Showing Gratitude

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Stealing is something that we all, except some capitalists, know is wrong.  I think quite a lot about the land that was stolen to make America possible and I know that simply giving it back isn’t an option.  Nevertheless, I do believe that we should listen, and listen attentively to those who’ve been here longer than Europeans.  Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass is an important reflection of this dilemma.  Kimmerer is Potawatomi and she’s also a professor of Environmental Biology.  The book is a series of essays that focus mostly on plants and what we can learn from them.  It also brings in indigenous teaching, contrasting the outlook of gratitude against that of greed.  By turns sad, funny, and profound, Braiding Sweetgrass contains a message that is vital to counter climate change.  To correct our attitude before it’s too late.

There’s so much in this book that it’s difficult to know what to touch on in this brief notice.  Throughout, Kimmerer notes that the First Nations viewed life as a gift.  The earth is constantly giving and the native way was to be thankful and to accept the responsibility of being given a gift.  Seeing how the European attitude was “take until there’s no more to take,” she points out that taking what you need and leaving for others is a way out of our current dilemma.  She does this, most strikingly, by the story of the windigo.  The windigo has become popular among monster fans as a consuming beast, but Kimmerer shows how the story has a profound point.  If all you do is consume you become a monster.  You stop a windigo by showing gratitude.

Perhaps the most striking thing, to me, was how Kimmerer describes her own experience becoming a scientist.  How standard academics refused to believe they had anything to learn from Native American outlooks, especially when borne by a woman.  How she was told she couldn’t be a scientist, not with that outlook.  And how she learned the European way but didn’t give up her native understanding.  How she brings two worlds together and does so with a sense of urgency and hope.  Things have gone too far simply to turn back the calendar and say that our ancestors had it all wrong, but it’s not too late to learn from those who lived for millennia on this land and were untainted by ideas of private ownership.  Those who knew how to live sustainably with nature.  Those who knew, and still know, how to defeat monsters.

Hellish Fears

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Aporripsophobia, the fear of rejection, and the fear of punishment (mastigophobia, or as I prefer, “spankophobia”) are closely related.  They define me.  Much of this comes from the fear of Hell, which I internalized early in life, along with the Calvinistic theology that backed it.  Some have thought that I’m “thin skinned” or afraid of criticism.  That’s not quite it.  I’m afraid of what criticism implies—I did something wrong and therefore may be punished for it.  What brings this on, all of a sudden?  Well, as I was getting ready to jog the other day a police car stopped in front of our house on a routine traffic violation.  My immediate thought was that I had done something wrong.  They were here for me, not the guy whose car they were attending.  Then this brought back that time in Boston.

I moved to Boston on my own, with all I had in a VW Beetle (old style).   I know now that the headache I had after that long drive was a migraine.  (I’ve had maybe a half-dozen in my lifetime, and they’re unmistakable.)  I parked the car, stumbled into my new apartment and went to bed.  The next morning I had a ticket for parking with the left tires to the curb (against the law in Boston).  I didn’t know it was illegal.  Even with a migraine I would’ve not parked that way had I known.  The receptionist at the police station actually said to me “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”  That terrified me.  I thought it was only something Gilligan said.  If you don’t know all the laws how can you possibly avoid punishment?  And isn’t punishment rejection?

Some think I always have to be right.  They may not know the underlying cause—being wrong is to be subject to punishment.  And punishment leads to Hell.  When I was in Kindergarten the first time, I was held back partially because I was four but partially because I colored the triangle in the left corner purple instead of yellow, opposite to the verbal instructions.  It was because I don’t know my right from my left—I still don’t.  To me that first ever school correction was seared forever into my gray matter.  I’d done something wrong.  I was held back in school.  More likely than not, I was going to Hell.  I’ve known people to suggest, as does Richard Dawkins, that raising a child in a religion is child abuse.  I understand parents’ motivation, however.  You don’t want your child to go to Hell.  If they end up living in it all their lives I guess it’s a small price to pay.

Photo by Vadim Bogulov on Unsplash

Bigger Picture

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One of the quirks of my thought process is that I tend to look for the bigger picture.  I’ve always done this and I suspect it drives some people batty when they ask me a question and I begin to answer from what seems to be a tangent.  (I also think this is why I performed well in the classroom.)  So, when I saw the article by Eric Holloway on Mind Matters, titled “Why Is Theology the Most Important Empirical Science,” I had to take a look.  Mostly a series of bullet-points that point out some of the religiously-motivated ideas that led to scientific discoveries, the article is useful.  My penchant for the big picture goes a bit broader, however.  The entire worldview in which the scientific process was born, and thus its underlying presuppositions, are religious.  Science and religion are the dogs and cats of the thought world but I’ve seen dogs and cats live happily together.

Science has always been with us.  Early peoples weren’t benighted troglodytes.  They observed, hypothesized, drew conclusions.  Science as we understand it, however, began in the Middle Ages in Europe, drawing on observations from earlier thought in the Arab world.  The context in that Arab world was solidly Muslim.  The Middle Ages in Europe were solidly Christian.  None of this discounts the contributions of Jews to the whole, it’s merely an observation regarding the larger cultural outlook.  Many of the principles of science even today (for example, that people are categorically different from other animals) are based on those religious worldviews.  We seldom go back to question whether we might’ve gotten something fundamentally wrong.  Meanwhile, the dogs began to chase the cats.

College as a religion major involved a lot of discussions about basic presuppositions.  Then questioning them.  Not much of this went on in the classroom (Grove City was, and is, a conservative Christian school).  The wonderful thing about higher education is the bringing together of people with different outlooks.  It was those after-hours conversations that helped form my questing nature.  I’d already started asking bigger questions when I was a child, annoying my parents and, I suspect, sometimes vexing clergy.  A single human mind is too limited to grasp it all, but it seems to me to deny religion a place at the table is to leave out massive amounts of human experience.  Of course, economics, the dismal science, seems well on the way to eliminating the study of religion in higher education.  And we will have lost, if this happens, a large piece of the bigger picture.

Photo credit: NASA

Hooting in the Dark

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Animals fascinate me.  I picked up Martin Windrow’s The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar: Living with a Tawny Owl at a used book sale.  Honestly, the cute photo on the cover swayed me.  Although some animals like living with humans, and although I grew up with lots of pets, I’ve tended away from that.  Reading about how an owl became a close companion to, and lived a good life with a human was somewhat bittersweet.  In the wild Mumble (the owl’s name) would’ve likely lived a far shorter span.  But I do wonder if she missed out on the challenges that make life rewarding.  (I sometimes wonder the same about those born rich among our own species.)  The struggle is part of nature inside us.  And although this book is generally fun, it does raise some deeper questions in my mind.

When describing the natural life of Tawny Owls, Windrow notes that they have an ability, not understood, to adjust their brood sizes by the amount of prey that will be available during a given year.  Such things always give me pause for a couple of reasons.  One is that we seem to assume we have all the data—that we know all that can be known of our world.  Animals prove that wrong time and again.  The other reason is that we are convinced there is no, for lack of a better term, spiritual world.  Or maybe better, paranormal existence.  Might it not be that owls have some ability to know the future?  Some people seem to have the ability to predict some short-term developments with accuracy.  Perhaps we’re missing something is all I’m saying.

In the end, however, I was surprised how Windrow couldn’t quite bring himself to reject a materialist view of her death.  I’ve had pets die on me—one of the reasons that I have no desire to “own” one—but as Windrow writes it, the relationship grew humdrum before Mumble’s death.  He had to work and she had to perch.  We do tend to take those closest to us for granted, I fear.  Life is so busy that we have to try to squeeze family in next to the demands of capitalism.  So the story towards the end winds down to a kind of “I had a pet owl but I had a life to live too” kind of narrative.  I’m glad to have read the book and I learned a little bit about Tawny Owls.  But I was also left reflecting on some of the larger implications.

Time Flees

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I can’t speak for all early risers, of course, but for me the absolute worst thing about this useless tradition of switching to Daylight Saving Time is the loss of morning light.  I’m in favor of keeping DST all the time, as the US Senate has voted to do.  The only reason this is still an issue is to give the House yet something else to fight about.  How dysfunctional are we, really?  This one’s a no brainer!  Look, I start work early every day.  I jog before work because I’m too tired afterward.  In late February to early March I can get out and back before seven.  (In the summer before six!)  Then DST happens.  I’m plunged into another month of waiting until seven to be able to jog.  DST is just one of those ridiculous things we just keep doing because we don’t have the will to change it.  We’d rather fight.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately.  How we think of it, how we divide it.  We sometimes lose sight of the larger picture.  If relativity is right, the stars we see at night are, many of them, long gone.  We’re seeing light trudging through the near vacuum of space, or maybe dark matter, and thinking how we’ve got to get to our meeting on time.  How we need to be at work from 9-2-5.  How somebody with money owns that portion of our time.  There’s a reason that DST starts on a weekend.  Time.  We can’t grasp it but we can waste it.  What are we waiting for?  Some of us are seeking the truth.  Even so we know that Morpheus was right—time is always against us.  It’s a limited commodity, but even that language cheapens it.

Those of us of a philosophical bent allow ourselves time to ponder such things.  We call time a dimension, but what does that really mean?  Theoretically it can be traveled along in either direction (again, pending relativity) but we only experience it in one.  So what do we do?  We interrupt its flow because during a war during the last century it was deemed that industry could be more productive if it were light an hour later.  Maybe we should just all agree to shift our perception of time ahead by an hour permanently.  That’s forward thinking.  And who knows, it might just save us all a lot of time.

Boo-Boo

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After an unfortunate encounter with a paper-cutter in which one of my thumbs didn’t fare so well, I sought a bandage.  This led me on a reverie since the bandage I found was in a box that I’d brought home from my mother’s apartment.  Mom was a practical woman and I’m sure she would’ve approved, although the item was selected in a moment of grief that still hasn’t completely dissipated.  As my wife was binding my wound the thought recurred that my mother wouldn’t be needing these physical assuagements any longer.  Like all of us, if cut she bled.  She’s beyond that now.  A person’s affects linger and contain pieces of their memories.  This particular box was plastic and therefore reusable—which is precisely what Mom did.  She taught me how to bandage myself and I’ve used that knowledge many times over the decades.  It’s something I don’t need YouTube to figure out.  Time is a gift.

When writing about recent times, I recently learned new vocabulary regarding decades.  For example, the first two decades when I was culturally aware were the seventies and eighties.  Together they’re known as the xennial period, named, presumably, after “generation X.”  (I’m a very late boomer, as well as a late bloomer.)  I found that fascinating.  Then I was reading something that made reference to the “noughties.”  This delightful word is the British term for “aughts” or “aughties”—the years between ’00 and ’09 of any given century.  We hear plenty about the “twenties,” “thirties,” and so on, so I became curious about the correct term for the second decade of a century.  Either “tens” or “teens” is acceptable, but it seems that in formal writing this should be transcribed by numbers. I guess teen ages are always difficult.

Our divisions of time demonstrate our preoccupation with both mortality and round numbers.  More and more people are living the entire way through a century, from aughties through nineties.  For most of us, however, we can, if things go well, use our birth decade as a rough guide.  I’m not likely to make it through the fifties, but it isn’t impossible.  If I do I guess I’ll need to upgrade my WordPress account because my daily posts will have used up my allotted memory by then.  In the meantime, I do need to buy some new bandages for the time in between.  When I do I’ll put them in a simple plastic box, and I will remember the gift of time I shared with my mother.

Verb Choice

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I can’t remember who started it.  Somehow, though, when I watch movies on Amazon Prime, the closed captioning kicks in.  I generally don’t mind this too much since some dialogue is whispered or indistinct.  I also presume some kind of AI does it and it makes mistakes.  That’s not my concern today, however.  Today it’s word choice.  Humans of a certain stripe are good at picking the correct verb for an action.  I’ve been noticing that the closed captions often select the wrong word and it distracts me from the movie.  (Plus, they include some diegetic sounds but not others, and I wonder why.)  For example, when a character snorts (we’re all human, we know what that is), AI often selects “scoffs.”  Sometimes snorting is scoffing, but often it’s not.  Maybe it’s good the robots don’t pick up on the subtle cues.

This isn’t just an AI problem—I first noticed it a long time ago.  When our daughter was young we used to get those Disney movie summary books with an accompanying cassette tape (I said it was a long time ago) that would read the story.  Besides ruining a few movies for me, I sometimes found the verb choices wrong.  For example, in Oliver (which I saw only once), the narrator at one point boldly proclaims that “Fagan strode into the room.”  Fagan did not stride.  A stride is not the same thing as a shuffle, or a slump.  Words have connotations.  They’re easily found in a dictionary.  Why do those who produce such things not check whether their word choice accurately describes the action?

So when I’m watching my weekend afternoon movies, I want the correct word to appear in the closed captioning.  Since the nouns generally occur in the dialogue itself, it’s the verbs that often appear off.  Another favorite AI term is “mock.”  Does a computer know when it’s being mocked?  Can it tell the scoff in my keystrokes?  Does it have any feelings so as to care?  AI may be here to stay, but human it is not.  I’ve always resented it a bit when some scientists have claimed our brains are nothing but computers.  We’re more visceral than that.  We evolved naturally (organically) and had to earn the leisure to sit and make words.  Then we made them fine.  So fine that we called them belles lettres.  They can be replicated by machine, but they can’t be felt by them.  And I have to admit that a well-placed snort can work wonders on a dreary day.

A Different Zone

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I haven’t read Stephen King’s The Dead Zone yet, but it’s on my list.  That’s why I was a little reluctant to watch the movie.  It was free on Amazon Prime, however, and I reasoned to myself that I’d seen The Shining and Carrie before reading the books.  Indeed, my earliest introduction to Stephen King was through movies.  (Well, I did read one of his short stories in high school, but the novel side of things came later.)  When the opening credits revealed it was directed by David Cronenberg I wondered what I was in for.  I didn’t know the story, but I hadn’t heard of this as a Cronenberg body horror spectacle either.  It was quite cold outside and I was nodding off, so why not.

The thing is, it’s not always listed as horror.  That’s a faulty genre designation, as is sci-fi.  There’s one futuristic scene in the movie and it lasts for just over a minute.  Does that make it sci-fi?  Also, I  realized, it deals with clairvoyance and for similar reasons the X-Files are also listed as science fiction.  Paranormal, it seems, is permanently ruled out of the realm of possibility by assigning it an improbable genre.  Well, back to the zone.  I figure the title will be better explained by King, but there is a brief scene explaining what a dead zone is.  The story follows Johnny Smith, a schoolteacher who becomes clairvoyant, although it manifests itself only after a car accident and a coma.  The main purpose of this, at least through the movie lens, is to prevent a Trump-like populist from being elected president.  That is the horror part, I guess.  And it’s becoming clear to me that writers were warning about these things since the seventies.

Unlike many of my weekend movies, I’d actually heard of The Dead Zone before.  There are some horror tropes present.  It begins with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and has a few other horror references tossed in.  Still, it’s a very human story.  The movie probes the difficulties of a life with special abilities.  Johnny never gets over the woman he was going to marry before his coma, and he feels for those whose futures he sees.  The movie is fairly slowly paced and it drops a few threads, again, likely found in the novel.  In the book or movie debate I generally go for book first, but that often leads to disappointment on the silver screen.  Maybe this was the right order to go this time around.  Once I read the novel I guess I’ll know.  Or at least have an opinion.

Using Brains

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I’m old enough to know better.  Here’s a thought.  I recently saw a headline that suggested human brains filter out things like ESP because brains evolved to help us survive.  No matter what you believe about ESP, the idea got me to thinking.  We often act as if our brains are able to determine the Truth (that capital is intentional).  At the same time we don’t understand what consciousness is.  We know that other animals have brains and that the evolution of said organ is to help individuals survive to reproduce.  Some animal species end their existence at that point, but others linger on to wonder.  And I’m wondering if our brains are filters.  Stick with me here: we know that there are stimuli that we can’t perceive that other brains can.  For example, it seems that migrating birds can perceive magnetic fields.  Even if they can’t there are magnetic fields that we perceive only through their effects on objects.  Our brains have no direct access.

Image credit: Andreas Vesalius‘ Fabrica, showing the Base Of The Brain, by user Ancheta Wis

Here’s where it gets spooky.  If our brains filter out things that may hamper us in survival, what if they overzealously teach us not to perceive things that actually exist?  We’re somewhat limited by our “five” senses, no doubt.  We get along okay.  But what of those people who see things that others don’t?  We tend to medicate them or lock them away, but what if their brains have learned how to shut off part of the filter?  Having written a book about demons, naturally they come to mind as a test case.  Or, if you prefer, ghosts.  We tell our children these things aren’t real.  Trust the filter.  Get on with life in “the real world,” right, Cypher?

I didn’t have time to read the article, but I’d experienced a perspective shift.  If our brains are all about gathering information (and in part they clearly are), that’s one thing.  If they are actively filtering things out, well, that’s quite another.  We laud the imagination of children until they become “old enough to know better.”  Do we teach them to shut out what they can actually see, or sense, in order to accept the inevitable, material, adult world?  This idea has startling implications.  As we plunge ahead inventing AI to do our thinking for us, perhaps we’ve left something even more fundamental behind.  Have we lost interest in the Truth?  We may not be able to access it directly, but I wonder if we’re taught to give up without even trying.

Seeing in Darko

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Having seen it I have to wonder why I waited so long.  Part of it was timing, of course.  I was still teaching at Nashotah House when Donnie Darko came out, and I didn’t watch as many movies then.  My loss of that job started me on my horror-watching spree, but Donnie Darko is more than horror.  In fact, it’s usually labeled a thriller instead.  Another reason I avoided it is, alas, the title.  It’s actually the name of the protagonist, and one of the other characters in the movie remarks that it sounds like a superhero name rather than a regular person.  What’s it about?  Well, that’s where it gets interesting.  Donnie has mental health issues, but those issues are tied in with time travel and philosophical discussions about the existence of God.  The high school Donnie attends, although not explicitly stated, seems to be Catholic but there aren’t priests and nuns about, and one of the teachers is seemingly evangelical.

Donnie has trouble distinguishing reality.  Instead of allowing the audience to get away with labeling him easily, the question of reality itself is left unanswered.  The movie is deep like Brazil or The Matrix, and is often considered one of the greatest independent films of all time.  It’s the story of Donnie’s October 1988.  He sleepwalks and sees a guy in a bunny costume who tells him the world will end in 28 days.  Of course he’s medicated and sent to see a psychologist, but what the guy in the bunny costume tells him ends up coming true.  The story is intricate and doesn’t bear a brief synopsis.  It is a movie that will make you think.  It’s become a cult film and I think I’ll be joining that crowd on this one.

Films that manage to put philosophical reflection in the spotlight are rare.  Even more uncommon are those that do so with high production values and convincing acting.  Movies that do this aren’t often cheerful—philosophers in general don’t tend to be a jovial lot (some are fun, of course, but they’re not the majority).  Thinking is serious work, even if those who do it aren’t really paid for their efforts.  Donnie Darko is a movie that will make you think.  Is it horror?  Some classify it so.  Others say sci-fi, but it didn’t really seem like that to me.  In fact, it’s very difficult to classify at all.  Many of the best movies are that way, in my experience.

Mind Echoes

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One of the things that must be frustrating about making movies is that so much competition exists.  Even when you hit on a great idea, such as using a Richard Matheson novel for a story basis, others might be producing something similar.  This isn’t unique to movies, of course.  Some of us have had the experience while writing books.  For those of us who watch movies online, rather than in theaters, the timing differential can still warp perspectives.  I’d not heard of Stir of Echoes until I stumbled onto a website that lists horror movies that have a little something extra.  While watching it I couldn’t help but think of The Sixth Sense, which I also saw at home, but quite a few years earlier than Stir of Echoes.  The acting in the latter is quite good.  The haunted kid pulls this off effectively.  And Kevin Bacon and Kathryn Erbe do a great job as parents (actor-wise).  Spoilers follow.

If you’ve intuited that the child sees dead people, you’re not far off.  It’s actually only one dead person and it’s not a Shyamalanian counsellor.  But the spooky part is his dad begins to see them too, after he’s been hypnotized by his sister-in-law, who’s an amateur.  At its heart the story follows the traditional trope of the undiscovered murder.  It does a good job of hiding the perpetrators until near the end.  The build-up is good also, with Bacon portraying Roy Neary-like obsession (interestingly, they’re in similar professions) quite well.  

The scary part, for me, was the sense that you’re not in control of your own mind.  There’s perhaps just a little too much possibility here.  We tend to think we own our minds, but what if they’re really just on loan?  I remember reading, as a high schooler, that religious people are difficult to hypnotize.  Hypnosis is still not well understood.  The larger fish in the pond is consciousness itself, which we really can’t even define.  We do know that memories are altered with time, and we can demonstrate this to ourselves by rewatching an old movie and seeing what we got wrong.  I suspect that’s why Stir of Echoes is so effective as a horror film—taking us into the realm of mind exposes us to so much that we really don’t understand.  And since ghosts seem to be pretty believable, well, the combination works.  Stir of Echoes is unsettling and a cut above much of what’s available for free streaming.  So if you’re in the mood for a ghost story, this might just fit the bill.

For the Music

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Believe me, I’ve tried.  I took a year of piano lessons but just couldn’t get it.  I married a musician.  I tried to learn guitar.  (I would still play with it, but I broke a string last time I tried to tune it and who has time to get to a music store where it can be restrung?)  I can’t sing—I’ve never been trained and I just don’t seem to have the voice for it.  (In fact, since I no longer teach those close to me say I speak so softly that it’s a strain to hear me.)  But the fact is I love music.  That’s why I don’t listen to it as background.  If there’s music playing, that I like, I find it difficult to concentrate on anything else.  It goes directly to my brain, it seems.

My memory is such that if a piece of music is too familiar I sometimes just don’t want to hear it.  I’m also out of touch with contemporary music.  I have strong tastes, and not too much appeals to me.  When something does, it’s transcendent.  It’s like I’ve fused with the performers.  It’s mystical and amazing.  Growing up, we couldn’t afford much in the way of records.  (I’m sure I need not say anything about cassette or 8-track tapes.)  I listened to the radio with my brothers from time to time, and enjoyed what we heard.  I secretly enjoyed what I heard coming from my older brother’s room.  Left to my own devices, however, I tend to pick up a book and I can’t listen to music and read at the same time.  I know that this is my own neurological issue, but I’m letting you in because anything transcendent is worth sharing.  

Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash

Although the quality isn’t as good, services such as Spotify and Amazon Music Unlimited have slowly introduced me to music of the nineties and later.  Why the nineties?  That’s when I began teaching and my spare time was spent researching (reading) and I had little time for other diversions.  You see, music may just be what it’s all about.  It’s being absorbed and enjoying every second of it.  Humans are visually oriented, but when we focus on sounds something happens to us.  I can be in a crowded store and stop dead right in the middle of the aisle if one of my special songs comes on in the background.  I have to stand and listen, shopping forgotten.  Transcendent moments are few.  If we were in transport all the time I fear it would become ordinary.  And such things are worth pondering on Groundhog Day.

Brain Exercise

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Why do we read, if not to expand our minds?  I’ve read all of Diana Walsh Pasulka’s previous books but Encounters is mind-blowing.  I feel particularly honored that a scholar of religion has been able to put together so many pieces of a very strange puzzle.  Pasulka’s first book was about Purgatory.  Having grown up Catholic that seems a natural enough choice.  Her second book, American Cosmic, focused on a topic that academics were just starting to address at the time—UFOs.  That book justly earned her acclaim.  Encounters takes a few steps further into the mysteries of being human.  Those who experience UFOs have much in common with people who have other extraordinary encounters.  The profiles in this book will give you pause time and again.

Many of us have felt that the unfortunately successful government strategy of ridicule toward experiencers has been a blanket covering up the truth for too long.  I was interested in UFOs as a child and was unmercifully teased for it.  One of the reasons I was interested was that I learned, when I was about eleven, that my grandfather had been interested as well.  I was only two when he died, so there was no way to learn this personally.  It came through discovering a couple of his books that my mother had kept.  Since she was one of five siblings, it’s difficult to say if he’d had any other books on the subject, but being a reasonable kid, I wondered why this was a forbidden topic.  You could talk about ghosts (at least a little bit) and be considered “normal.”  Mention UFO’s and you’re insane.

When the Navy’s video recordings of UFOs—renamed UAPs—were released in 2019, there was silence in the room for about half an hour.  Serious people began to realize there might be something to this.  Of course, those who’d internalized the ridicule response continued to fall back on it, perhaps as a defense mechanism.  That revelation has allowed, however, serious consideration of what is a very weird phenomenon.  I’ve deliberately avoided saying too much about what Pasulka covers in her book.  As I generally intend when I do this, what I’m hinting is that you should read this book.  You should do so with an open mind.  If you do, you might find yourself thinking in some new ways.  Of course, some will ridicule.  Others, however, may walk away with an expanded perception of reality.

Spider Thoughts

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Spiders know.  Spiders are aware of when they’ve been seen.  I’ve been noticing this for some time now.  You can verify this yourself, but it may take some resolve, depending on your level of arachnophobia.  You walk into a room first thing in the morning and see a spider placidly hanging from its web.  If you intentionally look at it, it knows.  Leave the room for at least ten minutes and then come back.  The spider will be gone.  When you first stare at it, it won’t move.  Nature’s flight, fight, or freeze response has a clear winner here.  Spiders play it cool.  This happened recently on a weekend.  I had my wife verify this for me.  I pointed out the spider (I’d already stared at it) and told her I was doing an experiment.  She’s been married to me for thirty-five years, and such things no longer come as a surprise.

I told her my thesis and suggested we both just get breakfast ready as normal.  The spider didn’t move, even with clatter of bowls and spoons.  When my wife went to take her bowl to the sink several minutes later, the spider had vanished.   (This doesn’t seem to apply to spiders actively descending on a web in front of your face, I’ve noticed.  They’re too busy with their spider thoughts.)  Animals are smarter than we give them credit for being.  Who ranks spiders on their list of smart critters?  But they are.  And I wonder what they think of me.  If a spider crawls on me, I run away.  Like a spider I won’t return to the same place where it happened, at least not for some time.  All of this brings Rupert Sheldrake to mind.

Sheldrake has been summarily wiped off the table by other scientists, in part because he has explored the sense of being stared at.  Materialistic science tells us there can be no such thing since being seen is passive and we have no sense organs to detect it.  We have all, however, had the experience of turning around to find that someone has indeed been staring at us.  As so often happens with materialism, we’re told simply to discard it as fantasy.  But that’s not the way it feels.  So I look at my most recent spider—I know there will always be more—and know that s/he knows they’re being stared at.  When you’re small running may not get you away swiftly enough.  Freezing makes more sense.  Freezing and waiting.  The thing you fear (for a spider it’s me) will generally go away on its own, looking for something more material, I suspect.

Unusual Places

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I don’t recall how I first learned about Mitch Horowitz’s work.  I read Occult America as soon as I found out about it—it helped as I was transitioning to writing about religious culture (largely through horror films) since there’s a healthy dose of occult in horror.  While still in publishing Mitch agreed to look at Holy Horror before it landed with McFarland.  The thing about my life is that it’s too busy (9-2-5 isn’t a size that fits all) to keep up with writers I find fascinating.  I hadn’t been aware of Horowitz’s continued, and continuing, book writing.  As soon as I saw Uncertain Places: Essays on Occult and Outsider Experiences I ordered a copy.  It brought back to mind the semester break at Nashotah House when I realized that to get anywhere near the truth you need to question and question boldly.  I told my students that if they didn’t challenge their perceptions with reading during semester breaks they were wasting them.

I met Mitch (although we’ve never seen each other in person) through our mutual friend Jeff Kripal.  They both have the courage to question apparent reality and to not stop at the line that the wall of materialism throws up around the pursuit of knowledge.  Uncertain Places is well titled.  Like almost all collections of essays some speak to the reader more than others, but I found myself pausing frequently to consider what I’d just read here.  One thought that keeps recurring is how even someone with a terminal degree can constantly feel like there’s so much more to explore.    Horowitz is a seeker unashamed.  And that also took me back to my past.

Growing up poor, I didn’t have many resources other than my mind to help draw some preliminary conclusions about reality.  Like many red-neck families of the time we had a CB radio and we were each instructed to come up with a “handle.”  I believe it was my mother who suggested “Searcher” to me.  She knew that I would never stop looking.  Uncertain Places is the work of another searcher—one who’s less fearful than I tend to be.  (I’m working on it.)  Reality, it seems clear to me, is far more subtle than most of higher education has taught me that it should be.  We try to make occult scary and demonic but Horowitz is, like yours truly, an historian.  Those of us who explore the history of religion can find ourselves in some pretty unusual, one might say uncertain, places.  And rather than dismiss what we see there, we take a closer look.