Who Stole My Gestalt?

Jenny never did find out who stole her gestalt. She wondered whether she could ever consider herself as a whole person or even a component of a holistic society. As she looked out her window she saw jumbles of shapes distinguishable only by gradations, complements, and stark contrasts of colors. What she would have in the past perceived as a tree looked to her now as disconnected shapes that had no coherent relation to one another. There were gradations of brown rising vertically but with jagged edges and faint but narrow curves. As the brown vertical variants rose there appeared a great variety of nearly indiscriminate shades of green, many blending together in a mushy conglomeration. There were, here and there, more striking differentiations, sharp edges and rounded curves of pale green adjacent to darker greens.

Jenny had a difficult time deciphering what she saw. She tried to make interpretations but chaos was the only explanation available to her. She felt anxiety welling within her. Her heart pounded, her palms sweat, her breathing irregular, and her thoughts jumbled. There was no way to create meaning. Absent meaning her anxiety swelled to panic. She had no means to create purpose and without purpose she lost her ability to develop intentions. She may have possessed a will but in her aimless condition there was no way to make decisions from which to act. Jenny merely sat in her chair staring out the window, terrified of all she saw, wondering if the shapes and colors were who she was rather than objects external to her being.

Her eyes blinked and as they came open again Jenny realized she could turn the chaos of color to darkness. She blinked and held her eyes shut, not understanding conceptually what she was doing. At first, there was just darkness, not quite black and yet an undifferentiated grey-black that momentarily soothed Jenny’s nerves. However, there were soon little spots of light, streaks of color, floating fragments of differentiation that disrupted the serenity of sameness that had brought such calm. Jenny screamed unintelligibly and began sobbing. Her eyes opened and she found herself looking at a tapestry of colors that shifted constantly. Her head was facing downward and what she would have been able to identify in the past as the objects she perceived were her beige pants, the leg within her pants, part of the maroon cushion of the chair she was sitting on, the grey carpet, the brownish leg of a wooden end table, and more that fell within her peripheral vision. She could not discern that any of these things were separate objects nor could she even build conceptions of what she saw. The tears in her eyes further muddled the situation as it appeared to Jenny that she might be drowning, though she didn’t have the words to describe such an event.

She bent over and lost her balance, falling from the chair to the ground. This disturbing and unexpected movement further disoriented Jenny. What she felt was shock and that temporarily displaced her terror. What she normally would have considered pain was merely a strangeness of sensation that differed from the tactile sensations she had previously felt. Her face was pressed against the carpet, a rug burn on her cheek. Her ass was sticking up in the air, her knees positioned in such a way to provide an anchor for it to remain. Her torso was slightly contorted and twisted, her arms laying limp at her sides. Her shins were parallel to the floor and her feet were splayed in opposite directions which further provided stability for her knees.

Despite this positional stability, the position was what the Jenny of the past would have described as painful. The Jenny of the moment was no longer in shock; instead, she was exploring the sensations she felt throughout her body despite the fact that she did not have anything approximating a belief that she had a body. The sensations that were within her seemed every bit as confusing and indeterminable as the shapes and colors she had seen while looking out the window. There was no way for her to discern whether they were “her” or something that was “not her.” For whatever reason, this alarmed Jenny far less than her perceptions of colors and shapes. It could be said that she had perceptions of tactile sensations, but the feelings had a quality of “realness” that satisfied Jenny. Discomfort or not, the feelings did not cry out for conception. They made fewer demands and thus Jenny was able to lackadaisically explore the sensations while enjoying regularity of breath, a slower heart rate, and other physiologically pleasing conditions.

After some time had passed, though, Jenny became more and more uncomfortable with the sensations coming from seemingly everywhere and nowhere. Jenny would have easily been able to identify the sources of her pain and discomfort had she still possessed her gestalt. Her cheek had rug burn and the sensation was growing more unpleasant by the minute; her forehead ached as it had bruised when she fell; her knees were sore from the carrying the weight of her torso; her back was aching from the awkward twisting position; there was a sharp pain in her neck from the weight of her twisted back resting on it as well as the irregular angle of its position on the carpet; overall, her entire body was weary from being in such a strange position for so long without moving.

All of those factors combined to overload Jenny’s senses. Again she felt anxiety arising and as she opened her eyes she became even more terrified as she began to couple colors and shapes with sensations. However, she was never able to maintain the connections, wrong as they were, long enough to put together an internal narrative of what was happening to her. Had she been able she would have screamed for someone to return her gestalt to her so that she could perceive the world as she had previously and, thus, function within it, taking care to address anxieties immediately as they arose, identifying and analyzing possible and perceived causes of distress so that she could mitigate and perhaps even eradicate the effects.

Just as Jenny neared an immersion into an all-encompassing horror, her gestalt returned. She quickly got up and looked around the room. There was no one there. She looked out the window but could see no one. She ran into the kitchen and looked through the window into the back yard. Again, no one was there. She ran upstairs into each bedroom as well as the bathroom, but she found no one, not even in the closets.

Jenny returned to the living room, huffing and puffing. She shook her head, shook her arms, and ran in place very fast for about a minute before coming to a stop. She remained still and she took several deep breaths, exhaling slowly. Jenny scrunched up her nose as she thought to herself, “Who could have done that to me? Who do I know with the power to rob me of my gestalt?” She sat in her chair and looked out the window. The tree was there and Jenny put thoughts together in such a way as to deduce that she had been looking at it while gestalt-less, unable to perceive its parts constituting a whole.

Her thoughts returned to who may have stolen her gestalt. It couldn’t have been her therapist, she thought. He was an evolutionary psychologist and didn’t even believe in the concept of gestalt let alone the actuality of it. Her best friend, a self-proclaimed phenomenologist, could have done it but never would. Her ethics would have prevented her from committing such a heinous act. Her ex-boyfriend had motive, but he lacked the sophistication necessary to stealthily remove gestalt from being. Janie, her sister? She had no motive whatsoever and was far too busy raising her three children and coping with suspicions about her husband’s business trips. Her parents were dead so it couldn’t have been them even if they had wanted to do so.

But then again … maybe they could have. Jenny realized she couldn’t limit herself to the living. This may have betrayed a scientific approach, but then again nothing within any scientific discipline would suggest that such a thing as a gestalt could be stolen. So perhaps the dead could have stolen her gestalt. Not necessarily her parents, but anyone dead. How could she determine the motives of a ghost, poltergeist, spirit, phantom, wraith, or any other potential manifestation of the dead? How could she even communicate with the dead to find out? A medium? A psychic? A spirit guide? Maybe.

Jenny allowed herself to consider other alternatives. Perhaps she would pursue ways to communicate with the dead, but she wanted to exhaust as many possibilities as she could before doing so. She cycled through her memories of different belief systems throughout the world, throughout history. Voodoo? Could someone with a voodoo doll steal gestalt? Jenny didn’t think so. What about witchcraft? Possibly. Anyone who could cast a spell might be able to steal her gestalt. A witch, a wizard, a sorcerer, a necromancer? How would she know? Yet another line of inquiry to potentially pursue.

Shamans, yogis, mystics? They all seemed like viable possibilities. A shaman doing the dirty work for a member of a tribe who had lost his or her gestalt? A yogi who used his or her powers for nefarious purposes? A mystic with powers of bilocation could have come and gone in a moment without a notice. Could it have been a Catholic saint, a Buddhist sage, or the Báb of the Baha’i faith? It seemed unlikely since mystics of those religions came from a mythology that exclusively heralded their selfless gifts to humanity rather than selfish motivations to harm others.

There were undoubtedly more belief systems Jenny could have explored, but she was exhausted. She rose to walk to the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of cranberry juice, feeling the need for fluids and fructose. She unwrapped a power bar and returned to the living room to sit in her chair. As she ate and drank she allowed her mind to rest. She stared absentmindedly out the window for several minutes after she had finished eating and drinking. She rose again to take the glass and the wrapper to the kitchen. She put the glass in the sink and threw away the wrapper in the small garbage can under the sink.

Jenny looked out the window at her backyard. She shook her head, thinking, “Why did this happen to me? Will it happen again?” She realized she had no way of knowing, certainly not at the moment. The possibility that her gestalt could be stolen again and next time not returned? A shiver went up her spine. She didn’t want to think about it. She tilted her head to the side and pondered. “What if my gestalt wasn’t stolen? What if I misplaced it or lost track of it?” But if that was the case how had she retrieved it? No, she decided, it had to have been taken from me by someone or something.

What about aliens? Jenny hadn’t yet considered that. Unfortunately, the possibility proved no more or less likely than the other possibilities she considered plausible. “If I take a scientific or psychological view, what might the explanation be?” Psychosis, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder? Maybe, but she had never had any experiences that fit into those categories previously. Why had she come out of it as suddenly as she had fallen into it? There was no psychological or psychiatric intervention, no medications or therapies that had rescued her from her state. It just happened.

A brain tumor? A static electric shock within the brain? A synaptic disconnection or a frayed nerve along the spine? Maybe. She’d need to consult with a neurologist, have an MRI. But she’d had a physical recently and less than six months ago she’d had an MRI after a car accident resulted in a mild concussion. Nothing out of the ordinary had shown up on the MRI or CAT scans. Still, it seemed as worthwhile to make an appointment with a neurologist as it did to make an appointment with a medium and contact a coven.

Nevertheless, Jenny still had her doubts about neurology. If there was a brain tumor or disorder then no one had taken her gestalt. Could it be possible that something besides her gestalt caused her terrifying experiences? How could that be? For Jenny, her gestalt was everything, her ability to perceive in the ways she did required the existence of a gestalt. Her entire belief system would crumble if she was to discover that something other than gestalt had caused her perceptions to change. How would she explain her perceptual reality without a gestalt?

The idea frightened Jenny. She didn’t like the direction her thoughts were going. She made herself turn away from the kitchen window, turn from the sink, and walk to the front door. She stepped outside. The sun was shining, the air was warm but the breeze was cool. The position of the sun on this September day in Boulder suggested it was late morning. “Perhaps a walk around the block would do me some good,” thought Jenny.

Jenny made her way down the steps outside the front door, stepped along the walk to the driveway, and made her way to the sidewalk. As she strode down the sidewalk past the landscaped yards of her neighbors, a car barreled around the corner just down the street. Its tires were screeching and a thumping bass throbbed from the car. Jenny stopped walking and stared at the car. She was momentarily in shock. The car straightened out and accelerated up the street toward Jenny. It swerved over to her side of the street and as Jenny began to run through the yard of the nearest house the car screamed over the curb and roared right through her.

Jenny died on the spot, her body a bloody, broken mess. The car smashed through the outer wall of the house and into the living room where it came to a stop. Inside the car was a driver and three passengers, all of them dead having died upon impact with the house. None of them wore seatbelts. In the backseat was a witch from Nantucket who had cast spells only on those she had never met and a yogi from Kashmir with a predilection for unleashing Kundalini awakenings on unsuspecting individuals. In the passenger seat was an alien from another galaxy, humanoid but without sensory organs; its brain swallowed the thoughts of others as nutrition. Driving the car had been a middle-aged woman, a neurologist who doctored MRIs so that she could justify brain surgeries that weren’t needed.

Given Jenny’s experiences it might be thought that the car was filled with those who had conspired to steal Jenny’s gestalt. However, that wasn’t the case. Unbeknownst to Jenny, her subconscious had hidden her gestalt from her consciousness as a practical joke. Without Jenny’s awareness, her subconscious mind had been fucking with her consciousness on and off for years, motivated always to humble consciousness from believing itself to be of the utmost importance.

But then, what of the carload of suspects that fit Jenny’s profiles for potential gestalt thieves? A case of mistaken identity. The carload had a story of its own and they had thought Jenny was someone she wasn’t.