TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Many people have experienced this: feeling like they’re floating above their body, or seeing their body from the outside, or feeling a dream-like detachment from their body and surroundings. It’s called an out-of-body experience, almost as if they move from the first person to the third person physically, in real time. They’re a part of folklore, mythology, and spirituality in ancient and modern societies. Out-of-body experiences fascinate me, because they are a surreal version of human adaptability.

I’d always associated OBEs with near-death experiences, but that’s not the only time that people experience them. It can happen as you’re falling asleep, waking up, or during times of extreme stress or trauma. In fact, researchers have found high levels of childhood trauma in a study of people who experience OBEs, suggesting that out-of-body experiences may be a response to overwhelming stress or emotional pain. In other words, they experiences may reflect a person’s subconscious attempts to dissociate and distance themselves from grief or trauma.

In this sense, the disconnection is a kind of “escape hatch.” The present reality is so distressing that it feels safer to exit it, to find a way out psychologically, if not physically. Humans have plenty of escape hatches that help us pull away from our lives and survive trauma. Some are destructive, like substance abuse or self-harm. Others are healthier, like art or exercise or meditation. But our brains are savvy and adaptive, and they find ways to protect us.

Today’s poem shows us that even when we can escape the physical location of a painful situation, our mind can still try to free itself from what the body remembers.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by Wayne Miller

I lived in Spain for one brief summer.
I could barely afford it. 


Joseph Brodsky says the eye identifies 
not with the body it belongs to


but with the object of its attention.
I’d read that right before I left America.


I was newly single and miserable,
just coming to understand


my past, which had brought me there.
I could barely be inside my body.


I smoked for hours in the Plaza de Paja
neglecting my book on the table.


Wherever I was, it seemed
my gaze kept pulling me from myself


so I could touch against the world,
so I could catch fragments of it


in clear slides of thought.
I was locked inside a strange


interior; I was feeling the walls 
inch by inch, looking for an exit door.


I believed that door was art—
but it was, I discovered, time.

“Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by Wayne Miller. Used by permission of the poet.