Depersonalization is the contemporary therapeutic term for a particular manifestation of anxiety. In this state, the sufferer feels a loss of reality, a haziness, even dizziness. One’s head can feel clouded or foggy; the effect is often similar to that of a bad drug trip that takes a while to wear off. It frightens people because it can feel like a psychotic episode, or resemble an experience of schizophrenia — but it is a common, and in most cases harmless, symptom of fear disorder. There are techniques and exercises for bringing oneself out of depersonalization. These often include “grounding” practices such as counting slowly, noticing concrete elements of one’s surroundings, and reminding oneself that the state is temporary.
Depersonalization is closely related to dissociation — that numbness many people enter into after a damaging experience. If one is able to go to some other “place” in one’s brain or consciousness, the effect of the terrorizing event is lessened. Once the nervous system and psyche have gained distance, the numbness can subside and the event is re-incorporated into one’s awareness. Eventually acceptance happens.
In the first months of the pandemic, finding myself alone in one of the epicenters, I often went in and out of this state. The deleterious effects of solitary isolation are well known; it is for this reason that isolation has historically been employed as severe punishment. Some people’s brains never recover fully from solitary isolation.
Mine was not the same as a prison sentence, but I did lose many things as the virus seized the city: a job I was about to start, the person I shared my apartment with. There were entire days when I chose not to leave the house. I fell asleep to the sound of sirens. The aloneness enveloped me in the feeling one has before fainting: a dimming or blackening of the sides of one’s vision, distinct sounds being muted. I entered into a space in my mind that was far from my circumstances — a state that is pathologized, for which people of today find facile explanations.
Is it perverse to say that after a time I began to enjoy this state? To find the impressions I received there more real than the facts of reality, to luxuriate in its glow? After all, many people pay for substances which will induce such a transport; but the great secret is that it is often complimentary.
Let us look at Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s great masterpiece “Beata Beatrix.” In this work, the poet Dante Alighieri’s beloved is shown in a moment of “spiritual transfiguration,” according to the painter, and the Tate Gallery describes the portrait as having “a hazy, transcendental quality, giving the sensation of a dream or vision.” The frame, also devised by Rossetti, features the date on which Beatrice died and includes a Biblical phrase referenced by Dante (“How lonely lies the city”).
It reminds me of another, more recent work: British photographer Nick Knight’s 2017 portrait of Kylie Jenner. Here, too, we observe a transfigured or rapturous state, in which the subject’s inner reality appears more profound and entrancing than any external communication.
The Spanish saint and mystic Teresa of Avila described similar experiences in her 1565 autobiography. “Resistance has been impossible,” she writes. “My soul has been carried away … without my being able to prevent it.” She also shares that “rapture leaves behind a certain strange detachment … the real nature of which I shall never be able to describe … a new estrangement … takes place.” Despite her humility, Teresa is excellent at describing how, in preparation for this state, “God … so strips [the soul] of everything that, strive though it may, it can find no companion on Earth … it does not escape from its solitude … and very often the soul is absorbed.” Those to whom this happens are “not sufficiently awake, but are like people who have slept and dreamed for a long time, and have not yet properly woken up.” The consciousness, or interior self, closes “its eyes to the things of this world.”
Kenosis is the theological term for the emptying of self that happens when one wishes to take on the will of God. In Christ’s case, it is said that he emptied himself of his divine nature so as to be more available to people in human form. Originating from the Greek word “kenos,” meaning “empty,” the process is described in Philippians 2:7 which says of Jesus that he made himself of no reputation. The kenotic state is closely associated with mysticism. Could it be said, then, that depersonalization is a kind of involuntary kenosis? Both involve the de-personing of oneself: the letting go of one’s so-called identity, reputation, constructed personality. Ecstasy, one of the fruits of mystic experience, is a coming out of stasis (“ex-” or to exit + stasis). The Greek “ekstasis” means “displacement” or “trance.”
Teresa differentiates between union, or the voluntary and stable connection to God, and rapture, which comes upon a person unannounced and is of a higher, ethereal nature. Having already given her life in her existence as a nun, and surrendered to the Divine “the keys of [her] will,” it is not surprising that these states overtook her at random moments. She had already completed her own kenosis; depersonalization, or ecstasy, was not far behind. “We play no part,” she says, “in bringing a rapture on.” For all its high-mindedness, her writing is frank and vital. “This is how things actually happen. If the raptures are true raptures, the fruits and advantages mentioned remain with the soul.”
For me, the fruits of the pandemic have remained. I have relinquished the desire for a return to “normal.” No longer do I wish to dissipate my energies in social exhaustion. And I understand the notion that compared to the union with God, which permeates one’s whole soul and all the ether around it, carnal pleasures appear exactly as they are: the mere friction of flesh.
Poet Rachel Rabbit White, a kind of saint of the dirtbag left, expressed in a Garage Magazine column that the greatest temptation for anyone who wants to live an “exceptional life” is “not money or power, but that of normalcy.” Her choice of the word “exceptional” is interesting: it does not necessarily mean superior, but rather to be “taken out” of something (from the Latin “ex” + “ceptus,” past participle of “capere,” or “to take”). This is similar to the concept of consecration, or to set something apart for a holy purpose.
Teresa, too, asserts that the “remedy” is to “lose interest in honor” (to make oneself of no reputation). When a person “wants Him entire … it can only be gained by abandoning everything.” People in religious life take vows of poverty, celibacy, and obedience to God. That is to say, they give up riches, sex, and the freedom of their own wills. What, then, must artists renounce? Respectability, security, and multiplicity of focus. For the artist, respectability is the great Enemy, security the great Deceiver. “In my longing to see God,” as Teresa says, or to submerge myself in the call to a life set apart, “I forget everything.”