Onism: On Being and Nothingness

 

What would it be like to be in his shoes?

--Aaron Burr of Hamilton in "Hamilton"

Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body that experiences only one place at one time

Probably one of the most fundamental attractions of reading or watching fiction is the magic of being transported from seeing the world from behind your only  set of eyes to seeing it from the eyes of another human being, even if that other human being does not and has never actually existed.

If you really think about it, each person in your life, each passerby, each enemy, lover, friend, teacher, boss, child has his own story in which they are the main character, the protagonist and you are just a bit actor--a realization some call "sonder," as in someone else yonder.

On at least five occasions, I think more, I have briefly exited this world and disappeared and then returned, having no idea where I was during that blank interval: Once during general anesthesia for surgery, when I woke up to the smiling face of a Black nurse in the Recovery Room, and I was so happy to find myself back among the living I expostulated, "Oh, you are so beautiful!" And she laughed and said, "Welcome back."

Another two times, I was watching someone draw blood on a patient and simply lost consciousness--that was before I went to medical school. Another time, later, I did the same while someone was drawing my blood and I disappeared into that black void and yet another when I was knocked unconscious in an auto accident.

On each occasion, I experienced nothingness, no sensation, no pleasant or unpleasant sense, just nothing. No noise, sense of cold or heat, smell, touch, pleasure nor pain. Just zip. Nothing.  Blank. Gone boy. Absent without leave. 

It was enough to convince me there may be no after life. I arrived here on earth from somewhere, presumably, and I have absolutely no memory of that nothingness and likely, may well be, headed back there.

Unless, of course, "I" will get recycled. As everything in the current universe where I "live" seems to be cyclical, that reincarnation would make a certain sense, and if there is "justice" or even sick humor in the universe, maybe, if I secretly loathe say, Black people or Indians, I will come back as a Black woman or an Indian.  Somehow that notion has appealed to me, so I have striven to not loathe anyone, to think of how it would be to have to live life as a very obese Black woman or a starving Hindu. 

Even writing novels has not allowed me to escape the single porthole view of life--even trying to imagine a new or different life, I always am drawn back to my own experience and cannot really create a new perspective; I find myself only a journalist, not a real novelist. I have never been able to create a new imagined existence but simply return to my own life experiences. As Fitzgerald said, "Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Sometimes I wonder about patients with "gender dysphoria" who feel they have been born into the wrong body, the wrong gender. Is their problem an intense longing to experience an entirely different life? One of the things I can least imagine, really do not want to imagine, is  what it would be like to be a woman, to have sex as a woman rather than as a man. Or to be Black and to adore whiteness, blonde hair, white skin. To be really short, or to be deformed or sickly. Or to simply be a child and have leukemia and be trapped in a hospital, unable to refuse treatment. 

Or, as William Styron imagined, to be a mother in a concentration camp, and watch the SS guards carry off your baby.

The fact is, much as one might long for a different, better, more exciting life, there are so many alternative stories from one's own story which would be so much worse.

Lola, in "Damn Yankees" was the ugliest woman in Providence, Rhode Island before she made a bargain with the devil and was instantly transformed into the most dazzling seductress in the world. But, for all the Hell she lives, she remembers that other hell before she made her bargain.

And what a blessing to have been born in the mid 20th century, before computers, the internet, Amazon, Wikipedia, to know how cumbersome life could be before our current high level of technological living, to be able to appreciate all this having been at the before and now to have the after--as our grandchildren cannot, because they never lived without these conveniences. 

But wouldn't it be something to be able to alternate between one existence and another or several others and to be aware of that other self you can occupy? Or maybe, like the heroine of Outlander, to be aware of the different existences you lead as you travel back and forth and time and place? 

Now there's a Netflix series I'd watch.