More than One Thing Split

Dinner with the former associates takes place at Steamers Landing, from which “you can see Ellis Island [and] the Statue of Liberty,” and “across the river two Jersey City office towers cast long red and bright white reflections on the ebony water. Near one of them was a large round neon clock, a billboard shaped like a red Colgate toothpaste box beside it” (45).

We discussed in class that each individual has multiple personalities, but that it can be difficult to perceive both the boundaries of each specific personality as well as the shifts between the different personalities. The boundaries and shifts are especially difficult to perceive in oneself. One of Carl Wylie’s personalities takes his work seriously because he believes it sometimes results in “blood on the floor.” Wylie is aware that people are affected by the deals he makes, and the effect could potentially be devastating.

The red and bright white reflections of the Jersey City office towers on the ebony water of the river by Steamers Landing allude to Wylie’s image of blood on the floor. The same type of deals that Wylie works on could take place in those buildings, and their reflection on the water reminds me that the associates live in the shadow of the results of their work – results that one of Wylie’s personalities views as “blood on the floor.” But they are also in the shadow of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, symbols of the American Dream. In one sense, perhaps the associates think they have achieved the American Dream by working their way into high-paying jobs. In a different sense that is more in line with the Wylie personality that can see the blood on the floor, part of themselves might view the American Dream as just a dream. The billboard of the Colgate toothpaste box reminds us of the everyday needs of the millions of people in the world. A Colgate toothpaste box is red and white, which reinforces the image of the blood on the floor. Millions of people passed through Ellis Island, and the majority would not have been able to earn as much money as these associates.

All the characters in the story are concerned with money. They talk about how much each other makes and how much the deals they work on are worth. Urquart’s conceptualizes the money in the world as “all these pools of money floating around out there – wherever ‘there’ is. All of us trying to attach ourselves to some part of them whatever way…we can…what difference does it make, and to whom, if Wylie makes seven hundred fifty a year or a million two?” (56). While no one in the story answers this question, the image of the “blood on the floor” suggests an answer – it makes a difference to someone. All the money in the world is not actually just floating in the ether as Urquart imagines it to. When Wylie makes 1.2 million as opposed to 750 thousand, he makes it at someone else’s expense. Maybe all the money in the world is “something split” – split between all of the people in the world. The vagueness of the “Something” in the story’s title reflects the uncertainty surrounding this idea of all the money in the world. It also reflects the ambiguity of the borders of our different personalities, and the difficulty of recognizing the shifts between them. Jack had trouble articulating exactly what he felt when he sensed “something” split in his doctor’s office. If we made more of an effort to directly confront our different personalities, it might allow us to understand difficult issues more clearly. If Wylie would spend more time grappling with the part of himself that sees the blood on the floor, the part that stops and wonders what his work has done to his brain, he might gain a better understanding of who he is as he relates to other people. This, in turn, might make him consider to whom it matters if he makes 750K, or 1.2M.

“A lawyer’s medium is time,” and the neon clock by the Jersey City office towers and Colgate billboard reminds me of this. One can conceptualize time in a similar way to that in which Urquart conceptualizes money. Time can be one big fluid pool that we all attach to or float through in different places. Time is also something that we split. We break up time into years/days/hours/minutes/seconds/split-seconds, and the scale with which we choose to conceptualize time affects our decisions. One Wylie times his espresso so that he does not waste a second of the “precise point when consciousness is heightened and everything glows” (33). Another Wylie wonders what effect living this way has on his brain. It is worth parsing the tension between all of these “somethings” that we split – personalities, money, time – because by recognizing the different parts at play, we can better understand the different ways we value each.

Thorough explication of this text would require more than 1,000 words. You did a pretty good job in a confined space, but perhaps the essay is really less about explicating Larry's poem and more about expressing the thoughts it leads to for you, which are now trapped against the back wall, as it were, with no space for development.

Dissociation is less the subject for you here than the internal conflicts which human beings use it to manage. What they whistle in the street is "time is money," and the poem, for you, is about how to turn that into complex, dissonant, conflicted music. That we dissociate in order to manage those conflicts, that our social interactions are about confirming and reinforcing those dissociations for one another, you see the poet seeing, but it isn't primarily where your thinking goes.

So the route to the improvement of the essay is down your street, as it were. You can explicate the poem less, or even not at all, and succeed in taking the signs of the conflict in others seriously, without the imagery, understanding the dissociations as superlatively ingenious defenses, with serious second-order consequences. Not splitting may be impossible for human beings, and would at any rate be dangerous. Understanding the conflicts we are managing, being aware of them as conflicts to be comprehended by our selves rather than "solved" by the obliteration of one aspect—which has also become literally part of us through dissociative conflict management—leads to getting more out of yourself while doing your selves less harm. Every human choice involves loss, as you said in your first essay. But the loss cannot be absorbed as a loss of the self which embodied the choice we didn't make.