Mystical

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I would never have experienced Tibetan singing bowls were it not for a family member’s cancer diagnosis.  Something you quickly learn is that many resources are available to help you cope.  One of those local to this area was/is Tibetan singing bowls.  I had no idea what to expect, but as a lifelong explorer of religion, I had gathered that the session would likely involve ways of thinking more common in East Asian cultures.  I was taken, however, on a spiritual journey.  In a darkened room with twenty-to-thirty cancer survivors, on our backs on the floor, we experienced sound.  Now, my musical training and ability are quite limited.  I could not identify most of the instruments (I kept my eyes closed), apart from the singing bowls which I had heard in other, western religious contexts as well.  I’ve had mystical experiences before, but I don’t know you well enough to tell you all about them.

Photo by Magic Bowls on Unsplash

The first thing I noticed this time was the color blotches in my closed eyes.  Everyone sees those kinds of things, but as the sounds increased the colors began to range outside their usual purple into whites and yellows.  It was almost like a segment from Fantasia.  The colors then began to take shape, some forming into flowers.  I knew my imagining mind had taken hold when images began to appear.  Although it was my usual bedtime by this point, I was fully cognizant of being awake.  There was no real storyline, but I was conscious of losing my sense of individuality and becoming part of the greater whole, which is what being a being on a small planet is all about.  As the sound meditation wound down, I realized that it had been many years since I’d put myself into such an environment.  It took some time to reorient myself.  When we arrived at home I was, paradoxically, too relaxed to fall asleep.

One of my college professors warned me against mysticism.  Mystical experiences are rare, in my life anyway, but unforgettable.  If you live long enough and pay the right kind of attention, however, you can find them.  They leave you with a profound sense of hope.  I’m not about to go off and join a Buddhist monastery, but Thomas Merton reminds us that Buddhism and Christianity are perfectly compatible.  This particular college professor was afraid, I surmise, that spiritual experience might outstrip dogged devotion to a single book.  Mysticism can take you to places that convince you what passes for reality is not all that’s real.  Being with lovely people who’ve had to face cancer is a spiritual experience in its own right.  Why shut out the light inside?

Creating Light

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I spend a lot of time awake when it’s dark out.  I try to limit the number of lights on, both for the environment and not to wake family members who sleep on a more normal timetable.  But this schedule makes me reflect a lot about light.  For example, the other day I glanced at a mirror that happened to be reflecting a light.  By reflecting light you create more light.  Think of the moon.  A full moon on a clear night can make a massive difference in how well you can see.  Farmers used to know this as harvest moons gave the possibilities for longer light-time hours to get seasonal work done.  And that light reflecting in my eye in an early morning mirror made me wonder what would happen if you set up a mirror facing a mirror with a light in the middle.  Wouldn’t you have just created more light in the world?

I’m almost always awake before sunrise.  I don’t recollect the last time I awoke to find the sun in the sky.  There are so many subtleties to morning light.  You can see it coming a long way off.  I try to jog at first light, when it’s just light enough to see where I’m going.  It’s important to seek light in the dark.  There’s a kind of spirituality to it.  Often when I’m jogging I’m amazed at how far even a small light carries.  When I see the stars at night and think how terribly, terribly far away they are, I marvel that their light still reaches us.  Light can be blocked out, but unless it is, it stops at nothing.  Light persists.  

Bioluminescence fascinates me.  We now know that our very genes have the ability to create their own light.  Fireflies and deep-sea creatures have figured out how to do it, and, I suspect, scientists could engineer a glowing person.  We have it within ourselves to create our own light.  Science wouldn’t disagree.  Sometimes such things are best seen by walking around in the dark.  The contrast helps that inner light show through more clearly.  Those who are afraid of the dark haven’t spent the time to truly become acquainted with it.  The dark is a very capable teacher and the rhetoric that it’s evil is based on mistaking, as the Buddha said, the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.  But it’s starting to get light out—time for me to go for a jog to seek even more of it in the semi-dark.

Hopeful Flowers

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Our front yard is a bit of a wreck this year.  You see, none of us are natural gardeners and with two chronic illnesses among the three of us we’ve had some multi-day hospital visits and shifting of priorities.  The front yard hasn’t been one of them.  I’m able to get out around 6 a.m. on a Saturday, however, to do some weeding.  My philosophy this year is that if it’s not something people would consider an “ugly weed” and if it stays under six inches tall, I’ll let it grow.  We’ve planted some deliberate ground cover that doesn’t seem very deliberate, but it’s slowly taking hold.  And, of course, there are the ubiquitous dandelions.  I don’t really have a problem with dandelions but others think of them as weeds and they do, admittedly, have no sense of personal space.  They’ll grow right up under some intentionally planted flower and crowd it out.

If you’ve dealt with dandelions, you know they have deep roots.  Well, it rained yesterday and the ground was soft enough that I was actually able to gentle one out the whole way today.  It was impressive.  Usually the root breaks off (a brilliant, if frustrating adaptation) less than an inch beneath the surface.  I thought to snap a picture before tossing this one on the compost pile (in the back yard, of course, inside the fence where it can’t be seen).  Talk about depth!  These yellow wildflowers with edible leaves and wine-making potential, are tenacious.  They have a very strong will.  Dandelions are perhaps the most strong-willed of plants.

With chronic illnesses, hope is essential.  Instead of getting angry at “weeds” I look at them as examples of just how mighty hope can be.  They find cracks that are so small that we overlook them.  The soil can’t always be great there, but they carry on.  Dandelions can reach impressive sizes (trust me on that one—I’m no gardener) and they don’t take “no” for an answer.  Such resilience gives me hope.  Were they more conscious (I’m sure they are at some level, but I surely hope it’s beneath the threshold of pain degree) they might well be dominant among the plants.  I missed mowing the lawn last weekend for being in the hospital with family, and it’s clear the dandelions have designs on taking over the place.  I see them and I find a deep peace.  Life finds a way, in spite of difficulty.  

Who Are We?

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I wonder who I am.  Beyond my usual existential angst, I tried to access some online learning modules at work only to have so many barriers thrown up that I couldn’t log in.  Largely it’s because I have an online presence (be it ever so humble) outside of work.  Verification software wants to send codes to my personal email and my company has a policy against running personal emails on work computers.  Then they want to send a phone verification, but I don’t have a work cell.  I don’t need one and I have no desire to carry around two all the time because I barely use the one I have.  By the way, my cell does seem to recognize me most of the time, so maybe I should ask it who I am.

Frustrated at the learning module, I remembered that we’d been asked to explore ChatGPT for possible work applications.  I’d never used it before so I had to sign up.  I shortly ran into the very same issue.  I can’t verify through my personal phone and I found myself in the ironic position of having an artificial intelligence asking me to verify that I was human!  I know ChatGPT is not, but I do suspect it might be a politician, given all the red tape it so liberally used to get me to sign in.  Not that I plan to use it much—I was simply trying to do what a higher-up at work had asked me to do.  So now my work computer seems to doubt my identity.  I don’t doubt its—I can recognize the feel of its keyboard even in the dark.  And the way my right hand gets too hot from the battery on sweltering summer days.  It’s an unequal relationship.

My personal computer, which isn’t as paranoid as the work computer, seems to accept me for who I say I am.  I try to keep passwords secure and complex.  I have regular habits—at least most days.  I should be a compatible user.  I don’t want ChatGPT on my personal space, however, since I’m not sure I trust it.  I did try to log into the learning module on my laptop but it couldn’t be verified by the work server (because the computer’s mine, I expect).  Oh well, I didn’t really feel like chatting anyway.  But I did end the day with a computer-induced identity crisis.  If you know who I am, please let me know in the comments.  (You’ll have to authenticate with WordPress first, however.)

Small Hops

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It was about the cutest thing I’d seen in a month of Saturdays—a baby rabbit.  It was no bigger than my fist and it was looking lost on the sidewalk.  The front “lawn” of the next neighbor’s house is paved and there’s only a wide street in the opposite direction.  Our front lawn has a retaining wall well about the jumping height of the little guy.  I didn’t want it dashing into the street, so I circled around from that direction, but the poor thing couldn’t get high enough to reach our lawn.  It was young enough not to be certain something at least twenty-five times its size meant it harm.  It allowed me to get close enough to scoop it up and put it on our lawn.  It immediately leapt away and sheltered under a bush, before eventually disappearing down a hole that I hoped might be its home.

Besides being a hope-filled chance encounter with the wonder of nature, the incident also caused me to ponder what that leporine brain made of this learning experience.  For human brains, any sufficiently large animal is a monster, and anything even larger is a god.  While there are some bad folks out there, people don’t seem evil to me.  And although we’re certainly not gods, I wonder what that little rabbit thought.  What I was attempting was an act of kindness.  I’m sure it scared the timid tyke—I can imagine being lifted by an enormous creature that I can’t understand and it is a most frightening prospect.  But what if that monster were to set me down just where I needed to be?  Might not my assumptions about it change?

We don’t know what other animals think, yet it’s clear that they do.  Our yard has a fence and we have no dogs, so rabbits tend to like it here.  I often mutter softly and try to avoid direct eye contact and sometimes they let me get fairly close.  I like to think some of the larger ones recognize me, and maybe can tell that a vegan has nothing but their goodwill in mind.  We like to think this about God.  Larger, easily able to harm us, but that somehow being divine also conveys good will.  The bunny incident cast a pleasant glow over the rest of an otherwise anxious day.  It had calmed me and conveyed a sense of appreciation for just how helpful the world of nature can be.  I hope for some tiny rabbits in your life too.

Next Gen AI, Truly

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Okay, so it was a scary meeting.  It was about AI—artificial intelligence.  Specifically Generative IA.  That’s the kind that makes up answers to questions put to it, or does tasks it’s assigned.  The scary part, to me, is that we are being forced to deal with it because tech companies have unleashed it upon the world without thinking through the consequences.  Such hubris gets us into trouble again and again but it never stops us.  We’re sapiens!  You see, GAI (Generative AI) is under no obligation to tell the truth.  It likely can’t even understand the concept, which is a human concept based on perceptions of reality.  GAI simply provides answers based on the dataset it’s been fed.  It can generate texts, and photos (which are so doctored these days anyway that we need a photo-hospital), which means it can, to borrow the words of a sage, “make a lie sound just like truth.”  We already have politicians enough to do that, thank you.

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

My real fear is that the concept of truth itself is eroding.  With Trump’s “truth is whatever I say it is” administration, and its ongoing aftermath, many Americans have lost any grip on the idea.  Facts are no longer recognized as facts.  “Well I asked ChatGPT and it told me…”  It told you whatever its dataset told it and that dataset contains errors.  The other scary aspect here is that many people have difficulty distinguishing AI from human responses.  My humble advice is to spend more time with honest human beings.  Social media isn’t always the best way to acquaint yourself with truth.  And yet we’re forced to deal with it because we need to keep evolving.  Those Galapagos finches won’t even know what hit ‘em.

Grandma was born before heavier-than-air flight.  Before she died we’d walked on the moon.  About two decades ago cell phones were around, but weren’t ubiquitous.  Now any company that wants its products found has to optimize for mobile.  And mobile is just perfect for AI that fits in the palm of your hand.  But where has truth gone?  You never really could grasp it in your hands anyway, but we as a collective largely agreed that if you committed crimes you should be punished, not re-elected.  And that maybe, before releasing something with extinction-level potential that maybe you should at least stop and think about the consequences.  I guess that’s why it was a scary meeting.  The consequences.  All technological advances have consequences, but when it takes a lifetime to get to the moon, at least you’ve had some time to think about what might happen.  And that’s the truth.

Thinking Power

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Thoughts are powerful.  An idea can change everything.  While materialism tells us that thoughts are only electro-chemical signals in an organic mass of tissue, those who have them know differently.  I don’t know you, kind readers, well enough to share the full truth of the matter, but I am more and more convinced that materialism is woefully overconfident in its ability to explain everything.  As a friend once told me, science accomplishes a lot and it clearly works, but it also sweeps anomalies off the table as statistically insignificant.  So when we read accounts of educated, rational individuals describing the impossible we laugh it off.  We shouldn’t.  Science and spirit working together is a powerful combination.  Getting the mix right is part of the process.

Our thoughts affect the world around us.  This can be as simple as deciding to mow the lawn.  By doing so, based on a thought, you physically altered the environment in some small way.  Isn’t it merely a matter of degree to let the thought do more of the work?  We’re a long way from mowing the lawn by mind power alone, but we’re at the point where belief (and I’m not talking facile follow-the-leader kinds of belief) should be allowed to grow a little bit.  There’s a lot more to the world than we’re often told there is.  What’s happened to our curiosity that we don’t explore it?  I have some theories regarding why we’ve cut ourselves off from potentially world-changing thoughts—thoughts that really could make the world a better place for all.  We’re tied to old paradigms.

We tend to be too busy to put large amounts of time into thinking.  As a society we undervalue that, in any case, until we need a professor in a specific specialization.  Thinking can lead to action.  We still can’t explain, scientifically, how the thought that I should mow the lawn translates to me standing from my chair, grabbing my hat and gloves, and a battery-pack, going to the garage, and hauling out the mower.  We do know that a thought starts a chain of events, but how does that thought move arms, legs, hands, and feet?  “For verily I say unto you, that whosoever shall say unto this mountain, ‘Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea,’ and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass, he shall have whatsoever he saith.”  Or so the perhaps most influential sage in history once said. 

Private Therapy

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A friend recently introduced me to the YouTube channel, Cinema Therapy.  While I had some vague notions already that cinema therapy was “a thing,” I had never looked into it.  This was so, even while consciously knowing that I use movies that way.  Most of what I’ve seen on the YouTube channel has been about Disney/Pixar movies, especially those that tug at emotions.  These have never been my favorite movies since I have unresolved issues from childhood.  Still I learn a lot from watching their analyses.  It can still be difficult to watch these films, though.  As a family we recently rewatched Finding Nemo.  It struck me pretty hard how growing up without a father figure left me the anxious, quivering mess that I often am.  I prefer movies where I can find a father, no matter how odd the choices may be.

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

In fact, in my own form of cinema therapy, I use horror films.  (Even the YouTube channel parses M. Night Shyamalan.)  Part of this is clearly because such movies take me back to my childhood.  I’m not sure why I found monsters so comforting, but I did.  We had no father and I latched onto the strong men—particularly if they didn’t smoke or drink—that dominated movies  (it was the sixties, after all).  Somehow I felt that this made the world seem alright.  Or a little less scary.   I didn’t understand the biology of parenthood, I just knew that I needed a man in the family.  One who would protect me and show me how to be a man.  Well, that never really happened.  My step-father was verbally abusive and I seemed to be his special target.  I watched horror and listened to Alice Cooper.

Sublimation, in psychology, is where you put difficult feelings aside, acting as if everything’s normal.  I did that for many, many years.  College, seminary, doctoral program, full-time professorate.  Then it all broke down.  After the tragedy at Nashotah House, I found myself watching horror movies again.  It took about a decade of doing that to realize that I could write books about the connection between religion and horror.  With three published (the third about to be, actually), I have a fourth nearly finished.  The writing is therapeutic as well.  I have to wonder, however, if these Pixar movies that are so painful for me to watch are really helping me.  I don’t always feel refreshed afterwards, as I do when I see a good horror movie.  (Bad films are their own kind of therapy.)  I’m an amateur psychologist (no license), with a most intractable client (myself).  My way of dealing with him is to watch horror and call it therapy.

Feathers and Flight

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Bird identification must be one of the trickiest activities known to humankind.  My office window overlooks a small segment of a porch roof that is popular with birds.  Whether it’s pecking at some invisible specks on the shingles or dipping a sip from the gutters, they stop by often during the day.  Maybe my brain wiring is odd, but since I was a child I wanted to be able to identify correctly any animal I saw.  We had a few of those Zim Golden Nature Guides that I poured over like a second Bible.  I would study page after page, repeatedly, until I could identify just about any critter I came across.  It seemed, in those days, that all birds were sparrows, starlings, or robins.  There was the occasional blue jay or cardinal, but usually it was the more ordinary, less colorful variety.  Birds are symbols of hope.  Their lightness and ability to fly are what human dreams are made of.

I’m not an avid bird watcher, but I do try to identify them.  I see bald eagles occasionally, several times a year usually, and plenty of red-tailed hawks.  Once in a while, however, a smallish bird hops by that resembles nothing in my field guides.  In frustration I turn to Cornell University’s bird identification app, Merlin.  Almost never can they find anything like what I saw.  Maybe it’s because the app asks the wrong questions.  Never do they say “was the tail long, medium, or short?” for example.  Things you’d actually notice.  They do ask where you saw it, and “on the roof” isn’t an option, let alone “on the roof overlooking my porch.”  I saw an interesting bird the other day that was all gray.  Bill and all.  I saw it next to a starling, from which it was clearly distinct.  It wasn’t in my book and it wasn’t on Merlin.  What could it have been?

This isn’t the first time this has happened.  Strangely, bird color isn’t always a reliable indicator of species although this is what the viewer tends to notice first.  To make positive identification takes close observation of details most people don’t immediately catch.  The more common species are seldom an issue, but the less showy kind are often more difficult to identify.  This strikes me as a life lesson.  We may all know who the showiest are, but those more modest of our avian friends likely live lives of greater satisfaction without people constantly chasing after them.  At least I imagine it so, since I can’t find a write-up about them in my identification guides.  But I can still watch them and gain hope.

Half Full

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Is the glass half full or half empty?  Perhaps trite, this is the textbook example of optimism.  In times when hope is important—and that may be always, but at times it’s really much more keenly felt—we need to see the glass filling again.  Emily Dickinson famously wrote “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”  Although published posthumously, many refer to this poem when the glass starts to look empty.  Recently a friend pointed us to a more realistic version of this by the contemporary poet Caitlin Seida titled “Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat.”  It’s easily found with a web search but I’m hoping to buy Seida’s book because most poets have a difficult time of things.  The gist of it is that hope is a scrappy, gritty rodent that knows how to survive in a dark, noisome world.

Of course, the Bible has a lot to say about hope as well.  Sometimes we tend to see the half-empty glass of the judgment verses, but what truly makes it Scripture is the hope.  In fact, hope is all around if we look for it.  For example, I recently had to get a new set of glasses.  I really liked my old frames and they had stopped being produced.  I had to try something new.  This pair, instead of screw-hinges holding the arms on, has a mechanism that uses tension between the two pieces of metal so they retain their shape but can also be folded.  The end result is they don’t have a solid fixed “normal” position, but one which can be slightly adjusted because they’re more pliable than fixed screws (it’s clear why I’m not a technical writer).  In any case, their ability to adjust is a sign of hope. If things don’t look right, literally, a nudge can fix it.  You can find resilience even in your eyeglasses.

In times of difficulty doubt can be the thing with feathers.  What we need is one of those water-drinking birds.  You know, the kind that’s made of glass filled with a red liquid that bobs its head up and down into a glass of water.  (It turns out they have their own Wikipedia article under the title “Drinking bird.”)  Here is the ultimate symbol of hope that spans both Seida and Scripture.  The bobbing head always dips into the glass even though it can’t actually drink.  We might be tempted to say it’s a foolish waste of time.  With the correct perspective, however, it shows the glass to be half full. At least when seen through the lenses of hope.

This bird knows hope! Photo by Matt Flores on Unsplash

Parthenogenesis

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It’s only a matter of degree, isn’t it?  I mean between reptiles and mammals.  While our common ancestor was quite a bit older than Lucy, we’re still fam, right?  I’m not the only one, I’m sure, who read with interest the New York Times story about the female crocodile who recently gave birth without the help of a male.  It’s called parthenogenesis and, according to the article, it’s not as rare as we might think.  Birds and amphibians do it.  Some fish even change gender under reproductive pressure.  And if you’ve seen Jurassic Park you know the implications might be larger by an order of magnitude or two.  My mind, however, wanders to mammals.  Then primates.  Then humans.  If our distant cladistic cousins can do it, can we?

The key appears to be males leaving females alone long enough.  As Malcolm says, “life will find a way.”  Life amazes me.  While we can’t count on it happening for each individual, life has a way of reemerging when you think it’s gone.  Previous owners of our house neglected a green ash tree growing in a location far too close to the house itself for many years.  Granted, it was on the north side where you seldom have any reason to go, but that tree sent out progeny that I’ve had to try to eradicate for five years now.  As much as I love trees, when they’re growing into the foundations of your house, they’re a bit of a problem.  I snip off the water shoots whenever I find them but they keep coming back.  I’m sad to cut them but I admire their persistence.  Life’s persistence. It’s will to carry on.  It continues even when we think it can’t.  Never forget the water bears!

Just a few days later the Times ran an article about the strong possibility of life on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons.  Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised.  I’m absolutely certain there’s life elsewhere.  It makes no sense for it not to be.  Life evolves to a point, it seems, where the “intelligent” variety seems to become arrogant.  I embrace our reptilian and amphibious and piscine cousins.  Even our insect and arthropod family.  Our plants and fungi.  Life is amazing and we seldom stop to ponder just how wonderful and mysterious and resilient it is.  A lonely female crocodile decides to have a family.  Phosphates spewing from an ice-cold moon whirling around a colossal planet that wanted to be a star.  Life!  How can we not be stunned into trying to admire it in its many, many forms?

Measuring Humanity

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The humanities have fallen in love with data.  Let me put a finer point on it: those who use the humanities as a profession have had to turn to “evidence based” metrics in figuring out what it means to be human.  As an actual human, I’m feeling data fatigue.  Some of us aren’t good with numbers.  Our teachers encouraged us to move into the humanities.  Now, at an age of not young, many of us are being instructed that we now have to get good at numbers because numbers are the only truth.  I have philosophical and spiritual objections to this, but you can’t get a job as a philosophical and spiritual objector.  Numbers don’t, and can’t tell the whole story.  The term “calculating” used to be used to describe a person without feeling.  Now we’re all just calculators.

Whither can we go to experience true humanities again?  Professorships are “measured” by success factors.  “Key performance indicators” are applied to the gods.  There are immeasurables, but they can’t be slotted neatly into our computer’s algorithms, so they are swept off the table.  If you want to wear a white collar, you have to put business first.  The soul is dying, but that’s just fine as long as we can keep the body alive.  You see, the humanities used to be about those things that can’t be quantified with “evidence based” metrics.  How it feels to be in love, or why we cower in the presence of an unseen deity.  How do you put numbers on artistic inspiration?  Sure, we can “measure” aspects of Beethoven’s seventh symphony, but they don’t explain what it’s like to listen to it.

Kowtowing to capitalism feels shameful to me.  But challenging capitalism is like pacifists standing up to those with assault rifles.  Greed derives its power only from getting everyone to agree on its objects of value.  The humanities try to argue the point, but those with control of the money are in charge of hiring.  And they do it with their abacus always close to hand.  I never learned to use a slide rule but calculators were required to graduate from the academic track in high school.  Now when I’m being asked to apply that kind of thinking again, I have to cast my mind back nearly half a century while my human brain dreams of reading and writing novels, viewing paintings, and listening to beautiful music.  But it’s a work day, and when it’s all said and done, data rules.  Look for no empaths in upper management.

A Theory

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Do you remember that crazy college professor you had?  Chances are there was more than one.  As a late friend used to say, that’s why we pay good money to go to college.  I have an idea, perhaps even a theory, that the neurodiverse used to be largely institutionalized.  And I don’t mean in mental hospitals or “insane asylums.”  I mean in two well-respected social institutions: the university and the church.  Before you can object to the latter, consider that ministers, and before them priests, derived from shamans.  Nobody would doubt that shamans think differently than most people.  So, my theory is that when neurodiverse people came along in capitalist societies, they were shunted toward jobs in higher education and religion.  Out of sight to most people most of the time.  Then capitalism grew.

Both the church and the university became businesses.  Again, if you doubt me about churches, get to know a few bishops.  You’ll soon see.  In higher education, business people were hired as deans and presidents.  Not knowing how to handle their neurodiverse employee pool, they began hiring more “normal” people.  Those who, with no real insight or ambition, figure teaching is a cushy job.  It pays well, and it’s respectable.  But to do the job right you might just have to be neurodiverse.  Now, I don’t have the means to test my theory, but I suspect if you surveyed students over time as they graduated, you’d find fewer and fewer crazy professors.  As my departed friend would likely have said, they’re not getting their money’s worth.

Money doesn’t compromise.  Many people are driven by it without ever asking themselves why.  Do they want to be able to build private rockets to take them to Mars when capitalism finally destroys this planet?  Do they want private jets and the endless headaches of having to worry about getting even more money?  Studies tend to show that wealthy people are far from the happiest on the planet.  In fact, many of them are privately miserable.  They don’t have to work, true, but what do they think about?  Deeply.  I’ve never been driven by money.  I would like a bit more than I’ve been able to manage with my background and specialization.  Enough not to have sleepless nights over whether we can afford to fix the roof.  And still buy books.  It may be crazy to still read like a professor when I’m no longer in the guild.  I like to think I’m participating in a very old tradition.

Wrong Entity

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In one of those weird synchronicities the universe likes to play, the very next day after I watched The Entity (2015) and wrote a blog post on it, this happened.  In yesterday’s post I noted that I couldn’t remember where I’d read about the movie, or who had recommended it to me.  I couldn’t even be sure which The Entity it was, since I didn’t write down the movie’s date.  The next morning I had the privilege of watching Claire Donner, of the Miskatonic Institute, talking about The Entity and it immediately came to mind that it was she who’d suggested I might like it (or might not).  Also, that I got the wrong one.  I haven’t had the opportunity to watch the one actually recommended yet, but it brings back to mind just how the Miskatonic Institute contributes to understanding horror.

The Institute has asked me to present a course this coming October and I will be posting more on that closer to the time.  It got me to thinking about a couple of things.  One is that I missed some major horror films growing up.  When I “got religion” in high school (I always had it, of course, and saw no problem with enjoying monsters too) I began to steer away from horror.  In college I had a dating occasion or two to watch horror, but it really only started again in earnest after being booted out of academia.  I was interviewed in seminary by a sociology grad student interested in why people watch horror, but my watching was (and still is) circumscribed by lack of cash flow.  The Entity made quite a splash in the early eighties, but it took someone in the 2020s telling me about it before I realized I probably should watch it.

The other thing Donner’s talk brought to mind is how religion and horror relate.  Such films are scary because of an existential threat—THE existential threat.  There’s nothing more powerful than God, but in such movies God can do nothing.  I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I suspect that’s true.  It’s certainly true of The Exorcist, with which it’s sometimes compared.  God doesn’t deliver Regan McNeil, no, Fr. Karras does.  And only by sacrificing himself to do so.  The existential threat has to involve a universe entirely out of kilter.  What is a God that’s powerless (it’s implied) to drive out evil?  The exorcism in The Exorcist doesn’t work, does it?  Yet there’s some benevolent force in the universe that gives us synchronicities and, it seems, is looking out for goodness in an often cruel world.

Iron Man?

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As a vegan, I sometimes end up thinking more about nutrition than I used to.  Back when I first became a vegetarian colleagues wondered how I got my iron.  I’m one of those apparently rare individuals who really likes broccoli.  I could eat it nearly every day of the week without tiring of it.  In any case, iron is important for health.  I’ve known people with iron deficiencies and it can be a real problem.  Doctors recommend ferrous gluconate as a dietary supplement since the body absorbs iron better from it.  (It’s best on an empty stomach, I’m told, followed by orange juice.)  But I’m no physician.  In fact, I’m quite squeamish, which may seem strange for someone who watches horror.  Still, thinking about iron took me back to my childhood.

I was a sickly child.  Couple this with a tendency to think too much and I must’ve been a handful for my mother.  I remember trying to explain to her once that I didn’t believe reality was real.  I was maybe twelve at the time.  She prescribed ironized yeast.  Now, Mom’s no doctor.  She didn’t even finish high school.  So thinking about broccoli made me wonder about ironized yeast.  First a web search revealed it’s not sold any more.  Further, it was a health food fad beginning in the 1930s.  Although I remember the taste and scent distinctly, I couldn’t find a website saying what it was or how it was made.  More to the point, why did my poor, frustrated mother think that it would help me couple reality with what was happening around me again?  (And was that even such a good idea?)

Questioning perceptions seems to run in my family.  I’ve long known that my thought process is very different from that of other people.  My saintly wife still says the reason she was attracted to me is that she’d never met anyone who thinks the way I do.  My thought process has had plenty of opportunities to drive her crazy since those early days, I suspect.  My brother and I sometimes talk about what it’s like being, I suspect, were we diagnosed, neurodiverse.  It’s easy to fall into the perception that others think like we do.  I suspect all people do that.  Few, at least among those I’ve met, question the reality that their senses tell them really exists.  Physics tells us it’s mostly empty space.  And yet although I still don’t know what it is, maybe I’d better find someone with an old stockpile of ironized yeast to get back to business. It is, after all, a work day.

Who knows what goes on in the mind of others?