52 Blue
By Leslie Jamison
Translated by Gao Yu Bing
Published by Guangxi Normal University Press
This book is a new nonfiction work by The New York Times recommended writer Leslie Jamison after Eleven Heartbreaks and Currents of Whiskey and Ink. The 14 separate stories focus on a common theme that strikes the soul: the desire to go deeper than the sea, and the resulting obsession. She asked the essence of this longing and tried to give the most sincere answer. Her inclusive and affectionate narration reflects the complexity, subtlety and moving nature of human nature.
Highlights:
We tell stories to ourselves in order to live again
In April 2000, a young child in Louisiana named James Reininger began to have nightmares about plane crashes. Whenever his mother came to his bedroom to comfort him, she found his body twisted, his hands and feet swinging and kicking, as if struggling to break free of something. He kept repeating the same words: "Plane crash!" The plane is on fire! Kids can't get out! ”
In the years that followed, the storylines of these nightmares became clearer and clearer. James eventually told his parents that these were memories of past lives. He said he had been a pilot when his plane was hit by Japanese troops and crashed. He began to use proper nouns that puzzled his parents. He was flying a "Pirate plane." He took off from an aircraft carrier called Natoma Bay. His parents never talked to him about World War II, and they couldn't imagine how he could have these hallucinations. James told them about his friends on board: a man named Jack Larson, and Walter, Billy, and Leon, all of whom were waiting for him in heaven. He named his toy special forces members after these people. His mother, Andrea, began to be convinced that James was recalling his past life, while his father Bruce was half-convinced.
However, when Bruce began to investigate, he found that some information made it difficult for him to be skeptical. In 1945, an aircraft carrier called Natoma Bay was sent to Iwo Jima, with a crew of two pilots, Jack Larson and James Houston, who were shot down near Chichijima on March 3 of that year. The crew of the Natoma Bay also included Walter Devlin, Billy Piller, and Leon Connor, all of whom died before Houston was killed. How would a little boy know about these people? Not to mention the name of their ship and the order in which they died.
In 2002, Bruce attended a crew gathering on the Natoma Bay and began asking questions. He wasn't ready to tell everyone what his son had recalled, he told everyone he was writing a book about the history of the aircraft carrier. Andrea is not interested in military history, she just wants her son to end his nightmares. She told James that she believed what he said, but that the past life had passed, and now he was going to live this life well.
In order to completely release James, when he was 8 years old, the family came to Japan. They plan to hold a memorial service for James Houston. They took a 15-hour ferry from Tokyo to Chichijima and a small boat to the approximate location of the plane crash in Houston. It was there that James threw a bouquet of purple flowers into the sea. "I salute you and never forget." He said. Then he held his mother's thigh and sobbed for 20 minutes. "Just put everything down here, man," his father told him, "just put everything down here." ”
When James finally lifted his head and wiped away his tears, he wanted to know where his flowers had gone. Someone pointed to a distant purple on the surface of the water: they were there, distant but still visible, still drifting, drifting farther and farther away on the surface of the sea.
On a clear day in January 2014, I went to a virginia institute called DOPS (Department of Perceptual Research) to visit a child psychiatrist named Jim Tucker. He spent 14 years compiling a database of children who claimed to remember past lives. When I met Tucker, his database covered more than 2,000 families. Still, he listed James Reininger as the most powerful case.
I was interviewed by Tucker by a fashion magazine in New York, and I understood that the magazine's editors were expecting me to write a rebuttal article. Whenever I tell someone that I'm writing about DOPS, and the institute focuses on past life memories, near-death experiences, and supersensory perceptions, they say, "Wait, what do you say?" "It can easily provoke ridicule from others." However, from the very beginning, I had the heart to defend the idea of reincarnation. It is not that I firmly believe in it, but that I have developed deep doubts about skepticism itself. It seems that it is much easier to pick a bone in the egg of people, to schemes, to belief systems than to establish, defend, or at least take them seriously. That kind of preconceived disdain erases too much mystery and wonder.
The theory of reincarnation itself is not unusual. We've all thought about what happens to us when we die. A 2018 Pew Research Center report found that 33 percent of Americans believe in reincarnation, while a 2013 survey estimated that 64 percent believed in the broader definition of "immortality of the soul after death." In New York, where I live, I always see a picture of a 13-year-old autistic boy who disappeared in October when I was on the subway. The kid lives in Queens, and no train passing through Queens doesn't have a picture of his face. I was irrationally convinced that they would find him, or, wherever he was, would somehow live in safety—and if that belief made me seem stupid, then I'd rather be a fool.
DOPS's offices are located in a majestic brick building in downtown Charlottesville. Tucker didn't look like a freak or a mystic when he came to welcome me. He was personable, clear-headed, and clear-headed— middle-aged, losing his hair, but light and thin, like your high school friend's marathon dad. He was calm and self-assured, with a hint of politeness. He spoke carefully, but without any reproach, explaining how certain mediators could summon the souls of the deceased, while birthmarks could confirm injuries suffered in previous lives. It's a bit like listening to a geologist who studies acids describe the composition of the land on a case-by-case basis.
DoPS was founded in 1967 and is technically affiliated with the University of Virginia, but its funding comes mainly from private donations. As Tucker showed me those offices, I scribbled in my notebook a series of strange details that were so easy to spot. Bulletin boards were plastered with inspirational words ("Our cognition of mind and matter must go through unimaginable stages") and flyers describing ongoing research projects ("Research on media claiming to provide information about the dead" and "Extraordinary Experiences of Epilepsy"). We walked past the "nursing room," which was designed for an experiment with extrasensory perception: a spooky-looking cave with a movable recliner on which participants sat waiting to receive messages from another location in the building. Tucker explained that the room's design was only later perfected—the walls were covered with sheet metal to prevent cheating with a cell phone—and seemed to assume that I probably already knew the construction of the Hypersensory Perception Lab.
The DOPS Library contains a huge glass case containing weapons from around the world — Nigerian shortswords, Thai daggers, Sri Lankan swords — that correspond to wounds that are said to be reincarnated. A sign under a Burmese mallet reads a story about a monk who was shot in the head by a deranged visitor and allegedly reincarnated a few years later as a boy with an unusually flat skull. In a nearby walkway, there are piles of pamphlets about various DOPS studies, one of which is titled "Seven Other Paranormal Experiences Related to the Titanic Shipwreck." We walked over a wall where two spoons were fixed to the wall, one of which was curved, as if it had been thrown into the fire and melted. When I asked Tucker about the two spoons, his answer was very casual. "Those?" He said, "Bending a spoon experiment. ”
And then there's the lock. DOPS's first director, Ian Stevenson, left a lock when he died in 2007, the password of which he alone knew. He thought that if his soul could be reborn, he would find a way to come back and reveal the code. Tucker and his colleagues have received several phone calls advising them to try certain passwords, but they have not been able to open the lock so far. As he talked to me about the lock, Tucker finally had a hint of sarcasm in his voice. However, during our visit, he was very restrained in telling jokes about reincarnation. At dinner that night, he told me he had tried to write novels, but when I asked him if he had considered writing again, he laughed. "Maybe the next life."
Tucker told me that working as a licensed child psychiatrist while working at DOPS made him feel self-divided. He gives a brief overview of what the database is made up of: most of his cases are of children between the ages of 2 and 7, and their memories. These memories are dominated by vivid and rich dreams and are filled with emotions of all kinds —fear, love, sadness. Most of the children are from foreign countries, and many of them are children that Tucker has not yet met. However, when new families come to their door, he interviews them regularly. When a seemingly credible past life identity is identified (usually someone in the family), he lists it as a "resolved" case. However, there are also cases like James's, who was a stranger in his past life.
A few weeks later, as I listened to recordings of our interviews, I was embarrassed to hear myself constantly declaring to Tucker that I was "open to mysteries." I say so seriously, but I can also hear the harsh self-persuasion, overly positive tone, and strategic shrewdness in my voice. In a way, I'm trying to convince Tucker that I'm not another skeptic.
When I visited Tucker, I had been participating in the 12-Step Abstinence Rehabilitation Program for over 3 years. I have found that to achieve this restoration one must at the same time completely let go (at least temporarily) many doubts: for dogma, for clichés, for insightful plans and pre-forged self-awareness, for others' seemingly rigid, superficial descriptions of one's own life. During the recovery process, we were asked to avoid "defying it before investigating," and writing an article about reincarnation — a tour of DOPS and its bent spoon — was like another test to see if I was willing to keep an open mind.
Writing for many years, I've always loved Joan Didion's essay "White Album." The article begins famously: "We tell ourselves stories just to survive." Its ending is less famous, but almost identical—Didion reiterates her doubts about all these "stories" and their false coherence, as if she hadn't repeated this point several times. Eventually, I began to have doubts about her doubts. I hate her complacency about how she portrays herself as a skeptic who sees through everything in a world full of self-deception. I came to believe that skepticism itself carries ethical failures, like the snobbery behind the urge to reject clichés in restoration meetings, or to completely refute others' overly succinct statements about their lives.
In my own work, I have become increasingly obsessed with describing lives and beliefs that may seem ridiculous to others: some claiming to have a skin disease that most doctors don't believe exist, some claiming to be isolated but having a spiritual resonance with an elusive whale. Frankly, however, this preference also carries a hint of self-righteousness. Maybe I like to tell myself that I'm defending the weak. Or maybe it's cowardice. Maybe I was too scared to say no to the stories people told to themselves in order to keep living.
This time, it's not that I was completely persuaded by Tucker's explanation of reincarnation, seemingly "around physics": the theory is based on a series of experiments selected from the history of physics, which one physicist I interviewed said were "carefully selected" and selectively misinterpreted. In any case, Tucker was a psychiatrist, not a physicist. Importantly, I reject emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually a tone of contempt that says I know more, what is possible and what is impossible. Suppose I have a deep understanding of consciousness itself—what it is, where it comes from, and, once we don't need it, where it goes—seems to be an arrogance.
In Virginia, I accompanied Tucker in interviews with two families. Both families have teenagers who remember past lives from an early age.
My return flight was cancelled due to a rare snowstorm in Virginia, so I stayed two nights in an executive hotel near the airport, passing the time with sparkling water in the lobby bar, cup after glass. As the television continued to broadcast news heralding the end of the world, the bartender and I looked at each other painfully: corruption, sexual harassment, and the blood of dead dolphins staining the waters of a secret bay in Japan. Somewhere in the depths of my mind that has not been mentioned, I have convinced myself that agnosticism and endurance are virtues in themselves, but in reality, I am not sure. Pretending that my belief system is tolerant enough to see everything as equally reasonable may not have helped anyone. Maybe there are experiences I can't understand, and there are things I can't believe.
So why on earth would I defend these past life stories? It's not that I want to prove that reincarnation is real, but I want to figure out why these stories appeal to people to believe. If we tell stories to ourselves in order to survive, what do we get from the stories that make us live again? It doesn't just alleviate the terrible endgame of death, it makes us realize that we are influenced by invisible or incomprehensible forces.
The snowstorm continued, and just as I was about to go to bed, I saw Yavonte Lacondo, the lost Queens boy, on the TV screen of the airport hotel bar. His body was salvaged from the East River. When the police thought they could still find him alive, they let go of a recording recorded by his mother in order to help him trust them: "Yavonte. I am your mother. You are safe. Walk in the direction of the light. ”
(This article is excerpted from "52 Blue", with abridgement)
Author: Leslie Jamison
Editor: Zhou Yiqian