31.

I’ve never watched the beheading videos. I’m too squeamish, afraid of a mental imprint that will disturb my waking and my dreams.

Jonathan Hayes wishes he had not seen a beheading. A forensic pathologist, he recorded his response to the video in which an American businessman, Nicholas Berg, is decapitated by the same group who killed Armstrong. Though Hayes had witnessed death many times, he regretted watching the Berg video. The violence, he said, “unearthed emotions I had no desire to feel: fury, despair, the desire for revenge. I no longer cared about the atrocities committed in Abu Ghraib, the images of which had outraged me the week before. I wanted every man in that little death club captured, torn from their families, and dragged into the darkest basement interrogation room.”

Hayes admits that these feelings were inseparable from the post-traumatic stress disorder he was suffering from his work on Ground Zero in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. The video exacerbated his symptoms. It “crushed the necessary buffer between the abstract examination of a dead body and the pain and horror of that death” and so hollowed him with sorrow, causing him to break off a marriage engagement, retreat into isolation, and consider moving away from New York.

When does curiosity toward the morbid go too far and scar us for a long time? Hayes’s article suggests that the lack of a “buffer” between a viewer and horrific images can damage equilibrium. Obviously, different viewers require different buffer zones. Some need large psychic areas between themselves and terrible sights; others, only a sliver. But without this buffer, we risk the transformation of morbid curiosity into trauma.

What is this buffer? The term implies a mental power that preserves the intensity of terror but keeps it from consuming us, that enables us to find meaning in the suffering, insight in the danger. For me, this faculty is the imagination. There are many ways to define the imagination, but one current that runs through the more intelligent definitions is this: Imagination is the ability to transform fact into symbol; that is, to turn raw existence into structures of significance.

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge explains. For him, the imagination relies on two processes, primary and secondary. The primary imagination is immediate perception of unadorned being; the secondary analyzes and synthesizes the unprocessed observation: “It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and unify.” This procedure requires self-awareness, that slight gap between what’s going on and our thinking about what’s going on. In that gap we can turn an unrepeatable, subjective encounter into an enduring representation that others can share. The ultimate result of this mental conversion: meaning. The singular becomes significant; the accidental, purposeful.

Coleridge offers an example of this process at work. He perceives a plant wavering in the breeze. He is moved by its greenish oscillations and imagines it breathing. He elevates this image to a meaningful concept: the plant is photosynthesizing, imbibing air and light, converting them into nourishment for itself and its environment. This physical concept he translates into a moral one: more than a respiring organ, this plant is a symbol for how we all should properly inhabit nature. We should be sensitive to its energies, take them in, transform them into nutriment, material or psychological, and in turn share our health with the world around us.

Not all events offer themselves as readily as breezy crocuses: some resist imagination. These are the moments that we can’t comprehend, that we can’t attach to systems of meaningful thought. These junctures can simply be weird, or they can be profoundly disturbing. Hayes found himself in the latter place. His viewing of the beheading overwhelmed his sense-making mechanisms.

Without imagination, morbid curiosity results in a shocking negation of meaning. But this same macabre inquisitiveness, bolstered by imagination, can generate knowledge. One can stand stunned and speechless before the horror; or one can imagine abomination as a significant, perhaps mythic pattern, burdened with tragedy but also illuminating the human condition.

The crime writer and scholar Harold Schechter believes that stories are essential for transforming macabre spectacles, otherwise shocking, into meaningful events. If I can assimilate a horrific eruption to a coherent narrative, then I can understand the terror as part of a larger and purposeful structure. Seemingly mindless violence becomes the predictable result of a story’s beginnings and contributes significantly to the end.

This is the value of myth: it can convert the monstrous into the moral. Take the myth of Oedipus (not funny after all). A man accidentally kills his father and beds his mother and gouges out his eyes in remorse. The events aren’t random, though; they are manifestations of divine destiny, revelations of cosmic order. Moreover, they send the message, Be humble before the gods. Or consider the story of Jesus. An alleged prophet is brutally and unjustly crucified, but the atrocity is an integral part of God’s plan and an admonishment to believers: You, too, must be willing to sacrifice yourself when the deity calls.

There are less grandiose examples, of course, of how we imagine narratives to console our sufferings. We understand a serial killer’s ostensibly random brutalities when we connect them to tales from his troubled childhood. We come to terms with nature’s deadly disasters by saying that the human suffering, appalling, teaches us how fragile life is and that we should take nothing for granted and try as best we can to help and love one another.