10

Prophetic Jouissance — Trauma, Survival, and the Precognitive Sublime

It is right it should be so:
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

— William Blake, Auguries of Innocence (1803)

I t was September 23, 1955, and the actor Alec Guinness had just arrived in Hollywood to film the movie The Swan . He was 41, and it was more than two decades before he would become a household name in America for his portrayal of the wise Jedi Knight Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars , and still four years before being real-life knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his achievements on the British stage and screen. And it was the very first time he had set foot in California. Unfortunately, the 16-hour flight from London had made the famously cranky actor doubly cranky, and events of the evening—including the gender-bending attire of his dinner companion—conspired to magnify his displeasure.

An American screenwriter, Thelma Moss, wanted to buy Guinness a meal, but she was wearing trousers—something women didn’t often do in those days. After being turned away from three different respectable establishments as a result of this unfortunate wardrobe choice, Moss drove her increasingly hungry and grumpy companion to a more liberal Italian place, Villa Capri, that she knew would admit them. Except, she had no reservation … and there were no available tables. ¹

By this time, Guinness was desperate: “I don’t care where we eat or what,” he told Moss. “Just something, somewhere.” Guinness wrote in his 1985 memoir Blessings in Disguise that as they left the restaurant to continue their search for food, he “became aware of running, sneakered feat” chasing them down, and turned to face a handsome young man in a sweat-shirt and jeans.

“You want a table?” the man offered. “Join me. My name is James Dean.”

Before going back into the restaurant, the young star of East of Eden (and the forthcoming Rebel Without a Cause ) wanted to show Guinness a shiny parcel in the parking lot: a new silver Porsche Spyder 550 he had just received from the mechanic who customized it. It was wrapped in cellophane, with flowers and a bow on the hood. “It’s just been delivered,” he announced full of pride. “I haven’t even driven it yet.” Dean, a car collector and racer when he wasn’t acting, had nicknamed the car “Little Bastard.”

“The sports car looked sinister to me, although it had a large bunch of red carnations resting on its bonnet,” Guinness wrote. “How fast is it?”

“She’ll do a hundred and fifty,” Dean answered.

At that moment, a grave expression passed over Guinness’s face, and he warned his new friend, in a voice he says he could hardly recognize as his own: “Please, never get in it.” He looked at his watch. “It is now ten o’clock, Friday the 23^rd of September, 1955. If you get in that car you will be found dead in it by this time next week.”

Dean just laughed at his warning: “Oh, shucks! Don’t be so mean!” ²

Guinness apologized for his strange utterance, explaining that it was due to hunger and lack of sleep. He and Moss then joined Dean and his entourage for a lovely dinner, at which no further mention was made of Dean’s new car or Guinness’s distressing premonition. Yet Guinness recalled that, despite the gaiety of the evening, he felt uneasy through the whole meal. And indeed, a week later, at 4:00 PM on Friday, September 30, Dean’s neck was broken when he slammed into another car while speeding through an intersection near Paso Robles, California, going twice the speed limit.

Skeptics will whip out their “law of large numbers” and “selection bias” arguments to debunk Guinness’s story, of course. Guinness no doubt knew or could guess of his young dinner companion’s reckless lifestyle, shared by many young celebrities. One might guess that many of Dean’s friends and acquaintances uttered similar warnings to Dean all the time, sort of the way we imagine young celebrities constantly getting concerned warnings about their drug abuse and other self-destructive behavior. In a certain small percentage of cases, the warnings come true soon thereafter, and these are the ones remembered after the fact and retold as part of the survivor’s life story. This one instance, because it happened to nearly coincide with Dean’s (perhaps likely or even inevitable) death in an automobile, could have taken on a numinous quality for Guinness in hindsight, as he rehearsed and retold the event to himself and others over the subsequent years.

But such a just-so story is subverted (if not undercut) by its repressed ghost. There is a coincidence in Guinness’s story that most readers, both skeptical and credulous, will miss simply because it is so obvious: The fact that the premonition was not about some random death, or the death of just any famous celebrity, or of just any acquaintance of Guinness. It was the death of a person Guinness had just met and formed a bond with. While this fact can be used to support the “law of large numbers” argument, it also lends itself to the opposite argument on the quite rational consistency of premonitions as centering on personally meaningful events and relationships. We will see later in this chapter that, on at least one other occasion in the early 1950s, Guinness had another premonition about the death of an artist with whom he had recently formed a kind of connection.

Even if Guinness claimed he couldn’t recognize the oracular voice that came from his mouth when warning Dean of his imminent death, most moviegoers can imagine that voice readily, for it uttered a similarly grave pronouncement aboard the Millennium Falcon en route to Princess Leia’s home planet Alderaan in Star Wars . “I felt a great disturbance in the force,” Obi Wan Kenobi famously says, clutching his chest just after (the audience knows) Alderaan has fallen victim to the Death Star, “as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something gravely terrible has happened.” Afterward he sits clutching his head with a pained expression.

The fact that audiences can so readily understand this scene, and relate to a “force” that connects people across time and space during a crisis, attests to the lasting power of Frederic Myers’ telepathy theory, which had dominated people’s thinking about psychic phenomena for nearly a century by the time Star Wars was released. Indeed, other than the role played by an automobile that could travel 150 miles per hour, practically hyperspace to a Victorian, Guinness’s premonition about James Dean would not have been out of place in Phantasms of the Living , the compendious 1886 volume Myers wrote with psychologist Edmund Gurney and skeptical writer Frank Podmore. Because ostensibly telepathic phenomena so often center on death, sickness, or other crises, Myers argued that it is strong emotion that overcomes the distances that usually separate people from their friends and loved ones, both in time and space. Trauma is the energy that powers telepathic broadcasts. ³

The notion of a person in crisis as a telepathic broadcast tower has given way to newer metaphors for anomalous experiences that seem to involve some remote connection, such as entanglement—even though quantum mechanics as we currently understand it does not even allow entanglements between two people’s brains on the basis of shared genes, let alone a shared dinner. But the link to powerful, especially negative emotions remains an overriding theme in accounts of ESP phenomena. Precognitive experiences frequently take the form of apparent “warnings” of death or disaster, as we’ve seen, even though as often as not it is in trying to evade foreseen outcomes that people end up fulfilling them. It raises interesting questions about how precognition may work as an orienting function, especially if, as I have argued, its adaptive purpose is fundamentally to orient us toward rewards.

We can get some clues to a possible answer by considering Freud’s writings on trauma, as well as subsequent psychoanalytic thinking about the paradoxical motivating power of emotions that lie, as Freud famously put it, “beyond the pleasure principle.”

Psychological trauma was a new concept at the time Freud was constructing his theory of the unconscious in the late 1800s. The industrial age and its railways had created a widespread phenomenon that until then only soldiers had been confronted with: grievous injuries, mutilation, and close calls such as the witnessing of horrific accidents befalling others. When the insurance companies were forced to assess claims related to psychological injuries that seemed to set in after a person’s physical injuries, if any, had healed, psychiatry was forced to confront a new class of illnesses, what one later writer called “pension hysterias.” ⁴ Trauma, which originally meant a physical wound, came in Freud’s writings to refer to events that, because of their suddenness or horror, left some kind of lasting scar on the psyche.

Freud’s innovation in the medicalization of trauma was twofold. First, he extended the conception of trauma to the sexual domain—namely, child sexual abuse. In the 1890s, because of repeated stories from his patients that seemed to point to sexually traumatic events in their childhoods, he formulated his famous “seduction theory.” Child abuse and pre-pubertal sexual experiences were, it seemed to him, much more pervasive than anyone had yet recognized and were the driver of adult hysterias and neuroses. However, when he “discovered”—many would say invented —what he later called the Oedipus complex, or lingering incestuous wishes from childhood, he abandoned his seduction theory in favor of a much more far-reaching idea: that many of these traumatic, neurosis-inducing “memories” were actually fictions woven from the threads of real, poorly understood experiences and a much larger component of fantasy, all abetted by childhood confusions about sexuality. The trauma, in many cases, was not some actual molestation that had occurred, but a nexus of ideas and fantasies inarticulately preserved in memory. Psychoanalysis came to mean enabling the patient to put into words those hitherto inarticulate ideas and fantasies, not simply recovering some buried memory (which is the simplistic idea still found in pop-culture parodies of the Freudian couch). ⁵

Long after Freud’s death, Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory was seen by many feminists and other critics as a betrayal of his patients who may really have been abused by their fathers. The reassessment of memory and trauma that ensued led to an epidemic of “recovered abuse memories” in the 1980s and early 1990s. These “memories” were often the product of highly questionable therapeutic methods like hypnosis. ⁶ Thanks to the important research by Elizabeth Loftus and others into the fallibility of memory and the ease with which false memories can be created in therapeutic settings, the pendulum swung back in the late 1990s, away from assuming traumatic childhood memories are accurate. But Freud’s cultural reputation, even in the humanities, has never really recovered from this “scandal.”

Nevertheless, and whatever the extent to which Freud’s reduction of trauma to sex should be bracketed, his second key innovation in this domain remains one of his most enduring and significant ideas: that trauma consists not in what happens to us, but in how we think about what happens to us. Crucially, these thoughts are displaced in time or deferred from the event as such. As the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche put it, “we try to track down the trauma, but the traumatic memory was only secondarily traumatic: we never manage to fix the traumatic event historically. This fact might be illustrated by the image of a Heisenberg-like ‘relation of indeterminacy’.” ⁷ The philosopher Jacques Derrida erected a whole philosophy on the notion of what he called différance (combining the sense of defer and differ ), with its central assumption that traumas are always secondary, always “supplements”: “One wishes to go back from the supplement to the source : one must recognize that there is a supplement at the source .” ⁸ Put simply, in this school of thought, memory is an infinite regress into the past, following chains of associations among memory traces, yet may never hit the bedrock of anything traumatic “back there.”

Could the inability to ever localize the origin of a trauma in the past, and the psychoanalyst’s need to assemble some chain of “traumatic thoughts,” signal that the search for origins has always looked in the wrong direction, for the wrong trauma, or both?

Playing Gone

Even decades after he had formulated his theory of Nachträglichkeit —“afterwardsness” (or as John Forrester puts it, “the deferred action specific to neurotic causality” ⁹ )—Freud continued to be perplexed by traumatized patients behaving in compulsive and seemingly very unpleasurable ways, almost as if they wanted to relive the event that had traumatized them rather than forget it. On the one hand, conflicts between our conscious aims and our unconscious desires could go some of the way toward explaining this. People’s reactions to traumatic events may be much more complex than we like to imagine, for one thing—we harbor unconscious death wishes for those close to us, as a result of sibling rivalries and the like. But ambivalence could not be the whole story. Why do war veterans obsessively relive objectively horrifying combat situations in their dreams? Why do neurotics find it so hard to “let go” of real or imagined traumas and end up staging situations that essentially repeat and reinforce them, almost as though they are trying to (re)create those traumas instead of move on? For a doctor whose whole theory of human motivation rested on the individual’s pursuit of his or her wishes in dreams and of pleasure in daily life, this compulsive returning to past traumas was a conundrum.

In 1919, Freud wrote his most controversial and arguably most interesting essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle , in which he attempted to formulate a solution. He said that the main clue to his answer came from watching his toddler grandson Ernst repeatedly throwing a spool over the side of his crib and exclaiming “fort ” (gone), then pulling it back and enjoying its return, “da ” (there); and then, when he was slightly older, doing the same thing with his own reflection in a mirror. The fort-da game is one of the most memorable images in Freud’s writings, and those who knew Freud assumed Freud had written this after the death of his daughter Sophie, Ernst’s mother, in 1920. But he hastened to correct them that he wrote it months before her death ¹⁰ (making it another possible candidate for precognition).

Staging the loss and recovery of objects and the self, Freud argued, is the child’s way of beginning to think about and master (via play) the traumatic absences of the mother. By bringing loss under its own symbolic control, the child builds a capacity to endure it. Thus, it is in dealing with trauma that the child first learns to use symbols to represent things that are absent. For later writers in the Object-Relations school, such play with what D. W. Winnicott called “transitional objects” is the very roots of cultural experience, the very beginnings of symbol use. ¹¹ But what was most interesting to Freud was the compulsive, repetitive quality of these childhood games, as well as the fact that the emphasis seems to be on the “gone” (fort ) half of the fort-da game. Children, in their play, like to play gone. Freud suggested that there is in an organism’s own destruction also a kind of reward, annihilation being the ultimate release of psychic tension, whose dissipation is felt as pleasure. ¹² He proposed that, apart from and even surpassing the rule that we are governed in our actions by pleasure, there is a parallel urge to dispel life energy and thus tension—and that this drive can be found at the root of war neuroses and the neurotic’s compulsion to repeat unpleasant situations. Specifically, he called this a “death drive,” or thanatos . Thus, beyond pleasure lay the even more extreme reward of oblivion. ¹³

Although intriguing, Freud’s idea of an instinctive urge toward negation or annihilation seemed paradoxical, and never really caught on … except as it was reformulated by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the late 1950s. Lacan’s French had an advantage that Freud’s German lacked, specifically the word jouissance , meaning painful pleasure or pleasurable pain—literally something “beyond pleasure” that takes over and drives a neurotic or someone who has been traumatized. The simplistic examples commonly given of jouissance include an orgasm so extreme that it causes agony, or the erotic pleasures of sadomasochistic acts. But a better analogy would be addiction, the compulsion to repeat an act (taking a drug, for instance) that cannot be resisted yet no longer gives much pleasure because it is more about the temporary dissipation or release of unpleasure. ¹⁴ There is no equivalent word in English either. In reference to Lacan, jouissance is usually translated as “enjoyment,” but it needs to be understood that there may be something deeply ambivalent or even repellent about this particular kind of enjoyment. It is an enjoyment we do not want , a weird mix of excitement and pain, reward and regret. The concept of jouissance , as the underlying energy driving human compulsions, including pathological compulsions and obsessions treated in psychotherapy, became so central for Lacan that late in his career he made the provocative statement that jouissance is the “only substance” psychoanalysis deals with. ¹⁵

Lacan might better have said “force” and not substance. Later Lacanian thinkers have likened jouissance to the warping of space in a gravitational field. The contradiction between conscious aversion and unconscious reward bends our symbolic-imaginary spacetime, causing the strange tail-chasing, repetitive “orbiting” behavior of all neuroses and obsessional behavior, and on some level all behavior. One’s “enjoyment” in this French sense of the word is what “turns one’s crank” (recall here also the “twisting, turning” sense of the Anglo-Saxon wyrd ). What may to an outsider appear to be a miserable or dreary compulsion (an addiction, a pattern of dating the wrong kind of person, obsessively collecting Hollywood memorabilia, whatever) conceals and also preserves or protects a vital and enlivening unconscious dimension, which it is the aim of psychoanalysis to help unbury. According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, this circular, orbital pattern is one’s symptom .

The push-pull of jouissance around signs of self-destruction represented a significant advance over Freud’s thinking about why traumatized people behave the way they do. Whereas Freud understood the traumatized person’s “compulsion to repeat” as a way of metabolizing or exorcising the pain of traumatic events and thoughts, Lacan saw that repetitive symptoms are really an adaptation to a new regime of enjoyment, how a person reorganizes his or her life in such a way as to continue to derive enjoyment from something that, on a conscious level, may be despised and even (in its most extreme and pathological forms) possibly does harm.

Lacan was no more interested in literal precognition or prophecy than Freud was, but his revision of the Freudian theory of symptoms and their relation to trauma is highly suggestive for an understanding of precognitive phenomena, and the ways trauma may sometimes become “displaced in time.” For instance, in many cases where disasters and deaths are precognized, even including deaths of loved ones or near-fatal perils in one’s own future, there is an implicit reward, if only in the very primitive—and hard-to-acknowledge—sense of “but I survived.” This can be a very repellant kind of reward, something appealing to a very base, “lizard-brain,” survival-oriented part of us that may be at odds with our conscious, moral, social desires and sense of self.

The paradoxical connection between survival and death, which sparked Freud’s thinking but which he could never resolve successfully, in some sense boils down to a matter of semiotics : the fact that the one value (survival) takes on its meaning or value as a signal only contrastively, when paired with its opposite (death/destruction). According to structural linguistics, which was hugely influential on Lacan, all signifiers ultimately derive their meaning from their opposition to other signifiers. In life’s semiotic (or “sign language”), death or disaster befalling others is the foremost signifier of our own being-there, our da-sein . If you find yourself “traumatized” by witnessing something terrible, you have by definition survived. Dreams seem to give people dramatic and often distorted previews of those situations lurking in the foggy waters ahead. So do premonitions like Alec Guinness’s vision of James Dean’s death. One can imagine that Guinness would have read of the death of his fellow actor, whom he had just met a week earlier, with a mix of horror and regret, but also grim affirmation: It wasn’t me . I didn’t have the reckless need to go racing through a little California town in a flashy sports car.

We could apply this logic to interpreting one of the best-known premonitory dreams, Mark Twain’s dream about his brother Henry lying dead in a metal casket. In his Autobiography , which he dictated to a stenographer in 1906 at the age of 70, Mark Twain recounts that when he was a young man, age 23—at that point just Samuel Clemens—he had been in training to be a Mississippi River steamboat pilot, and he persuaded his 19-year-old brother Henry to come work with him as a “mud clerk” aboard a boat called the Pennsylvania . ¹⁶ The writer told how one night in May 1958, while they were ashore and staying with their older sister Pamela and her husband and daughter in St. Louis, he dreamed of Henry lying in a metal casket, which was placed on two chairs. Henry wore a suit of his own (Samuel’s) borrowed clothes, and on his chest was a bouquet of white flowers with a single red rose. The dream was so vivid, he recalled, that he actually arose and went outside to collect himself before viewing the body, which he expected was on display in the house. During his walk, he realized that it had only been a dream. He told Pamela about it, with her six-year-old daughter Annie present.

A few days later, the brothers shipped out in the Pennsylvania on its run south to New Orleans. There, Samuel had the most violent in a series of ongoing clashes with the boat’s pilot and was made to stay ashore when the boat made its run back north to Memphis. Two or three days later, he received news that Henry had been badly injured in a boiler explosion that had taken the lives of many of the Pennsylvania ’s passengers and crew. Samuel took the next boat to Memphis and sat with his severely burned brother in the hospital, but Henry ended up dying of an overdose of morphine that the inexperienced doctors administered to kill his pain. The writer recalled that the next day, when he arrived at the building where the dead were laid out in caskets, he was stunned to behold the exact scene he had seen in his dream. Henry’s body was laid out in a suit he had borrowed from Samuel when they were in St. Louis. Some women volunteers, impressed by Henry’s stoicism enduring burns over his whole body, had pitched in to buy him a metal casket, whereas the rest of the bodies were laid out in caskets of white pine. Just then an elderly volunteer nurse entered and placed a bouquet of white flowers, with a single red rose in it, on Henry’s chest. ¹⁷ A few days later, when the coffin was brought to their sister Pamela’s house in St. Louis, it was laid on two chairs, also as Samuel had seen in his dream. ¹⁸

In a Freudian reexamination of this case, religion scholar David Halperin notes that a submerged death wish could have accounted for what only seemed in hindsight like a precognitive dream about Henry’s death. ¹⁹ The young Samuel Clemens felt a good deal of resentment toward his younger but much more upstanding brother, who appears as the “goody-goody snitch” ‘Sid’ in Tom Sawyer , for example. Henry could do no wrong in their mother’s eyes, Twain later recalled, whereas he himself could do no right. ²⁰ From these clues, Halperin deduces that Clemens would have harbored unconscious murderous wishes for Henry, as siblings typically do, and thus would probably have had many dreams over the years involving his death. It thus might not actually be too strange a coincidence, Halperin argues, for Samuel, upon seeing his brother in a coffin, to recall having dreamed approximately that scene at some point and formed the notion that he had had a recent premonitory dream about it.

The testimony of Twain’s niece Annie Moffett somewhat undercuts this argument, however. According to Moffett, the dream occurred while napping in daytime, when Samuel and his siblings, including Henry, were at home, and that Samuel actually came rushing into the room where they were all sitting to tell them about it. ²¹ It shows that his confused rising from bed to view Henry’s casket could well have been a consummate storyteller’s later embellishment. But the discrepancy lends some support to the basic core truth of the story: that Samuel did indeed have a dream of Henry’s dead body before his death, and that it made enough of an impact on the dreamer that he shared it right away with his family. Presumably he did not go telling his family about dreams of his dead brother all the time—that might have stood out in Annie Moffett’s memory as remarkable for different reasons. (She also noted that others in the family were amused at how seriously Samuel evidently took this dream.)

Even if we accept Samuel Clemens’ dream as a bona fide case of dream precognition, Halperin has hit on an important dimension of this story that should not be ignored: the fact that there would have been more to his reaction to his brother’s death than simple grief. There was guilt, first of all. Twain felt guilty the whole rest of his life for inviting Henry to work on the Pennsylvania and for not insisting his brother remain with him in New Orleans. ²² And there would have been even more to it, as once again, the death of another person always contains, by implication, a small but important piece of news that some basic animal part of us takes reassurance in—I survived, I’m still here, it didn’t happen to me . Given the singular circumstances of Henry’s death—dying as a result of a boiler explosion after Samuel had been made to stay on shore—how can such a sense of luck or fate favoring Samuel over his brother not have crossed the future writer’s mind, leading to an unconscious sense of relief commingled with that guilt? For Samuel’s unconscious, if not his conscious reflection, the meaning of this story would have been “it could just as easily have been me.” ²³ I suggest that it is precisely this equivocally rewarding signal that might have been “displaced in time” to spark a dream some days earlier.

Calling Samuel Clemens’ dream a “dream of his brother’s death” is really as inaccurate and misleading as calling Elizabeth Krohn’s dreams ( Chapter 1) “plane crash premonitions.” His dream was about being alive to witness his brother lying dead in a coffin, including the singular and significant detail of his brother wearing his own borrowed suit. It was a dream about the viewing of Henry’s body, a kind of wake, and a wake is an event in which the living—those who have survived—pay respects to the dead. Samuel Clemens’ dream was not a premonition of his brother’s death, but a premonition of his own survival.

Entropy and Sublimity

The concept of jouissance , particularly as it relates to scenes of destruction and ruin, provides an alternative, psychodynamic explanation for the prominence of explosive, entropic occurrences in precognitive phenomena. The reader will by now have noticed that many premonitory experiences center not just on death but on chaotic and explosive events like car and plane crashes, terror attacks, calamitous sea disasters, and devastating volcanic eruptions—in other words, things moving rapidly from a state of order to a state of disorder. Physicist Edwin May noted that psychics in the U.S. military Star Gate program were much more accurate at describing “hot” targets (explosions, nuclear reactors on aircraft carriers, etc.) than other targets. The prophetic halo around 9/11 or many of J. W. Dunne’s dreams would be consistent with May’s hypothesis that psychically sensitive individuals may somehow, through some as-yet-undiscovered “psychic retina,” be detecting large, rapid changes in entropy as bright beacons on the landscape ahead in time. ²⁴

May’s argument makes a certain amount of sense given the classical equivalence of time’s arrow with entropy. Things that are very rapidly dissipating heat, such as stars and nuclear reactors and houses on fire, or even just a living body making the ultimate transition to the state of disorder called death, could perhaps be seen as concentrated time. But steep entropy gradients also represent a category of information that is intrinsically interesting and meaningful to humans and toward which we are particularly vigilant, whatever the sensory channel through which we receive it. An attentional bias to entropy gradients has been shown for the conventional senses of sight and hearing, not just psi phenomena. Stimuli involving sudden, rapid motion, and especially fire and heat, as well as others’ deaths and illness, are signals that carry important information related to our survival, so we tend to notice and remember them. ²⁵

Thus, an alternative explanation for the link between psi accuracy and entropy is the perverse pleasure—that is, jouissance —aroused in people by signs of destruction. Some vigilant part of us needs be constantly scanning the environment for indications of threats to our life and health, which means we need on some level to find that search rewarding. If we were not rewarded, we would not keep our guard up. Entropic signals like smoke from an advancing fire, or screams or cries from a nearby victim of violence or illness, or the grief of a neighbor for their family member are all signifiers, part of what could be called the “natural language of peril.” We find it “enjoyable,” albeit in an ambivalent or repellent way, to engage with such signifiers because, again, their meaning, their signified , is our own survival. The heightened accuracy toward entropic targets that May observed could reflect a heightened fascination with fire, heat, and chaotic situations more generally, an attentional bias to survival-relevant stimuli. Our particular psychic fascination with fire may also reflect its central role as perhaps the most decisive technology in our evolutionary development as well as the most dangerous, always able to turn on its user in an unlucky instant. ²⁶

The same primitive threat-vigilance orientation accounts for the unique allure of artworks depicting destruction or the evidence of past destruction. In the 18th century, the sublime entered the vocabulary of art critics and philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to describe the aesthetic appeal of ruins, impenetrable wilderness, thunderstorms and storms at sea, and other visual signals of potential or past peril, including the slow entropy of erosion and decay. Another definition of the sublime would be the semiotic of entropy . As Kant described:

Bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunder clouds piled up the vault of heaven, borne long with flashes and peals, volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river, and the like, make our power of resistance of trifling moment in comparison with their might. But, provided our own position is secure, their aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the forces of the soul above the heights of vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature. ²⁷

Landscape paintings from the 18^th and 19^th centuries by artists like J. M. W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich often display this aesthetic appreciation of violent nature, disasters, and especially ruins. If there is any one painting that has always exemplified the sublime—the painting that stands as its exemplar in many Freshman Art History textbooks—it is Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice , also called The Wreck of Hope , created in 1823 or 1824. Jagged slabs of ice pile in a rough pyramid in a cold Northern ocean, and if you look carefully, the stern nameplate of a ship can be seen about to disappear in the water bearing the name HMS Griper . (The work was inspired by the explorer William Parry’s 1819 expedition to the Pole, although in fact the Griper survived the expedition.) There is a remarkable similarity between this and other paintings by Friedrich and the iconic photos of the twisted wreckage of the World Trade Center towers rising from the gloom soon after their collapse on 9/11.

Originally, the sublime was elevated above the merely beautiful as something that mainly men were able to savor and enjoy (women were believed to prefer pleasant domestic scenes, flowers, and other images that were not so existentially challenging). Today we find the sublime aesthetic dominant in disaster cinema and post-apocalyptic science fiction. Films like Alien or Planet of the Apes (with its famous final scene of the Statue of Liberty rising from a far-future beach) exemplify the mood of enjoyment-in peril as much as the bleak haunted landscapes of Friedrich or the sweeping destructive visions of Turner. The common element that links these works is that they stage the same pleasure at annihilation-and-return, losing and finding again, that Freud observed his grandson Ernst engaging in with his spool, albeit on a far grander scale. The basis of the aesthetic sublime is precisely in its reinforcement of the thought “but I survived,” an enjoyment of the fact that I’m still here, even amid these signs of ruin . If you’re able to witness and even be traumatized by some sign of destruction, then you’ve survived it. “Your position is secure,” as Kant put it.

The aesthetic of the sublime may help us understand the many premonitory dreams and visions and artworks related to disasters like 9/11. It ought to be evident that, for most Americans, who did not live in Manhattan or Washington, DC, and who did not lose loved ones or friends in the attacks, the “trauma” of that day was really a mélange of complex and conflicting emotions that went way beyond the obvious shock and horror of the destruction. As philosopher Slavoj Žižek has noted, 9/11 fell into a fantasy space that had been prepared for it by decades of disaster cinema as well as growing social antagonisms in American society. It represented the fulfillment of a repressed wish on the part of many Americans, not only to be gripped by an unfolding cinematic disaster happening elsewhere to other people, but specifically to see massive icons of Establishment power and wealth destroyed in such a daring, David-vs.-Goliath way—this indeed was the genius of the attacks, to give Americans “what we wanted” on several unspeakable levels.

It sounds terrible to say, but the result was that Americans enjoyed the news coverage of 9/11. It was a spectacle, it inspired awe at its audacity, and certainly for most Americans, it provoked an enormous sense of relief that the terrorists hadn’t targeted their particular place of work or that of their loved ones. If you were watching it on television, it was probably not happening to you; it thus created a nation of grateful survivors, united by love and patriotism in its aftermath, as well as survivor’s guilt. This mix of guilt and gratitude, horror and relief, is the essence of jouissance .

Freud wrote that “if we are to be judged by our unconscious wishes, we ourselves are nothing but a band of murderers.” ²⁸ According to the logic of jouissance , it is more that we are vampires, deriving an unspeakable pleasure from signs of suffering and death. Žižek has likened jouissance to the drive that propels the undead in horror stories; it is a kind of life beyond life, an excess or surplus of life that cannot be contained in the living. ²⁹ Again, it sounds terrible, totally amoral, but it could be said that the Lacanian framework restores a bit of our moral dignity that Freud’s logic of narcissism and his talk of death drives seemed to take away. We do not really thrill to others’ losses or suffering out of ill-will or malice toward our fellow humans; it is simply that if death and suffering are seen to befall others—if we are in the position of witness —then those fates are not (at least not yet) happening to us . In his classic study The Denial of Death , Ernest Becker paraphrases Aristotle: “Luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow.” ³⁰ It may be that feeling our fate most exquisitely depends on these kinds of sublime close calls. Obsessively re-watching the planes crashing into the towers, dwelling endlessly on news images and photographs for months and years afterward, re-living the destruction and our own reactions to it in our conversations was very much like a neurotic symptom, a “compulsion to repeat,” and a way to enjoy our own survival. It expressed a morally unacceptable “life drive,” rather than a death drive as Freud would have framed it.

What Freud seems to have overlooked in his interpretation of his grandson Ernst’s fort-da game was the child’s point of view—that even though the spool was “gone,” Ernst himself was still there, and the spool’s gone-ness may have highlighted or intensified his budding awareness of self. More than the birth of symbolism, playing gone with transitional objects might be the birth of self-consciousness in relation to void. The spool is serving as a symbol for the child, but the symbol’s referent is not the mother—it is the child’s own persistence in the world, his survival (again by contrastive opposition). The aesthetic love of destruction and decay is similarly a way of playing “gone” and thereby bringing our survival into sharper relief. By extension, what traumatized people may be enjoying, what they anxiously cannot get enough of (in their traumatized state), is their own being-there or da-sein . If our prophetic unconscious orients us toward our future survival, we might expect it to similarly focus on chaotic upheavals that serve as a backdrop for an “I survived” signal—a context in which the persistence of the post-selecting self makes sense as “good news.” ³¹

Whether or not it is the real or only substance addressed by psychoanalysis, as Lacan argued, jouissance seems to be the real substance of prophecy. We are connected to our future by a resonating string of ambivalent enjoyment. Even when they seem darkest, the oblique messages carried on that string often have to do with our own survival in the Not Yet.

“Use the Luke, Alec!”

In a 1977 interview on the BBC talk show Parkinson , Alec Guinness remarked that his “very spooky” premonition of James Dean’s death in Little Bastard had been unique in his experience. ³² He was mistaken. We know from his memoir that it was at least the second time such a thing had occurred in his life within the span of a few years in the early 1950s. The first, because it did not involve such a long time delay and had a more “haunting” quality—and perhaps because it did not involve such a famous celebrity—did not fall for him in the same mental category. Yet, in fact, it seems very much like an example of the same future-influencing-present effect at work around learning of the untimely death of another artist with whom he had just made some connection. In this case, the death itself had taken place exactly a year before the experience; the connection was via one of the dead man’s paintings. What Guinness failed to recognize was that it also may have been premonitory of his role in one of the most iconically entropic scenes in cinema history: the destruction of the Death Star.

The actor recounts that, four years before his trip to Hollywood, he and his wife Merula purchased a painting by the Ukrainian-English painter Bernard Meninsky called Two Irish Girls , which “showed two solid-looking females in shawls, confronting each other in some place of bright green bushes and withered hedgerows.” Guinness writes that there was “something enigmatic” about the painting, however, and one night when he entered the room where he and Merula had hung it, he was seized by an inner voice obsessively reciting a Bible chapter and verse, “Luke, Chapter XXIII, Verse 31.” He had attended a religious school in his teens, ending up at age 16 a “confirmed atheist,” so he had to scour his house to get his hands on a Bible to look up that verse. Eventually successful, he read the following: “For if they do these things in a green tree what shall be done in a dry?”

“It was obvious,” Guinness wrote, “that the words could be applied to the painting, which I was staring at with fascination. For the first time I noticed that the green bushes were loosely painted, round, self-satisfied faces and the twigs agonized, screaming, figures.” ³³

Here, a skeptic will interrupt to point out that his years of religious schooling had given Guinness ample exposure to the Bible, and that his unconscious mind could have simply connected a subliminal perception of the faces and figures in the green foliage and twigs in Meninsky’s painting with a Bible passage he had once read and whose sense he had somehow retained, along with the exact chapter and verse, despite no conscious memory of it—what Theodore Flournoy called cryptomnesia. Yet we now know that memory does not work as Freud or Flournoy believed. We do not retain every experience pristine and unaltered in our memory; in fact, quite the opposite—most memories of our past, including memories of things read or seen in books, are extremely fragmentary and inaccurate. ³⁴ Even if that Luke passage had somehow stuck in Guinness’s mind, how would he have retained the exact chapter and verse? As I suggested previously, the superpowers of the unconscious as formulated in the Victorian era really seem like a deflection away from a much simpler (but of course, temporally obscene) explanation for these kinds of experiences. Precognition simply orients us to pertinent information latent in the landscape of our near future.

In this case, the Luke passage was only part of what Guinness precognized. He writes that after his discovery of hidden, unsettling depths in the painting, he took it off the wall and replaced it with another. When Merula entered the room, she didn’t notice the new painting but said immediately that the room had “regained its innocence.” Then comes the kicker: “A day or two later we learned it was the anniversary of Meninsky’s suicide.” ³⁵

A day or two later we learned … While Guinness implies something spookily haunting about this picture, which had perhaps been created in one of Meninsky’s bouts of depression that led to his suicide in 1950, the reality is likely much more straightforward—er, straightbackward . Learning that it was the anniversary of Meninsky’s suicide—perhaps in a newspaper or magazine retrospective on the artist (Guinness unfortunately does not say)—was clearly surprising and unsettling, precisely because Guinness and his wife had recently purchased a work by the artist. Guinness’s close encounter with the painting a day or two previously under the influence of Luke XXIII:31 oriented him to this learning experience as well as amplified its uncanniness, according to the time-loop logic we have seen again and again in this book. Reading a perhaps sad or disturbing story about Meninsky and his mental illness and suicide seems to have pre-oriented Guinness toward the painting a few days earlier, via the passage in Luke, but in turn that would have primed Guinness to pay attention to information (perhaps in a magazine) about Meninsky and his death. The apparent coincidence of dates (the year anniversary) is itself nothing special. Humans, and the media, like to mark anniversaries, and in this case it was probably such a commemoration that provided the occasion for the unsettling learning experience.

The detail of the Gospel of Luke is, in a way, the most bizarre and ironic aspect of Guinness’s story. The actor does not mention the coincidence in his memoir, but of course by the time he had written of this event (in 1985), he had become world famous for precisely a line in which his character, as the spirit of a dead man , addresses “psychically” a young rebel by that very name: “Use the force, Luke .” The line is delivered in the moments before Luke Skywalker destroys the Death Star, and is probably the single best-known, best-loved, and best-remembered line Guinness ever uttered on stage or screen … and Guinness hated that fact .

To become most famous for a role in what he regarded as a children’s film was an embarrassment to Guinness—who in 1977 was the only “movie star” in Star Wars —hence he barely mentions the film in his writings other than being forced to acknowledge that it had made him financially comfortable in his middle age. That blow to his artistic self-respect, while granting comfort and fame, is itself arguably a kind of equivocal “survival”—another kind of existential gain set against the backdrop of a loss, even a kind of “castration.” One can only wonder whether this is why his precognitive unconscious, all the way back in 1951, fastened upon a line from Luke’s gospel awaiting discovery in his library, to help represent his premonition of learning how he had, in effect, survived Bernard Meninsky’s suicide. As when he learned of James Dean’s death, it was the other guy who got hit by the arrow.