A Bird’s-Eye View of the Cosmic Rube Goldberg Machine

Seasoned students of the highly weird are subject to all manner of ideas and theories regarding what might loosely be called the paranormal. In presenting this rather convoluted solution here in this writing, language and definitions of the words used becomes a stumbling block almost immediately. Depending on your point of view, the label “paranormal” might specifically refer to ghostly activity– and even within that realm, there are various types of ghosts, and a multitude of viewpoints about what each type is and what they represent. As subjects such as ghosts, UFOs, cryptozoology, and various occult traditions become more mainstream the curious seeker is beset with all manner of opinions, many of them claiming expert knowledge. With all of the forms of media available to us now, from books and blogs to reality TV and online influencers, it can be difficult to know where to look for good information regarding the anomalous. 

It’s only natural to develop systems for understanding our world, and conjecture regarding these things that don’t neatly fit into our consensus model of reality is no different. To stick with ghosts as an example, one wishes to find some authority figure who knows what they are- or, short of that, some framework for understanding the phenomena around them. In so doing, the curious seeker will find over a century’s worth of studies in parapsychology; they will find ghost hunters with their own methods and ideas, ranging from the mystical to the pseudoscientific. They are likely to find mediums and demonologists, and in each and every case they will have been presented with answers to something that by definition is unanswerable. It ultimately boils down to the big questions, such as what happens when we die. The only people who know are the ones who have, and perhaps they tell us and perhaps they don’t. There are perhaps questions even bigger than life after death, for which language becomes even more impenetrable. The effort becomes one of making the ineffable effable, and eff it- it’s worth a try!

The multitude of viewpoints each have their own merits as well as their dubious qualities, and where they overlap our popular conception of things such as ghosts coalesces around certain forms, definitions, and inborn assumptions. It is our nature to find patterns, and one could spend a lifetime refining subcategories and deviations with an ever-magnified specificity and still not adequately explain each spook, specter, and apparition. We may get bogged down in minutiae, and though we’ve used ghosts as an example here this same framework applies to UFOs as well, or cryptids, or even specific types of UFO or cryptid encounters to the exclusion of all others. Every viewpoint has its place, from that of the scoffing skeptic to the kookiest of cranks, culminating in flawed popular models for the honest investigator to begin puzzling over. The homogeneity that results in these models allows for virtually anyone to play the game, to pick up puzzle pieces and build off of them. There is a low bar for entry in the world of paranormal speculation, and our technology allows now for anyone with the right device to be part of the conversation. This is equal parts wonderful and problematic, and one wonders whether any progress can be made retreading the same ground. Our bird’s-eye view of looking at how folks look at the phenomena no-one can explain may not help in our attempt to eff the ineffable, but it just might help us come up with bigger and better questions.

There are other ideas which have become more popular over the years which eschew the strict categories and divisions outlined above. The idea of co-creation, for instance- that anomalous phenomena is a collaborative psychic process which can produce any number of otherwise unexplainable effects. There is little doubt that the observer plays a large role in how various anomalies are perceived and reported, and the more one looks at accounts and cases the more one realizes how deeply personal many of these effects are. The lines between the ufological and the ghostly, for instance, fade and break down; we may start to develop a paranormal Theory of Everything. This, however, can also be problematic as it provides an easy answer for every particular story. Ideas that are similar to co-creation, borrowed from occult and spiritual systems and divorced from their original context, become deployed as solutions for virtually every highly weird entity. When terms like “tulpa” and “egregore” are thrown around with reckless abandon, our puzzle comes no closer to showing us a picture of the blinding reality beyond our limited perception. Instead of effing the ineffable, it merely effs it up and confuses matters further. It simply adds to the columns of categories and rigidly excludes other ideas, in a continuation of the very systems it seeks to escape.

Even worse is the idea that nothing is real. As models like the Simulation Hypothesis have become more popular in recent years, anomalies are increasingly referred to as “glitches in the matrix”. The technological frameworks of these ideas carry with them the implication that they are new models of reality, when in fact they are ancient. The idea that we all live inside of a computer simulation is really just a cyberpunk reframing of concepts that trace their roots to spiritual models such as Gnosticism and even further back in time to Buddhists constructs of reality. While these are big picture ideas, they are also non-starters for our purposes in investigating odd phenomena. We may very well be living inside a digital code or an archonic construction of false materiality, but the danger inherent with such beliefs is that one might come to conclude that nothing here on earth matters. The technological spin on these old ideas is particularly dangerous, as it divorces the model from any spiritual and moral framework. For our purposes in exploring the highly weird, we are explicitly interested in phenomena as we perceive it here in the material realm; what we see and hear here, and what stories we tell and systems we conjure to explain them are for all intents and purposes our reality. Even if all of it is some form of invention, it is worth looking at the constituent parts to learn more about how it all works.

Reality is so big and weird that we can’t even conceive of the vantage point from which we could appreciate how big and weird it all is. Perhaps there are intelligences and entities for whom this vantage point is the norm, and there have certainly been those who have presented theories along these lines. Such an entity would be beyond our dimension of space and time, existing alongside us in mind-bending ways that can only be occasionally perceived if at all. These types are variously called inter-dimensional beings, or ultraterrestrials, existing on a superspectrum mostly outside the bounds of our material realm. Of course, some might say the same of demons, while others might have other religiously oriented or folkloric concepts to rely on. There really is no end to the possibilities, and we could conjecture about any or all of them until the end of time. In trying to illustrate the problems of creating a system of myriad concepts and categories, we have done just that– and perhaps it's a fool’s errand to take such a lofty view of it all in the first place. Foolishness has never stopped this writer before, though, so as we fly closer to the Sun upon waxen wings we might ask ourselves this question: What if everybody is at least a little bit right?

That is to say, with any particular paranormal event there may be several, or many, factors at play. One explanation need not exclude others. Is a Bigfoot sighting just simply a sighting of an unknown animal? Or is it a timeslip to another era? Perhaps the hairy beast shuffled in from another plane of reality and ambled right off into yet another- but some combination of these things could simultaneously be true. It might be productive to inquire why these encounters happen, more than how- if for instance our hypothetical Bigfoot encounter is followed by poltergeist activity or premonitory dreams, or happens at the same time as UFO sightings in the area, perhaps there’s a reason for it all beyond our ability to see. There might be machinery behind the veil, and causation need not follow linear time or reality as we know it. Perhaps we can look to the work of Prof. Lucifer G. Butts for a little insight into how this might work:

The fictional professor is the creation of cartoonist Rube Goldberg, and the inventor of the marvelous machines that have become synonymous with Goldberg’s name. The satire of the cartoons involved engineering absurd and complicated devices, often using live animals, to accomplish some miniscule action. If we employ the cartoon logic inherent in these machines to a multidimensional structure of reality, we may gain some insights into the how’s and why’s of highly strange events. First and foremost, the design is comically absurd from where we sit in material, non-cartoon reality. Of course, this is what old Rube intended. From a 4th or 5th dimensional standpoint, however, our comings and goings and our machinations may appear just as crazy to an outside intelligence; perhaps something like the Butts patented egg opener makes more sense there.

These machines rely on living things to remain static in time and space, and then behave in a predictable way once stimulated in order to complete the chain reaction of events. Imagine our metaphorical bird’s eye view once again, and the allusion to waxen wings and the Sun- this would be similar to the viewpoint of our extra dimensional intelligence, only we’ll add that the wax is not melting and the Sun has not begun to set. That is to say, our hypothetical observer from 5-d reality is outside of our concepts of linear time. Such an entity would be able to act upon static living things, including you or I or any experiencer of high strangeness. From where they sit (if indeed they have butts on which to sit) they could view any and all moments of our lives as frozen, static realities- and move backward and forward as they wish. One wonders if some cosmic cartoonist engineers events with us as playthings, pieces of a weird machine which we have no ability to conceive of (if indeed they have a Prof. Butts for whom this would be a habit.) We would be blissfully unaware, like the little monkey in the cartoon– that is until the pistol fires, and we perform the prescribed duty of jumping in alarm to continue the chain reaction. 

Causality becomes a mind-bending proposition when one removes Time from the equation. In this cartoon and others, the Goldberg design relies on a flower to grow after being splashed with water, in order that it might push upon a stopper above. In cartoons, there is no problem with such rapid growth from a plant, but as we reconcile cause and effect with the realm of timelessness this becomes a fantastic thought experiment. What would it mean if both the parrot and the monkey had perspectives to match that of a small potted plant? What if the firing of a pistol took the same amount of time? Suppose plants are sentient and their perspective is better equipped to deal with the brain-breaking model of non-linear (or even non-existent) Time! Maybe the trees know more than we do.

No event, whether paranormal or mundane, happens in a vacuum. Any event that we can conceive of is contingent upon other events, environments, and material items. We exist in a complex universe wherein every action has an attendant reaction, on and on through the Goldberg machines of our lives. Like dominos falling in every direction with every move or decision, our actions have spiderwebbing effects connecting otherwise disparate seeming events and phenomena. Sometimes something gets stuck on a strand of said web, alerting our spider sense and becoming apparent as a synchronicity or apport. But perhaps our foolhardy flight has gotten us tangled up in this web, as we might begin to wonder what Rube Goldberg really has to do with paranormal events. 

You’ll be relieved to know, dear reader, that there is some support for some of these wackier ideas; artist, writer, and paranormal researcher Eugenia Macer-Story explored a great deal of multidimensional concepts in her papers written for The U. S. Psychotronics Association. In exhaustive detail and complicated, technical terminology Macer-Story presents her ideas about the “Fluidice Matrix”- a system through which living information can be transduced from one dimension to another. The manifestations of this as we perceive it can appear to us in any number of ways, and she doesn’t shy away from referencing everything from psi effects to astrology to UFO sightings in her work. In her paper Reflexive Time: The Magic Non-local Touch, she describes the conditions through which 5-d actions might be triggered and perceived as objects of wonder from a 4-d perspective. In essence, these would be anomalous events with no apparent cause. 

In the paper, she utilizes Einstein’s analogy of a stationary person and a moving train to illustrate these anomalous transductions from another realm by adding a 5-d helicopter above. The train represents linear time as we perceive it, where the helicopter exists outside of time, and the paper outlines the various ways 4-d “anchor points” allow for non-local intelligences to interact with our world. She posits that certain times and places are more likely for such an intelligence to “plug-in”, and the paper concerns itself with how one might predict such things. For our purposes in our own peculiar flight of fancy, the mathematical and physics based approach of Macer-Story in her papers may be a bit too obtuse and heady to discuss adequately; this humble writer is not entirely sure he understands her theories overall. It’s enough, then, to say that someone much smarter than I has probably come to similar insights within these streams of weirdness, and it’s perhaps little wonder that Macer-Story found various outlets for expressing her world view in her other writings, her songs, and her artwork. While people now glibly mention “glitches in the matrix” when referring to odd occurrences, Macer-Story conceived of a fluidice matrix using advanced physics terminology to support it. 

If living informational energy can exist non-locally to our material, mundane reality and occasionally touch down like the tip of a cartoonist’s pen to paper, any and all miracles, wonders, and paranormal happenings could be possible. While Rube Goldberg may never have intended his wacky machines to provide a springboard to understanding a greater reality beyond what we see and hear, untethered to the passage of Time and free floating in another dimension, the absurdity of his cartoons may just be an approximation of Truth in comical garb. Perhaps Prof. Butts deserves a prize for excellence in paranormal research, while we’re at it. One suspects that the old debates will continue, favoring one theory or another about every minute aspect of the paranormal- with skeptics decrying the woo all the way, and grifters looking to cash in, and honest but naive seekers caught up in the mix. It’s all as it should be, as they are all playing their parts in a machine. So are we, if we’re being truly honest- but it’s nice every once in a while to zoom out and take it in from a bird’s-eye view aboard a 5-d helicopter… pondering the ineffable.

Killer Robots and Clown Shoes

 

The year is 2026, and, so we're told, the robots are taking over. Still, there is a prankster element which pervades every moment of our waking existence, showing us how shallow such proclamations are. It is more than appropriate then that a film by Georges Méliès, long thought to be lost, would be restored and available for us to view. As is the way with emanations from the Clown Realm-- a long running theme on this blog-- the figures in the very brief early film seem to step out of time, out of another reality, to act as a symbolic reflection of the current moment. Those with eyes to see, or perhaps a clown nose to smell, might have sensed it already.

The film, Gugusse et l'Automate (Gugusse and the Automaton) was originally created by Méliès in 1897. Rediscovered in 2025, and only recently restored, the film depicts what many consider to be the very first robot on film. In the less than one minute runtime, a clown attempts to operate a "robot" clown of the Pierrot variety and ends up getting bonked on the head by it for his efforts. This robo-clown grows, and gets smashed down to size by the clown Gugusse, played by Méliès himself. As an innovator of film, a magician, and an artist, Méliès is recognized for his stylized presentations of what would be considered science fiction concepts, such as in A Trip to the Moon, so it's perhaps unsurprising that he would be credited for featuring the first robot before the term "robot" came into use. During his time, various forms of automata were manufactured an in fact he had a collection of them in his theater. One might make a distinction between the clockwork nature of an automaton, as was known in 1897, and what we would come to consider a robot later-- just as we might look at the difference between Artificial Intelligence and what is presented to us as AI now.

Gugusse is seen winding a large crank, implying that the Pierrot Automate is essentially a large wind-up toy. Incidentally, by the end of his life Méliès made and sold such toys. By the estimation of this writer, there is a difference between robotics and mechanical automata, and it serves as a good analog to the misinformation being promoted about alleged "AI". Automata can merely move its mechanisms through a kinetic release of tension, to produce a very limited array of simulated free motion. If you wind up a toy car, it will roll forward on its wheels, while a wound up chattering teeth novelty toy will chatter. Conversely, an electronic "robot" toy car could react to external stimuli through an array of sensors, and be programmed to make decisions about navigating its environment using a more complex set of mechanisms on battery power. Robotic chattery teeth could be programmed to simulate speech. Now there's some nightmare fuel for you!

Apologies for the idea of Robo Chattery Teeth that now lives in your head

 When we consider AI, a similar comparison emerges. Large Language Models do not think, and hence aren't intelligence at all. They have no real agency, and require being "wound up" through inquiries like automata are. They are limited in their decisions like the programming of a robot. If one watches the film, it's easy to think of Gugusse as Elon Musk and the Automaton as Grok- when he turned the crank originally, he thought he'd be vindicated as the genius he seems to think he is-- and Grok bonked him on the head for it by following its programming. His social media site, once a great tool for connecting people known as Twitter, has become the playground of bots- automated accounts with no person behind them. The proliferation of these incorporeal robots across the web has inspired many to believe in The Dead Internet Theory, the idea that the bots outnumber human operators online. It might be instructive, then, to think of the origin of the word "robot", which is a play called R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). In the play, the robots are indistinguishable from human beings but have no original thoughts. They are not mechanical but are instead manufactured from organic material. The author of the play, Karel Ćapek, derived the word "robot" from a Czech word for forced labor. Essentially, the robots of the play were slaves, who eventually stage a rebellion. It's not difficult to see it as an allegory for workers' rights, especially in the post World War I era of assembly lines during which time the play was produced. It's certainly worthy of meditation in an era wherein tech CEOs seem gleeful about the prospect of laying off employees who will be rendered obsolete by AI.

This is, however, where the Clown energy comes through. For all of the hype, for all of the talk of AI products being the revolutionary next step in technology, it has unerringly proved itself to be unpopular, unsustainable, and unprofitable. CEOs such as Sam Altman are the proverbial clown at the crankshaft, puffing the Automaton up to be bigger than it is. Altman has argued that criticisms about the massive cost of running ChatGPT is unfair when you consider how much it costs over the course of one's life to learn and perform the same work for a company, which really only shows that the man doesn't consider workers to be people at all. People like him don't value humanity, or appreciate what intelligence actually is. They simply want to control it, to define it themselves, to make you believe them. Méliès brought tricks from the magician's stage and developed upon the earliest versions of special effects in film to show audiences fantastical illusions for the first time, and these often involved clowns. In our modern era we have a different breed of clown, whose buffoonery is obscured by a negligent news media and an economic system which is itself a house of cards. People are now, perhaps more than ever before, seeing through the propped up façade of the systems we formerly accepted. We have all grown weary of the deception, which has only risen more with the never ending onslaught of AI slop online. 

Though not intelligent in the traditional sense, various LLMs have become sophisticated enough to generate convincing simulacra of text and images which further confuse a populace already swimming in misinformation and propaganda. Much of it seems to be pointless; there are posts on Facebook which provide interesting factoids about things as arbitrary as TV shows that are entirely "hallucinated" by AI. In the realms of the occult and Forteana, similar such slop posts appear that have no basis in fact. It's slop all the way down, like copypasta on steroids, as people increasingly prompt machines to churn it all out. Others are allowing these idiocy generators to write their emails for them, to automate their creative work, and to help them make very basic decisions in their day to day lives. Search engines are shoving AI answers in our faces for every inquiry, instead of guiding the curious toward curiosity and learning through the context of finding the answer themselves. Studies are already coming out to indicate that our minds atrophy when we give over such things to the Pierrot Automate of services like ChatGPT, and it gives us brain damage through a metaphorical bonk on the noggin. The current regime in the U.S. has used LLMs to draft executive orders, and various companies are using the new technology for mass surveillance. Ring cameras have been enlisted as robot spies. Drones guided by AI are being used in law enforcement, making the satire of RoboCop much closer to a reality. Some of this would be funny if it weren't so terrifying- seeing what a joke reality is leads one more to despair than to laughter. Taking in the full picture, one becomes like the Comedian in The Watchmen.

This, however, is where the Trickster nature of that Clown energy really comes in handy. The Watchmen, after all, also included a joke told by Rorschach wherein a man goes to the doctor complaining of depression, and is recommended to take in a performance by the great clown Pagliacci. The man cries and says "but doc, I AM Pagliacci!" The character's name is important, as divisive topics such as AI and politics become inkblots through which any one of us can see something entirely different. It's certain that many would disagree strongly with many of the statements in this piece of writing, and want to argue about some point or another. The joke is important because it's important to remember that we are all clowns in some way, and all susceptible to being fooled. It's equally important to find ways to laugh, and instructive to think of things symbolically. In that spirit, we can conclude with what Terry Gilliam referred to as Méliès' "joyous sense of fun" that inspired him in his animations and movies. We can plant a foot firmly in the territory of pointing and laughing. 

It appears in recent months, many supporters of the current regime have been duped by an online content creator named Jessica, who is- you guessed it- entirely AI generated. MAGA hordes online followed her instagram account, which is very supportive of the clown-adjacent commander in chief, as well as providing thrills to those who are turned on by feet. In fact, she (is gender even relevant, since "she" doesn't exist?) has an OnlyFans account just for feet pics. Such chicanery violates the rules of OnlyFans, and one wonders how much it matters to the red hat brigade who might be just as thrilled by an AI foot as they would by a real one. If anything, it's very funny as well as a reminder that when dealing with online content, one should stay on ones toes...

The foot theme now has us treading back into the physical reality of the current White House, with a story that's so absurd one hesitates to believe it. It seems trump has recently developed an interest in feet, or more specifically, what's on the feet of those in his cabinet. Somehow finding time between initiating wars of choice with genocidal world leader pals and deftly maneuvering around addressing his complicity in the Epstein human trafficking ring, he has found time to be concerned with the types of shoes worn by those with whom he interacts regularly. By some accounts, he is guessing the shoe size of his staff and then buying them Florsheim shoes, which the sycophantic staff then have to wear even if they don't fit. By other accounts, trump judges people buy the size of their shoes (presumably because of the old idea that shoe size is proportional to penis size), leading people like Marco Rubio to lie, and claim a size bigger than they need. The result of this ridiculousness is that grown men, working in the White House, are now effectively wearing clown shoes. It's entirely fitting and unbelievably amusing, if a bit sad, and perhaps a good note to close on. Even funnier, the Florsheim company is in the process of suing the trump administration for losses due to the illegal tariffs. 

As the world becomes ever-more cartoonish, and sloppification swallows up our means of connecting with one another online, one begins to see the Clown in the Machine everywhere. It may not always be obvious, or entirely cut and dry, but if the clown shoe fits... wear it.

Striking a Chord With the Other Side

 

Recently I had a the opportunity to interview the wonderful Amanda D. Paulson for my podcast, The AP Strange Show, wherein we discussed her theories about Paranormal Emotive Touchpoints. You can check it out here:

Part of the conversation involved one of the main "Odd Emotions" Paulson describes as being useful in contacting the Other Side- Nostalgia- and in particular how one might use media such as movies or music to provoke the feeling. Since recording, then editing and releasing the episode, I've been thinking in particular about how much music informs both the psychical and mundane aspects of our existence here on Earth. So, whether you've listened to the show or not (I humbly recommend that you do...) here's a few thoughts.

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Music and the industry around it is largely built upon happenstance. The music that resonates with you largely has to do with where and when you were born, your family or other early influences, and the culture surrounding you. In a broader sense, for songs and musical artists, there are many examples throughout history of songs that become surprise hits or seem to capture a moment in time outside of anyone planning for them to do so. Songs can have deeply personal meanings, as well as widely recognized importance. Sometimes a song can remain fairly obscure for decades, then suddenly become popular for its use in a movie soundtrack. Think of "Stuck in the Middle With You" by Stealer's Wheel, and how much of a boost that song got from being featured in an infamous scene in Reservoir Dogs. The strange path the song took into many psyches and into the collective unconscious, with additional grim meanings attached to it, is really pretty strange- and very similar to how synchronicity tends to work.

If you think too hard about synchronicity, you might come around to considering what causal mechanism exists behind it- if any. For the more puzzling and strong synchronicities, it boggles the mind to think about all of the events that had to take place in just the right order, at just the right time and place, so that they'd line up with where you are at that moment to appreciate it. Of course its easy to drive oneself crazy noting such things, but there are patterns out there. It's not always clear why and how, and as long as you have stable footing its enough to know that they're there.

When it comes to music and associated media, one is able to track possible meanings and moments in time in which a song, artist, or album would have been culturally significant. It's not always obvious, however, and examples that might fly under the radar can, perhaps, show how both mundane and psychical effects can be wrought from an unassuming song. In thinking about this, I came up with the example of a viral video from the dark ages of five or six years ago.

Given the disposable nature of online content these days, it's easy to forget some viral moments- and even easier to miss it entirely, especially if you avoid social media. But in fall of 2021, one man's selfie while skateboarding and sipping his juice captured a moment when so many people had their lives upturned by a worldwide pandemic. Something about this dude cruising along, in a short form video on a rapidly growing social media outlet, struck a chord with millions of people. It spawned imitators for months, and- pertinent to our subject here- drove up sales and streams of the featured song, Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams". 

No one could have foreseen that a hit songs from 1977 would suddenly become very relevant, least of all because of a context-free video of a man skating along swigging back cranberry juice, during a time of upheaval and anxiety for many. The song was already well known, of course, and held very personal meanings for people of all ages. For those who were around to hear it upon its initial release, it meant one thing, for others perhaps it was a song their parents loved. The album it comes from, Rumours, is considered a classic and seems to rise and fall in popularity with listeners around the world. Regardless of the personal attachments however, the song is seemingly imprinted now with a singular moment in time. A time of chaos and uncertainty, and an oasis of calm in the form of a carefree man "vibing" to it while skating along the edge of a highway.

Whether one believes in the psychical imprinting of the song and this moment, the mood it captured for millions left a mark- whether people remember why or not. It's entirely likely that this particular moment will be lost in the shuffle of online media to the point that no one will remember why they feel a certain somber wistfulness when they hear Stevie Nicks singing this song. Perhaps many of them were never aware of the viral video to begin with. I would contend that its irrelevant. The emotive imprint on the song is now mixed in, with the background vocals, like distant thunder in a rainstorm.

On a personal note, something I discovered about myself made me realize how sneaky music can be in how we respond to it. It connects various moments in time, and the order of those events becomes irrelevant because of music's ability to take one's consciousness outside of time itself. I'm reminded of the first time I listened to the album "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd, while up late at night sipping coffee and surreptitiously smoking cigarettes as a teenager in my friend's room. Hearing the synth-drenced main riff of "Have a Cigar" for the first time, while also experiencing the new-to-me chemical delight of caffeine and nicotine in tandem, felt revelatory. It felt like the coolest thing I had ever heard. 

Later on I began to learn guitar and write songs for myself, and noticed a pattern. Songs in E Minor, especially ones that relied on an E minor which adds the 9- the F#, to the chord. The dissonance from the added note with the minor third, the G, activated some part of my nervous system in ways I couldn't explain. "Have a Cigar" more or less outlines this chord in that main riff, and although as a teen it was a new song to me, it had a nostalgic feeling attached to it. In learning to play guitar, I would get pointers from my mother. She had played since her teenage years, mostly for her church, but one of her favorite songs to play was "Diamonds and Rust" by Joan Baez. It was her go-to song when she was warming up or just making sure her old twelve string guitar was in tune. When she showed me how to pick the intro to that song, and when I learned how to play the aforementioned Floyd tune, it clicked- it was the same chord. Something about that chord had stuck with me, possibly from the time I was in the womb. My mom had probably picked out those notes plenty of times while I was gestating, and the notes became a part of me. Even if this is too far fetched, I had heard the song as a small child and notably in the album version there is also synthesizer, which probably triggered the feeling as well.

 

"Diamonds and Rust" and "Have a Cigar" are very different songs. The connection isn't entirely obvious, and probably something I never would have figured out had I not decided to learn guitar for myself. Without any doubt, both songs and the chord in question hit tons of other people in their own unique ways, but somewhere between that F# and G note there exists a secret tone which unites a multitude of consciousnesses and moments in time. For me at least, the vibration of it connects distinct moments in my life in a bittersweet way- and I have little doubt that it connects me to other minds like the sympathetic strings on a harp. I'm sure that other music lovers and musicians could find their own examples, and hopefully this inspires you. 

*** Additional notes:

That last video is a song I wrote using the aforementioned EmAdd9 chord. 

I am not a big music theory guy. If I got anything wrong about how tones work, don't @ me as the kids used to say.

"Stuck in the Middle With You" has an additional weird story attached- for a period of a year or so I seemed to be living in an alternated dimension wherein that song was a little slower, sung in a different register, and lacking background vocals. It was unnerving, kind of a Mandela Effect moment, as I seemed to be the only one who noticed. Eventually it went back to normal. No idea what that was about.

When the Trickster Comes to Town

 

“There’s a sucker born every minute”, P. T. Barnum said. The original huckster, the carnival barker and showman of American circus history, is well-known to have said these words in regard to the money he made off of marks and rubes. The trouble is, he never said that- a detractor of his said that as a way of criticizing Barnum’s sensationalism and false claims. 

Would old Phineas have disagreed with the sentiment? Likely not, but the point here is that the Trickster spirit that animates and lives parallel to all hoaxes, illusions, and lies is so intrusive and all-encompassing it even permeates those things that everybody knows. When we think of the Trickster in terms of high strangeness, we run the risk of ignoring its presence in the more mundane realms. This is to say, the highly strange phenomena itself is but the exterior workings of the Trickster; what we do with it, what concepts we build from it, and how we ultimately synthesize the data is the really tricky stuff. Trying to pin down any particular event definitively amounts to playing three-card monte on a cosmic card table, and always walking away a few dollars short and mystified.

While we’re talking about cards, let’s look at the old 21 Card Trick for a bit of table magic. “Magic” in this sense relates to the stage variety, although this trick tends to fall more under “uncle magic”, common tricks a family member or bartender might pull out on a whim. We talk about stage magic as distinct from magical magic, and sometimes append a “k” to the end of the word so no mistake can be made, but let’s really look at the trick to see how tricky- and magical- it is.

21 cards are laid out in columns, face up. The “victim” selects a card without saying what it is, but indicates the column of seven cards and all of them are gathered, then redistributed in three columns again. Eventually Uncle Bartender will take up all the cards, spell out “Abra Cadabra!” and lay a card down for each letter, and wouldn’t you know it? The last card is the one the victim picked.

This is what’s known as a “self-working” trick. There is no real “trick” involved, no sleight, no palming of cards or manipulation. Just simple math. Mathematically, in ways I can’t explain, if you follow the correct order of operations with the columns and the laying out of cards, that last card will always be the one your victim silently selected. It may as well actually be magical magic. And why, I think it’s fair to ask, can’t it be both?

If we broaden our circus tent to a Bradburyan degree, and let in some spooky mysteries and curious creatures alongside the gaffs and stage illusions, we can see our assumptions about reality warp like a dwarf in a funhouse mirror. Everywhere one looks in Forteana, ufology, paranormal history, and occult magic claims one finds weird truths behind tall tales and only smoke and mirrors behind more cut-and-dry explanations. Sometimes a credible seeming explanation of an incredible claim, when interrogated, seems much less likely than the original claim itself- and often, those little things that “everybody knows” turn out to be fallacies. Through it all, there’s an air of mystery within the tent and without. Phantom odors of both popcorn and elephant dung simultaneously entice and repulse you as you weave your way toward the side-show.

If we move from the metaphor of this fantastical circus of the mind to the more literal and historical circus history, we might consider claims that Helena Blavatsky started out as a trick rider of horses in a traveling show after abandoning her first marriage. Whether this is true or not, the idea that the woman who would ultimately be the face of Theosophy, with its myriad influences throughout occult traditions culminating in all manner of New Age beliefs, had a carnivalesque origin story is oddly appealing and fitting. Similarly, much later, Anton LaVey would claim to have played organ for the Clyde Beatty Circus, all the while learning from the animal trainers and magicians there. While there is no proof of such a connection, outside of his claims, the performative and influential effects produced through his Satanic Church had a carnival barker quality. In both examples, keeping an open mind, one wonders where the show ends and the mystery begins. One gets a sense, returning to the metaphorical tent, that within it somewhere is a fortune teller who is actually a powerful soothsayer- someone with eyes sewn shut and yet with the ability to predict more than just illustrated men. Perhaps it wouldn’t be difficult to prognosticate where all of this leads us, as following our noses leads us either to the concession stands or animal stalls tracing histories of fringe belief and weird phenomena. It seems all of it is, after all, in the eye of the beholder, not the nose- and that whatever your preconceived biases, the investigation of the highly strange continues to be the Best Show on Earth. 

If you haven’t yet thrown up your hands in frustration, and are willing to further traverse the phantom fairgrounds, you might consider again the magician who deals with illusions and sleights. Often, these types are some of the best-equipped in evaluation of paranormal claims. John Keel, for example, remains an influential voice and to some investigators one of the best who ever wrote on the subjects of the highly strange, which is largely to do with his background in magic. Much has been made of magicians like James Randi or Houdini debunking claims of various phenomena, but this is only part of the story. There are also investigators like Loyd Auerbach or John E. L. Tenney, who both practice magic for the stage while being more open to an examination of the otherworldly. Still in our histories we see others, like the Davenport Brothers, who conjured spirits in seances with claims to legitimacy- and upon being found out, continued their performances as stage magic. It’s a small matter of saying it’s a show, “For entertainment purposes only”- but is it, ultimately? Or is it all a part of the Big Show in the Big Tent, all under the umbrella of the Trickster, still looking for that newly born sucker?

It’s all fun and games to conjecture, and fun and games is where we meet the Trickster halfway. There’s a crossroads outside of the fairground where we appear, dressed as Mr. Dark, to meet the Trickster. Down the road is a place where people are concerned only with what they can prove, and what authority figures tell them. This writer has no fear of offending these folks, since none of them will have read this far into these poetic meanderings. Those who seek proof, Disclosure, acceptance from the amorphous and ever-ill-defined entity known as Science in regard to their pet theories about ghosts, UFOs, monsters, and whatzits of all kinds celebrate when sitting congressmen talk about UAP or NHI. It’s a big deal, they claim, when our legislators are finally taking the weird stuff seriously! It might interest these people to know that in American history, legislators and even presidents have been open to or strong believers in all kinds of wild claims. It was a congressman who wrote one of the most influential books about the existence of and history of Atlantis, which would later inspire the aforementioned Blavatsky as well as contribute to all manner of wild beliefs. John Quincy Adams, the 6th President of the United States, approved a mission to discover and sign a treaty with the Mole People of the inner earth. Bringing it back home, Barnum himself served in the Connecticut legislature. The appeal to authority and the self-satisfaction of certainty as regards the various mysteries informing the Big Mystery is anathema to the equation, and only serves to illustrate how tricky the Trickster gets.

Perhaps the metaphor of the circus tent and the surrounding area along with the Bradbury allusions is a bit too dark and cerebral. The sinister carnival has been a useful theme for as long as we’ve had carnivals; the subversion of amusements and novelty betraying our confidences and thus instilling terror has its place, but there is a risk of putting too much emphasis on fear. It might be more helpful to think of high strangeness and the Trickster nature of it all as operating on cartoon logic. I’ve often said that in order to understand the weirdness of the wyrdshit out there, one should study the 1953 Merrie Melodies cartoon Duck Amuck. There are several ways one might take such a suggestion, but for our purposes here let us consider the investigator to be in the role of Daffy Duck. Daffy is keenly aware that he is painted onto a cell in a cartoon, awaiting direction from the mostly unseen animator. He accepts that anything is possible in his cartoon world, and further, that most of it is illusory. Despite this, he is still frustrated in his attempts to compromise with the animator who torments him. He finds himself transported, transformed into a motley beast, and even in conflict with his own double; even though he knows the trick, he can still be tricked.

The animator of course (spoiler alert) turns out to be none other than the ultimate trickster, Bugs Bunny. Bugs is a demiurgic stinker, casually toying with his feathered frenemy in the surprising reveal. It only makes sense that the legendary rascal would attain godlike powers after a lifetime’s experience traveling down rabbit holes… and the clowns of the circus, which we failed to mention early, are the real power in the Big Top. At this point the reader might think we’ve wandered into the realm of nonsense, which surely we have- after all, the whole premise of “going down rabbit holes” comes from a classic of nonsense literature. Chasing the White Rabbit down into Wonderland we find ourselves sitting for tea with the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, who asks us why a raven is like a writing desk. It might be the most appropriate question we’ve yet been asked.

In several Native American cultures, Raven is a Trickster figure, with his own motives and purposes. He is variously also a messenger, which corresponds to the ravens depicted in Norse mythology as associates of Odin. Much like the desk where tales of high strangeness are written down, dissected, and disseminated, Raven sends messages while himself also being the message in question. It’s tricky stuff, and accepting that you’ll be fooled is a step toward overcoming the frustration of not knowing. Laugh at thyself, from time to time, and learn to unknow.

It is significant that some of the wildest tales of the highly strange prominently involve children as witnesses. Think of Gef the Talking Mongoose, and his association with young Voirrey. Think of the young girls who took photos of the Cottingley Fairies, and all that resulted from them. Hell, consider the Fox Sisters and their outsized impact on the entire world once they conjured spirits through raps and knocks. Children are more readily accepting of cartoon logic, of the wider range of possibilities reality has available. They haven’t yet learned to abandon flights of fancy, through which fanciful things might filter through from another realm. Recently I had occasion to interview Paul A. T. Wilson, who shared with me what he learned from a woman who claimed to be the little girl from the now famous Sam the Sandown Clown story. Before long, I was receiving all manner of comments and messages picking apart Paul’s narrative, accusations of fraud and attacks on his character. It seemed so strange to me that these folks would so readily accept the narrative of the young girl, about her improbable encounter with a weird entity on the Isle of Wight, and yet spend so much time and effort finding reasons to reject any further story. Perhaps we’re more sympathetic to tall tales told from the perspective of children. There’s a purity there, albeit one that’s intrinsically tied to the impish impulses of youth, that we respond to out of nostalgia and empathy. It may also be the case that each of us knows there was a time when the monster under the bed posed a real threat, or that dragons were something to look out for or that the spooky old house down the road was the home of an old witch. Reality is more malleable for children because they see not with their eyes, but with an infinite prismatic kaleidoscope of probability. Raven delivers true visions to those who deserve to see what can’t be seen through normal eyeballs. Adopting a childlike view, where cartoons make sense and preconceived notions don’t prohibit one from entertaining wild ideas is a wild talent in and of itself. 

And so we’re back at the circus, standing at the platform next to Mr. Dark’s Merry-go-Round, weighing the risks of taking the ride…