Anesthesia, page 20
It was like I was in the presence of everything that has been ever known by man and everything that ever will be. All things that could be known or understood were there, whether man had ever known or understood them. It was like there was this huge, huge vast presence and intelligence.
And in its presence, she said, she felt minute, fragmentary.
I had this feeling that I had seen something that no human being could ever, in a conscious state, be present to and be whole. That it was so vast that the consciousness of human beings—the little consciousness of human beings—unless it was under extraordinary circumstances, shouldn’t or couldn’t be privy to it. It was actually too big, too immense and I felt that I’d been forced there, and I had to survive it.
It sounds oddly like the experiences described by Jesse Watkins in R. D. Laing’s 1967 classic The Politics of Experience, in which Watkins, following his own general anesthetic, enters a sort of existential psychosis. “I had a feeling at times of an enormous journey in front, quite, er, a fantastic journey, and . . . I had come to the conclusion, with all the feelings that I had at the time, that I was more—more than I had always imagined myself,” he told Laing, “not just existing now, but I had existed since the very beginning, from the lowest form of life to the present time . . . and that what I was doing was experiencing them again.”
Ahead of him, he said, lay the most horrific journey. “[T]he only way I can describe it is a journey to the final sort of business of being aware of all—everything. It was such a horrifying experience to suddenly feel, that I immediately shut myself off from it because I couldn’t contemplate it, because it sort of shivered me up—I was unable to take it . . .”
For Rachel Benmayor, for Jesse Watkins, these experiences (hallucinatory? visionary?)—one during an anesthetic that failed, the other following one that had apparently worked—would vividly inhabit them for decades.
It was the same for a J. A. Symonds, whose own experience following an operation under ether he recounted to William James:
A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway. The lightning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people close to one another, and I was one of them. He moved in a straight line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short conscious existence only that he might travel. I seemed to be directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his own life up out of my pain. Then I saw that what he had been trying with all his might to do was to change his course, to bend the line of lightning to which he was tied, in the direction in which he wanted to go. I felt my flexibility and helplessness, and knew that he would succeed. He bended me, turning his corner by means of my hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest point of this, as he passed, I saw. I understood for a moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could remember while retaining sanity.
Looking back on his own nitrous oxide adventures, James commented in The Varieties of Religious Experience on the persistence and authority of those visions, despite the near impossibility of knowing what to make of them.
One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
And so it was for Rachel Benmayor, that day in the hospital as she gave birth to her daughter. In the vast space in which Rachel now found herself, the library—or perhaps something in the library, or something in Rachel—spoke to her. The things it said related directly to what was happening to her on the operating table, but were also universal—except for one that was just for her.
“So, the first thing that I was told was that life is breath. Life is Breath. Those three words. And what I understood from this was that breathing is the fundamental basis of life, and is our connection to life, and if we’re not in that connection deeply, if we’re not in that deep connection, then we’re dying, we’re dead.”
Her second message was more of a riddle—the sort of potted paradox with which rabbis and rinpoches tease the minds of young seekers. “Everything is important, and nothing is important.” (She sighed as she said it). “And that left me feeling in despair, as well as quite uplifted. It was such a dichotomy.
“The next one,” Rachel said steadily, “was this: the reason why human beings don’t like to feel pain is because, underneath all pain, physical and emotional, is the truth. Pain hides truth. So the truth is hard to find because it’s underneath things that are not pleasant. But truth is not found in the pleasant. And when people move through pain, they find the truth. It’s kind of a feeling of needing to accept the pain more, or to explore it more, or to be with it more, and to not be afraid of it.”
Was there a sense, I asked, that we tended to avoid pain because, frankly, the truth could be too much to bear?
“Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.”
So, here we have entered a realm where the strangest things can happen. Where a woman being cut open on a steel table can simultaneously be in an enormous library, hearing enormous messages. Where a fully conscious brain, apparently unimpeded by anesthetic drugs, can manifest from the same set of neurons two overlapping incompatible realities, the one superimposed upon the other. Look, look, it’s a baby girl / The reason why human beings don’t like to feel pain is because underneath all pain, physical and emotional, is the truth.
It blows my mind. It blew her doctors’ minds. And it very nearly blew hers away completely.
Rachel’s next message was a personal one, relating to her relationship with her husband. Then there was one final message. And this, she told me, was the one she had struggled with the most. “That our life’s purpose as a human being was to procreate. That having children was our primary focus as human beings.” This was not something Rachel had ever believed or wanted to. “And I still don’t want to believe it. I wanted my reason for being to be something a lot more elevated than having children . . . [But] there was this steady strong feeling . . . that that was true.” Whether that meant attaining a level of consciousness through her children, or continuing the human race, she did not know.
Rachel does not know if the words came from within or beyond her. Nor of course do I. But what her story did tell me was that within the reductive dualism of much Western scientific thought and language—conscious/unconscious, sleep/wake—here was something unaccountable. And while neurologists and psychologists could speculate about oxygen deprivation, hormone-induced hallucinations and electrical brain surges, what they could not account for was what was going on in Rachel’s mind. The membrane, the messages. The otherness of it all.
I believed her account entirely. There is nothing I have observed in Rachel Benmayor that would make me feel otherwise. But the truth was that I had no idea what to do with her messages. I felt even that I had wanted something more from them—something that perhaps spoke more immediately to my own life. Some answer to a question I had not yet framed. The number 42. And where did they come from anyway?
Eventually I reasoned that the messages had (must have) erupted from within Rachel. Her own unconscious mind speaking at last—shrieking—to her conscious self: this is how it is; these are the things that matter. While most of the messages (except for the one about her husband) seemed universal, they did all relate directly to the awful situation in which she now found herself. For a long time I shuffled them around this manuscript, unable to decide where they belonged or what light they might shed on anyone but Rachel herself. Then I deleted them.
It would take me much longer to wonder if perhaps it was not, or not only, Rachel’s unconscious—stripped back so brutally by the trauma of her daughter’s birth—that was at play here, but my own.
Ghost stories
In the Blue Mountains west of Sydney there is a big yellow house filled with books. Varuna. These days it is a writers retreat. It was named by its original owners, the writer Eleanor Dark and her doctor husband, Eric, after the Hindu god of the oceans, and I don’t think I have ever stayed there without the conversation drifting into talk of ghosts. One resident claimed to have looked out of her bedroom window on a moonlit evening to see a woman standing below in the garden looking back up at her. Another described a hand pressed against her shoulder. Midnight visitations, groaning bedsprings, baleful shapes in the corners. I stayed there with the American writer and teacher Robin Hemley, who reported seeing what appeared to be a sleeping form beneath the quilt in the Darks’s marital bed. On another night, he woke in the same bed to see what looked like a figure standing against the curtains. He could not make out whether the figure was male or female but was convinced enough to ask out loud, “Who are you?”
But in the main the ghosts are not of the house. They arrive with their owners and wait until these owners are soft and receptive before beginning to stir. Bottom dwellers compressed beneath the weight of unthought thoughts, they rise into the night like slow, flat fish. I experience at Varuna an unsettling sort of mingling, my days colonized by reveries and wavering absences; my nights swarming with half-thoughts and murky hallucinatory dreams. One night during the same week Robin Hemley saw shapes in his bedroom, another resident woke from a nightmare in which, through her mirror, she saw an old woman’s corpse seize her from behind, wrapping pale powdery arms around her, locking them over her chest as she herself growled and sank her teeth into the sweet doughy flesh.
The house stands impervious; squaring its yellow stucco walls to the sun and the rain, holding calmly within it its cargo of unshelled creatures, mutant half forms, words. One morning I woke into the wash of dawn light and found waiting in the front of my mind the instruction, or statement: permission to speak.
But what to say? How do we speak the parts of ourselves that are not available to our own conscious inquiry? That we don’t even know are there? And that may not, in any case, be available to language?
We can’t march in with our big boots and kick down the doors (I have tried). We can’t set traps for ourselves—we can see us coming. Sometimes we can create the conditions for those hidden parts to express themselves. We meditate or make art or do therapy or simply walk. But there are no guarantees. Consciousness is a small boat on an immense sea. We may learn to row, we may even rig up a sail, but we can’t know what’s beneath, let alone control it. Which means our conscious self can only ever tell us part of the story. The rest, that remnant topography, stays submerged beneath the surface of our daily life, creating its own currents and eddies and occasional whirlpools.
Sometimes it is left to our bodies to do the talking.
Around the time that David Adams published his study (ocean/water) in the mid-nineties, I moved from Darwin to Sydney to write for the Australasian edition of Time magazine. The man I had gone to Darwin to be with had also moved down. For the last six months of our relationship we lived in separate apartments by the sea, unable to be together, unable to separate. I had three other close friends in Sydney at this time. Over a period of six months, one had a breakdown, one entered a deep depression and one began the final stages of his dying. In the early hours of each morning, as I lay frightened and sleepless in bed, I promised myself that today I would not drink and I would not smoke. Each night I came home from work, poured myself a glass of wine, lit up a cigarette, breathed in slowly and deeply, breathed out; made myself another promise. The friend I was living with was trying to lose weight and so kept the freezer filled with Lean Cuisine, which we ate two at a time, along with takeaway from the corner shop.
I had not been feeling particularly well for some time before I saw my doctor, but I felt that I was in better shape than most of those around me. My doctor looked at the results of the blood tests and told me I might recently have contracted the glandular fever virus and that my immune system might still be trying to combat its effects. “Take a week off work,” she said. “See how you feel.”
Walking away from the surgery, past the naval ships and ocean liners and crumpled gray waters of Woolloomooloo, I felt light and peaceful. I didn’t believe I was ill, but I rolled the words around my mind. Glandular fever. Kissing disease. I rang work and went to bed.
Within three or four days I could barely walk. My legs, when I got up to go to the toilet or kitchen, felt light and shaky, far away from the rest of me. Alone in bed I felt neutral, dreamy, but as soon as I was required to do anything, I became teary, overwhelmed, exhausted. At the end of two weeks my flatmate put me on a plane to Canberra and my parents. There I stayed recovering for most of the following year.
For weeks, months, I lay in the bed that had been mine as a teenager, sleeping and staring at the walls. At mealtimes my mother brought me food, though I have no recollection of appetite. There were books by my bed which I did not, could not, read. Even speaking was too much. My words seemed pinned to the bottom of my jaw, and came out compressed and monosyllabic. I don’t remember crying much, but there was a dampness, as if moisture were constantly seeping through my skin, and sinking. As if everything inside me had become viscous, liquid, beholden to gravity and I was draining always to the lowest point; the soles of my feet, my buttocks, my back.
Nobody knew what to call it—glandular fever, chronic fatigue—the labels drifted around but none seemed to stick. I don’t remember any pain. I don’t even remember depression, though it was there. What I recall is an exhaustion so utter that at the very center of me I could only find cold.
My mother drove me down to the artificial lake around which the nation’s capital is built. She parked in an alcove a couple of hundred meters from the water and we set off slowly together, my arm on hers, toward a wooden bench at the lake’s edge. I walked like a very old woman, barely raising my feet from the ground. By the time we were halfway across I was spent—my body too heavy to drag, the rest of me insubstantial, as if I was spread so thin I would start to come apart, like clouds, and disappear. A thin, panicky feeling. We turned and shuffled back to the car.
And that was how it was. If I resisted it, pushed against the sickness, it would push straight back, a gray wash that could submerge me for days. I discovered that the things I had believed to be easy were often the most demanding. It was easier to move, to stand, to walk, than it was to think. It was easier to think than it was to listen. Easier to listen than to talk. As I began to get stronger I could measure my strength on any given day by my ability to communicate, my voice slow and flat, like a mop being dragged across a floor.
And then, beyond the outer layers of the illness (the weakness, the dullness of spirit, the incapacity), beyond too the concerns of others and the background guilt, was also a sort of luxury, a deep private pleasure in this passivity. I had given up: lain down. I was being looked after. My mother brought me soup in bed and my room was full of light and sweet Canberra air. Canberra has a reputation for being small and soulless, a suburb dressed up as a city, plonked in the middle of nowhere, three hours’ drive from the ocean. But I loved it. It was a sanatorium. I liked its neutrality, its in-betweenness, its cafes and galleries. I forgave it its lack of a center (even the large sign in its un-bustling main street, announcing “city center”). I came to love it less for what it was than where it was, six hundred meters above sea level in rolling high country, its air astringent, its streets lined with avenues of eucalypts. Somewhere buried among all these layers, too, unremarked on by myself or—in my presence at least—anyone else, was a profound sense of relief. Here, like this, no one could call me to account. I was a child.
This, then, is part of the story—the part that I know to tell. There is more to that story about illness. I feel sure of it. But how can I ever truly know?
Eventually I recovered. I resigned from my job and my relationship and moved to a seaside apartment in Sydney. In Bondi my bedroom window looked into the silvery yellow canopy of a huge old paperbark, and a five-minute walk away was the sea. On warm days I could wander barefoot with a towel over my shoulder to the beach and dive without thought into the crack of the waves. Everything was fresh and clean and salty. Most days I would pull on my walking boots and stride the two-and-a-half kilometers between the seaside villages of Bondi and Bronte. Along the ocean path cut into the sandstone cliffs, dropping down to cross pale sandy beaches and small rocky bays, then up again, taking the stone steps two at a time. Now and then, looking out across the ocean, I would watch pods of dolphins surfing the waves. Once, lying on my belly on a section of rocky overhang, I looked down and saw a solitary penguin in sharp muscular flight through the choppy swell.
But for all that I remember this re-entry into Sydney as a time of happiness and renewal, I had not managed to completely discard my old self. The stronger and healthier I felt, the more clearly I could see through the waters down to the rocks below.
Not long after I arrived I had an affair with a man who told me I was too nice for him. This was true, but when he dropped me I found myself retreating into a bleak, unedifying corner of myself. My doctor gave me the name of a woman in Paddington, a psychologist. She was a Buddhist, unnervingly beautiful with wavy dark hair and sometimes-fierce eyes. We did guided visualizations. She told me I needed to live less in my head and more in my body. When I felt anxious or uncomfortable, she said, the trick was not to avoid the feeling, but to observe it—size, shape, position, color. She said the intellect was a tool and that I should not let it control me; that I should let myself be led by my unconscious. She suggested spontaneous acts such as driving home by a different and unplanned route, turning left or right on a whim. She had me sit with my eyes closed and follow the feeling of the breath as it entered and left my body. Even at the time I sometimes felt sorry for her. I talked around and around in circles. I talked about the man. I talked about other men. I talked I suppose about my family. Sometimes at the outer extremes of my awareness I could hear her trying to tell me things. But much of the time I did not, could not, listen.
