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.

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…

Of Grumpy Cats and Alternate Realities

On Friday, May 17th, the news hit the internet that celebrity pet and meme legend Grumpy Cat had passed away, due to complications from a urinary tract infection. The famous grouch's owner, Tabatha Bundesen, made the announcement to the cat's thousands of fans through her extensive social media presence. The kitty in question, whose real name was Tardar Sauce, was 7 years old - and accomplished more in her short life than can be expected of most people.

But for some of us - this had all happened before. Some of us experienced a bit of a Mandela Effect moment...

goodbye grumpy cat pic.twitter.com/2LmoYXM1Rr

— shitty watercolour (@SWatercolour) May 17, 2019

 For my own part, internet memes - cat related or not - occupy little of my attention online. But I couldn't help but feel that I had heard of the passing of Grumpy Cat a few years ago; in fact, I had distinct memories not only of reading a headline, but of reading a short article that remarked on how her condition of feline dwarfism, which contributed to her classic scowl, had also decreased her lifespan. After tweeting this as a passing thought, attributing it to the Mandela Effect while rejecting the possibility that I might just be wrong about something, I found that I wasn't alone in having a memory of Grumpy Cat's demise. Grumpy Cat, for some of us, had died either several years ago or a few months ago... a quick glance at #MandelaEffect on Twitter gave me a better idea of how prevalent this memory is.

I have a distinct ambivalence about the Mandela Effect as a concept. My knee-jerk reaction has generally been that it's an outstanding example of arrogance inherent in Human Nature - that, rather than consider the possibility that some number of people is wrong about the spelling of a title of a children's book series, or how exactly an iconic movie line was delivered, there must by necessity be an alternate dimension or timeline, a temporal shift or some other time/space anomaly responsible. It would be hypocritical of me, however, to dismiss it outright. I've certainly considered crazier ideas. And I have to admit, finding out that Ed McMahon DIDN'T deliver giant checks to peoples' homes gave me a really eerie feeling. I was so certain that I remember seeing it in commercials while idly watching reruns of Gilligan's Island as a kid... To a lesser extent I felt similarly about Grumpy Cat.

One logical explanation for a shared memory of a celebrity cat's demise is that there have been a great many celebrity cats online, several of whom have died. Perhaps we were all remembering a different ubiquitous meme cat's venture into the great beyond? Another famously grumpy looking feline, Colonel Meow - the Guinness Book record holder for cat with the longest fur - died at the age of 2 in 2014. There's a longer list of celebrity or meme related kitties than this blogger cares to enumerate, many of whom have passed on. It's worth considering why the history of the internet (and social media, in particular) is so replete with cat photos and memes. One could argue that cats simply fulfill an archetypal need for our mental health in a data-driven world, wherein we find ourselves awash in a hopeless whirlpool of opinion pieces, bad news, and hoaxes, overwhelmed by the vast sea of information and misinformation that bombards us daily. Grumpy Cat certainly fulfilled this need for many people, who often used her image in memes expressing their dissatisfaction about any number of mundane issues. The image of, and mythology of cats has precedent in many societies throughout the world. It's not surprising that cats would hold such a powerful place within our collective unconscious - down through the ages, cats have occupied some level of metaphysical and emotional space as companions, protectors, and pets. Most obviously the ancient Egyptians held the cats in a place of reverence, and had a goddess in their pantheon named Bast. Bast was the daughter of Ra, and a protector deity.

In other cultures, cats portray a trickster nature and are associated with witches, vampires, and even genies. Black cats, according to superstition, can walk between realities, occupying a liminal territory between one world and another... and of course, in modern physics, there's the often misinterpreted thought experiment of Erwin Schrodinger, who used reductio ad absurdum to illustrate the problems he saw with the Copenhagen Interpretation - that being, when a particle is in an either/or state, it is considered to be both - known as a superposition - until it can be measured. In Schrodinger's example, a cat in a box with a radioactive particle and a flask of poison may either be alive, or dead, but without opening the box to observe, the cat retains equal chances of either state - and thus, according to the quantum view, is both alive and dead. (My apologies to any physicists reading this, I'm not a scientist but I do my best to understand these things...)

So is Tardar Sauce, aka Grumpy Cat, a modern Bast-like avatar of our era, one capable of shifting all of time and space, one who occupies a position both within the realm of the Living and the realm of the Dead?

Unfortunately, it seems that the solution to this inter-dimensional quandary is much more mundane, as so often regrettably happens. In 2016, a rumor of the death of Grumpy Cat went viral, leading many of us to believe that the iconic puss-faced pussycat had passed on. It wasn't the first time either; in 2013 pranksters on Twitter created a death hoax for April Fool's Day. It would appear that many of us were duped by misinformation either three or six years ago, creating an eerie deja vu effect upon hearing the news this time. In this age of being perpetually bombarded with both good and bad information at an accelerated rate, we can hardly be blamed for the occasional false memory. Of course, this tinkering with perception may very well be causing a rift in reality itself - perhaps the Mandela Effect in this case IS real, while simultaneously a simpler and more logical solution is true. One thing is for sure, we could all use a protector deity like Bast to protect us from a Temporal Rift...

Clowns to the Left of Me, Joker to the Right...

It's been a weird week, here at the headquarters of your humble Aficionado. I set out to write a nice little analysis of the Joker, of Batman comics fame, and got a bit sidetracked down a rabbit hole of research on the broad subject of clowns... it seems I opened a portal to the Clown Realm, inadvertently. Allow me to explain...

Firstly, I should establish here my personal thoughts on clowns. Growing up, I thought that coulrophobia was equal parts people who joked about fear of clowns, and people who were scarred by the TV miniseries It and its monstrous demon clown Pennywise. I never could relate to the fear of, or even the creep factor of clowns. To me, they're funny; a bit corny and outdated perhaps, but then again so am I. I have a fair amount of cartoons and art that I've drawn featuring clowns, and I'm sometimes dismayed when people think they're creepy. I have great respect for proper clowning as an art form, so if any clowns are reading this - I give you a 21 bicycle horn salute!

That being said, I set out to write about Joker, in anticipation of the anniversary of his first appearance in Batman #1 back in 1940. This triggered the idea for another post about the science behind creepiness with some Phantom Clowns thrown in for good measure. In the process I noticed a few clown synchronicities that I joked about on my Twitter account. Then they started to pile up... I wondered briefly if I should bother writing about this here on the blog late last night, and got an answer from the Clown Realm:

*sigh* Here goes nothing...

I started noticing odd coincidences in doing the research, in conjunction with the #OnThisDay posts I'm fond of doing on Twitter. Jack Nicholson (Joker in Batman, 1989) celebrated a birthday on the first day of really digging into the writing, April 22nd. April 23rd was the birthday of Ruggero Leoncavallo, the man behind the opera Pagliacci - which I was incorporating into a character analysis of the Clown Prince of Crime. On a whim, my creepiness entry included a picture of the creepiest smile I could think of - that of Mr. Sardonicus, the title character of a film by Gimmick King and thriller movie maker William Castle - and then found out Castle's birthday was April 24th.

On the 24th I had a moment of metaphysical hilarity in the form of greeting a woman at her place of work, only to have her ask - without glancing up from her smartphone - "Do you know where I could buy a clown car that leaves a trail of bubbles behind it?" I was a bit bewildered at first, and made sure she was actually talking about an actual clown car. I'm happy to say I think I managed to point her in the right direction, accomplishing my weird deed for the day.

My day-to-day life involves a lot of driving around, so I always make sure I have podcasts to listen to. One day last week, the episode of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio that I was listening to ended with a discussion about world politics and this phrase - "Clowns run the world". The next day, I was listening to something a little less weird - WTF? with Marc Maron. Wouldn't you know it, during the opening neurotic rambling customary for his program, he read a fan letter - from a clown. The fan went into detail about the therapeutic benefits of Theatrical Clowning. Meanwhile I was in my truck saying to no one in particular "You've GOT to be kidding me!"

It didn't stop there, either, but it did seem to wind down a bit. The whole thing reminded me of an article I had read in an old issue of Fortean Times, by Bob Tarte and Bill Holm *, recounting his year of misadventure being plagued by synchronicity involving a clown named Bobo and the number 22. This sadly doesn't exist online anywhere where I can find it, but parts of it are included here for your perusal. Mr Tarte dealt with the nefarious and enigmatic Bobo for a full year - here's hoping I can avoid this fate and close the clown portal with this blog entry! Conspicuous is the fact that my first observed clown coincidence occurred on Nicholson's birthday - April 22nd...

Friday I went to the X-Filers United! Conference in Warwick, RI, and checked out Greg and Dana Newkirk's Traveling Museum of the Paranormal & Occult. Greg and Dana are every bit as cool as I suspected they'd be; very welcoming, kind, and easy going. I was thrilled to meet them!

I was so thrilled to hang with them that ectoplasm blew out of my left ear. A little embarrassing, but these things happen I suppose...

I mentioned my clown synchronicities to them, for which I immediately felt a bit sheepish. But like I said, they're cool as Hell, and didn't seem to mind me continually coming back to linger at their museum and casually chat with them! The reason I mention any of this is that their collection included two items which caught my eye right away...

Each clown seemed to have a terrifying entity attached to it. Smiley, up top, terrorized college students with its attached "Dog-Eyed Humanoid" that would come out at night... While the clown below was found in a Chicago basement, wrapped in a picture of itself - this one seemed to make some skeletal creature that made cracking and popping noises manifest... Creepy stuff, indeed!

The traveling museum is really quite a wonderful collection of oddities and is worth going out of your way for. Every item inside was fascinating and wonderful. I spent a bit of time with a black scrying mirror, and was relieved that my reflection hadn't grown a clown nose...

That brings me to the weekend - of course I told my son about my clown troubles, which he found hilarious. Saturday afternoon the two of us were chatting with my mother through video chat, when she spontaneously put her phone down - only to pick it up again, surprising me by her and my dad wearing clown noses. Uncanny.

I also realized I had missed the series finale of the TV series Gotham, which aired on April 25th. I'm not sure if it was intentional on the part of the writers and producers of the show, but I suspect it was - that's the date of the anniversary of Joker's first appearance, the thing I set out to research and write about to begin with. And, fittingly enough, the episode - "The Beginning..." - revealed the Joker as we know and love him toward the end.

So now that this is all out there for the whole wide internet to chew on, hopefully these clowns can pile back into their phantom clown car and hit that cosmic freeway back to the Clown Realm from whence they came. I can close the Clown Portal and move forward, and write about something else next week. Anything else. Clowns never creeped me out before, but I gotta say they've been trying real hard this week!

Pictured: Clown College Drop-Out

* Bob Tarte has reached out to correct me on the attribution of his authorship of the article "A Circle of Clowns" from Fortean Times. He co-authored it with Bill Holm, who he says did the bulk of the writing. Weirdly enough, Holm also shared a birthday with Jack Nicholson - April 22nd! Bob is a real nice guy and the author of books such as Enslaved by Ducks and Kitty Cornered. Go check them out!