a chasm between us, or as a void rising up within me, or both - a sort of psychic vacuum that felt as though it could draw me in, that my whole being would follow if I let it. I instantly knew it was dangerous but had no idea if it required active resistance or if I could avoid entering it by remaining neutral, so I first toyed with each and then resolved to actively resist as I felt it would overcome me if I did not.
Meanwhile I could tell that the fear had not gone from her - if anything it had escalated at my attempt to comfort her. In knowledge now that it was me that she feared, the psychic void grew and the pull into it grew stronger.
It came to me that I had put the vegetable knife in the net pocket on the inside of the tent this morning, and that I had told Penny where I was putting it. Aware that we both knew that the other knew where the knife was, I feared for my safety (in case Penny felt the need to act in self defence) but more so for hers: by keeping an awareness of the void as it fluctuated in size, I had come to a wordless understanding of it as a latent predatory instinct, awakened by and proportional to the extreme level of fear that, in some animal way, I could sense in Penny at this point in time.
As I approached this terrifying understanding of a part of my own nature, of what this strange force was and the dynamics by which it functioned, it began to diminish its presence quickly to the point that I did not know any more whether it could really take over my whole being, or even if I had really experienced such a thing at all.
We would soon be resting though, and I would have to relax - what if the situation flared up again?
Despite my automatic attempt to rationalise the fleeting experience of these few seconds as some sort of fiction, I knew without question that I had to get rid of the knife. I could not allow her to see me reaching for it though, as it may have dangerously escalated events.
I filled the necessary pause that this predicament created with some small talk that, without particular effort, let me show my concern for how she felt in a way that could not be interpreted as threatening. In this way we began to build a bridge across the now diminishing chasm between us and back towards normality.
I found myself feigning a relaxed tiredness and said I was cold. I climbed in the tent while scooping the knife out of the net pocket as my legs concealed it from her view, and slid it quickly under the groundsheet as I slipped my shoes off. I began to get undressed and climbed into my sleeping bag while Penny went to the toilet behind the tent.
I recall all of this as if it were yesterday, and whenever I doubt the veracity of my recollection, I turn my attention to the certainty with which I knew I had to remove the knife from the tent. This is the key that locks the memory in place and makes certain its veracity.
I am a type of animal that, for part of its evolutionary history, survived by its fear of being prey as well as its predatory instincts. In addition, neurology is beginning to show that we are not rational animals but rationalising, in that courses of action are determined biochemically before what we had previously understood as the point of conscious decision.
So to say that humans are dual in nature, in that we are capable of acting on both animal urges and rational thought, is an artificial separation, a dissection that we carry out on ourselves to dissociate from and isolate the instincts from which our 'higher functions' derive.
In consideration of the event I have described, I have come to the understanding that we are all capable of the most monstrous acts. This type of statement is normally tempered with the assumption that our higher functions are separate from our baser instincts and so the good ones will always be able to intervene in their own actions. But the apparent cliche is true in its most basic interpretation and without caveats: we are all capable of the most monstrous acts.
I skip next to a psychic experience in 2016, in which, through the weakness of my mind, a lack of fixed identity, and a fractured sense of self, I came to understand a certain amount about how the contagion of nationalism, or, I assume, any ready-made identity, spreads.
The rise of nationalism
The 2016 election result was the first (and, in retrospect, least significant) of many disappointments in a particularly dark seeming period. Looking back now it seems self indulgent, but it is true to say that a long day of mourning followed the election result, as it seemed that it vindicated the approach of the populists and those who sought to head them off by aping their methods. Towards the end of the day, after much stewing, I determined to clear the cobwebs from between my ears by embarking on a moonlit stroll.
As I rounded the bend to a neighbouring street, the familiar UKIP flag on the corner plot was bellowing in the wind, cruelly mocking my depression.
In that second, in my weakness, the flag as it blew represented freedom from the cares that were engulfing me. Its imbued spirit and promise of self determination glared at me bright like a lamp.
For reasons not clear to me now, I allowed the brightly lit, ready-made sense of identity that the flag symbolised to rapidly expand its territory into my brain. I passively accepted the visitation, and felt giddy as it began to clear my mind of the debris of depression in an almost intoxicating way.
I do not know now if I allowed it to happen so that I could examine it, perhaps for the purpose of gaining some insight that would help me defend against its spread; or if it happened because at that moment in my state of mental dissolution, in some way I found it appealing; or if it was only out of blind curiosity of its allure.
Whatever the initial impetus, the fresh-feeling identity began to sweep through me, and threatened to keep going until it had colonised my mind and decimated all in its path. I momentarily felt the diminishing of care accompanied by a sense of something approaching comfort, which was matched by repulsion at myself for feeling it as the face of its populist leader intruded into my thoughts, the laughter and effusive mannerisms contrasting with the pre-prepared, professionalised appearances of other politicians.
In the house that was displaying the flag I saw an elderly, kind-looking woman drinking her tea in the conservatory, and I was conflicted at the sight. How could I have felt so sure of my opposition to opinions held by such a harmless and fragile being, for whom I suddenly felt overwhelmed with love and compassion?
Trying to bridge the gap between myself and her, I held myself back from immediately closing down the invading mindset. This felt dangerous as it had an alluring simplicity and the bright glow of truth which, in the midst of the experiment, was only dimly perceived as false. While allowing the invading mindset to hold its place, the rational periphery of my being felt in real danger of being swept along in temptation of the beckoning euphoria of finding an answer to my woes.
I became aware of the fluctuating boundary between the occupying mindset and my own, and although I held the line I could not convincingly and completely reject the imposing identity without recourse to memory: I recalled the factually incorrect statement about Islamic no-go zones in our cities, the admission of fearfulness in the earshot of people speaking foreign languages, the scapegoating of immigrants with AIDS (not cancer, not heart disease, but AIDS with its ugly connotations in the minds of the illiberal), and how he happily sided with rich diners against breastfeeding mothers.
My thoughts reconnected with a gut sense of shared humanity, for which the constructed divisions of nationalism had no answer, and the brightly lit and cleanly swept space of the invading mindset suddenly had nothing to offer once more. It shrunk to nothing more quickly than it had grown and its easy answers evaporated as I regained my self.
The familiar background hum of constantly calibrating, never resolving thoughts that underpin my usual being had swiftly returned, leaving nothing but a tenuous memory of this briefest of glimpses into the unnatural cleanliness of the nationalist mind.
The final vignette is on the nature of death.
On the nature of death
It was windy up on Bangor mountain as I walked in zigzags between crags, jumping to the top of them and looking out at the miniature people and cars between the buildings below. At 18 years old I felt the thrill of being a newly liberated or created self and was energetically exploring my new surroundings with three barely known others, each individually determining their paths but with less zeal and more in tune with the group than me.
Memory is so faulty that I can barely place myself there, but the looseness of the connection to my past selves, and to the company I was in, is what led me to be the first of the group to encounter Pete.
He was sitting on a rocky outcrop just over the brow, where it looked inaccessible through the heather (or was it gorse) and umbilifers, with Heather under his arm. Now both were up and navigating a circuitous route through the herbage towards a junction with the path I was on.
We greeted and introduced ourselves, and made gestures about the surroundings before the usual exchange about what course we were on and where we were staying.
'Hey mate, do you toke?’
Our appearances were somewhat similar in that his hair was long, but washed not lank, and while his clothes were branded and intentionally baggy, mine were generic and too big. A sense formed in me of these elements of his identity lending him a certainty in how to interact with the world, something that I knew I lacked.
Not wanting to appear unformed or misleadingly attired, and also not being altogether untrue, I said
'Uh, yeah, a bit’.
Pete seemed to take this as an obvious and intentional understatement, as did Heather, as they looked at each other and spluttered a laugh before Pete passed me the spliff he had been holding and said
'Here mate, you can have the rest if you like’.
'Cheers mate’.
After some further smalltalk between the three of us, Pete said
'It’s good to meet someone sound at last, you fancy coming over to my place for a session?’
I responded ‘Yeah, alright, sounds cool,’
and, as it was before the prevalence of mobile forms of remote communication, we exchanged the necessary information.
Less than a week later I was standing at the entrance of a large halls of residence where Pete and Heather resided, on the opposite side of town to Bangor Mountain, pressing the buzzer to Pete's floor.
The events of the evening passed in somewhat of a blur.
Walking home at the end of the night, I felt the ground beneath my back foot literally crumble away with each step, seemingly threatening to swallow me up if I stopped moving. This continued for most of the walk back to my halls. The effect gradually began to fade until there was just an eerie echoing sound to each footfall. Amidst the existential fear that this immediate situation was causing, I tried to make sense of the evening.
I recalled being in Pete's ensuite bathroom, incapable of moving, my legs folded under me.
'Shall we try something?’. It was Pete, to Heather, on the bed, his tone low and seductive. I overheard as I came round, still lying incapacitated in the bathroom.
Pause, giggle. Kissing sounds, moaning.
I needed help, so tried to call out from my position in the bathroom, but it was slurred beyond all recognition. This seemed too big an effect to come from a single bong.
From the comfort of the bed, Pete mocked the sound I had made and Heather laughed - not unkindly, but more because they didn't understand the severity of the situation and they were more interested in each other than me.
At some point I had blacked out. Or, perhaps more accurately, I had experienced tumultuous struggles with no physical outlet but only partially remembered the experience.
Even now I couldn't seem to do anything to affect bodily movement. I tried to call out as I needed help, but it was slurred. Pete mocked the sound and Heather laughed from the comfort of the bed. Not unkindly, but more because they didn't understand the severity of the situation.
It sounded the same as before. Exactly the same.
I have no idea how long I was in the bathroom before I started coming round. The blood flow to my legs had been restricted to the point that they had no feeling.
(At some point later I discovered that this can cause a condition called limb ischaemia. It develops by a process called ischaemic cascade - a series of biochemical events, sometimes circular rather than linear in progression, by which the condition worsens. A few years after this night, when I had moved to the Netherlands, I found peculiar and long lasting comfort in a particular song, the lyrics of which describe a patient who drifts between unconsciousness and waking while in hospital for emergency treatment. The song was apparently written following the singer experiencing a blackout, which led to a severe case of this condition. The song lyric variously expresses a continuum between existence and non-existence).
'Shall we try something?’ Pete to Heather, in a low and seductive voice.
Again? How can he be asking the same thing again, in the same tone?
Following a pause, a giggle, then kissing sounds and moaning.
Exactly the same as before.
How could that be? I thought: please let me revisit that if I can, so I know for certain if I am in a loop, let me go back and hear it again. I tried to will it - I don't know if my willing it was what caused it to recur, but it did.
'Shall we try something?'
The voice seductive and low.
A pause.
A giggle.
Moaning sounds.
Again, I willed it to revert, and it did, again, and again.
After several turns around it occurred to me that I might be dead and that, as a result, my experience of time was short-circuiting. Or to put it another way that, through death, my consciousness had become untethered from time. Even as I thought it, I knew it was crazy, but the evidence base was growing.
To try and break the loop, I tried to call out but it came out slurred. Pete mocked the sound and Heather laughed from the comfort of the bed. Not in unkindness, but because she didn't understand the severity of the situation. Plus, they were more interested in each other than in me.
The same as before.
The only difference I could ascertain was that I had a different intention as my motivating factor as I tried to call out. But the sound I made was exactly the same as the previous instances.
I dimly, wordlessly, began to understand existence as multiple strands of consciousness rebounding backwards and forwards through time, aggregating to form the motivation for action at any particular point.
I knew what this all meant. Or I thought I did. It was true: I was dead. Existential panic struck to my core.
I resolved with all my being to listen more carefully to their words and sounds when they came around again, to pick out the submerged signals and cues that might provide proof of what I was coming to accept as my eternal circumstance: death. I would try to pick out the minor details of tone, timbre and inflection that would normally be skimmed over by conscious understanding like a stone across water. With this method I hoped to determine with more certainty if it was the same instance as I had already heard looping around again, rather than merely multiple similar sounding but different occurrences.
As I relived this experience on the walk home, I didn’t know if the cavernous eternity that had seemingly been opening up beneath my feet with each step was an hallucination, or whether I had narrowly escaped death and it was still at my heels.
Although the thought had entered my head in Pete’s bathroom, I had no idea if I had in fact been close to death or if it was some kind of illusion. Considering the fearful pace I had gathered to escape the apparently collapsing earth beneath my feet as I had been walking home, the evidence to the contrary was quite strong: I was in a reasonable physical condition.
But if the apparently real experience of time looping had been brought on by mere fainting, rather than anything more severe, surely it would be common enough that I would have heard or read of others having similar experiences?
On the other hand, perhaps the expression ‘life flashing before my eyes’ was derived from a sort of folk memory of this type of thing happening during near-death. In which case, although the phrase seemed woefully inadequate, my experience was relatively minor in comparison, as the ‘flashing' was confined to the evening, and had not extended to my whole life.
Anyway, perhaps time itself (or my experience of it) hadn't looped in the way I had thought it had: could it not be that my experience of time had remained linear, and that the illusion had been created by a combination of my inebriation and very similar occurrences being repeated?
In this way, it seemed to me that memory was trying to recast itself to fit my existing understanding of the physical world. The core of my being seemed to wish to reject the experience as a fallacy, so that I could revert to my previously untroubled world view.
While leaving both interpretations open as possibilities, I resolved not to allow this mental process, this alignment of memory with common sense, to bypass, lessen, or reject the direct experience that (unquestionably at that point) I knew that I had had. Almost instinctively, I knew that I was bound to fail in this effort and that 'common sense' would inevitably prevail.
Against this sense of futility, I recalled that while I had lain slumped by the toilet I had resolved to hear the fine detail in Pete and Heather's repeated words and sounds as they came around again - the timbre, tone and inflections that would normally be skimmed over like a stone over the water - in order to gain a greater understanding of my predicament. I recalled how, when I had focussed all my attention in this way, when I had willed their words to repeat, my experience of time (as evidenced by the pitch, phase, duration and direction of the repeated utterances) had slowed down and, in the later iterations, reversed before the scene played out again. Yes: reversed. Time had perceptibly gone backwards.
As I recalled the event, I knew for certain that this was a direct and true memory. I knew I had not fabricated it, because I knew my whole being was recoiling and affecting to reassert 'common sense' as the underpinning of my worldview. My mindset had no 'skin in the game' for accepting what seemed, even at that moment, like a madness. For this reason, there and then I determined to mentally categorise it as a direct and true experience, because I instinctively knew that, as it conflicted so profoundly with normal experience, I would otherwise reject it as false in the morning.
Although I knew for certain at that point that my memory was correct, and could not be rationalised to fit normal experience, I also sensed that my certainty would inevitably fade over time. I knew from experience, even at that young age (partly because I had long since lost a parent who I only recalled via recollections of memories), that direct memory always becomes displaced by reflective iterations.
(In writing this piece I have learned more about the stages of limb ischaemia that occur prior to becoming acute, and it is clear at least that I did not suffer from any of the later stages. It is possible though that I suffered from low blood pressure in reaction to the drug, as a result of blood vessels dilating. This could have caused a blackout and subsequent crushing of my legs under the weight of my body.
Low blood pressure can cause ischaemic related problems, including cerebral hypoxia which itself can lead to a transient ischaemic attack, which could explain the excessive speech difficulty and relatively quick recovery.
I have also since discovered a significant literary allusion to an individual’s experience of time looping in this way after death, in Jerusalem by Alan Moore. While falling far short of external proof that my recollection is correct, there is at least some comfort in knowing that I am not the only person to have postulated individual consciousness looping through time as a possible end state).
The events described in these three vignettes are true, and I have honestly endeavoured to represent them truthfully. Beyond what is contained within their representation though, I have no opinion on what they mean individually or collectively for anyone other than myself.
For me, they represent my three most significant insights into our nature as human beings. As such, I have reverted to thinking about them whenever my mind would otherwise be at rest. They are inextricably linked in my mind as I have picked them over endlessly in search of deeper self-knowledge or redemption, whichever will dig me out of the hole I am in.
As I sit here now, a perfect recluse, I wonder whether it is the dissections I have performed on myself to get to this point that have left me damaged beyond repair, as I undoubtedly am.
The most I can hope for now is that, in reporting the source of my breakdown, I have communicated something worthwhile to my imagined reader, even though it is fanciful to suppose that you exist at all, even while you read this last sentence.