Confessions of a Pareidoliac
If a woman chances during her menstrual period to look into a highly polished mirror, the surface of it will grow cloudy with a blood-colored haze.
—Aristotle, On Dreams
Our ancestors survived in great part due to their ability to group things, to categorize and see patterns.
This ability is so ingrained that we see patterns where there are none – faces in the bark of trees, purpose in random chance, a “woman” where really there is me.
There is a word for this: pareidolia. Artists are particularly susceptible.
The sixteenth-century painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo developed a humorous pareidoliac specialty — grotesque portraits that, upon further study, reveal themselves not as human faces, but agglomerations of books, vegetables, flowers, and fish.
As Arcimboldo’s work implies, our predilection for finding patterns can lead us into error. Sometimes that slender, curling silhouette waving about in a tree really is a snake. And sometimes it’s not.
Stephanie Burt puts it this way: “the assumption of likeness is always a fiction.”
In 1927, Constantin Brancusi attempted to bring a sculpture, Bird in Space, into the United States for an exhibition organized by Marcel Duchamp. Brancusi presented the sculpture to Customs officials as a duty-free work of art. The officials disagreed, reclassifying it as a dutiable manufacture of metal. Brancusi challenged the decision in court.
Truth is stranger than fiction.
In the Odyssey, Penelope explains why dreams seem to be either pointless or prophetic, punning on thesimilarity in ancient Greek of the words for horn and truth, and the words for ivory and deceit: “For two are the gates of shadowy dreams, and one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory. Those dreams that pass through the gate of sawn ivory deceive men, bringing words that find no fulfilment. But those that come forth throughthe gate of polished horn bring true issues to pass, when any mortal sees them.”
I once purchased a book of interviews exploring how dreams influence writers’ work. Despite the glowing, new-agey promises of the back cover, the interviewees generally denied that dreams influenced them. In fact, they seemed suspicious of the whole idea.
I don’t blame them. After all, if one were to admit that one’s creative work was drawn directly from dreams, from the unconscious, that unordered messy nothing, then how could one claim genius in the result? How could a dream be art?
As an irritable Mark Strand put it in a 1998 interview in The Paris Review, “People who write down their dreams and think they’re poems are wrong. They’re neither poems nor dreams.”
One of my college professors argued that the lack of perspective in the icons of Andrei Rublev was intentional,meant to reinforce the idea that the divine realm being depicted – which for Rublev was the true world – isn’t like this one at all.
In other words, Rublev’s icons are neither paintings nor dreams. They’re real.
The sociobiologist Robert Trivers notes that, when people feel as though they are not in control of their lives, their patternmaking impulses go into overdrive, leading them to see elaborate correspondences in random data.
In his treatise On Dreams, Aristotle argues that dreams are the detritus of the past day’s events, remixed and toyed with by the sleeping mind. By contrast, in his later work of the same name, the early Christian bishop Synesius of Cyrene writes that dreams provide rich and poor alike with divine insight.
Because each dreamer is unique, Synesius advises that there can be no standardized dream interpretations;one might as well assume that all mirrors reflect the same object. Instead, he counsels readers to record their dreams, the better to track how they manifest themselves in the waking world.
“Nobody fact-checks dreams, of course,” writes Christopher Benley.
Contemporary explanations of dreaming mostly follow the dichotomy sketched by Aristotle and Synesius. Either they’re just a meaningless byproduct of the brain’s assimilation of information into memory, as Aristotle and neurologists would have it, or they provide insight into the fundamental realities, per Synesius and psychoanalysts.
Of course, there’s one important distinction between Freud and Synesius: Synesius thought your dreams predicted your future; Freud thought they revealed your past.
Regardless, maybe it’s not the truth of the pattern that matters, but the belief in it.
Plato threw poets out of his Republic because he saw them as mere imitators of the world, instead of, like philosophers, its interrogators.
But neither poets nor philosophers stand beyond the world. They are in the world, and part of it.
I find it hard not to blame people for what they do in my dreams. When I dream that someone is treating me badly, I figure my subconscious is trying to tell me something.
As Aristotle put it, “the soul makes assertions in sleep.”
One commonly remarked-on feature of dreams is that we don’t notice their senselessness until we’re awake.
But I’m not sure why we would expect dreams to make sense, when our waking lives so often fail to observe narrative convention.
The truth is, our lives aren’t stories. In stories, things happen for a reason.
When I was a kid, I enjoyed swinging the mirrored door of the bathroom medicine cabinet toward the larger mirror on the wall, and sticking my hand in between. So many hands, all waving!
At least, I enjoyed it until some girl at school told me how Bloody Mary could appear in any mirror, so long as you called for her. After that, I spent about six months afraid to look into mirrors at all.
Bloody Mary aside, people who stare fixedly into a mirror often experience hallucinations, due to a phenomenon known as Troxler’s Fading.
It works like this: When you stare at a single point, your brain quickly ceases to process anything on the extreme periphery. Instead, it replaces those details with a cobbled-together image of the thing you’re staring at.
So if you stare deeply into a mirror, you may see garbled replicas of your own face floating on the edge of sight.
The poet Jessica Smith points out that astrological writing has much in common with avant-garde writing, and with conceptual writing in particular. A system is presumed to exist, and the work extrapolates from it.
But what kind of system?
Oxford professor Deborah Cameron has devoted her career to combating the notion that men and women use language differently. She explains that such ideas are dangerous precisely because, “whether or not they are ‘true’ in any historical or scientific sense, [they] have consequences in the real world. They shape our beliefs, and so influence our actions.”
Among all my acquaintances, it is my women friends that seem most interested in alternatives to formal logic – divination, astrology, tarot, dream interpretation.
One could read this as a form of illusory pattern recognition. Feeling themselves shut out from the traditional pathways of control, they adopt alternative methods of making meaning.
“Storylessness, after all, has been women’s big problem,” writes Katha Pollitt.
But why should women adopt an alternative to logical reasoning, when doing so may expose them to criticisms – of flightiness, unseriousness, unintelligence – that presumably they hope to avoid?
Here’s a thought: once someone extrapolating from false premises has built up the case for your not actually being human, you might be tempted to chuck the whole concept of logic as flawed.
Or maybe it’s just fun to troll the self-appointed logicians by calling yourself a witch.
When you know how others see the world, you can manipulate them. For example, I concede that one of the reasons I became a lawyer is that when someone hears that you are one, they perceive you as dangerous.
But regardless of whether my silhouette, waving about in the tree, is like that of a snake or a lawyer or a woman (or possibly all three), only one thing seems really certain. I’m me.
According to Aristotle, the red flush left by a menstruating woman’s gaze is difficult to remove from a new mirror, but quite simple to remove from an old one.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice . . .
I like the idea that getting older renders me less susceptible to error. But it could be that age simply hardens one’s distortions.
Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Mirror” sinisterly recounts, from a mirror’s point of view, what is said to be a common experience for the aging – that of being continuously surprised that one’s reflection does not remain the same as it was, say, at seventeen.
I didn’t very much like being a child. I wanted to grow up. Not so that I could have a boyfriend or a car or eat ice-cream for dinner. I wanted self-assuredness. Grown-ups, I thought, knew what they were doing.
After twenty-odd years as a grown-up, all I can say is, well, there goes another unfounded belief.
Feng shui teaches that it is unlucky to have a mirror facing your bed. I’ve had a mirror facing my bed for the past eight years, and there it will stay. I mean, at some point, you have to stop believing everything you hear.
Or see.
Plath’s poem inscribes the same horror as the Bloody Mary story: that of looking into a mirror and seeing something other than what you think you ought.
But what we see in mirrors is already wrong, transposing left and right.
Here’s an old brainteaser for you: if left and right are transposed in mirrors, why aren’t up and down?
The answer is that mirrors don’t transpose left and right at all. We consider reflections transposed only because left and right are contextual. Your right, my left.
Artists besides Arcimboldo have benefited from the eccentricities of human vision. For example, many observers perceive the flowers in Monet’s painting “Poppies at Argenteuil” as actually shaking, blown by a wind that isn’t there.
The illusion is produced by Monet’s use of paints of different colors, but equal reflectiveness. We normally rely on the relative brightness of objects to judge their positions. When everything is equally bright, our brains can’t decide which things are in front and which are behind. And so we see them as glittering, subtly shifting in space.
Is a painting that pulses with such indeterminacy more accurate in its representation of the world? Or less?
Regardless, the painting is part of the world that it purports to represent.
At the time that Brancusi sued the U.S. Customs Service, objects were considered “art” for legal purposes only if they closely and accurately imitated nature. A journalist reporting on Brancusi’s lawsuit scoffed that, under this test, the greatest sculpture of all time would be a podiatrist’s model of a bunion-afflicted foot.
In the short reflection “Borges and I,” Borges describes how he resists transforming completely from his shy, private self into the loud and boisterous public Borges, who fame constantly threatens to make more real.
The final sentence professes uncertainty as to which Borges is writing the page.
Asking me how I feel is like asking which way the wind is blowing. Right now the wind may be in the north – but in a day, an hour, a minute – the wind will blow another way.
Maybe if I wrote 12 different versions of every event on clear plastic sheets and then stapled them together I’d approximate lived experience.
Instead, I create and present the Maureen on this page. A person you can never speak with; never answer, or take to task. Nor can I.
She exists inviolate here. And here she stays. As I move on and away from her, as we find ourselves farther and farther apart.
Rosalie Moore wrote that “the mind’s disguise is permanence.” In other words, constancy of self is just a pattern that we perceive.
In The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick explains the distinction between the writer and her on-page persona this way: The persona is “apparently, only her solid, limited self—and she [is] in control.”
A writer, by contrast, is a real person, and thus in control of nothing – though she can try to manipulate the way you perceive her.
To quote Borges again, “the original is unfaithful to the translation.”
I’m an emotional mess in real life. But here, on the page, I am calm, collected, distilled into perfection.
But wait — am I an emotional mess in real life? I might feel like one, but people are always telling me how controlled I seem.
The face begins to fit the mask. The writer is part of the world.
And still our perception of the external is complicated by our interiority, by the things of which, according to Yeats, “man makes a superhuman mirror-resembling dream.”
There’s the I that I see, the I that I want others to see, and the I that they actually see.
With such complications, perceiving the world clearly requires both fine-tuned faith in, and deep skepticismabout, one’s judgment.
In an essay on John Berryman’s Dream Songs, Robert Lowell describes the poems as not dreams but “a waking hallucination.”
In other words, the dreams aren’t dreams. They’re life.
At the end of the Bird in Space trial, the court found for Brancusi, holding that his sculpture reflected a “so-called new school of art, whose exponents attempt to portray abstract ideas rather than to imitate natural objects.”
Because he saw the world as subject to an overarching order, Synesius faulted Penelope for believing that any dreams were false. Rather, he argued, the dreamer had simply not yet penetrated their meaning.
If truth is stranger than fiction, the art that most accurately mimics reality would be as strange as possible. Dreamlike. A pattern extrapolated from the assumption of, rather than the reality of, a system.
Unlike Synesius, I don’t believe that the world is subject to an overarching order. But I’m sympathetic to his claim that if a person “were placed outside of the world, he could not any longer use his knowledge, because he exercises it upon the world, and by means of the world.”
Imagine trying to find your way with a compass that wants every direction to be north.
This is more or less where we are, perceiving the world around us by means of instruments that find patterns everywhere.
We’re in it, and of it. Really living the dream.
And so, in the words of Judge Waite of the United States Customs Court, “Let judgment be entered accordingly.”