An artist named Stoneham painted The Hands Resist Him, a painting called ‘haunted’ that sold for $150,000 on eBay.
It shows a creepy boy and a large female doll standing in front of a set of French doors, with hands pressing the panes and floating in the dark behind him. It creeps out almost everyone who looks at it, or an image of it, as can be found online. Don’t look it up. You’ll be sorry.
Stoneham intended to create Neo Surrealism but may have touched deeper human caverns. His painting inspired a horror novel by a writer named O’Neil. Currently that book’s going to film.
Are the wide-ranging manifestations of dread said to be prompted by the image — even by prints and screen shots, even print-outs — psychological?
Well … Motion-sensor camera images show the boy crawl from the painting in the night, show the girl or doll brandish a gun when she was painted with no such thing in her hand.
Faked?
Difficult and expensive to accomplish, so it’s considered unlikely.
First to own the painting was the actor who wakes up with the horse head in his bed in THE GODFATHER. His name was John Marley, and he was not dead to begin with, door nails to one side. He sold it but died in 1984 after open-heart surgery, so … more bad juju?
The painting is currently in a back room at a Michigan art gallery, as far as we know. Maybe it’s crawling around.
Stoneham painted a series of six prequel and sequel images, telling a fragmented story adding up to eerie ambiguity.
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One small anomalous event — even just a painting that evokes feelings of unease — leads some people to spend their lives focusing on and trying to learn more about it, and mostly, 30 or 40 years down stream, they look back and nothing has surpassed or matched the initial item or event that gave them that eerie frisson. Why was it so compelling? Why did it seem so important?
What is it about such anomalous experiences that take hold of minds, of lives? Why not shrug them off and get on with living?
Immanence. Inherent meaning. That inner glow of significance.
Chasing connections to bigger things compels many of us and a white crow experience can fuel such obsession. Church services suffice for a good many seekers. Ritual is symbolic behavior that tunes us to resonant energies. Rhythmic patterns are part of what entrains us from individual to congregation, from lone meditator to part of the egregore.
Once in sync, we spiral up and out, expanding perspective.
Some want more than the front-loaded stuff of church services. They want to chase things down in the wild. Wild things compel them.
The higher and wider we fly, the more we can see, and the more context becomes apparent.
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Legend tells us an Arab Sheik had a black horse that could fly.
It was mechanical.
Are we facing a fable? Or are we hearing filtered fact?
Clouds of dust arose when this mechanical black flying horse took off. Screws are mentioned as a means of controlling flight.
Another term for a propellor is a screw.
Archimedes knew of water screws.
Did ancient Arabs know of air screws?
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An air castle guarded by flying horses is also claimed.
Ancient Alien Theorists cite misunderstood and poorly described airships. If a stone-age tribe sees an airplane they call it a bird. Cargo cults made airplane shapes to entice these generous birds to return and once again leave food and tools, as WW II supply drops had done on tropical islands.
Or was it simply fiction presented as fact for entertainment?
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In future, will our science fiction be discernible from actual events?
It seems obvious from today’s man-on-the-street interviews that idiots abound and refuse to accept, say, NASA’s Moon Missions, or Earth being an oblate spheroid. People are turning increasingly away from consensual reality, which requires a measure of trust in institutions, in science, and in common, shared experience. They lean harder into the benighted pit of suspicion, dread, and paranoia, offering wilder theories for this or that projected conspiracy, rather than accepting basic fact.
Fact, in fact, we’re told now, is negotiable.
No, it’s not.
Fact can be confirmed independently.
Oh, but how can we trust any source, including our own senses and thoughts? Truth is, no one knows anything for sure, they say.
It’s truth that’s subjective, requiring no evidence, leaning on the invisible crutch of faith, demanding willful blindness, looking beyond reality into projected conspiracy to explain anything, everything.
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Another Fourth of July has come and gone and it’s 2022 C.E.
Sounded like a war.
Night fell and up into the sky — and onto roofs, into dry fields and forests, and into eyes and chests and other soft flesh — went private fireworks. Pop, pop, pop, bang, kaboom.
Our dogs don’t like it. They’re calm but for booms, be it thunder or someone echoing white supremacy winning at dawn’s early light.
What was happening? A celebration? A reckoning? A spasm of excessive behavior?
Bangs sound like guns, which reminded me that Thomas M. Disch, a brilliant writer of elegant science fiction, whose work remained too literary to be really popular, shot himself to death in his NYC apartment on Fourth of July 2008 and wasn’t found for a while.
War sounds provided cover. Fireworks masked gunshots.
He was bereft at the loss of his partner and conflicted and oppressed due to having been openly gay from 1968 when you couldn’t.
Oh, yeah, still can’t. Haters still on the march to burn more witches.
No one in science fiction cared but society did.
“I’m gay myself but I don’t write gay fiction.”
He wrote to reach us all.
One thing he wrote was Camp Concentration, a short novel released in 1968 about POWs given drugs to boost intelligence so they could slave on high tech weapons for a fascist regime. These drugs also wore you out and killed you in a few short years. This was the fascist preference to letting a population be well-fed and educated. They preferred to capture people into slavery and work them to death.
Hello, Hitler and every other fascist tyrant.
So this was science fiction. Disch had the example of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, among many others in history. He didn’t anticipate others specifically but wrote of a standard default sadism and cruelty fascism evokes and embraces. Look around.
Now look while you’re looking at North Korea. This is a state that starves its populace, immerses its people in lies, and kidnaps young academics from the rest of the world to force them into slaving intellectually on high-end weapons development.
Camp Concentration should join 1984, Brave New World, We, It Can’t Happen Here, The Handmaid’s Tale, and so many others as among the great dystopian novels. As among the clearest warnings.
Reading these books inoculates against fascism.
If you know the face under the mask, and the history of that particular criminal, you won’t be fooled again.
Or will you?
Will future people be able to tell Disch’s fiction from despotic fact? Will they tell dire tales rooted in fiction intended as cautionary without realizing it wasn’t factual?
Will they emphasize fiction when fact was much worse?
Nothing was celebrated on Fourth of July 2022 C.E. — only drunks who like sparkly kabooms.
Independence, freedom, equality, democracy?
No more reason to pretend such things.
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Can’t be an expert in unconfirmed things.
All you can be is a student honest with yourself.
Fact is objective and can be checked, confirmed.
Truth is subjective, depending only on belief.
To believe is to pretend, facts being irrelevant.
Reality is what’s there whether we are or not.
Home is where your self-deceptions aren’t challenged.
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Obverse is the other or under side.
Obsession is being fixed on something to the exclusion of all else. Idée fixe, the French say.
Fixation means being stuck permanently in one spot. To fix is to pin.
People who glom onto an idea or search or purpose or cause are fixated. They are stuck on one thing, and all else is ignored or filtered through that one thing. That’s obsession.
Philip K. Dick, another science fiction write, who was friends with Thomas M. Disch until they weren’t, wrote visionary paranoia that achieved philosophical depth and penetrating insight.
He had what he called his Pink Light Experience, an epiphany of sorts.
A beam of pink light struck him in the forehead and uploaded staggering amounts of information to him. He wrote later of VALIS, meaning a Vast, Active, Living Information System.
Modern physics has gone beyond the Planck Constant into an information-based realty. Time has been vanquished, replaced by causation. We can now speak of Space-Causation in place of Space-Time.
PKD’s dazzling access to information from elsewhere allowed him to diagnose a life-threatening condition in his son, which doctors ignored, then sneered at until Philip K. Dick insisted. Tests confirmed his amazing diagnosis and the child’s impending death. PKD’S son was saved by this insight and doctors could’t explain how he’d known.
When he tried, Philip K. Dick was called crazy, schizophrenic, and paranoid by what he’d thought were his friends and colleagues. Look at Ridley Scott’s BLADE RUNNER, any variant, and you’ll see how PKD looked at the world. Androids, people-shaped things, versus the few human beings, who had memories, feelings, compassion, altruism … hope.
In one of his novels, PKD wrote of a man who found slips of paper with labels on them, such as car, news stand, bank building. They lay on the ground and he realized such solid things, such places and items, existed only in his mind, suggested by those notes.
Nightmarish? Or is this scene a clear metaphor for how it is?
Maya is what Hindu philosophy calls the apparently-real but illusory world we see and experience around us. Physical reality is a sham.
Physics concurs. “Mostly empty space, a dance of energies.”
Memory might be an energy field. So might mind, awareness, cognizance, sentience.
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What about Information Theory as the bottom line?
Acting as a foundation for reality, the smallest increment of what comprises our world, was the Planck Constant, a quantum of energy that couldn’t be split any further.
Now, the Planck Constant is replaced by information bits. These are conceived as binary states.
Up, down. Left, right. In, out. Those sorts of choices.
How are these choices made, to allow them to elaborate our universe from such tiny beginnings?
Causation, they say. What causes a binary bit of information to flip to one or the other of its innate situations?
Observation, which requires sentience. This strongly hints that every quark, atom, or molecule may be aware. Sentience may be a kind of energy field, with cognizance a condensation from self-awareness leading to intelligence. That’s the general notion.
Magical thinking lies about being able to have wishes come true, citing information theory, trying to con people into believing, (pretending), that thoughts change the world without further effort.
Contemporary distrust of all forms of authority combines with internet chaos and near-infinite alternative arguments to create a generation of isolated individuals, each trapped in an empty bubble of delusion, misinformation, wishful thinking, and projected prejudices.
Home is where self-delusions aren’t challenged.
Angry insistence on one over another delusional world view creates discord that divides us and inspires terrorism and personal violence. Symbolic acts of lashing out lead to mass shootings every day, a senseless slaughter rooted in lies, fears, and bigotries.
Information matters, fact more so. Confirmable, consensual fact.
Yet we see Flat Earthers on the rise. Ignoring the ship’s mast sinking at the horizon, ignoring any number of images taken from NEO showing the Earth’s curvature, thrust like a malicious nude’s hip that won’t tempt them —ignoring anything but their own projected stubborn nonsense, they insist we can’t trust anything to be real.
Solipsism, it’s called. Withdrawal into a personal delusion.
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Obsession’s obverse might just be the real reality.
Don’t be contrarian, which is simplistic and shallow. It’s easy to contradict what ever comes along.
Instead, think hard what might be going on besides the obvious.
Always look under rocks, especially the ones thrown at you, the ones that knock you in the head. They might be plastic and part of a hoax.
Worse, they might be a con job trying to bully or dupe you. Politics, business, and religion are all fields rife with such deception.
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Dismissers guard against learning too much, or looking too hard.
Skeptics resist conclusions, always demanding more evidence.
Analysts consider all angles.
Believers fit observations to foregone conclusions in end-justifies-means certainty.
Scientists apply reason, rationality, science, and logic, all as rooted in physics. Their method is to devise a theory or hypothesis that seems to explain the evidence at hand, then to disprove it if possible.
Amidst all that are average people uninterested in fringe topics such as science, reality, and cosmology. They focus on pleasure and profit. They’re essentially a zoo of narcissistic animal appetites.
Self-centered greed allows predators the leeway needed to let them seize wealth, advantage, and often control in a given society.
Taking serious interest in society — especially in an altruistic way — is rare and usually a response to pressure from the stalking bully classes.
In place of interest, projected wishful delusions, religious and nostalgic, blind the masses even further. What we end up with is superstition, emotional responses, rigid dogmatism, us versus them bunker mentality, and conformity to empty posturing and ritual.
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Fiction save us. Not lies, but the weaving of stories that matter to us. Not lying, but the concocting of a society that works through the construction of cultural myths and legends rooted in fact and convincing in details, focused on ways to behave and what not to do.
Fiction must be a holdover from an ancient shamanic act of conjuring a world. It’s too strong a drive. Fiction must date to before literacy.
It may go deeper than language itself, than words, speech being a conjuring aloud. Each instance of communication knits the world and its inhabitants more intimately to an individual’s experience. It keeps us from sinking too far into ourselves.
Story lets experience dance with imagination. Joy and fear made coherent in narrative offer renewed chances to hold life close, even as it extends from past into future.
When sound became symbol, when words became writing, voices could reach across time and space to touch distant, future minds. This knit the pattern of existence into myth and history.
Memory could be affirmed in fixed form. The first incunabula kindled a light of learning in what darkness had prevailed.
Scrolls to books to screens elevated discourse that spanned centuries of living, a record for any interested glance, with electronic communication condensing a vast human experience into a continual conversation.
Objective reference met subjective interpretation to conjure meaning. With purpose came ambition beyond self. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs leapfrogged through all cultures in conceptual exchanges of electrons.
Writing’s ancient roots elevate us all. They got us where we are but brought along the enemy, too.
To burn books, to take a stance against intellectuals, to howl and rave and rage against literacy, is nihilism’s version of murder-suicide. Such growing movements of exploited, duped, disenfranchised people are like the maniac trying to grab the wheel of a speeding vehicle, the suicide bomber who carries an explosive onto an airplane, the sneak terrorist hoping to scuttle the ship, the lying politician sowing chaos and disorder to create a fog behind which crimes can thrive. All these are manifestations of Dark Chaos Magick.
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Prove it’s not.
See, that’s the trick. Can’t prove a negative. You can’t prove there isn’t a – [ fill in the blank ] – standing there or causing this, that, or something else.
That’s how people are duped by big lies and conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theories is a misunderstood, currently a pejorative, phrase. On the one hand, there is no questions that conspiracies exist. Of course they do, as Julius Caesar or read Unsafe At Any Speed by Ralph Nader or The Octopus by Frank Norris or The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, or look over the current facts about how lying about the legitimacy of an election tried to demolish the peaceful transfer of power in what was once the USA.
There are far too many examples of genuine conspiracy to deny they exist. The Mafia, any political party, collusion to keep prices controlled, etc.
Ah, but explaining how they work, that’s where we stumble off the cliff of rationality. The theory part of the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ is weaponized to lead us away from fact into confusion, disorder, and strife.
We know something underhanded is going on but haven’t taken the time or made the effort to suss out factually how it’s being accomplished, so we eagerly jump on bandwagons that tell us it’s THEM, it’s THOSE OTHERS, it’s THAT GROUP YOU FEAR, HATE, AND MISTRUST. Yes, prejudice is a bait to entice you, and often it is the very conspirators who are taking you by the nose and leading you down a garden path where you’ll be left powerless, ridiculed, and useless in any attempt to stop the crimes.
Bait-and-switch works, too. They’re promising you this but they really want to come for your – [ fill in the blank using a hot-button emotional buzz word or phrase ] – so vote for us, we would never, ever do that. We stand for family values and save the children and stop the cannibalism.
It’s absurdly simple to stampede groups of otherwise ordinary people away from factual reality into a burlap sack to be tossed into the river of political and corporate crime. Soon you vote against your own interests and sell your children and grandchildren down the river, giving them no chance at a better life than you had.
You trade their futures for the momentary glow of throwing an emotional fit.
All because of the obverse obsessions we never examine in ourselves or others. That underside of life that one swindler who used the fake name Adam Smith called The Invisible Hand, as if there were such a thing making sure we do the right thing without knowing anything about a given topic.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market was a confidence lie told so investors would keep feeding the beast of gambling known as stock exchanges and money markets. It encouraged them, assured them in fact, that in an unfettered free market, that invisible hand would guide trades and keep things on an even keel, fair and square, profit über alles.
It was smoke blown in the public’s face to hide the blatant cheating, insider trading, outright theft, cornering of certain commodities, lying, empty promises, and the endlessly creative ways traders and investment firms chisel and steal money. The invisible hand is a thief’s bullshit.
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“You are not entitled to an opinion, you’re entitled to an informed opinion. Unless you’re informed, your view means no more than the braying of a mule, the barking of a dog. In fact, the dog’s bark and the jackass’s bray likely mean more.”
This is both factual and true, please note.
It’s a paraphrase of something Isaac Asimov once wrote, no doubt harsher than he’d have phrased it, but it gets the gist across.
So there you are on the operating table.
You’re having, say, an eye removed due to cancer.
Your surgeon comes in, and you hear, just as you drift off and go dark, his voice. He’s asking a janitor and a passer-by what they think he should do.
How’s that feel?
You trust the surgeon. He’s experienced, knowledgeable: Informed.
Those others? What do they know?
Is that who you want advising on the surgery to remove your bad eye?
What if the janitor says, “Well, the one’s a mess, I’d say take both, save yourself another mess down the line,” would you balk at his janitor logic?
You’d always want informed opinion, informed consent, informed analysis, informed assessment.
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So you see a UFO, a ghost, a cryptid such as Bigfoot or Nessie. This excites you and you share your encounter or observation with others. Often you have a picture or video. Ooh and ahh, eh?
Such things are real but we don’t know what they are.
We understand that people have cited them throughout history. We know not all can be mistakes or hoaxes, unless we’re a dismisser. We try our best to gather more data, to sift out information, to find evidence. Still, such fringe things, such anomalies, remain Fortean, unexplained, inexplicable given our current state of knowledge and science.
We may one day gain a vantage that lets us understand these baffling items in our constant, churning info-dump existence. Maybe we’ll say, Oh, that, yeah, funny, huh?
That day’s not today.
If someone speaks to you, ask yourself why is this being said to you, why now, and what is the speaker up to. This is suspicion used as a tool to unpack the manipulation from the phrasing. It lets you stop and think for an instant before you respond emotionally or blindly.
Your anomalous experience excites others. They chime in with opinions. It’s a bird, swamp gas, just a camera blur. You were drunk, on drugs, or sleeping. This, that, and the other explanation, each suited to project its source’s prejudices.
If you go to a surgeon, they want to cut.
If you go to a radiologist, they want to zap.
If you go to a chemist, they want to drug.
If you go to a shrink, they want to analyze.
If you go to a mechanic, they want to fix.
People are primed to follow their training.
This affects there perception of reality, too.
If you go to a true believer, they want to pretend they know.
They don’t.
No one can be an expert on things that aren’t confirmed.
Next time a potential obsession crops up, flip it over and look for the maker’s mark. Try to discern hidden agendas. Squint hard at what little your observation or experience left you with.
Chances are, you’ll have data insufficient to make information from. You’ll have evidence insufficient to allow a conclusion to be drawn.
Look at the Jack the Ripper murders. Late Summer, early Fall 1888, in London, England’s east end, the Whitechapel district.
They can’t even agree on how many murders happened at the Rippers’s hands, nor even if there was a single killer. Some claim the name came from an underhanded newspaper editor eager to put a brand name on what was selling papers. Some find the From Hell letter convincingly paranoid and strange to ascribe it to a genuine serial killer. Others just sneer at the Dear George letter sent to Mr Lusk with a chunk of a human kidney enclosed.
What do people want, huh?
To make the circus even funner, we see dozens of potential culprits. Suspects clustered then and there, it seems. All manner of crazies walked loose in Whitechapel during the Ripper murders.
Nailed-down facts are scarce but those existing don’t add up to enough hint-wink-nudge to be sure of any suspect.
FBI profiler John Douglas opted for Aaron Kosminski as Saucy Jack, based on his profile, but believe it or not Doctors George Philips and more notably Thomas Bond drew up the first known profile, working from autopsies of the Ripper’s canonical victims. They did this during the hunt for Leather Apron, when mixed reports of surgical skill and mere butchery vied for attention. Bond’s official statement tallies well with modern profiling.
All those experts, all those suspects, all this time, and Jack the Ripper’s real identity remains unknown outside the covers of the dozen or so books released each year by the JTR cottage industry, each of which is sure it’s got it sussed and squared away.
They don’t, but it’s their obsession.
A good anomaly has infinite capacity for theories.
New ideas, new routes of investigations, and new technology will always fit into the burlap sack of a good anomaly. Such a capacious zone of inquiry will always pay dividends in hope while always allowing room for more of the darkness of the unknown to swallow each new thrust, foray, or expedition. It’s how these things work.
True, some have figured ways to monetize or even make good livings from this or that obsession. Ghost hunting shows, urban explorers, and cryptic hunters can get internet followings or TV shows. Unsolved crimes can produce books that sell categorically, as long as each book has an interesting angle or new fillip. Did Jack the Ripper Murder a Ghost Aboard a Flying Saucer? Was Bigfoot the Victim of a Hair Growth Allergy? Did Dogman Eat Your Homework?
No matter what anomaly you obsess over, keep it mild. Stay light with it, and carry a sense of humor in your vampire hunting kit. Obsess gently, for an occasional hobby. Choose your obsession as you’d choose a novelty tee shirt. Don’t get lost in it. Don’t sacrifice daily life, connections with other people, or time better spent in pursuits better calculated to pay off in a worthwhile way.
Yes, I know, the obsessives all say it. If they make a breakthrough it will be momentous, world-shattering, it will change history, it will make them rich and famous …
Sure, but that breakthrough ain’t coming.
Well, probably it’s not.
Y’never know, right?
Look on the underside of everything, especially obsession.
Obverse world views last longer.
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