The Evil Hours by David J. Morris Read Free Book Online Page B

remembered the soldier’s question simply because of what happened next? Because of some need to make a meaningful story out of a meaningless event?
    To scientists, these sorts of ideas are typically viewed as examples of
apophenia
.An extension of the normal human impulse to find patterns in life, apophenia is an aberrant form of sense-making that can, in its extreme form, merge with the pathological, as in paranoid schizophrenia. The classic example of apophenic thinking that is usually given is that of the NASA scientists who in 1976 discovered a geologic formation on the surface of Mars that seemed to resemble a human face. Some observers saw this as evidence of intelligent life on Mars, a greeting card left on the surface of the red planet by a previous civilization. More recent images from the Mars Explorer show that the apparent face was, in fact, the result of unusual light conditions at the time of the initial photographs, and it is actually shaped more like a lump of cookie dough.
    Over my months in Iraq, I became obsessed with the idea that there was something behind apophenia, reasoning that because being close to death necessarily heightened one’s perception, then the right sort of person in Iraq might be in a position to achieve a higher form of consciousness, almost like a physicist staring into the glow of a particle accelerator. It was this line of thinking that kept me coming back to the war, year after year, to the bewilderment of my friends and colleagues. In my own peculiar way, I felt like the German painter Otto Dix, a veteran of World War I, who wrote, “I had to have that experience: how someone near me suddenly fell and was finished. . . . I am a man of reality. I must see everything. I need to experience all the abysses of life. That is why I volunteered.”
    Later, this habit of needing to see everything, of trying to make sense of my experience through intense examination, came to dominate my postwar existence. In time, I came to think of myself as devoted to a sort of Kabbalah, a cult of one whose mission it was to discover what the others had missed, the pattern hidden in the loom, the hand of God, if you will. This habit of rumination, of pattern seeking, of needing to make sense of it all, is present in everyone, but it can kick into overdrive in the wake of trauma.
    It was this type of obsessive sense-making, of unintentional apophenia, that vexed Freud when he first observed it in the dreams of World War I veterans, an observation that changed the course of psychology. In
On Metapsychology
, written not long after the guns had fallen silent, Freud saw that sufferers of war neuroses “were endeavoring to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis.”(In some translations of Freud’s work, this phenomenon was even referred to as “fate neurosis,” because it seemed to dominate his patients to such a degree that it became a sort of destiny, a pattern of trauma and retrauma that seemed likely to govern the rest of their lives.) Prior to the war, Freud’s theory of the unconscious had been dominated by what he called “the pleasure principle,” the idea that all people ultimately desire the gratification of their biological impulses, the need for sex and the need for mastery of their environment. The idea that some people would obsess over such unpleasurable memories flew in the face of everything that Freud believed. And as he observed, the call of such moments becomes something akin to a moral obligation, in the way that some widows are drawn to the graves of lost spouses. One can see this sort of obligation in the words of the poet Wilfred Owen, who in a letter to his mother shortly before his death wrote that “I confess I
bring on
what few war dreams I now have, entirely by
willingly
considering war for an evening. I do so because I have my duty to perform