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159 8 The Psyche Awakened The Other as a “Trauma Which Heals” C. S. Lewis’s (1946) compelling allegory of heaven and hell, The Great Divorce, begins with its nameless main character standing in line at a bus stop in the civic center of a “grey town” that is “always in the rain and always in evening twilight” (1). Surrounding the bus stop are residences spread out in concentric circles, littering the dull landscape as far as the eye can see.1 Without a clear understanding of why he is doing so, the main character boards the bus that takes flight above the seemingly enormous expanses of Hell and takes the passengers on a day trip to the outer recesses of heaven. Upon arriving , the passengers are met by figures who they had known in their earthly lives. In his conversation with his “Teacher,” the main character describes where he has just come from. The conversation plays out as follows: ‘The big gulf, beyond the edge of the cliff. Over there. You can’t see it from here, but you must know the place I mean.’ My Teacher gave a curious smile. ‘Look,’ he said, and with the word he went down on his hands and knees. I did the same...and presently saw that he had plucked a blade of grass. Using its thin end as a pointer, he made me see, after I looked very closely, a crack in the soil so small that I could not have identified it without this aid. ‘I cannot be certain,’ he said, ‘that this is the crack ye came up through. But through a crack no bigger than that ye certainly came.’ ‘But—but,’ I gasped with a feeling of bewilderment not unlike terror. ‘I saw an infinite abyss. And cliffs towering up and up. And then this country on top of the cliffs.’ 160 The Demanded Self: Clinical Applications ‘Aye. But the voyage was not mere locomotion. That bus, and all you inside it, were increasing in size.’ ‘Do you mean then that Hell—all that infinite empty town—is down in some little crack like this?’ ‘Yes. All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste.’ ‘It seems big enough when you’re in it, Sir.’ ‘And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that it contains , if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all’ (137–38). The enormity of Hell is an illusion. Hell fits into a crack in the soil of heaven, so small that a butterfly could swallow it. However, one’s state of consciousness when in this Hell does not feel constricting . Rather, as the main character states, “It seems big enough when you’re in it.” Perceptually, it appears to expand for eternity. Experientially, Hell is all consuming. Oddly enough, many of the passengers on the bus—the visitors to heaven—choose to get back onto the bus and shrink into the prison of a miniscule narrative. For a variety of reasons, they are not able to tolerate, recognize, or desire the transcendence of heaven. The Teacher explains, “Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see” (139). They prefer the sameness of a somnabultory existence and defend against waking to surprise, variety, and otherness. Levinas wrote extensively about a consciousness caught up in hellacious clenching, grasping, constricting, and egoist slumber. He recognized a human tendency to remain intoxicated by the security of sleep and the safety of totalizing narratives.2 For Levinas (1985), the complacency of being is the homeostasis point for the ego. Arrested in a protected state of equilibrium and suspended animation, we prefer our stories to maintain a particular course, a predictable frame of reference. Consumable, bite-sized experience is sought in the place of saturated encounter with otherness. We live out of constricted narratives and remain asleep to alterity, in a state of “tranquilized undisturbance ” (Kunz 2006, 7). [18.191.5.239] Project...

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