Apophenia & Psychopomp

What matters? An essay on seeking significance, or just making it up, and listening for guidance in the places I'd rather not look.

Dying seems rough. Everything you’d taken for granted to the point of not thinking much about it, like your breathing and pulse, is going away.

You’re all alone, going somewhere you’ve never been. The reviews of the place you’re going are mixed, and it seems like they’re mostly made up.

Death would be a good place to have a friend, a guide. The name for this is a psychopomp, a fantastic word. It’s Greek, but the Egyptians were big on them too. Dante had one in Virgil, who showed him around, and sent him on his way.

The Tibetan Bardo Thodol, or book of the dead, is a guide you’re supposed to read near a person’s corpse. It may be made up, but it always hits me in the belly. The idea there is that death is the same as life. The difference is mostly a matter of degree. The transformations are quicker, the betrayals more sudden, the realizations truer, the consequences more lasting.

Guides

If life is just a slower, more stable version of the afterlife, one commonality is that we still need a guide. But it’s tricky. The history of guides is full of treachery. The guide is a bullshitter or else the guide gets sold out by the people they tried to help.

The reasons for following a particular guide vary widely: I was raised with this guide. Who has time to listen to all the guides? This was the only guide who could stop me from picking my nose in the way I love, but everyone else hates. It was my parents’ guide. The guide said I’d be in deep trouble if I listened to another guide. I tried another guide in college, but got tired of explaining it. This guide isn’t so great, but at least he’s not trying to get in my pants. This was the only guide who said I could still pick my nose in the way I love, but everyone else hates.

Apophenia

In the physical world, patterns abound. Nature proliferates according to a few dozen plans. Beaches and mountains array themselves according to a couple tendencies of water, gravity and rocks.

It’s easy to perceive less of reality and more of the rhythm of recognizable patterns. It feels good, the rhythm. But after a certain moment you’re humming along to a song that’s stopped playing. You see faces in tree bark. You see woodgrain patterns in the underbrush.

And why are you in the woods? Is it to see something there, or to escape what you were seeing in the town? Is the thing that matters in the non-pattern of the underbrush, or in the pattern drawn from the woods?

Seeing things

To see things at all is a kind of hallucination. The separation of experience into discrete parts is a function of language. But it fits well enough to keep us from getting killed, and to keep us almost as calm as the animals.

Language is a little like the face in the woodgrain, which is a face, but also not a face at all. Hallucinations expound on patterns, but take their marching orders from desire.

Play my favorite song

It’s like the oldies station. The world sounds different from the songs, so you turn up the volume. The disconnect feels like a bitter injustice has been done to you. It’s an injustice that keeps adding up. After all, you’re not asking for all that much, really.

The music is out of step with the present moment. It takes you another tick farther from reality. But what are you supposed to do, turn off the music? It’s right there, the music you like. And isn’t music supposed to be one of life’s pleasures?

So you just click the button, overrule the sounds coming through the windows on a summer night, and put guard rails on your wandering thoughts. But if you’re always feeding yourself a line, then how do you tell when you’re actually onto something?

Are you entertained?

Bored, you go looking for excitement, for trouble. Afraid, you repent and retreat to quiet nights in. For the upper socioeconomic third of the world, are life and entertainment so different?

You live long enough to develop tastes. You find the places that serve the books, movies and food you like. Maybe you’re loud about those places. Maybe you’re a fan.

You get good at finding the things you like. It gets easy to withdraw to your opera or comic books or plushies. And things get smaller, colder. Is Star Wars or Taylor Swift really enough to cleave off and be its own universe?

The press of a button

But remember the radio? Remember listening to what was on? It put you in touch with the tastes of your neighbors, the personality of the radio DJ, the commercial constraints on the station, the inspiration of the band, and so on.

Radio stations far from home had the quality of divine revelations or messages from UFOs. The greater the distance from home, the larger you became, even if those stations were also just playing The Doors. It was a moment shared with the miles and miles of fellow listeners, and with the airwaves themselves.

To hear your favorite song on the radio on the highway, far from home is very different from choosing it on your phone and tapping play. To hear an ancestral song sung once a year is very different than browsing through words of encouragement and choosing the ones that suit you best. 

Distance and difficulty are how a message gets through. Friction, once eliminated, appears to have been our ally. It separates us from a blinkered notion of our desires. It introduces us to the inconveniences where psychopomps reside.

Interruptions and alibis

The oldest things in the world are the parts that don’t add up. It’s a mark of the world we’re in that we want to count and measure everything, but that the numbers never entirely work.

Across cultures and centuries, the calendar is a bit sloppy. The year doesn’t add up to an even number of days or weeks, and it doesn’t break down to even months of mathematically satisfying 30 days, or 28-day cycles or the moon’s 29.5-day cycles. Then there’s the leap year, which you have to remember to skip every 128 years. The only mathematically smooth aspect is the day of 60 seconds, 60 minutes and 24 hours. But I suspect this is the result of working backwards from the day to define a second. It’s pretty elastic, given how differently you can count to ten.

The failure to quite add up is a defining characteristic. It’s something that criminal investigators and avid readers count as a mark of reality. Only an alibi makes perfect sense.

I always perk up in a story at the details that work against the motivation of the teller and the desires of the listener. They make me pause wherever I find them, whether it’s in abduction accounts or the Bible.

Emperors and trash day

For a month or so there was a small terrarium with “Severus” markered on tape on it, out on the sidewalk, two doors down from my own. It was full of dirt and meal worms, the home of a dead pet. Sanitation wouldn’t touch it.

At the time, I was reading a history book. And it mentioned Severus, the emperor. He was a big military success, but glum, known to remark “I have been everything, to no avail.” And when his son was planning to assassinate him, he advised the young man “don't let them see you kill me.”

The terrarium and the book seemed like a message of some sort at the time - maybe a mirror on the absurdity of accomplishment and the absurdity of being depressed. I’m not sure. But even if you don’t understand what someone is saying, you know when you’re being spoken to.

Selected Bibliography

Forget This Good Thing – Try it now

Jacob Burckhardt’s The Age of Constantine the Great

Forget This Good Thing – The app for iPhone and iPad

Forget This Good Thing - Paper book 1 - Paper book 2

Forget This Good Thing - All About It

Forget This Good Thing - Its creation - What it can do for you - Why it matters - Thirteen descriptions - The Risks - Case Study - Case Study #2