RAPTURE

I was drunken and overall miserable and I crashed into him-the unforeseeable x-factor, wild card, that revolutionizes, that wreaks magical transformation on, gets into the water systems of, a system. It was a ridiculously improbable match - no one would have thought it.

Back home after our 'first date' I lay in bed the next days (because in those times I wasn't well). Extreme things were taking place in me, but I, (I should make a distinction here), Conscious-I, didn't notice. I started obeying unconscious drives, out in the open, during my waking life, but Conscious-I lay there senseless to these events, except in the most passive of ways. Even though I was awake, Conscious-I still felt diurnal and Unconscious-I still nocturnal, and diurnal missed nocturnal (almost) exactly as if they really were separated in time, though they weren't. Conscious-I became a senseless fool watchman to Unconscious-I's frolicking trespasses.

What's more, I had been severely depressed for a long time, and when you have been that, you don't notice much about yourself. Heavy, long-term depression dulls and deadens you, in both directions. It acts on you this way, but it is also your response to it - very reflexively, you power down, reduce your heart rate and your senses to not feel the awfulness. Like an animal playing dead before a predator, you take on a non-living state.

I started looking at the videos and photos of him over and over. And these periods, before his image, were like being caught in a thick reverie or slumber or fog.

I remember on the fourth day... a voice suddenly spoke in my head, startling me from the unconscious reverie and I tried to shake myself free of it. "I can't be like this," it said with determination, "daydreaming all the time like this," and then I observed myself, third-party-like, getting up from the bed, going into the other room to get my phone, dialing his number and saying to him, "I need to talk to you," without knowing what I was doing, and understanding only then as I heard myself speak the words, the same time as he was. And we arranged to meet in a few days. But then, a day or so later, another or the same voice appeared in my head, and reversed the previous voice's decision. And so when we met again, it just became our second date.

For that date we met in a rain mist under the awning of Kellog's diner. I had just come from the unconscious reverie before his image of the last several days, but when we walked together from the diner to look for a bar, I was stealing glances at his still not very familiar face, asking myself if I liked him. If ever there was proof of how dumb consciousness is. How small it is. How oblivious, ignorant, uninformed.

The activity was compulsive, and seized me several times a day. The need arose, and I had to quench it - my body would just act, head for the videos and photos, open them up on my desktop, and set them playing.

It took a while for me to even perceive this activity. Because of all the unconsciousness. And even when I did start to piece it together, and did start to realize, and tried to hold on to the pieces and look at them, handle them, they almost always slipped through my fingers. If not right away, then days later, months later, years later.

I could eventually realize what was happening to me only because of the disturbances that interfered with these spells, shaking my consciousness awake. These disturbances would form part of my consciousness, and became like pieces of raft, land to stand on and survey from, the surrounding unconsciousness. Like how when you are awoken suddenly and are granted a view of your dream, that you wouldn't otherwise have been privy to, I was gifted some ghost-memories of Unconscious-I.

A ghost-memory is like a mysterious path. The conscious bit marks the entrance to the path. Without it, the path doesn't exist. Like with what I just mentioned, caught in a thick reverie, and on the fourth day, a voice speaking in my head, startling me from my stupor. It is only this disturbance, that formed part of my consciousness, and only when and if that conscious part floated back into mind, with a little view of Unconscious-I attached to it, could I 'remember' the extreme somnambulant stupor of those days.

So whatever I came to know, was in this roundabout way - the disturbances were bridges that led me backwards to these ghost-memories, which are so tenuous, and tend to dissipate immediately, or if not immediately, if I am able to hold on to them, to write about them, ponder them, for a time, weeks, months, years, they always in the end erase themselves, slide back into oblivion, leaving very uncomfortable holes, very unnerving problems. It becomes disquietingly difficult to re-stitch back together any kind of past. The hole contaminates everything around it, because so much is no longer tenable without it, all the thoughts related to it, the understanding built on it, the days spent thinking about it.

What I know about it all also comes from writing - because writing is a live and direct line into the unconscious. I started writing of my experiences about a year into them, and sometimes it would inadvertently trip something, upset a stone, causing a door to quietly open, and a ghost-memory to become available to me. That's how I gained a few more sightings into my unconscious. But always, the opening would quietly close again, without warning, taking the ghost-memory with it, and leaving no trace of ever having even existed. Except for the writing. When there was any. Twice, I have come back to my desk to pick up what I was working on, and rereading pages and pages, several days' worth of notes, in my own hand, I would chillingly realize that I suddenly no longer possess the memory. That the heart of my notes, of my past few days, has been ripped out, leaving a very uncomfortable hole. Making my own notes, feel eerily alien.

For a long time it felt like, I understood it as, I had seen something of too great wondrousness, that my consciousness went blind, and that I had to undertake endless hours of 'work' or 'training' - compulsively setting up the images, pressing play, inducing the rapture again and again, pressing the vision onto my eyes again and again, to become accustomed to it, to deaden its impact - in an unconscious drive to reconcile it with my conscious self. For a long time, I thought of it as 'work,' that I performed mechanically, like a job, because I would only be aware of myself going for the images, setting them up, hitting play, but once they were playing, I became unconscious and never had any memory of what I was experiencing in that lost time. I had the memory of doing something, repetitively, over and over, but I didn't have any memory of any 'feeling' associated with the activity, so I believed I did it mechanically, without emotion. But one day, in writing, I unwittingly overturned something, and for a minute, had access to a ghost-memory of the teeming emotion I feel in those moments, while before his image. My consciousness ceases, but everything else of me remains, lovingly, ecstatically wrapped up in tracing every line, taking in every detail... his profile with lowered eyes, his hair matted beneath a mesh baseball cap, the grooves in his long sleeve t-shirt, the cut of his figure against the stage, the slight glimpse of his eyes behind the sunglasses...

Also for several days another ghost-memory opened up to me, of having experienced another consciousness - of being un-individualized, not yet born or already dead, just cosmic material in outer space. All was luxurious black womb, pulsating with one heartbeat. It felt absolutely joyous.

The original rapture (the event) occurred the night before our 'first date,' while I was looking at photos and videos of him online for the first time (researching him a little, so as to have some things to say to him). It must have, because this was the act that I would unconsciously revisit as if under a spell, again and again, all told thousands of times again. These were the grounds that I haunted like a ghost, and kept returning to, the original site. And that's why the black cold terror that sickened me going to meet him for and throughout our first date. I was scared to death. And that's why an abnormal nervousness inflicted me on all the following dates well into our relationship. Since the night before our first date I already knew unconsciously...

Entering these episodes, it feels as though my body and my conscious freeze in their tracks, as much as if fantastical creatures had stepped through thin air, before my eyes, transfixing me to my spot, so intense is my fascination, so acute my emotion. For those first months especially, I was caught in a rapture and reverie so thick and total, like in a movie booth transfixed by softly unfolding dreams.

I am so far away in these moments, (in my unconscious, which in these experiences is apparently far, far away), as if in a spaceship hurtled deep into outer space. If someone addressed me, it was like coming to mid-transport, I saw and heard from a different atmospherics, from suspended somewhere else in another galaxy, over an ocean, over earth, sound and image coming to me all warbled, through curtains of space-time.

The conscious seems to only be capable of a passive awareness of unconscious things. The rapture exceeded what my conscious could handle, short-circuiting it, leaving my unconscious to take over. Like as well in times of unspeakable horror or fright. From there on out, my conscious had only the most passive and vague awareness of the extreme goings-on and behavior. It couldn't consider or incorporate that awareness, it couldn't even remark upon it to itself, even though the extreme things trespassed so flagrantly into the integrity of my normality.

I had a sister activity to the unconscious rapture-inducing activity, daydreaming. I took every opportunity of idleness - riding the subway, waiting in a doctor's or counselor's office... - to indulge in it. I would almost run to the subway seat, the waiting room seat, in joyous anticipation of the idle minutes to come, not wishing to waste a second of them, sit down, open up my store of memories of him, quickly select one, and set it playing - and I would experience a total washing over of ecstasy.

This store of happy, blissful memories was like a cache of drugs. It's as if the mind's eye distills the memories, isolating only the loved one and all the attendant happiness and adoration and love, removing everything else, till you have left only the purest form, amazingly refined, a pure nugget, delivering the most joyous rush of ecstasy.

About two years into our relationship, I took over the care of his cat. It started because he was going away for five weeks, touring a play, but then I fell so hard in love with her, Bebek, that even after he returned, she remained with me, for some more months, until she sadly died from cancer (she was very, very old - but she remained till the very last, the most magical, dead-pan cat that can be). I loved her so immensely and I found that I could do the same thing with her. I could open up her memory and experience ecstasy.

Each night, right before sleep, even when he lay there next to me, after we'd said good-night, I would eagerly turn the other way and open up a memory of him, or later, of Bebek, and be awash in ecstasy.

The daydreaming was obviously self-stimulation, though non-sexual. It was a means, at my disposal, and inexhaustible (for the longest time), to attain exhilarating, ecstatic pleasure. And I did it constantly. Every chance I got.

The daydreaming would outlast the rapture. After about a year and a half, they both started to lose their potency and to subside. At around two years into our relationship, the raptures were finished, but the daydreaming persisted a little longer, like a cherished habit, a child's clinging to her security blanket or thumb-sucking, that one repeats even after it has lost its function, because it is so deeply associated with comfort and pleasure.

A lot of times in my daydreaming I chose to go back to, to try to approach, the original site. Like a haunted house, or some other off-limits forbidden grounds, this border, and getting as close to it as I could, exerted an intense fascination over me. Of course there, I always went blind. I never returned from it remembering having 'seen' anything.

Dumb, stupid, smart. It's about electrical firings.

The dumb are excessively stilled by some one thing - mostly the insignificant, the inconsequential, the maybe not even real, overwhelmed by something internal or useless.

The stupid just don't have a lot of connections or firings, either internally or externally. They just don't feel or sense much.

The smart are super-connected to the here, their bodies prickling with connections, responding to everything, attuned.

The dumb are ones who can't get beyond even their internal sightings, tripped up already by something there, on their way to here. They can't even get here. They can't even arrive.

Smart people are fully here. Their internal life is pressed into perfect connection with their externals, and everything sings. Whereas the dumb's internals / externals connection is faulty or not working. They can't port. They're adrift, departed. The flesh abandoned.

When a subject experiences intense emotion - excessive fright, horror, awe, love... - s/he pulls sometimes a not-here. What s/he leaves behind is a body that fascinates me. You run up to it, like up to the empty box after a magic trick, examining it... Where'd s/he go? This body is the site of a disappearance. You shine a flashlight onto its dumb face, into the wide eyes...

S/he has absconded from the present. And what's here is the body at the very instant of absconding - the expression and pose are that of the subject when s/he was caught by the overwhelming emotion, and now the face-overcome and body-mid-gesture are frozen like a mask. Stopped in its tracks. You shine a flashlight into the open eyes. Nothing. No reaction. And you admire this strange scene.

Like Star Trek's beamer chamber. The body is left behind, the remains of excessive feeling. As the portal. A site for the subject to exit and enter the present.

So it's the body of a sudden deduction. An abduction. Of a hole in the present. Flight. Of other dimensions, durations.

It's diabolical.

Once the visions came to me while I was in the company of others, having a work meeting. Out of nowhere they appeared. I no longer remember what the images were. I just remember that they weren't even full-on, like they just broke through a little (from their world into this one), that they appeared as from on high, and that their colors were so rich and saturated. When they appeared, which was the only time they broke through into my reality spontaneously (which actually allowed me a kind of side-by-side comparison - I held both reality and visions in view simultaneously), even only partial as they were, they were still so magnificent, fixing my attention to them unbreakably. Reality, whose colors are drab, lifeless, gray, in comparison, receded and faded to the background of my vision. I tried to pull my attention away from the visions and back to my work meeting, but I couldn't.

This has never happened to me before. Where I've experienced rapture, religious-vision-sized rapture, and over a regular person, someone that I see every day, that I have a normal relationship with. I've never experienced rapture before. Never expected to. But I do have a tendency to become fixated or stilled. For example in my work, I can look at something, or think upon a subject, a small area, almost indefinitely. It doesn't matter how slow or long the process is. I do everything slowly. It doesn't matter how irrelevant the thing is.

For the last few years I got hooked on one pop music star, and then subsequently, another. I am a typical fan in that I will look at every new performance, interview, photo. But even more fanatically, I tend to watch things, mainly only performances, over and over again, dozens of times, my fascination never diminishing, except after some years. There's a magic and I want to grasp it. And with great performers and great performances, you never can. Something always exceeds your eye, your mental abilities.

When you fix on something, it grows fuller and fuller. I've read how wrong it is to posit that we share an objective duration. That we're travelling along at the same speed and trajectory, enjoying the same views. View is relative to rate. I have a hard time moving away from something. I like to return again and again. Like a refusal to move forward in time. When you fix on something, it opens up and gets richer. It changes.

Triggering the rapture - I did this heavily, several times a day, for a year, more lightly for another six months, after which, the drive diminished more and more, finally extinguishing itself.

The daydreaming I did as much each day and for even longer, by some months.

Total years and hours spent - for almost two years, thousands of hours, I sat, lay or stood spellbound by visions of him, thoughts of him, UNABLE to move.

Bernadette Van-Huy, February 2014