Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

  The Hermeneutic Moment

  However evocative it may have been for generations of Jung’s readers, the theory of synchronicity, like Freud’s wish-fulfillment theory of dreams, ultimately obfuscates the precognitive dimension of the individual unconscious and fails to adequately explain the time-looping effects precognition gives rise to in our lives and relationships. Those temporal tautologies are among the difficulties that have always kept people from taking the entire topic seriously and shunted investigators onto other, less hard-to-think and less taboo paths. Synchronicity, like the unconscious itself, is a kind of “halfway house” concept. It offers people a convenient idiom in which to talk about an extremely common, paranormal-seeming dimension of human life, “impossible coincidences,” without glibly dismissing their significance, yet at the cost of reframing them as something beyond or outside rational understanding altogether, safely sequestered from scientific inquiry. We can now do better.

  Dunnean precognition, as an orientation toward meaningful experiences and encounters ahead, is both more powerful as an explanation and more human. If the material world (including myths and symbols materially encoded in texts) comes to seem acquainted with our thoughts, it is neither because we are simply deluded about the probabilities of coincidence (as psychologists never tire of insisting) nor because we live suspended in an amnion of cosmic meaning that imprints its ageless archetypal patterns on our lives. Rather, it is because our brain is somehow predigesting, pre-metabolizing our future engagement with that world, via some natural and probably universal mechanism we have yet to fully understand. Synchronicity is simply what it looks like when people orient toward future meaningful encounters with no inkling that this is what they are doing.

  It is no accident that both Freud and Jung were fascinated with ancient artifacts—Freud displayed scarabs and other artifacts in his Vienna office, for example—and both liked to use archaeological metaphors of unearthing and discovery to describe their past-oriented hermeneutic enterprise. Ruins and artifacts seem like they belong to domain of history and memory—hence these two, highly history-conscious thinkers both embraced a picture of health that reconnected us to what is dead and buried. Curative moments in the clinic, for both men, meant awakening to influences belonging to our personal or collective past.

  I suggest we should flip those artifacts and ruins, see them instead as things awaiting discovery , latent in the landscape of our future. The most baffling “contents” of the personal unconscious may be things we will consciously think and feel in our future, and the “contents” of the collective unconscious may simply be the world of culture, ideas latent in our world, including books we ourselves will read as well as those that our doctors (as well as teachers and gurus) will excitingly explain to us. Those hermeneutic moments in analysts’ consulting rooms, where unconscious contents were brought to light, may have actually been the cause of the dreams and symptoms that preceded them. How many more cases like Maggy’s—or Freud’s “Herr P.”—are hiding unrecognized in the psychoanalytic literature, simply because this causally perverse possibility never occurred to anyone? In other words, were Maggy and Mr. Foresight especially precognitive patients, or were they just unusually bad at hiding their precognition in a therapeutic context that resolutely oriented their doctors toward the past in their search for meaning?

  Could it even be that the clinical setting effectively turns a patient into a medium or fortune teller—one who is compelled, by a medical reframing of his or her precognition as pathology, to pay the “client” (the doctor), rather than the reverse? 73

  It would be hard to answer these questions, given how inextricably entangled precognition is with hindsight. Discussion in a therapist’s office invariably deals with past events, since those are the only ones we consciously know about. Thus dreams about the next day’s epiphanies might still seem to be about past events that were dredged up and discussed during a rewarding session. 74 The rare cases where precognition is discernible in historical case studies are those that contain some kind of tracer—some intrusive material fact about the hermeneutic moment that clearly distinguishes it as the dream’s or symptom’s source—such as the scarab arriving at Jung’s office window, or Freud showing Dr. Forsyth’s calling card to Herr P. Most case descriptions lack this kind of detail. The way the discussion unfolded in the consulting room, including the (surprised, shocked, resistant) reactions of the patient, have gone unrecorded even in Freud’s more detailed case studies.

  But the question I am raising really goes beyond just the prevalence of precognitive episodes here and there in psychotherapy, or of the transference relationship as “psi-conditioned” (as jule Eisenbud termed it). 75 What if it is somehow our misunderstood, unacknowledged, looping relationship to our future that makes us ill—or at least, that contributes to our suffering—and not our failure to connect appropriately to our past? Could some neuroses be time loops misrecognized and denied, the way we haunt ourselves from our futures and struggle to reframe it as being about our past history?

  The next two chapters will examine this question through the lives of two famously precognitive and neurotic writers. Both show strikingly how creativity may travel together with trauma and suffering along the resonating string that connects us to the Not Yet.

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  Fate, Free Will, and Futility — Morgan Robertson’s Tiresias Complex

  Who can tell us of the power which events possess … Are their workings in the past or in the future; and are the more powerful of them those that are no longer, or those that are not yet? Is it to-day or to-morrow that moulds us? Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?

  — Maurice Maeterlinck, “The Pre-Destined” (1914)

  T he monkey wrench precognition appears to throw into the problem of free will is an important part of the force field inhibiting serious consideration of it by many people in our culture. It may have been a fear of the inevitability of things prophesied that made the whole subject so anathema to Freud, for example. In a society that places priority on success and the individual’s responsibility for its attainment, it is both taken for granted and a point of fierce conviction that we choose and that our choices are not completely made for us by the inexorable clockwork of matter—the Newtonian inertia that brought the Titanic and the Iceberg, mere inert objects, together. Scientists may pay lip service to determinism—Freud himself did—but the inevitability of material processes due to causes “pushing” from the past somehow feels less restrictive than a block universe in which our fate is already set. The radical predestination implied by time loops may rob “great men” of their ability to claim credit for their successes. When Freud received a medallion that showed that a youthful “fantasy” had really been prophetic, in the same stroke as signaling that he was well on his way to getting his wish of being a (dead) bust admired by the living, it was a doubly awful realization, a kind of doom —another Anglo-Saxon word for fate (also judgment).

  There’s a flip side to doom where precognition and time loops are concerned, though. A successful medical pioneer like Freud might naturally reject those possibilities outright and then, when confronted with evidence of their reality, feel like he’d seen a revenant; but someone gripped by feelings of failure, guilt, and shame may be more liable to embrace precognition and actively seek evidence of its workings. The point is not merely to secure some greater measure of control over one’s destiny—the presumed simplistic wish skeptics typically impute to ESP believers—but mainly to secure a sense of absolution . The block universe implied by precognitive experiences carries with it the sense that our fate is out of our hands … and thus, “I am not to blame.” It is a way to wipe away whatever guilt a person feels in life.

  This was a keen insight made by psychiatrist Jule Eisenbud, who noted in his clinical work that “paranormal foreknowledge” in his patients was often tied closely to guilty or shameful feelings. He observed
a pattern of deeply ambivalent patients expressing uncanny precognitive-seeming ability as a gambit to elicit the guilt-absolving sense of “it was fated and I could do nothing.” A prime example among his patients was a married but secretly homosexual clergyman with a habit of producing precognitive dreams as part of a defense against his sexual orientation, of which he was deeply ashamed: “Securing a glimpse of what was to be and then seeing this actually come to pass seemed to reassure him that whatever happened was inevitable, and that in the final judgment, with which he was perennially preoccupied, he would therefore be absolved from culpability.” 1 (In the 1940s, another psychoanalyst, Jan Ehrenwald, noted a very similar case of dream precognition, also in a male patient fighting against his own homosexual impulses. 2 )

  It is through this same lens of guilt, specifically the Oedipal guilt so beloved of Freudian analysts, that Eisenbud interpreted the life and work of the most famously precognitive of writers, Morgan Robertson—the man who, some believe, foretold the sinking of the Titanic 14 years before it occurred. 3 When Futility is placed within the larger context of the writer’s biography, the case for this 1898 novel being prophetic is considerably strengthened. Robertson’s whole life was dominated by the themes of providence, immutable fate, and the impossibility of capitalizing on our psychic abilities because of the maddening visibility of prophecy only in hindsight. Robertson seems to have been a man tragically ruled, and ruined, by time loops.

  Futility tells the story of Lieutenant John Rowland, a once-promising naval officer who has fallen into disgrace because of his drinking and is now working as a common sailor on the new, massive, “indestructible” ocean liner, Titan . Titan is making her third round-trip voyage across the Atlantic, from New York to Liverpool, when Rowland happens to encounter an old flame, Myra Gaunt, among the passengers. Myra’s rejection of him years earlier is what led to his drowning his sorrows in whisky and his ultimate downfall. (Coincidence of this sort was rampant in Robertson’s fiction.) Myra is traveling with her husband (she is now Myra Selfridge) and young daughter, also named Myra, and seeing her awakens in Rowland all his old anguish and self-pity and sends him straight back to the bottle.

  The Titan , moving at an unsafe 25 knots through thick fog, is unable to avoid a collision with a smaller ship, which it cuts in two, killing all the smaller vessel’s passengers. The captain attempts to buy Rowland’s silence on the matter but Rowland refuses, and so the Captain has him drugged in hopes it will change Rowland’s mind. As the drug takes effect, Rowland soliloquizes to the boatswain on the cruelty of fate in a Godless universe:

  “The survival of the fittest,” he rambled, as he stared into the fog; “cause and effect. It explains the Universe—and me.” He lifted his hand and spoke loudly, as though to some unseen familiar of the deep. “What will be the last effect? Where in the scheme of ultimate balance—under the law of the correlation of energy, will my wasted wealth of love be gathered, and weighed, and credited? What will balance it, and where will I be? …” 4

  He is answered almost immediately when an iceberg looms out of the fog ahead and slices into the Titan ’s starboard side, causing it to fall over on its side and drown most of the passengers. Chance finds Rowland alone on the ice itself, along with little Myra, who had wandered from her mother in the minutes before the collision. What ensues is an increasingly improbable series of events, including Rowland’s battle with a polar bear living on the ice, after which he burns pieces of the wrecked ship for fuel and cooks the bear for food, and delivers further soliloquies on chance and necessity, causality and the superstition of belief in a merciful God. (Remember, no one ever claimed Futility was great literature, just that it was prophetic.)

  Months later, having lost an arm as a result of his wounds from the polar bear but gained guardianship of little Myra and given up drinking as a result, he chances to encounter big Myra in New York. She was one of only 11 others on the Titan who survived in one of the lifeboats. Big Myra takes back little Myra from Rowland and accuses the hapless seaman of kidnapping and torturing her daughter. But he is exonerated the next day at his trial, when he tells the true story of how he had survived and protected the girl. Big Myra’s father in law, as chance would have it, was the corrupt businessman at fault for providing too few lifeboats to save the ship’s roughly 3,000 other passengers. The ending of the novel is bitter, befitting its title: Rowland’s period of guardianship of the little girl has straightened his ways, made him go sober, but he loses the girl, and he does not alas win back her now-widowed mother.

  When the novel was reissued in 1912 with a new title, The Wreck of the Titan , Robertson—presumably at the request of the publisher—adjusted some of the statistics of his Titan to bring them even closer to the Titanic , and also tacked on a few lines to the end in which big Myra invites Rowland to come visit, making the ending just a bit more hopeful, bittersweet instead of just bitter. But many of Robertson’s works have the same dark theme, and center on the same core issue: what Rowland calls “chance and necessity,” the inexorability of cruel and unknowable (yet also, paradoxically, expected) fate. The iceberg that sinks the Titan is just one example of the type of calamity that most of Robertson’s protagonists are, in one way or another, unable to avoid … except in a few very interesting cases, as we’ll see, through a clairvoyant or precognitive sixth sense.

  A Tragic Prophet

  John Rowland, like most of Robertson’s protagonists, was autobiographical. Despite being a prolific and moderately popular writer, Robertson struggled with the shame of a powerful alcohol addiction, and probably as a result of the latter always lived on the brink of poverty. He was gripped by a deep and at times crippling ambivalence about chance and fate, but unlike Rowland he felt there was some higher law of coincidence or providence, and consequently he was deeply interested in (and wrote several stories about) the mysterious prophetic possibilities of the subconscious mind. The theme of inability to avert a foreseen disaster or to redeem oneself in its aftermath was central to much of his fiction, not only Futility .

  Not much is known of the writer’s early life except for some barebones details. Born in Oswego, NY, educated in public schools, he ran away at age 16 to become a sailor. He worked on ships for nine years before settling down in New York City and studying the jeweler’s trade. Failing eyesight in his mid-thirties forced him to seek a third career, however, which is when he tried his hand at writing. Since he knew the life of the sea, it was an obvious subject, and he found he had a knack for spinning a good yarn. He later also turned his imaginative abilities toward invention, as we will see shortly, but it seems to have been only writing that brought him any success or recognition. Even that proved fleeting, unfortunately.

  Many writers tie their writing ability to some kind of occult influence. Robertson belongs to a much larger pattern in the world of letters that Jeffrey Kripal has charted in his book Mutants and Mystics —science-fiction and comic book writers inspired in their work by paranormal and “psychic” experiences. 5 Robertson reported the distinct sensation when he was setting words to page that he was channeling, in the words of one friend, “some discarnate soul, some spirit entity with literary ability, denied physical expression, [which] had commandeered his body and brain.” 6 When poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote to Robertson in the aftermath of the Titanic tragedy to ask him about it, Robertson replied:

  As to the motif of my story, I merely tried to write a good story with no idea of being a prophet. But, as in other stories of mine, and in the work of other and better writers, coming discoveries and events have been anticipated. I do not doubt that it is because all creative workers get into a hypnoid, telepathic and percipient condition, in which, while apparently awake, they are half asleep, and tap, not only the better informed minds of others but the subliminal realm of unknown facts. Some, as you know, believe that in this realm there is no such thing as Time, and the fact that a long dream can occur in an instant of time gives color to it, and partly explains pr
ophecy. 7

  Robertson explored this “subliminal realm of unknown facts” throughout his fiction. Although Rowland in Futility does not display psychic powers, a recurring character in Robertson’s stories, an old sailor named Finnegan (a stand-out exception to the tragic tone of most of his protagonists), possesses an uncanny but totally unconscious foresight that always saves the day. The fact that this foresight—or plain dumb luck—manifests only when Finnegan is completely drunk provokes wonder, amusement, and speculation on the part of his shipmates.

  In one of these stories, “The Subconscious Finnegan,” published in 1905, the thoroughly inebriated Finnegan is put at the wheel of a battleship as an experiment by his superiors, to see if the monotony of the task may hypnotize him sufficiently that a well-timed “suggestion” may cure him of his drinking problem. After cruising rapidly through a fog for a few hours, the officer in charge discovers to his horror that Finnegan has turned the ship a few degrees off its intended heading. Just as the quartermaster steps in to correct the mistake, an ocean liner looms out of the fog ahead. Only the fact that they were off course enables them to avoid hitting the luxury liner, with its “thousand electric bulbs,” slipping past it to the “shouts of startled men and the screams of women and children.” The ship’s surgeon then tries to interpret what happened:

  There is no doubt in my mind … that Finnegan put himself in to the subjective state, and that his subconscious self took charge of him—that is, his subconscious mind had clairvoyant knowledge of the position of that steamship, out of sight in the fog… 8