Dissociative Eurydice: "Where is my mind?"
"With your feet on the air and your head on the ground Try this trick and spin it, yeah"
I don’t think I can begin to convey exactly what the song “Where is my mind?” means to me. This song has both cognitive and place based association. This masterpiece was written on the campus of Umass Amherst. (Part of “Western Massachusetts” which is geographically near the Berkshires where Rowe Conference Center is) Anyone who has ever been to Western Massachusetts has likely noticed that pretty visible counter culture as sales gimmick. It’s a region where many things get normalized. Rowe center being near it…isn’t a surprise.
The song strongly conveys a dissociative experience that the singer is just riding out. It’s seen as a type of a psychedelic trip and was written in the exact type of town where people would openly enable it. The flights of fancy to the Caribbean openly invoking a type of submersion into dissonance. Before I accepted DID/OSDD as a clinical reality, I would often play this song for hours to vent out how I felt.
The song was added to the soundtrack of Fight Club which shows me that others see dissociation in this song. I love Fight Club. I utterly adore it. I don’t care if it is seen as one of the major “Red flag movies for teenage boys to enjoy.” It is such a potent example of what when one bows to the altar of entropy. The illusion of overcoming decry while being utterly ravaged by it. I remember a scene where the main character loses teeth due to the utterly debased lifestyle he had adopted with the help of a disassociated part “Tyler Durden.” In his mind, he was undergoing an alchemical transcendence of the flesh. In reality, he was rotting and reality was always going to win.
Both characters who recreationally attend support groups for severe conditions suffer from severe unnamed mental illness. They are so in the throes of it that they perceive their illness as being a type of tantric enlightened state. The attendance of a support group for those suffering from testicular cancer further grounds these themes into the narrative. The emasculation elements are noted by many but the elements of physical decay are often undernoted. I remember thinking this was the most obvious cult of Shiva depiction I had ever seen in Western cinema while being a complete subversion of it.
Tyler Durden serves as an amazing psychopomp into a false promised land. He is confident and desires to take the main character beyond the life he had built. I barely remember the name character’s name but would be utterly remiss to forget Durden. Durden acts similar to how an alter who has external a highly narrative reality would act. Fight club isn’t an insulting depiction of DID but rather a highly artistic one. The main “front” personalities often feel hollow and like they were artificially inserted into the world without much meaning. The follow host, living as a soap salesmen desperately tries to put together the context of being human. One day, the Dissociative barriers begin to break and a seemingly stronger alter takes hold. Tyler has many ideas for the life of the host. He wants to utterly transform the host.
Together they believe they are fighting to reveal a hidden reality and that this reality must take an extremely Shiva form. They can only understand decay as truth and have utterly lost the ability to trust calm stimuli. Relaxation only coming from intense risk taking and courting a sense of near death. This is a fairly extreme case of DID. The only two psychological alters present are either outward presenting as normal while dead inside or utterly insane. There is no internal appealing towards a sense of flourishing. There is only feigning normalcy and completely giving into the distorted worldview which had to be deeply suppressed. Watching this film, I could see clearly how both personalities were deeply wrong about the world. I’m grateful to have seen this film when I was older and had more of a grasp of these themes. I kept thinking of the various mystics who devoted themselves to the burning grounds due a similar conviction that to understand the destroyer would be to understand existence. The characters in Fight Club are not rewarded with the dissolution of Maya, they are just shown to be deeply maladaptive human beings.
“Where is my mind” takes a vastly softer approach of the same disorder. It more commonly matches many mundane DID says than the drama of fight club yet is still imbedded with the same phenomena that produces both. Amherst is a place where both whimsical art and extremist ideas meet. Where it isn’t uncommon to mind people talking about violent degrowth one minute and then talk about utterly frivolous things the next. Knowing that this song was written there just…makes sense.
What a fascinating interpretation. I tried to watch this film a few years ago and gave up because it was so violent, perhaps I will try again with your reading in mind.