My Weird House, Post 2

Sweet reader, I would be so mortified if by my recording of my so-called paranormal experiences you form the idea that I am one of those silly women (and it usually is women) who believe that nine-tenths of the things that happen to them are haunted and who see in photos of dust motes and lens flares a world of proof and wonder! So if what I say in this post strikes you as ridiculous, think of it not as excited and breathless look-at-me (which I truly hope it is not) but as the commentary of a woman who, through a genetic disposition toward mental imbalance and the ravages of alcohol, is possibly losing her mind, and who is perhaps vaguely aware of it and subconsciously attempting to document it on the way down.

Sometime between 2:15 and 6:45 on the morning of September 23 (the time between my going to bed and getting up), there may have emerged in our house one of those spectacularly undramatic little splinters of weirdness that seem to poke us here every now and then. These events are so nearly pedestrian that they're almost indistinguishable from ordinary occurrences; my husband views them that way, I think, or at least he doesn't seem to spend too much time dwelling on them; and even the booze-riddled magic box in my own head is leaning about three-fourths of the way over on that side, and would already have slipped off the table if it weren't for the tiny catch that each of these episodes, somewhere, has: a little hook of weirdness that snags in my mind and restrains it from splattering onto the clean-scrubbed sterile linoleum of rationality.

It is so easy for our attention to be lured by distraction and diversion! There is a reason why, in the grubbiest and most soiled of human pursuits like thieving, politics, business, and war, misdirection is elevated to a pinnacle of art. And I think that for many of us who stumble blindly through the foggy meadows of the paranormal -- certainly for third-rate intellects like mine -- we all too naturally let ourselves be drawn toward the bonfire flames of the highest strangeness, the ultra weird, the most unsettling tales, partly because they are more fun to listen to (or, if you prefer, more stimulating to the intellect), but also because we may assume that, since these slashes through the cloth of the workaday world are so dramatic and so rare, they must let in a sudden light upon the truth, just as lightning on a dark night instantaneously illuminates the world (before flashing out and leaving one with light-dazed eyes, more blind than before).

But so much has been speculated about the deceptions of paranormal visitors, about the "look at me!" aspect of strange lights, or the ridiculous behavior of entities, that many students of the paranormal wonder if all the drama isn't intended to cover up or conceal something else that is happening while we're mesmerized by the theatrical waving of the magician's visible hand.

John Keel, in The Mothman Prophecies, speculates on the link between UFO lights (the possible diversion) and cattle mutilations (the possible "payoff" for whatever is running the show). I am not a conscientious enough scholar to be sure, but it does seem from the scatterings of information I've picked up (again reminding me that I am attempting to reason from ignorance and should just shut the hell up, but then again when has ignorance ever stopped anybody from exploding half-baked nonsense upon the world) that the two are occasionally paired -- some of the alleged incidents at the Skinwalker Ranch, for instance, suggest this -- but not enough that it seems to be a consistent feature. But of course livestock don't exist just everywhere any more; and who knows what is going on in places where the diversion of lights is seen but no apparent payoff is detected?

I think most of us make a very large mistake, most of the time, in assuming that we have a pretty good idea of what's going on around us; but in reality countless acts, decisions and events -- some of which may turn out to have significant impact on our lives -- are happening all the time that we never do find out about simply because we never notice them ourselves and nobody tells us about them, at least not until after the damage is done and the horse is out of the barn.

One of the biggest fallacies of modern times is believing that everything of import makes it onto the news; one of the biggest fallacies of the rationalist, when he attempts to explain away the weirdness of the world, is to assert that if there were anything to any of this science would have investigated it and everybody would know about it.

My outlook on all of these things -- on everything in fact -- not that I have any great reasons for believing it, it's just the workings of the inner shapelessness and inconsistency of my mind; but I feel that all that we know, or think we know, or perceive, is a blend of real and false, truth and lie; I think some dazzling spectacles of high weirdness likely are Baltic Concessions and German-Soviet Nonaggression Pacts, attempts to pacify and inveigle us so we lower our guard, lessen our suspicions, and close our eyes to what might be going on behind the scenes, whereas other episodes may be the paranormal equivalent of panzers clanking over the frontier.

I am interested in the history of the Soviet Union and a while ago read something that stuck in my mind. In a new biography of Joseph Stalin, the Russian historian Edvard Radzinsky, when discussing Stalin's apparent shock at Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union -- about the preparations for which Stalin had for weeks been receiving rather ominous intelligence -- mentions that Stalin had been tracking the price of mutton in Germany and noticed that the prices were not going up. In the labyrinths of that wily byzantine mind this proved that Hitler was not planning to attack, since if he meant to attack the USSR he would need to lay in a stock of sheepskin winter clothing for his soldiers, which would have diverted sheep from the table to the textile factories, which would have meant that mutton would be in more limited supply and hence more expensive. In reality, it was just that Hitler thought that he'd tear through Russia in a couple of months and be done before it got cold, so Stalin was being a little too sly for his own good; but it opened a splinter of light for me on the kinds of ways that people in intelligence agencies may go about their jobs, ignoring the brightly-lit spectaculars staged by foreign governments in favor of obscure details which on the surface seem meaningless but when collected and analyzed may point to the existence of deeper machinations.

High weirdness is beyond my ken; it doesn't happen to me. But every now and then I am given the equivalent of an odd little newspaper article, or a mysterious spike in the price of a commodity, which possibly suggests that something might be occurring in the shadows that lie beyond. I think it is likely a lot of people experience such things. But, because the events are so minor and unshowy, we tend to ignore them and forget about them, and so a person like me, who has had them happen on and off throughout my life, when asked will usually say that I've had little or no paranormal experience. But if I had compiled them all I might well be able to see a pattern.

I am glad now that I made an effort earlier to set down the details of the last splinter, because now I can go back and see that it jabbed us four months ago almost to the day, and, curiously enough, again occurred one day after one of us (in this case me) had gone away for the weekend.

Like the last episode, this one occurred in our kitchen, which seems to be the room in our house in which most of the weird things occur (the runner-up is our former bedroom, which is above the kitchen).

My husband does not like having our kitchen cabinets left hanging open because he says it will mess up the hinges. Alas for his peace of mind and those poor hinges, I frequently forget to close them, which sometimes earns me a lecture. So on Monday morning I shamble into the kitchen to get the coffee started and he comes in and at some point notices the cupboard over the refrigerator and asks me why I left the door open. I look up and sure enough the cupboard is hanging wide open, but I didn't do it. I never open that cupboard because a) I can't reach it without standing on a chair, and b) there's never been anything in it but some old spraycans left there by the previous owners and some glassware wedding presents which in more than 10 years of marriage I have never had occasion to use.

Now I know doors can swing open on their own. Once we had the hall carpet taken up for a few months and the basement door is so poised that without the carpet to obstruct it, the movement of air caused by your body as you walk into the hall would cause it to drift shut as if under the action of an invisible hand. This never did stop creeping me out, since it always seemed to happen when I was home in the house alone at night, but I understood that it was a perfectly natural occurrence.

The problem with that refrigerator cupboard is that, since it is never used, the hinges are springy and tight. You have to pull it open -- it won't just swing -- and if you don't open it more than halfway it will snap closed again. I got up on a chair and messed with it for ten minutes or so trying to get it to come open on its own but I couldn't manage it.

I finally dismissed it as a fluke, but on the morning of the following Sunday my husband called me into the kitchen because the door was open AGAIN. I confess I felt rather more nervous about it than is strictly mature, particularly when I realized that with the door open you can see the brand name on the glassware box -- Mikasa -- and I wondered if something was trying to tell us "mi casa" or "my house". Not that I'd have any reason to suspect anything in this neck of the woods would be likely to know Spanish, but I suppose it is possible that on some plane of consciousness the meaning of words may eclipse the various phonetic sounds assigned by different languages to those meanings.

In any event, whatever caused that door to open up twice hasn't repeated itself as of yet, more than ten months later. And that is fine with me.

The Gestapo God

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them. And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. -- Job 1:6-7

How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? -- Moby Dick, Chapter 108

...behold, ye have sinned against the LORD: and be sure your sin will find you out. -- Numbers 32:23

I am sorry for the brevity and disjointedness of this post, but I have such a hard time bringing anything to completion that if I don't move hurriedly I will never write down the random thoughts that strike me as meaningful when they clang against the inside of my skull, and in the corrosive waters of my mind random thoughts do not survive very long no matter how loud they clang.

I read or heard somewhere, once, that the frightful omniscience of the Gestapo -- its uncanny swiftness in detecting (so-called) malcontents, deviants, and enemies of the Nazi state -- was due not, as one might assume, to being so large and pervasive as to become an omnipresent entity in German society, for in reality it was almost hopelessly small for its tasks and its operatives spent most of their time at their desks. Rather it was the willingness of the average citizen to tattle on everybody else that lit up so many homes, schools, businesses, and public places with a sleepless eye and a stopless ear.

The thought comes to me (not that I give it much weight, it is just one of those ephemeral what-ifs that sometimes flash, like a poisoned fish in its death twist, through the surface scum of the swamp of my brain) whether the oft-advertised omniscience of so many deities is due not to any inherent power in the gods themselves, monitoring whatever metaphysical phone-taps and surveillance cameras are available to them in their inaccessible bureaucracies in the sky, but to a legion of spies and informers who, unbeknownst to us, travel among us and observe our behavior so they can pour their intelligences into the greedy ears of an isolated god?

Not that this is an original thought, of course -- the idea of gods, even jealous monotheistic ones, making use of numinous messengers and servants is an ancient one, at least in Europe and the Mediterranean. The only reason I have for bringing it up is that, as someone who believes (some of the time) that the numinous does exist, and that there is some kernel of truth in ancient folklore (even if it does come with the coloring of religion, which, in the minds of people smarter than me, automatically establishes anything to be 100% nonsense): if these things were true then, they must also be true now, unless we are to assume that the gods die, or that whatever presences were here to sow those seeds of folklore have long since departed for other worlds or planes.

Somehow that is the most poignant and unsettling of the possibilities to me: not that these entities are, or never were, but that they were once and are gone. Perhaps I have a fear of abandonment, or perhaps it's something else, but there must be something in my psychology that causes certain images to resonate with me when others do not. But I am not going to dive into that bottomless mucky pit today.

Why do I keep returning to all these swamp and bog metaphors?

But enough, um, caressing of the orchid, if you take my meaning. But then again, what do I write here that is not that?

Blah blah blah. It is all well and good for me to speculate facilely on folklore and the paranormal and such, but what I never seem to be able to get through my head is that if I really do believe in, or am willing to grant the plausibility of, these possibilities as I claim I do, then I should not treat them so casually as mere intellectual curiosities and matters of entertainment. If there really are entities going to and fro in the earth and monkeying around in it, that is some extremely serious business. If there is any truth to any of this, it would be wise for me to start cleansing and restoring this sadly deteriorating temple lest all brightness depart from it forever and dark things come to shriek in the rafters. It would be wise for me to do that anyway; clean living is simply a positive good, even if I am nothing more than a bag of animated meat with a bit too much marbling and some rudimentary self-awareness. But it is hard, ye gods, it is hard!

That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered. -- Ecclesiastes 1:15

McFaith

I have read on more than one occasion that studies show that, among the western nations, the United States is by far the most religious.

Of course the number of times one reads an assertion should not necessarily be considered a measure of that assertion's truthfulness. I won't presume to speak for anybody else, but in my case most of my reading is on subjects that are interesting to me, written from an angle that is congenial to (or at least not hurtfully abusive of) my own point of view.

Because of this, the writers I read tend to hold common thoughts and perspectives and, since they are writing on the same subjects, often draw some of their information from shared sources or even from each other; which means that an unverified, erroneous, or false assertion made once, if it is deemed useful or interesting, is likely to be picked up and disseminated throughout the blogosphere, just as in olden times the plague crept its inexorable way from the hovels of the seething East to the barren moors of Scotland. Corrections come too late; once the error begins to spread it can no longer be contained by a lonely voice of truth posting three or four dozen comments down in the original thread, any more than the Black Death in an English port could be stuffed into a cargo box marked refused and shipped back unopened to Byzantium.

Some folks use this as a reason to criticize the modern generation who does most of its research on the Internet; and while I agree that using the Internet as one's exclusive resource is probably in most cases insufficient, at the same time I feel the criticism is perhaps tainted with a smidge of hypocrisy, since books are susceptible to exactly the same contagion of errors. On the Internet at least there is a chance to detect an error early and edit it out before much damage is done; but with a book the error is bound in perishable materials for all time. At this very moment I sit surrounded by musty old tomes many of which, we now know, are full of falsehoods: the antiquated assumptions of the tweed jacket pipe-smoking set and the obsolete science of crew-cuts and horn rims. In the bibliographies of the historical works I have sometimes amused myself, once I learn of an error (so starved do I sometimes find myself for entertainment when I am unable to indulge my grosser cravings), by going through the footnotes and identifying which of the authors sailed the plague-ship into my harbor and which merely had the ill luck of picking up his infection.

And these are only the errors we know about. Who can tell what other as-yet-unrecognized bogus junk my head is now freighted with after all the reading I have done?

Perhaps that is why (or one of the reasons why) I am so gullible and can believe almost anything, and yet can feel sure about nothing; and why science (and indeed all rational thought) has come to seem like such a scam and a shell game to me. Stable, well-balanced minds can see the tip of the iceberg of error and look beyond it to smooth sailing in the wide-open shining sea of truth; my shivering mind, gnawing its nails and cringing on the deck, can't stop fretting about the enormous mass of invisible error that may lurk unseen and deadly beneath the glassy waters. That wide-open shining sea, to me, is not lit by the blessed sun of knowledge but obscured by fogs of doubt; it is clogged with floes and the gnashing of pack ice, until I sometimes feel that, like those old whalers and seekers after the Northwest Passage, my little ship is in danger of being trapped by the winter freeze and slowly crushed to splinters. Let us hope the hold is stocked with plenty of rum to help me through my vigils in the Arctic night!

But this is an awful lot of staggering over the doubtfulness of assertions for me to finally stumble back onto the subject of this post and to say that I see no reason to question this particular assertion about the religiosity of the United States. Not because I have done any sociological or statistical research or examined the evidence in any way, but because it fits in with my existing prejudices and opinions (which is a horrid reason for believing anything) and because it conforms to my own experience and observations (which is a right and valid reason for believing things, although I do not presume to expect anyone to believe that the experience and observations of drunken slatterns carry any meaningful weight).

I suppose I should take a moment now, since it is becoming obvious to me that I'm not going to be able to get to the point (there really is one, I promise) until I get all the tangential junk out of my head, to try to explain what I mean when I say the United States is religious, since religion is one of those sprawling Russias of a noun which contains within its borders a polyglot diversity of concepts. Traditional native American cultures, Pharaonic Egypt, Republican Rome, Medieval France, Reformation England, and modern-day Saudi Arabia are all, one way or another, religious societies, yet what a gulf lies between the religion of the Ottawa shaman and the Saudi Sheik! Nor is the religious component of American culture quite like any of these others -- in fact compared to them the US doesn't really strike me as being very religious at all, but of course we are not saying that the US is one of the most religious societies in human history but only that it is relatively the most religious when compared to the other, more anemic (religiously speaking), modern western nations.

Yet I do believe my country has a distinctive, characteristically American, religious coloring all its own.

This coloring lies not in the authoritarian dominionism that has been a part of our religious makeup since the first patriarchs landed on Plimoth Rocke, nor in the sober conservative churchgoing of the Teutons of the middle colonies, nor in the backwoods revivalist and millenarian fanaticism of the South, nor even in the panglossian mildness of Transcendentalism and Unitarianism (here let us remember that huge swaths of people in each of these regions and faiths are exempt from the unfair broad-brush characterizations of a booze-ravaged trull), although all of these strains remain in our national blood to this day and play a role in making us the most religious of the western lands.

Rather I think it lies in the same attitude of shallow laziness that defines so much of everything else we do as distinctly American. As a people we cover our obligations by flinging out a thoughtless token gesture that costs us nothing. We establish who we are and what we stand for by sticking on one of the pretty labels mass-produced for us by the panopticon of media and marketing saturation from which, like fish slowly eaten alive by the poisoned sludge of a rust belt river, we are never able to escape.

You can see this coloring in the cracked and faded yellow ribbon car magnets that prove how much the owners support our troops^TM; in the pasty face beaming with smug piety when it shows up in church twice a year on Christmas and Easter; in the arteriosclerotic red bald spot of a disgruntled blob who fancies himself linking hands with Washington and Franklin because he just sent off an angry email to his congressman!

(It is also to be seen in the vacuous mumblings of unproductive alcoholic shrews who have turned the whole track of their lives into one interminable train wreck and now pretend that they have any business saying anything to anyone about anything, but here I discretely draw a veil)

Without knowing a single thing about this survey I am going to tie on my magic blindfold and hazard a completely uninformed and ignorant guess as to why the responses were so high in America as compared to Europe:

Because in Europe if you pose the question are you religious? to a person who doesn't pray, doesn't read the Bible, doesn't belong to a church, and doesn't spend any time worrying about the existence of the numinous or what his relationship to it should be, that person is likely to answer NO.

If you pose that same question to an American who doesn't pray, doesn't read the Bible, doesn't belong to a church, and doesn't spend any time worrying about the existence of the numinous or what his relationship to it should be, that person is likely to answer YES.

(I refer to churches and the Bible because of their cultural predominance in the West, not because I mean to slight the many people whose faiths do not include one or the other of them.)

In America we say yes because here religious is the thing to be, even for people who don't take it seriously, whereas in Europe the bloom has gone off that rose. Most of us here want to be seen as spiritual and reverent even when we're not. I'm not going to waste any more of anybody's time speculating as to why this is so or, for the benefit of those who may disagree with me, making the case that it is so. This is long enough and I am hopelessly stranded as it is.

I think it goes without saying that some people, for good or ill, take their religion very seriously indeed and I am not talking about them, nor about dispassionate atheists, agnostics, or others who will have no truck whatever with religion. I am talking about treating our connection with whatever numinous presence or presences may exist (if any do) as a disposable trifle, something we bring out when we need to entertain ourselves or masturbate our egos and then carelessly toss away; about getting our religion from the metaphysical equivalent of the discount bin at Wal*Mart where we grab all the rest of the cheap Chinese slave-labor junk that infests every angle of our lives; about our apparent belief in a star-spangled super-sized Ronald McDonald god who is supposed to shower material prosperity and eternal life on a herd of spoiled self-indulgent brats who spend all day whining in the playroom while the rest of the world sinks in a deepening sea of misery and despair.

Lest anyone think I am casting judgment -- well, I guess I am, but I pour the filth first on my own head. I am as guilty as anyone. In fact I'm more guilty than most because I know better than to be this way; but alas, it has become apparent to me that knowing better and going ahead anyway is the rail on which the little locomotive of my soul is grooved to run.

In the grand scheme of things, of course, none of this matters very much. Answering yes on that survey isn't like waterboarding somebody; answering no isn't going to put food in a hungry baby's stomach. But maybe it does matter just a little, even beyond the possibility that if we paid more attention to some things we might be a better people and create a better world. If the numinous does exist, I wonder sometimes whether at some point our careless unthinking lack of involvement might turn out to have consequences. I don't mean extravagantastic Cecil B. DeMille consequences like burning in a lake of fire for all time or provoking a demigod to come down out of the sky and start smacking people with a rod of iron, but, as befits elusive and inscrutable inhuman presences, something more subtle and strange.

A Curious Phenomenon of Dreams

Today I would like to muse a little bit about a curious phenomenon of dreams which, somehow, I never happened to notice until just recently; which is kind of nice in a way, since it suggests that at my advanced age and stage of mental deterioration my dissolving brain can still, sometimes, find a blind acorn twice a day.

I suppose it goes without saying that these waters are too muddied and too deep for a shallow wader like me to sound, and I trust that the repeated disclaimers on this blog are thick enough that no one who stumbles across it will expect to find substantial answers to anything -- other, perhaps, than the question of just how much damage alcohol can to do a human brain.

But in case you've missed all my sleazy low-rent advertisements (like commercials for Euclid Avenue pawnbrokers broadcast by my local NBC affiliate during Soul Train at 2:00 on Sunday morning), let me say forthrightly here that I don't have any insight or knowledge at all on the nature of dreams: whether they're symbolic phone calls from our subconscious, or the data storage process of the jelly-based hard drive in our skulls, or both, or neither. In my ignorance I have no business speculating, and I know it.

But then again, in the grand scheme of the universe it is an irrelevancy either way. In a very few years nothing will be left of me but some corrupted meat tucked away out of sight and, perhaps, some memories -- mostly less than flattering ones, no doubt -- in the minds of a handful of people who will recall me less and less over time until I am forgotten completely. What will it matter, then, that I sat here scribbling tonight these nonsense pages to be sent forth into the unlistening ether?

But enough of this funereal mood! Divine Bacchus, the most unworthy of your servants beseeches you for the strength to break these sorrowful chains.

So (after a mere six paragraphs of blather) to return to this phenomenon of dreams. It is simply this: why is it, that when we see in a dream someone we know (a parent, a lover, a relative, a co-worker) or someplace we know (the house I grew up in, the house I am living in, my workplace) that, so very often, the person or place does not look anything at all like it actually looks in real life?

Surely our subconscious, or our inner hard drive, or whatever it is that manufactures our dreams, can accurately reconstruct the physical lineaments of our waking hours? In fact we know it can, because there are other times in our dreams when people and places look just like how they "really" are!

What determines, then, whether we get the 'waking reality' version of the object, or the 'dreaming freestyle' one?

One idea that has begun to interest me recently in my dabblings in the paranormal is multiplicity of truths: in other words, the idea that the different types of paranormal phenomena are not identical objects that spring from one single source, but different types of objects whose origins differ depending on the case.

For instance, when most laypeople like me (and even, apparently, some people who put a lot of time into studying these subjects) think of UFOs, we think of them as being mechanical vehicles from other planets, and that's what they are. Or else they're top secret military projects, and that's what they are. Or that ghosts are the spirits of the dead, period. Or demons trying to deceive us, period.

The more I have read and heard, the more I agree with those who think there is some degree of diversity in the paranormal, just as there is diversity in the animal kingdom, and in the plant kingdom, and among our own humble little species. So I find myself thinking that perhaps some UFOs are shadow government black ops, and some UFOs are mechanical extraterrestrial spacecraft, and some UFOs are manifestations of group consciousness, and some UFOs are as-yet-unclassified weather or electromagnetic phenomena, and some UFOs are extra-dimensional entities, and some, needless to say, are misidentifications or frauds.

Perhaps some ghosts are the spirits of the dead; others are imprints recorded on the environment; others are non-human entities of some sort (demons or otherwise); others are temporary chemical imbalances in the brain; and so on.

Alas, the paranormal is a slippery enough eel as it is, and muddying the waters with multiplicities only makes it harder to grapple with, which, no doubt, is why so many people prefer the simple, clean-cut explanations and are so reluctant to consider alternative possibilities. "I know ghosts are the spirits of the dead. Case closed!"

So I wonder if perhaps there aren't different types of dreams? Do we get the "lookalike" dreams from one source, and the "it's not at all like the real thing, but you know that's what it is" dreams from another? Perhaps some dreams are messages from our subconscious; some are data storage processes; some (since I am a woowoo and can believe anything) may be communications received from outside us; some may even be out-of-body experiences.

What purpose is there in giving me a dream in which the house I grew up in, that is apparently supposed to be the house I grew up in (since I recognize it as such in the dream), is laid out differently, and has different furniture and interior design, than the real-world house I really did grow up in? Or in showing me a person I know or have known, very intimately perhaps, and the person looks nothing at all like the real person or, indeed, like anybody else I know?

I fully accept the symbolic nature of dreams (or some dreams). Is there some kind of abstruse symbolic meaning in making an old boyfriend look slight, blond and fair instead of dark, sturdy, and Mediterranean, as he was? Or in putting the kitchen west of the living room instead of north of it? Or in painting the walls off-white instead of the "harvest gold" or "avocado" that covered every wall of the 1970s working class hovel I grew up in?

I've heard it stated by scientists that we dream in black and white. I've always had a hard time accepting this; many of my dreams do seem to have muted colors, it is true, as if seen under a cloudy sky; maybe they really were in black and white. But in other dreams it seems sure to me that there was color -- sometimes very vivid color, as in recent dreams of Cleveland on flame (which did not look much at all like Cleveland, even though it was, supposedly, Cleveland).

In any event, how do scientists know this to be true? Have they somehow managed to dissect the rods and cones in the mind's eye? Now researchers in Japan are claiming to have succeeded in pulling images out of the human brain, but this is a very recent discovery, whereas this assertion that we dream in monochrome has been around for a long time. Or did scientists, as they sometimes do, just declare it to be true to show they're smarter, as they used to declare that pets have no emotions and that silly unscientific pet-owners were simply applying subjective human interpretations to their pets' behavior?

And if it is true that we dream in monochrome -- what does it mean? What is the significance of the fact that the movie theater of our brains is still stuck somewhere in the 1940s, unlike our eyes that have upgraded to the glorious spectacle of technicolor?

Again I am forced to understand just how hopelessly out of my depth I am, and it is quite possible, probable even, that my ignorance makes me perceive sinister glooms and shadows in the sunny light of noon; but in the dull, untutored swamps of my peasant brain I cannot escape the feeling that no matter how you look at it -- and the more we learn about it -- there is something very strange, suggestive, and not altogether comforting about the nature of dreams.

I'm in Love with a Vampire

I'm so paranoid these days that I'm afraid even to use titles like this, lest they become literally true, but at the same time I like having catchy titles (or at least as close to catchy as I can get) so I'll keep it.

Dear reader, be advised, there will be no magical thinking (or any thinking at all, really) in this post! This post is purely about the brain damage end of the business. Not even the gods can be serious all the time; why should we mortals, whose lives are fleeting?

I am feeling unusually happy right now. My dear husband has treated me to a surprise, and I have just had the very pleasurable experience, which I think is really remarkable considering my long history of alcohol consumption, of tasting the most perfect beer of my life: the beautiful, ruby-hued Nosferatu from the local wizards on the mistake on the lake, at the Great Lakes Brewery.

I've tried some of the Great Lakes beers before. They're all delicious (though of course expensive compared to the Natural Lights and Red Dogs of the world, but you pay for quality) and I like the clever names with a local connection. They have a bunch of them:

• Elliot Ness Amber Lager (my favorite, until I tried Nosferatu). This one is named after the famous Untouchable G-Man who became Cleveland's Safety Director in 1935, only to leave under a shadow for never managing to catch the Cleveland torso murderer;
  
  

• Holy Moses White Ale named for Connecticut surveyor Moses Cleaveland (spelling correct), who, in 1796, came to the mouth of the Cuyahoga, thought it would make a great place for a city, and then (like many another person who has come to the same spot) left and never came back;
  
  

• Burning River Pale Ale to remember the infamous episode of June 23, 1969, in which the Cuyahoga river proved to be so grotesquely polluted that it actually caught fire (but who needs clean water, if business turns a profit and politicians get a cut?);
  
  

• Moondog Extra Special Bitter which celebrates "the 1952 Moondog Coronation Ball held at the Cleveland Arena, what many consider the first 'rock and roll' concert" (explanation stolen from Wikipedia);
  
  

• Edmund Fitzgerald Porter to remember the Cleveland ore carrier, immortalized in the song by Canadian folkster Gordon Lightfoot, that on November 10 1975 sank with all hands on Lake Superior;
  
  

• Commodore Perry India Pale Ale in memory of the hero of the War of 1812, who in a battle on Lake Erie became the only naval commander in history to capture an entire British fleet.
  

Great Lakes beers tend to have a higher alcohol content than the usual proletarian swill that dominates the American boozing scene, so they pack a nice good buzz. And Nosferatu is king of the court, tipping the scales with an alcohol content of 8%!

The problem for me, apart from the cost, is that I find them very heavy and yeasty; it's like drinking liquid bread. Not that I mind it -- in fact I like it a lot -- but they knock me right out. I drink a couple of Great Lakes beers and I go to sleep and gain five pounds.

But back to the positives, Great Lakes beers are the only alcoholic drinks I can enjoy these days that still give me a buzz and make me feel happy. Everything else just makes me sick and crabby.

But that's enough of this. I am going to go suck on another vampire. Nighty night!

Alien Dreams, Part I

First an explanatory note: whenever I speak of aliens on this blog, I am using the word merely as shorthand for the various kinds of entities reported by experiencers of paranormal contact or abduction phenomena; I don't pretend to have any insight or understanding of their true origin.

I know nothing is more irritatingly tedious than listening to some fool spew on about their dreams, and I promise I won't make a habit of it here. I only set these two down because I don't recall ever having dreamt of aliens before being repeatedly exposed over the past several months to accounts of contacts and abductions, and because while I don't usually believe that dreams are anything more than internal processes of our brains, sometimes I do -- at least some dreams, and these two, particularly the second, feel to me to fall into that category.

I do understand that the most probable reason for these dreams is simply that I've been listening and thinking and freaking myself out about the subject, and so my subconscious is playing around with it and my deteriorating brain is going haywire on me and that's all there is to it; but at the same time a part of me buys into the statement often expressed by explorers of the paranormal that the more you think and search and open yourself up to these things, the more they will seek out you. Again, I understand that probably the reason they're "seeking" you is just because you've predisposed your brain to interpret everything it perceives in a certain way, regardless of what's objectively there. But then again, I can't share the absolute certainty of psychologists and materialist-rationalists that the things we perceive in altered states of consciousness are mere imaginations of the mind; such reasoning strikes me as fundamentally flawed because it is based on an erroneous assumption: alien entities absolutely do not exist, nuh-uh no way; therefore anyone who sees them has to be hallucinating, misinterpreting, or lying.

Of course, most psychologists and materialist-rationalists, being educated, rational, and brilliant people who wish to appear educated, rational and brilliant, will happily admit that alien entities probably exist all over the cosmos; they just don't happen to exist in the one spot of the cosmos where their presence would be inconvenient for the beliefs of educated, rational and brilliant people.

Oh, if only I could bottle my self-loathing vitriol and drink it in its fermented state, what a happy woman I would be.

Anyway, to my mind it seems just as reasonable to assume (since that's all any of us are doing, whatever lies some people may tell themselves) that these entities really do exist, but that for some reason (and many intriguing speculations have been put forth) we are unable to perceive them in our conscious, waking state.

But I've wandered long enough for now. Onto the first dream, which strikes me as by far the less interesting of the two I've had.

As it begins I am surrounded in darkness, nestled snugly but perhaps a little anxiously in the darkness, and I know I am watching or about to watch a film, though not on a screen, or at least I can't detect the screen; it's as if I'm looking through a glassless window onto the real world. I have a very dim sense of seeing one or two lines of opening credits, though if I did I have absolutely no recollection of what they may have represented: peoples' names or the title of the film or whatever.

It opens on a farm in a rural area at night: ten o'clock, I seem to know, though it feels later. I am looking down upon the scene; low mountains in the distance, perhaps a lake or river, certainly there are many trees; and a starless sky with a pale-bright full moon, to which my eye is drawn. There is a dirt road, a fence I think, a large wooden building like a stable and perhaps a cluster of outbuildings. A house? I can't recall. I seem to remember smoke rising from a chimney, but can't say for sure. The impression is of utter isolation in a sparsely-populated region miles from nowhere; it is so difficult for me to remember, but it strikes me that my feeling was an odd mixture of cozy enchantment (because I'd love to live in a place like this) mingled with an undercurrent of anxiety (because I'd hate to be alone in such a place at night) that seems to be present throughout this dream.

I watch this scene for a few moments. Overall I think I enjoy it, I get a good feeling from it. I like the little quiet place out in the country. And now I am shown that the night wears on by a weird sequence of the moon. You've probably seen the kind of time-lapse shot or whatever it is where you are looking at the night sky, and the position of the moon gradually fades from one spot to reappear in another. In this case something odd happens; the old position of the moon doesn't seem to fade out so much as the moon seems to split itself like an amoeba, or perhaps turns to a box and then fades out and reappears as a peanut shape or as an orb that extrudes something from itself until it assumes a peanut shape. I seem to recall seeing a sharp black line briefly appear through the place where the two moons joined. I can't sort out in my mind now just exactly what happened with it. But in the end the moon became a pale-bright orb again, just a little lower in the sky directly beneath where it was before.

My view drifts down to a close-up of the stable. I have the sense that something needs to be done: a few simple last-minute chores, perhaps, prior to shutting the place down for the night or the season, and there's a sense of peace and completion such as I feel when being the last one out of the office at night mingled with that same underfeeling of unease, as if I want to get out of there quickly because I'm suddenly nervous being there in the dark by myself, or am afraid that someone or something might show up soon, or will show up soon. I seem to have become part of the film now, to be the person who is involved in the plot, but as I think of these things to be done somebody else comes on scene and I split back to being a watcher again; whether she's the star or a minor character I can't tell, but it's Sigourney Weaver, apparently, in a white blouse and cream-colored jeans or riding pants. She is the one who is taking care of these last-minute things, though I don't remember seeing her actually do anything. Maybe she finished up just before coming on, or maybe it gets done behind the scenes as she's there.

She gets in the car. Do I feel that we (she, me?) are now safe, or that we waited too long and are now on the brink of disaster? It's all mixed up in my head. But as she drives along, and I seem to be floating outside the car moving along with it, looking at her in profile as the night countryside speeds by in a blur, I either see or have the sense that now Richard Gere is looking at this scene as film footage frame by frame, holding a small screen in his hands and peering intently at it, and whether I'm him or there next to him or watching him as an actor in a film on my own screen I can't say. As with most of my dreams, the details afterward are horribly confused. But I know, because it seems to be the whole point of the film, that Sigourney is going to encounter an alien; I am watching for it, waiting for it, and sure enough, as I watch the blurry black background outside the car window move past frame by frame, a grayish-white blur pops into view.

There it is! I think, and I may feel exultant at having seen it or calmly assured by what I had known was going to happen, but I'm certainly not scared or concerned in any way. The film slows even more now and I watch as the blur clicks horizontally closer toward Sigourney -- although the car was moving from left to right, and the alien blur, as I recall, did not appear at the right side of the screen and work its way to the left as you would normally expect if she were driving toward something on the roadside; as I recall the blur appeared suddenly in the middle of the screen and seemed to move toward the right faster than the car did, or maybe kept pace with the car. Still no fear. And the film slows down even more, because we want to get a really good look at this alien, and apparently in the mechanics of this dream the more you slow down the film the clearer and sharper the objects it captures will be. I am excited, athrob with anticipation; I want to see the alien!

So the film slows to a stop, and there it is, clear as a bell, staring right into the car, its elongated head and huge black eyes and tiny mouth slackly open like a confused old man's, the neck so thin and short that it's barely not even there, thin as thread, and I think I see a long flexy arm, maybe its right arm stretched impossibly behind its back to reach around on its left side toward the car window, and though I was expecting to see its face and, as I thought, prepared for it, the sudden clarity of it huge and looming at the window scared the bejesus out of me and I burst awake with a scream or some kind of violent convulsion that woke my husband, who is a dead-snoring log sleeper.

Unlike some scary dreams, the fear of this one immediately dissipated as soon as I realized I was awake and had been dreaming. It wasn't until I started meditating over it there in the dark night and conjuring up visions of them trying to get at me through wormholes in the realm of sleep that I began to work myself into a state.

I certainly don't expect anyone to see any usable significance in what is surely just another dream. But for whatever pittance it may be worth, you are welcome to it.

Why I Keep My Thinking to a Minimum

In my case it's like trying to drive a nail with my breasts. It hurts and the results are unsatisfactory. And now it can even make me fat:

"Caloric overcompensation following intellectual work, combined with the fact that we are less physically active when doing intellectual tasks, could contribute to the obesity epidemic currently observed in industrialized countries," said lead researcher Jean-Philippe Chaput at Laval University in Quebec City, Canada.

Now I don't pretend that I really understand any of that; I tried, but my jeans started to feel tight and it seemed wiser to abandon the attempt.

I can now appreciate, though, why legitimate science refuses to so much as consider silly sky fairy subjects like UFOs: what intelligent, rational, level-headed scientist would waste time on a nonsensical phenomenon for which there is nothing more than trace evidence, radar responses, and thousands of eyewitness reports (or, to use the proper scientific terminology: mass hypnosis, delusions and lies, and in any event eyewitness testimony is completely invalid anyway) when fascinating answers to the real mysteries of the ages are to be obtained by watching college kids work on computers and scarf tater chips?

As many a parabnormally-minded person has long known: if only we could make UFOs, ghosts, or cryptozoology as lucrative a pursuit as the weight loss industry, the Jean-Philippe Chaputs of the world would grab their laptops and microscopes and hurl themselves shrieking onto that fabulous El Dorado gravy train in the manner of, as the elegant phrase has it, stink on a monkey.

Not that I have anything against Dr. Chaput or his work; I am sure he's a fine human being and a scrupulous researcher, and of course all scientific discovery is worthwhile. I just like to bitch.

And now I drink a draft of the magical brew from my cup and uncloak my mind for the ravishment of the oracular god. HEAR AS YOUR PRIESTESS REVEALS THE ULTIMATE MYSTERIES WHICH WILL BE PROVEN BY SCIENCE AT THE END OF TIME:

1) everything makes you fat; and

2) everything also causes cancer or otherwise kills you.

The full horrifying article is available here.

Because I'm Drunk and Annoyed and Reading the Internets at 2:00 in the Morning...

Dear Forum Poster:

No one has any business taking you seriously if you:

• use a Greco-Roman pseudonym (on edit: uh-oh -- but then again, I rest my case)
  

• treat Shakespeare like he matters more than any other great writer of the past 400 years
  

• use the phrase: Wow. Just. Wow.
  

• use the word sheeple
  

• can't discuss contemporary sociopolitical issues without making references to obesity, waddling, Wal*Mart, sixpacks, etc.
  

• can't discuss contemporary sociopolitical issues without making references to Hitler and the Nazis
  

• think you're saying something profound by posting song lyrics.
  

Dude, You Just Stepped in Some Bigfoot

As I am writing this, the much-ballyhooed Georgia Gorilla press conference, scheduled for today, has yet to burst its bombshell upon the world; but based on the little commentary I have read, and the pictures I have seen...

I confess that I believe (some of the time) in the wisdom of the people (that is to say, folklore) which acknowledges that tiny bands of large hominids, unknown in the taxonomies of scientists, really do exist in unhumaned places like the white emptiness of the Himalayas and, elusive as the corpse of D.B. Cooper, in the black, shaggy wilds of the Pacific Northwest.

Since I accept the verdict of folklore, I believe that it is quite possible, especially in light of the continuous diminishment of the American wilderness, that the body of one of these creatures could eventually be found.

I would love, really love, for their existence to be proven, though in the end, objectively, it would amount to nothing more than the discovery of yet another animal previously unkown to science (I'm aware of a speculation that these creatures may be at least partially paranormal, but personally I don't find that speculation persuasive for no other reason, really, than that I simply don't have any interest in believing it). As we continue to tear up the jungles and probe and poison the oceans, previously unknown animals are discovered frequently enough that we have ceased to be shocked by it. What's the big deal?

And yet "Bigfoot" isn't just another animal. For reasons I don't have the energy to explore, he has long since become wrapped up in the same kind of wide-eyed fraudulent kookery that, accidentally or not (I believe the answer is a bit of both), has long since come to infest and discredit every aspect of the paranormal. Because of this, otherwise rational and intelligent people who don't bat an eye when a new frog or butterfly or flower is discovered, and who would probably lay down money on the odds that more frogs, butterflies, and flowers are still out there waiting to be discovered, lose their heads and become all giggly and illogical at the thought that a large primate could thus far have escaped the net of the zoologists.

Regan Lee has been tracking the obsession that a certain branch of the fundamentalist materialist-rationalist orthodoxy appears to feel for this subject, an obsession which, in my opinion, is rather unwise since it seems to me that of all "paranormal" phenomena the existence of an unknown primate is the easiest to prove, and the most likely to be proven: again, it is simply the discovery of another unknown animal. But because of the heaps of subjective baubles with which we've all loaded this particular animal, its discovery would be interpreted as a mighty vindication of the "Woo" community and an intellectual Stalingrad (in the German sense) for the "Reality-based" one.

The oracle slurred by your priestess: when weaving your security blanket, do not choose the thread most likely to unravel.

If a large hairy hominid ever were discovered, I believe it would be interesting and very instructive scientifically (if you consider psychology a science) to monitor the reaction of certain fundamentalist materialist-rationalists. It is said by them that they would accept the discovery with the same placid equanimity with which they welcome any evidentiary revelation that furthers our understanding of the world we live in.

I don't buy it. Not for a second. It is my suspicion (and I'm willing to wager my drinking of booze on it, so convinced am I that I'm right) that our hypothetical psychologists would be recording not gentlemanly smiles of complacence, but symptoms of depression, denial, and anger. I half expect that, if a Sasquatch body ever really were found, that some particularly distraught reality-based anthropoid would take it upon himself to strap on a pack of dynamite and jihad himself upon the offending carcase, obliterating the shattering of his cozily manageable world in a fiery Jahannam of blended primate parts.

But I don't think he'll need to be joining the Academy of the Illuminated Martyrs just yet. After an initial flush of excitement it seems to me, as to most other people in the paranormal community, that based on what has been released thus far, unless this story turns out to have a super-shocking Twilight Zone twist at the end it can't possibly be anything other than a hoax -- and apparently not a particularly skillful one.

Saturday morning update: press conference "inconclusive"; blood in the water; if these fine examples of the blessings of democracy really do turn out to have a body now, I'll stop drinking. The hoaxing process is fascinating to me, particularly the point at which it gets away from you and stops being fun; the thought of lawyers intrudes, and you have to keep juggling faster and faster to keep the wolves from your door.

The Hungry Gods, Part III

(This post is a continuation of The Hungry Gods and The Hungry Gods, Part II)

I distinctly remember reading or being told once, years ago, that human sacrifice developed after animal sacrifice, when someone came to the conclusion that since the life of animals like goats and bulls were desireable to the gods, how much more delectable must be the life of the most precious animal of all? and ever since I've operated under that assumption. But the scholarship in my recent reading takes the view that the earliest sacrifices were human, and that animal sacrifice developed afterward as a way to satisfy the rituals without having to kill somebody. Echoes of this are believed to be preserved in stories like biblical Abraham sacrificing Isaac (who at the last moment was saved by the appearance of a goat), or of the Greek Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia (who in earlier accounts was killed, but in later ones was saved and replaced with a deer).

The author of I, Claudius, British litterateur and reputedly somewhat dodgy classicist (and mushroom-eater) Robert Graves, wrote an extensive explication of Greek mythology in which he sees in nearly every human male who gets looked at crosswise the memory of the ritual murder of a sacred king, in the days before animals were on the menu. My advice to impressionable teenagers and children is to steer clear of this book. It's been nearly twenty years since I read it and I still remember the feeling of sickening horror that seeped into me as I digested account after account of kings being torn apart, beheaded, burned alive, shot full of arrows -- and that's only the first half of volume one. Nor am I the only one to feel this way, judging from the reviews on Amazon and my college classics professor's remark still preserved in my dusty notebooks: It's a nightmare work. It can get to you if you're not careful. It really can!

If human sacrifice really did precede animal sacrifice (and I don't dispute the scholars), to my mind this pretty effectively torpedoes the kindergarten-level rationalist approach I've been trying to use in looking at the subject. It's no longer a case of "here, take some of our wheat and leave us the rest" or "share a meal with us to nourish yourself in the afterlife dear grandfather" or "how can we cadge a mutton dinner out of the tribe?" It's a case of somebody somewhere (and not just in one isolated place either) coming to the conclusion that in order to make things right somebody has got to die.

Even so I cannot entirely abandon my infantile attempts at rationalism. I can imagine cases of starvation, in which cannibalism was a desperate last resort and the guilty or horrified survivors tried to rationalize it with the invention of a ritual -- if early person felt guilt and horror about such things. But then the question is: why continue the ritual when it was no longer necessary? Was ancient person forced to resort to cannibalism all the time? Or did he just discover that, like Alferd Packer, he liked it?

I can imagine someone, an outlaw or outcast perhaps, or maybe a stranger, perishing or being killed and left to lie on the ground. Perhaps the corpse has seeds in its stomach or in a bag, and as the body decomposes and springtime comes the seeds sprout; or perhaps it is left to lie in a patch of some wild food plant and the fertilized plants grow better where the body lay; or perhaps carnivores or scavengers come after it and are harvested by the hunters; and so people come away with the idea that the death of a man produces food.

Perhaps food is scarce and somebody is making himself obnoxious, complaining about being hungry or stealing food from others. Someone else flies in a rage and kills him, perhaps unintentionally, but now there's a bit more for everyone else to eat and the tribe is saved.

I am sure you can imagine more scenarios, but the scenarios are not really the crucial point. The crucial point is to resolve two big questions:

1. Why would human sacrifice perpetuate itself?
   
   
2. Why would human sacrifice perpetuate itself everywhere?
   

It seems to me that human sacrifice can only perpetuate itself if people believe they are gaining something from it. It seems to me also, from the very little I know of "primitive" peoples, that they don't make a habit of killing themselves off on a regular basis, apart from possibly extracting very little ones from the mouth pool during lean times Of course everyone is perfectly happy to kill off folks from other tribes, and maybe this is what fed the earliest sacrifices -- though I wonder, in those ancient times, if there were really all that many different tribes crawling over each others' feeding grounds.

If, as in my second and third scenarios, people believe that killing someone produces food or leaves more for others to eat, you can see why sacrifice would perpetuate itself. People need to eat continually, and so someone would have to die on a regular basis. But wouldn't there have been a time beforehand when the people could remember plants growing and animals being caught without somebody needing to die? Wouldn't they, as hunter-gatherers, ever migrate to richer pastures in which they had spilled no blood, but were none the poorer for it? Maybe once you've stared starvation in the face and are miraculously saved by a corpse you forget everything that comes before or after, and as an evolutionary tactic with your god-gene brain adopt the idea that inventing a corpse produces food.

But then this begs the question of how you move away from human sacrifice once you've been practicing it for a while. If you've come to believe it's producing food for you, or doing anything else of importance for you, who'd be the first one foolish enough to say, "hey, let's try just killing a goat instead and see how that works?" And who in the group would go along with that? "Sure, let's take a chance on angering the god and STARVING TO DEATH!"

It also begs the question of how the god gets into it, or indeed where gods come from at all. Would early person, completely integrated into nature, concoct a fantasy that some invisible sky being made plants and animals for men to eat? Would he not be more likely to assume that plants and animals were just there? I have a hard time remembering much of my very early childhood, but I don't recall, in playing outside amidst the grass and the trees, or in looking at the sun or the moon or the snow or the storms, ever having the idea that anybody made them; they were just there because that's how the world was.

Granted, if you're taught something as a child you'll grow up believing it and will propagate that belief to your own children -- unless, of course, you take the other traditional course of indoctrinated children and rebel utterly against the belief. But whatever course you choose, someone, somewhere, still must have originated the belief that was passed on to you, and the belief must have been deemed acceptable by a large enough percentage of the community to be worthy of passing on. I doubt early people were any keener to buck the consensus than their 21st century descendants.

But I confess I have a hard time believing that early people, out of whole cloth, just stitched together the idea of invisible superheroes in the sky who made things work. It's easy to imagine a scenario in which one person might do it; maybe he's schizophrenic and sees things. Maybe a whole tribe eats a bunch of whacky mushrooms and sees crazy things flying all over the place. But we're still left with the question of how belief in the invisible supermen spreads itself to human tribes everywhere. Are we to assume that missionary work went over better in those days than it's ever done in recorded history? Even if you have mind-blowing mushrooms to distribute? (well, okay, the mind-blowing mushrooms might persuade some folks, I mention no names).

My personal theorizing over this is hopeless bunk. I know nothing about it. And while I can't claim to have read about the subject in detail, I feel justified in saying that, of the little I have read, about 99% of it is also hopeless bunk. So why am I even bothering? I should just shut up.

But I can't shut up just yet. One theory does appeal to me very strongly. I first saw it raised in conjunction with some comments on the strange visual descriptions in Homer (the author apparently not buying into the old tradition of Homer being blind, which might account for strange visual descriptions); it has since popped up once or twice elsewhere. I'm ignorant of everything but the shallowest shape of it (perhaps the reason it appeals to me so much, since I need most things to be shallow):

The brain of early person worked differently than our brains work today. His way of perceiving the world was constitutionally different from ours.

Like I say, I don't know whose idea this is, or anything about the argument really; but even the sketchy outline of it rings true to me -- and it offers a solution to the questions over which I've been chasing my tail. The concept of gods and spirits could have developed universally early on, could have called forth serious responses like human sacrifice, because early person, as far as his mind could tell, was literally experiencing gods and spirits as a reality as concrete as the herbs he ate, the deer he chased, or the rain that fell on his head.

Most of us nowadays do not hear the voices of burning bushes or see shades coming up from the underworld because our brains do not use the same filters that were given to early man.

Of course this does not necessarily mean that gods and spirits are real (although I do believe, usually, that the numinous exists, and that it can still be perceived by at least some of us, at least ephemerally); it only means that early man's brain was forming certain impressions of the world around him -- impressions that may be beyond our reach today.

I think it is likely that our rationalist-materialist approach to things may well have been beyond the capabilities of early man, try as he might to grasp them. The filters are different. Why would science and technology progress but slightly for thousands of years, then suddenly shoot into the stratosphere over two centuries? Although it is fashionable in some quarters to attribute the technological stagnation of the past to a belief in sky fairies, belief in sky fairies is no inherent obstacle to the employment of science, as is proven by the works of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans (please remember that I am reined in by my western bias, I do not mean to slight anyone elsewhere).

But then again, who has a better understanding -- a more visceral, instinctive, and intimate understanding, a real understanding -- of the world we live in?

The naked savage who is a part of it, who lives, eats, drinks, sleeps, poops, mates, and dies in it? Who has to learn every detail of it, to recognize every hint of benefit and every whisper of danger, or he dies right quick?

Or the modern feeble thing in a sterilized lab-coat, festering with allergies and neuroses, sitting in an ergonomic chair in a climate-controlled flourescent chamber, peering through spectacles into a microscope for twelve hours straight and letting a box of plastic and silicon do nine-tenths of his thinking for him?

The modern feeble thing asserts that he does. Sometimes he gets really angry, pathologically angry, if you suggest there's anything he can't understand.

I've been around modern feeble things when the air conditioning broke. My impulse is to side with the howling cave painter.

I think the modern feeble thing lives in a magic bubble of Newtonian corn syrup and ego. I think he is one poke away from disaster. Some people think a great big poke is coming soon. I hope not, because I'm a modern feeble thing myself and don't want my cozy little bubble to be popped.

At first I thought I was rambling again, hugely rambling, but now it feels like somehow or other I've gotten to the place I needed to be, because after three long incoherent posts on this subject I've finally managed to stumble upon the core premise with which I should have begun.

At times it is -- depending on my mood -- my suspicion, belief, or even intuition (or perhaps just varying degrees of wishful thinking) that early person was tapped into the raw existential truth of life on this planet in a way that we cannot begin to conceive. I believe early person, while he almost certainly lacked the capacity to explain it or reason it out, had a much deeper awareness of how humanity and the rest of the planet interact with each other. Without understanding the details of their arguments, I tend to side with those who speculate that the evolutionary advantages in the development of the human brain involved more than just the ability to invent tools and language. I believe the human consciousness may hold, or may once have held, gifts and powers that millennia ago were chained up in a chest and shoved under a pile of junk in the attic. Perhaps the contents of the chest moldered away long ago and it is not possible now for us to recover anything more than the empty chest, or at most a lingering whisper of the fragrance of whatever was in the chest.

It is my suspicion (some of the time) that early man did not invent gods and spirits out of whole cloth, but that he was describing and reacting to something that really was there for him, something that he could perceive as solidly as the herbs, the deer, and the rain. I suspect (some of the time) that all of the mess, nonsense, and fraud that man has been heaping up in his religions since long before the reign of Akhenaten originates not from further elaborations on a fanciful conceit of the cavemen, but from a loss of understanding and involvement with the entities or energies that glided around caves and groves but were either shut out from or chose not to enter irrigation ditches and the stone halls of palaces.

In short, I am proceeding from the premise that early person developed and perpetuated the concept of sacrifice because something was there to accept the sacrifice.

Now I must pause and regroup. More to come!

The Hungry Gods, Part II

(This post is a continuation of The Hungry Gods)

First an explanatory note: whenever I speak of gods on this blog, I am usually using the word as shorthand for some kind of numinous (or at least a "not-like-us") presence. I don't pretend to have a clue as to what that presence really may be: supernatural or extradimensional beings, extraterrestrial or cryptoterrestrial visitors, a unifying energy force or cosmic consciousness, an advanced human civilization, a hallucination, or nothing at all.

So many mysteries lie buried in the depths of time. How can anyone determine at this late date how the first stirrings of religion made themselves felt in humankind? In my last post I assumed that the ritual of sacrifice was developed by the earliest people, but this may not be true. Perhaps sacrifice is not conceived until society develops some small system of food surplus, through the pastoral herding of animals or the rudiments of agriculture. Perhaps it isn't conceived until the city priests see a way to extort food and treasure from the nameless masses who aren't known to them and before whom (and behind the swords of the temple guards) they don't feel any guilt about amassing wealth. In any event, once someone hit on the idea, how did it spread? Is it something that each tribe discovered on its own in its own time, or did it travel by word of mouth, or did one of those strange telepathic broadcasts occur similar to which, as I've read, a successful new behavior in one bird seems to be instantly adapted by the rest of its species in the area?

Who can say? I think it is extremely difficult to discover the thought processes of the earliest people. I wonder sometimes how close even the most insightful and rigorous professionals can come. The concept of living as early person did in perfect animal union with nature is completely and utterly alien to our minds. At bottom we are supposed to be the same product -- but perhaps not, for who knows how the parings of natural selection and the influence of bizarre meddlers like toxoplasmosis have messed with the recipe over 200,000 years or more? Perhaps even the last remote stone-age persons discovered over the past century in the jungles of the Amazon or the South Pacific are significantly different from original person. But even if we are identical chemically to him, certainly our psychological and intellectual configuration (at least in everyone who is not an isolated stone-age tribe) must diverge significantly from his by the tens of millennia of cultural accretions and transformations that human beings have made in the way we understand and interact with our environment. Surely the compulsion to eat must be a fundamental human instinct, innate and unchanging regardless of when and where one lives; yet I have to imagine that the brain of a cave painter or a Bushman or a Pottawatomie, who deep down in the core of his being never knows where his next meal is going to come from if it comes from anywhere at all, interfaces with his instinct in a profoundly different way from those of us here in the illustrious and enlightened West who deep down in the core of our being cannot conceive of our next meal not being a 5-minute drive from the supermarket or the Burger King.

But as usual I am rambling everywhere except where I meant to go. Whoever is responsible for evolving the idea, the original intent seems clear: sacrifice must have been conceived originally as some kind of payment, compensation, consideration, or the like, to a mystical power who could not be compelled in hopes that the power would be persuaded to do or not do something; just as in our own time struggling shopkeepers pay protection money to strongarm men, or 90% of a sheepflock is sheared to the bone in winter to support the 10% who own 90% of the pen and control the wolves. I make these comparisons because the usual assumption, at least among us laypeople, is that early person, with his unenlightened childlike booga-booga mind, must have feared the inscrutable, ineluctable, arbitrary power of the gods he imagined infesting the world around him. But this may not be so.

I admit I don't know much about "primitive" person, but from the little I have picked up the suggestion is that cultures who are much more attuned to the natural world, like pagan barbarians or 17th century American Indians, feel rather less surprise and dismay over nature's harsh surprises and realities than do people who have started to move themselves out of nature. Also I have read numerous commentaries from antique whites who interacted with the unconquered peoples of the Americas or the Polynesias and were amazed at the equanimity shown by the darker people in the face of death. Not that the native people wanted to die, but they did not feel the irrational terror of it that civilized folks do. So I think it is possible that perhaps early person was perhaps less frightened, or at least more accepting, of the powers of the gods than we may give him credit for.

Perhaps too the first gods were not lords of terror and destruction blazing down off the mountain the way they do now to massacre everyone they can get their hands on, but helpful little approachable gods who didn't try to pass themselves off as omniscient, omnipresent, or omnipotent but who could be counted on to help you out to the best of their ability; the same kind of gods whose echo is heard in the spirits of the ancestors, in the lares and penates of the Romans, and in Catholic saints.

In fact now that I am on the subject I recall reading once (probably in a long-discredited work by an anthropologist who himself has long since been gathered to the bosom of his fathers) that the earliest numinous presences to whom humans paid homage were not gods but the spirits of ancestors. And now it becomes clear to me. Probably my earlier assumption is wrong. In the beginning sacrifice was probably not conceived as a bribe, but as an act of love and duty, in the same way that (as one example) modern Mexicans, still honoring the ancient traditions of the Mesoamerican Indians, bring food and gifts to the cemeteries on the Day of the Dead.

Certainly, by far the majority of sacrifices that I've come across in my reading took the form of food. In part this could be because at the lower stages of human development food was about the only commodity available to give. But probably I'm trying to think too much, and that never works out well. At bottom it's probably no more complicated than the simple recognition that the numinous, like babies or old folks or pets or flocks, needed to be fed.

So what do the gods like to eat? If they're cooking for themselves, says Homer, Ambrosia and Nectar. But humans can't make that, so when humans do the job the gods have to be content with human food. Occasionally the old books mention libations of wine, milk and honey, beer perhaps; occasionally they mention shewbread, grain-offerings, cakes. Personally I would be the wine and cake kind of goddess myself. But far and away, when the gods gather to feast at the table of man, they are going to be dining on meat. Over and over and over again the folks in the Mediterranean world (which I base my thinking on because I am most familiar with it, though I realize people elsewhere may have done things completely differently) go on record as offering up bulls, heifers, calves, rams, ewes, lambs, kids, doves, and so on, to satisfy the hunger of the gods. Sometimes parts of the animal are burnt and the gods are believed to feed on the savor of the smoke; sometimes the blood is spilled onto an altar or allowed to soak into the ground and the gods are believed to absorb that. I've read some commentary that the difference depends on whether the presence inhabits the sky or the underworld, but if memory serves the accounts themselves are not consistent: sometimes YHWH gets smoke, sometimes blood; and the same is true for Zeus or Apollo. I could be remembering wrong, or maybe the difference has to do with the ritual in question, or maybe I'm just not understanding it right.

Sometimes (depending on the ritual) humans are permitted to share the meal, sometimes not. But the god is always getting fed.

In the biblical story of Cain and Abel the point is explicitly made that grain offerings just don't cut it. YHWH, apparently, prefers to be a carnivore (which is perhaps not surprising, considering his Old Testament behavior). I see no reason to argue against those who say this story symbolizes, or mythologizes, a conflict between agrarian and pastoral peoples; it rings true to me that it does. But at the same time, everything is so layered that I am not sure it is right to discard a more literal interpretation. I admit I am making assumptions for which I have no good grounds, but my assumption is that, usually, a myth or symbol, rather than being invented out of thin air, attaches itself in the human subconscious to an actual object or event, though of course in the telling the original object or event may become exaggerated or distorted; and so, because of this assumption, I proceed on the idea that this mythologized account of farmers and herders at odds is affixed to the memory of an actual incident in which a farmer killed a nomad, or one brother killed another in a fit of passion, or (since I can believe almost anything) a god evinced some sign of reacting better to a bloody banquet than to a vegetarian buffet.

I suppose the life force of an animal is judged (at least in the consciousness of us fellow animals) to be more potent than the life force of a plant, and thus more invigorating for the god; and that is why animals are deemed to be a more effective offering. If plants perceptibly screamed and writhed when they were cut, perhaps there would have been no difference in the olden time between offering the gods a salad or a steak.

I was going to suggest that maybe meat was harder to get or more expensive than grain or drink, or perhaps people liked it better, so it was preferred because the ritual allowed the celebrants to have a justification for eating it; but the fact that in some rituals the celebrants were not to touch the meat weakens this idea.

Suffice it to say that the gods must eat, and we humans must feed them.

We humans must feed them.

Something literal and horrifying emerges from these words. Listen closely: do you catch that little whisper? It is the whisper of a darker truth -- the echo, centuries old, of the shrieks that once pealed from Tenochtitlan's bloody heights and the abominable vale of Ben-Hinnom.

More to follow, I hope.

The Hungry Gods

The other day I was listening to Todd Sheet's Nightwatch podcast. The guest, author Chris Ebert, was talking about Voodoo; early in the conversation he mentioned that an associate of his was a Voodoo priestess, and that she was also a member of PETA and didn't sacrifice animals. The first thought that sprang into my head (since I am completely ignorant of Voodoo, along with just about everything else) was, how could her rituals possibly be effective without a sacrifice to propitiate or otherwise engage the services of the powers? I know that asking that question shows I am relying on a number of assumptions -- all of which are probably wrong -- but, to rework the aphorism of the old duke, one of those incompetent toy soldier aristocrats whose fumblings in realpolitik ruined his king, bankrupted the nation, and butchered oppressed and impoverished peasantry by the hundreds of thousands, you think things out with the brain you have, not with the brain you wish you had.

Mr. Ebert went on to say that the decline in animal sacrifice is general, and that many Voodoo practitioners nowadays will ask for a sacrifice not of animals, but of money; not necessarily as a payment for their services (though that may be partially the case), but for you to prove to yourself, to the priest(ess), and to the spirit power that you are serious about your request: for in the 21st century, what is rarer and more precious to most of us than money or time? This was a novel thought to me, one that I'd never considered, but it rings true: If I had a goat or a pig it would be a considerable inconvenience to me and I'd be glad to get rid of it; but when I'm forced to give up an hour of drinking or vegetating time, that hurts!

But the reason for this post is not to talk about Voodoo, but to muse a little over the idea of sacrifice. I know others must have gone as far toward finding answers as it is possible to go: scholars, anthropologists, students of religion and who-not must have devoted countless hours of time and thought to investigating the origin and purpose of sacrifice in religion; if I really wanted to inform myself on this issue I could read them. But I did not come here to be informed, but only to talk things out to myself in an effort to provide some therapeutic stimulus to my too-long atrophied mind.

Looking at it from a purely rational standpoint, I suppose the argument goes something like this: early humans, with their childlike outlook on the world, couldn't understand scary and destructive natural forces like storms, floods, earthquakes, lions, and so forth, so as a coping mechanism they anthropomorphosized them, thinking of them as sentient beings who acted from some sort of motive and who could perhaps be reasoned or bargained with. I remember reading a dramatization of this idea in the caveman chapter of James Michener's The Source, in which the cavewoman who had discovered the rudiments of agriculture was faced with a flood sweeping toward her wheat field; she started grabbing up handfuls of wheat and tossing them into the water, screaming out that if they gave the flood some of their food maybe it would be satisfied and leave the rest alone.

As the millennia roll on civilization matures and primeval magical thinking develops into organized religion. We've all heard the saying that man makes the gods in his own image. The savage forces that bedeviled the children of nature give way to kingly superheroes dwelling in thronerooms in the sky, their power descending earthward unto man just as edicts and officials descend upon the populace from the palace in the city. The idea of sacrifice is retained: the gods must still be placated, just as taxes must be sent to the city treasury -- withhold either and mighty beings become discontented with you. Then too, the priests themselves must heavily encourage it; after all, there's no sense letting all that good mutton go to waste after the thighbones have been burnt, and the offerings of gold and silver have to be looked after by someone. What a sweet thought for a priest to discover that his own well-being and richness shows honor to the god!

But it's not just childish thinking and greed. As the levying of a cash fee in Voodoo suggests, sacrifice triggers the magical thinking gene to provide psychological stimulation: by offering up something so precious you are conditioning yourself to believe that weighty matters are at stake and that big mojo is being invoked on your behalf; you will then be more likely to accept your situation and keep on keeping on in this cruel hard world whatever the deity decides. Of course you'll get a big boost if your prayers are answered; but even if they're not, despite your disappointment you'll still believe at bottom that everything is fundamentally okay: the power is still there, it can still be invoked for you, it's just that it didn't happen to pan out this particular time.

On the surface this rationalist explanation, which I'm sure I've simplified to the point of absurdity -- and probably gotten wrong from the beginning, since my smattering of anthropological reading dates from books written during the Johnson administration (Lyndon, not Andrew) and it seems like much of the theory from those days has since been discredited or superseded -- on the surface this rationalist explanation makes a lot of sense, and I don't think any honest person can deny that it has to be pretty close to the truth -- on the surface. But at the same time I think that on questions like this rationalists are content with scratching the surface and behaving as if the gouge they've made constitutes the entire answer. Of course you can't blame them: as far as they're concerned the question really is solved, because the surface is all that there is. There are no gods, no magic, no mystic forces. Religious experience is an empty skin of paint with nothing underneath.

Perhaps it is. Probably it is. Yet I wonder (because I have the mind of a greedy child who needs security) if the nothing-to-see-here explanation doesn't rely on some unfounded assumptions.

Throughout history examples may be found of individual disbelief or crises of faith. In civilized societies, with large numbers of unconnected citizens and an entrenched religion, these individual experiences don't have the power to overturn the entire system of belief. But in the tiny confines of an ice-age nomad tribe, in which everyone knows everybody else and authority is honorary and ceremonial rather than a function of sociopathy and armed might, does the day never come when someone realizes that no matter how much wheat you throw into the flood, the grain still gets swept away? Or that no matter how many times you dance for rain or deer that the rain and deer don't come? Or that no matter what kind of hoodoo convolutions your shaman works up, the person who dies remains dead? Does the day never come when the great original atheist hero doesn't arise and gather all his friends and relatives around the campfire and grunt out, "Listen, I've been doing some thinking about things and all this magic we've been pouring our time into just isn't getting the job done?" and somebody else grunts back, "you know, now that you mention it...."

Is it reasonable to assume that these early people who had to be so perfectly attuned and observant of the natural world in every other way would turn into blind chuckleheads who kept throwing precious food away with no return on their investment? It seems to me, contrary to what smart people are looking for in this brouhaha about the proposed God Gene, that the natural world most definitely does not reward baseless magical thinking, no matter how fervently you believe in it. Once you get into cities you have some cushion, perhaps. You have farmers and silos. You have some amount of surplus. Perhaps you can afford to get a little screwy in your notions about what goes on in the sky. But can you afford it on the glaciers of Beringia?

There is more I want to say -- in fact I haven't even gotten to what I wanted to talk about when I started -- but this post is long enough for now. More to follow, if I don't get distracted.

My Weird House, Post 1

I've gone back and forth in my mind as to whether I should bring this up at all.

From one angle I suppose it doesn't really matter; most people who care enough about the paranormal to spend time hashing it out on blogs probably have already joined one of two predetermined camps: either they refuse to admit its existence at all (in which case everything I say will be ridiculous) or they wholeheartedly believe in it (in which case stories like mine will seem perfectly commonplace). In any event, it's certainly not like anyone is beating a frenzied path up the mountain to base their viewpoint on the latest oracle from the Staggering Priestess.

At the same time, though, I think that for any of us -- even for superficial dabblers like your hostess -- who believe that the paranormal is a legitimate field of inquiry that deserves to be taken seriously, more is at stake than simply the issue of whether we're preaching to the choir or proselytizing amongst the damned.

Between the two armed camps of no-there-isn't and yes-there-is lies the great mass of society at large: the undecided, the open-minded, the (gods, I feel my IQ dropping to the level of a network news anchor, and with my mangled brain that's saying something) swing voters, whose "hearts and minds" (another IQ drop) are still in play and whom we on our side should be fighting to win over: not so that we can take a vote on the validity of the paranormal, and not to deprive the no-there-isn't people of their civil rights or force them to start wearing yellow question marks or anything like that, but to bring public consensus over to the idea that paranormal occurrences are not just a bunch of hoo-ha kookery, misidentification, and lies but valid phenomena produced by something that can be investigated and for which, hopefully, some explanation can eventually be found.

If the subject is respectable, investigation opens itself to many more serious people whose training and expertise might be of great value but who at present won't go within ten miles of the paranormal because it is fatal to reputations. And not just in laboratories and academic cloisters.

Of the people I know, most do believe in at least one aspect of the paranormal: religious experience, ghosts, UFOs, cryptozoology, or something. Most of us have no problem with the idea of the paranormal at all. But once we enter the circle of public consensus we all become skeptics; we all toe the line. Regardless of what we may privately believe, if someone in a public environment starts talking about seeing a ghost in the attic or strange lights over the expressway or a hairy giant on a camping trip, our group reaction tends not toward "wow, that's intriguing, tell us more!" but "uh-huh, okayyyyyyy...." because we are conditioned to react as if anyone who publicly confesses to a paranormal experience has a little screw loose.

Of course I am not the first to make these observations (I admit openly that nothing on this blog is original, I am not that deep a thinker). Many have commented before on the way our great national brainwashing machine deals with paranormal subjects. But, as usual, I have wandered far, far away from the subject of the post. When I started I just meant to say that I am hesitant to talk about my own experiences because, while I know my efforts can't aim very high, I still feel an obligation for the sake of the field at large (oh so pretentious!) to treat the subjects discussed here sincerely and do them as much justice as I can; and I feel I can't do that properly, or at least not as well, if I present myself as an experiencer. And yet, I should question that assumption. But that's a subject for another time.

So here is the experience I was going to share. If you're expecting a good story I warn you: it's uninteresting and utterly banal. The main reason I bother to tell it at all is so that I can start documenting these occurrences, because this is not the first time something like this has happened. I wish I'd had the idea back when it started, because by this time my memory has jumbled the earlier events into one big slush. But there's no use crying about that now. Maybe later I can work on summarizing them. But enough yapping.

It happened on the morning of Tuesday, May 27. My husband had returned the afternoon before after being away for the Memorial Day weekend. I mention this only because it's the one out-of-the-ordinary detail I can recall. Maybe his absence for a few days had something to do with it. Anyway, over the weekend while he was away I noticed that he had left a bottle of Windex on the kitchen counter by the coffee pot, so I put the bottle on top of the refrigerator, cramming it in among all the other junk he's stashed up there over the years. I distinctly remember doing this.

Apparently he wanted to use that bottle of Windex on Monday night, couldn't find it, and was going around the house looking for it and asking what had happened to it. He told me this the next morning; I was sealed up back here working on something and didn't see or hear him, so he never managed to find the bottle and couldn't finish whatever he'd wanted it for.

On Tuesday morning he came into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee and yelled "where did this come from?" I asked what he was talking about and he gestured at the Windex bottle, sitting on the counter by the coffee pot again. I'd made the coffee earlier that morning and while I couldn't recall if the bottle had been there I certainly knew that I hadn't put it there.

This is not the first time an object has appeared to relocate itself. About a year ago my husband's primary set of car keys went missing only to turn up a week later in a basket in the back of the pantry. I vaguely seem to remember one or two cases of things disappearing never to be found again, but my memory is too foggy that far back for me to be sure. There have been other instances of items seeming to disappear and reappear within a few minutes, but these, I suspect, are due to us being hasty and just not seeing something that is lying in plain sight.

I know, drunks are proverbially unreliable witnesses. I still have enough functioning gray matter left to be sure of what I did and did not do with that Windex bottle.