Backfire

One of the many things that baffles me about my fellow humans is how hard it is for people to say, "Well, I guess I was wrong, then."

I mean, I'm sure I've got as many idées fixes as the next guy.  There are parts of my worldview I'm pretty attached to, and models for how the universe works that I would be absolutely astonished to find out were incorrect.  But I'd like to think that if I were to be presented with hard evidence, I'd have no choice but to shrug aside my astonishment and say it.

"Well, I guess I was wrong, then."

This attitude, however, seems to be in the minority.  Many more people will hang onto their preconceived notions like grim death, sometimes even denying evidence that is right in front of their eyes.  I distinctly recall one student who, despite being a young-earth creationist, elected to take my AP Biology class, about which I was up front that it was taught from an evolutionary perspective.  She was quite friendly and not at all antagonistic, and one time I asked her what her basis was for rejecting the evolutionary model.  Did she doubt the evidence?  Did it strike her as an illogical stance?  Did the whole thing simply not make sense to her?

No, she assured me -- she knew the evidence was real (and overwhelming); the whole argument was impeccably logical and made good sense to her.

She simply didn't believe it.  Despite all of the science she knew (and excelled at; she damn near aced my class, which was no mean feat), she simply knew that the Bible was literally true.

I didn't question further -- my aim, after all, was understanding, not conversion -- but I left the conversation feeling nothing but puzzlement.  My only conclusion was that she defined the word knowledge very differently than I did.

To take a less emotionally-charged example, let me tell you a story about a man named John Murray Spear.

Spear was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1804, and from a young age attended the Universalist Church, eventually studying theology and being ordained.  He became minister of the congregation in Barnstable, and using his position fought for a bunch of righteous causes -- women's rights, labor reform, the abolition of slavery, and the elimination of the death penalty.

Spear, though, had another set of interests that were a little... odder.

He was a thoroughgoing Spiritualist, believing not only in the afterlife -- after all, that belief is shared by most Christian sects -- but that the spirits of the dead could and did communicate with the living.  He delved into the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer, both of whom had attempted to give a scientific basis for spirit survival (and for the related belief in a soul as a substance or energy independent of the body).  Spear's obsession eventually brought him into conflict with the Universalist Church leaders, and in the end he followed his heart, giving up his ministerial position and breaking all ties with the church.

In 1852 he wrote a tract in which he claimed to be in contact with a group called the "Association of Electrizers," which included not only Spear's namesake, the Universalist minister John Murray, but Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Benjamin Rush.

You have probably already figured out that all of these men were dead at the time.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

This didn't stop Spear.  He produced documents with texts from Murray et al., and which included their signatures.  Asked by skeptics how ghosts could sign their names, Spear claimed that okay, he'd held the pen, but the ghosts had guided his hand.  The texts contained information on how to combine technology and Spiritualism to create a source of energy that would elevate humanity to new levels, so he set about building a machine in a shed on a hill in Lynn, Massachusetts that he claimed would release a "New Motive Power" using a "messianic perpetual motion machine."

Whatever the fuck that means.

So Spear and a few followers got to work building their machine out of copper wire, zinc plates, magnets, and one (1) dining room table.  After months of effort, Spear and an unnamed woman he called "the New Mary" held a ceremony where they "ritualistically birthed" the machine in an attempt to give it life.  Then they turned it on.

Nothing happened.

After a couple more abortive attempts to get it going, Spear's Spiritualist friends got fed up, destroyed the machine, and told Spear he could go to hell.

This is the point where you'd think anyone would have said that magic phrase -- "Well, I guess I was wrong, then."  Not Spear.  Spear became even more determined.  He seemed to follow that famous example of a faulty logical chain, "Many geniuses were laughed at in their time.  I'm being laughed at, so I must be a genius."  He kept at it for another two decades, never achieving success, which you no doubt could have predicted by my use of the phrase "perpetual motion machine."  It was only in 1872 that he said he'd received a message from the Association of Electrizers telling him it was time to retire.

But until his death in Philadelphia in 1887, he handed out business cards to all and sundry saying, "Guided and assisted by beneficent Spirit-Intelligences, Mr. S. will examine and prescribe for disease of body and mind, will delineate the character of persons when present, or by letter, and indicate their future as impressions are given him; will sketch the special capacities of young persons...  Applications to lecture, or hold conversations on Spiritualism, will be welcomed."

On the one hand, you have to admire Spear's tenacity.  On the other... well, how much evidence do you need?  Surely on some level he was aware that he was making it all up, right?  He doesn't seem to have simply been mentally ill; his writings on other topics show tremendous lucidity.

But he had an idea that he wanted to be true so badly that he just couldn't resign himself to its falsehood.

I have to wonder, though, if there might be a strain of that in all of us.  How would I react if I learned something that completely overturned my understanding?  Would I really shift ground as easily as I claim, or would I cling tenaciously to my preconceived notions?  I wonder how big a catastrophe in my thinking it would take to make me rebel, and like my long-ago student, say, "Okay, I see it, I understand it, but I don't believe it"?

It's easy for me to chuckle at Spear with his Association of Electrizers and New Motive Forces and messianic perpetual motion machines, but honestly, it's because I already didn't believe in any of that stuff.  Maybe I'm as locked into my worldview as he was.  As journalist Kathryn Schulz put it, "Okay, we all know we're fallible, but in a purely theoretical sense.  Try to think of one thing, right now, that you're wrong about.  You can't, can you?"

The facile response is, "Of course not, because if I knew I was wrong, I would change my mind," but I think that misses the point.  We all are trapped in our own conceptual frameworks, and fight like mad when anything threatens them.  The result is that most of us can be presented with arguments showing us that we're wrong, and we still don't change our minds.  Sometimes, in fact, being challenged makes us hang on even harder.  It's so common that psychologists have invented a name for the phenomenon -- the backfire effect.

Perhaps Spear is not that much of an aberration after all.  And how is this desperate clinging to being right at the heart of the political morass we currently find ourselves in here in the United States?

Once again, how much evidence do you need? 

So those are my rather depressing thoughts for the day.  A nineteenth-century Spiritualist, and an attitude that is still all too common today.  At least, for all Spear's unscientific claptrap, he still found time to support some important causes, which is more than I can say for the modern crop of evidence-deniers.

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Thunderbolts and lightning (very very frightening)

The cause of lightning has been strangely elusive.

Oh, in the broadest-brush terms, we've understood it for a while.  The rapidly-rising column of air in a cumulonimbus cloud induces charge separation, resulting in an electric potential difference between the ground and the air.  At a potential of about three megavolts per meter, the dielectric strength of damp air is exceeded -- the maximum voltage it can withstand without the molecules ionizing, and becoming conductive to electrical current.  This creates a moving channel of ionized air called a stepped leader.  When the leader reaches the ground, the overall resistance between the ground and the cloud drops dramatically, and discharge occurs, called the return stroke.  This releases between two hundred megajoules and seven gigajoules of energy in a fraction of a second, heating the air column to around thirty thousand degrees Celsius -- five times hotter than the surface of the Sun.

That's the origin of both the flash of light and the shock wave in the air that we hear as thunder.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Maxime Raynal from France, Port and lighthouse overnight storm with lightning in Port-la-Nouvelle, CC BY 2.0]

The problem is, there was no consensus on what exactly caused the very first step -- the charge separation in the cloud that triggers the voltage difference.  Some scientists believed that it was friction between the air and the updrafting raindrops (and hail) characteristic of a thundercloud, similar to the way you can induce a static charge on a balloon by rubbing it against your shirt.  But experiments weren't able to confirm that, and most places you look, you'll see words like "still being investigated" and "uncertain at best" and "poorly understood process."

Until now.

A team of scientists led by Victor Pasko of Pennsylvania State University have shown that the initiation of lightning is caused by a literal perfect storm of conditions.  They found that free "seed" electrons, knocked loose by cosmic rays, are accelerating into the rapidly-rising air column at "relativistic" speeds -- i.e., a significant fraction of the speed of light -- and then ram into nitrogen and oxygen atoms.  These collisions trigger a shower of additional electrons, causing an avalanche, which is then swept upward into the upper parts of the cloud.

This is what causes the charge separation, the voltage difference between top and bottom, and the eventual discharge we see as lightning.

It also produces electromagnetic radiation across the spectrum from radio waves to gamma rays, something that had been observed but never explained.

"By simulating conditions with our model that replicated the conditions observed in the field, we offered a complete explanation for the X-rays and radio emissions that are present within thunderclouds," Pasko said.  "We demonstrated how electrons, accelerated by strong electric fields in thunderclouds, produce X-rays as they collide with air molecules like nitrogen and oxygen, and create an avalanche of electrons that produce high-energy photons that initiate lightning...  [T]he high-energy X-rays produced by relativistic electron avalanches generate new seed electrons driven by the photoelectric effect in air, rapidly amplifying these avalanches.  In addition to being produced in very compact volumes, this runaway chain reaction can occur with highly variable strength, often leading to detectable levels of X-rays, while accompanied by very weak optical and radio emissions.  This explains why these gamma-ray flashes can emerge from source regions that appear optically dim and radio silent."

There's still a lot left to explain, however.  Also this week, a paper came out of Arizona State University about the astonishing "megaflash" that occurred in October 2017, where a single lightning bolt traveled over eight hundred kilometers -- from eastern Texas all the way to Kansas City.  Even though the megaflash dropped some cloud-to-ground leaders along the way, it didn't discharge completely until the very end.  Megaflashes are rare, but what conditions could lead to a main stepped leader (and the corresponding return stroke) extending that far before grounding are unknown.

So like with all good science, the new research answers some questions and raises others.  Here in upstate New York we're in thunderstorm season, and while we don't get the crazy storms they see in the southeast and midwest, we've had some powerful ones this summer.  I've always liked a good storm, as long as the lightning stays away from my house.  A friend of ours had his house struck by lightning a few years ago and it fried his electrical system (including his computer) -- something that leads me to unplug my laptop and router as soon as I hear rumbling.

Even if the mechanisms of lightning are now less mysterious, it's still just as dangerous.  Very very frightening, as Freddie Mercury observed.

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The green children

One of the strangest tales out of old England comes from the turbulent reign of King Stephen, which lasted from 1135 to 1154.

Stephen was the grandson of William the Conqueror; his mother, Adela of Normandy, was William's daughter.  When the legitimate heir to the throne, William Adelin (son of Henry I) died in the "sinking of the White Ship" in 1120, it set up a succession crisis as Henry had no other legitimate sons.  So when Henry died in 1135, Stephen seized the throne.

The problem was, Henry did have a legitimate daughter, Matilda, who basically said "Oh, hell no" (only in Norman French).  And honestly, Matilda's claim to the throne was better, according to the law of primogeniture.  But (1) Matilda was a woman, which back then was for some reason a serious problem, and (2) she was arrogant to the point of pissing off just about everyone she came into contact with.  Personality-wise, though, Stephen was not a lot better.  So they squared off against each other -- and thus began the First English Civil War.

The result was what always happens; years of back-and-forth-ing, and the ones who suffered most were the common people who just wanted to survive and put food on the table.  It wasn't helped by the fact that both Stephen and Matilda seemed to excel most at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.  Both of them came close to winning outright more than once, then did something so catastrophically boneheaded that they blew their chance.  (If you want an interesting perspective on the war against the backdrop of some entertaining fiction, Ellis Peters's charming Chronicles of Brother Cadfael are set during Stephen's reign.)

Eventually, everyone got fed up with it, including the two principals.  In 1153 Stephen more or less capitulated, and agreed that if Matilda would give up her claim to the throne and cease hostilities, he'd name her son Henry (the future King Henry II) as his heir.  Treaty signed.  Stephen only lived another two years, Henry became king, and the Plantagenet dynasty was founded.

So it was a mess, and in fact is sometimes called "the Anarchy," which isn't far off the mark.  And it was from during this chaos that we have the odd story of the "Green Children of Woolpit."

Woolpit is a town in Suffolk.  Its curious name has to do with wolves, not sheep; it was originally Wulfpytt -- a pit for catching wolves.  In any case, some time during the war, when things were at their worst, two children showed up in Woolpit, a boy and a girl.  They spoke no English (or French either, for that matter), only a strange language no one in the area recognized, and refused all food except for raw beans, which they ate voraciously.

Also, their skin was green.

Naturally, this raised more than a few eyebrows, but they were taken in by one Sir Richard de Calne, a nobleman of Norman descent who lived near Woolpit.  The boy died soon afterward, but the girl lived, was baptized with the name of Agnes, and gradually learned to speak English.  She adjusted to her new life, although remained "very wanton and impudent," according to one account.  When she was able, she told her caretakers that she and her brother had come from a land where the Sun never shone, and the sky was a perpetual twilight.  Everything there was green, she said.

The place was known as "St. Martin's Land."

The brother and sister had been herding their father's cattle, she told them, and had heard the sound of cathedral bells coming from a cave in a hillside.  Curious, they entered the cave, at first losing their way, but eventually coming out near where they were found in Woolpit.

Two contemporaneous writers, Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh, both give accounts of the Green Children, which substantially agree.  Over time the green color of Agnes's skin gradually faded until she looked more or less normal.  She eventually found work as a servant, but rose in status when she married Richard Barre, a scholar and justice who worked for both Henry II and Richard I.  The details of her later life are unknown.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rod Bacon, WoolpitSign, CC BY-SA 2.0]

So, what's going on, here?

First, it seems pretty certain that something real happened -- i.e., that it's not just a tall tale.  There are too many apparently independent references to the story to discount it entirely.  Needless to say, though, I'm not inclined to believe that they were aliens, or some of the Fair Folk, or any of the other fanciful quasi-explanations I've heard.  It's been suggested that the green color of their skin was due to hypochromic anemia (also known as chlorosis), which can be caused by chronic iron deficiency, which would explain why the coloration went away in Agnes's skin once she had a better diet.

It's also been suggested that their lack of knowledge of English was because they were Flemish.  Both Stephen and Matilda had invited in Flemish mercenaries to help them in the war, and some of these settled in England permanently.  It might be that they were the children of some of these Flemish settlers.

But.

If the cause of the green coloration really was malnourishment, the condition should have been much more widespread, because as I noted earlier, during the First English Civil War just about everyone was starving.  And hypochromic anemia doesn't really make you green, it makes your skin waxy, yellowish, and pale.  The children's green color was striking enough to merit emphasis, which suggests strongly that it was something no one who saw the children had ever seen before.  As far as their being Flemish, their guardian, Sir Richard de Calne, was a well-educated nobleman; both of the principle chroniclers, Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh, were multilingual.  There is no way that if the children had been speaking Flemish, none of them would have recognized it, especially given how many Flemish soldiers and merchants were in England at the time.

Plus, if all the children had done was go through a cave in a hill and come out of the other side, they can't have been far from home.  We're talking Suffolk, in flat East Anglia (Suffolk's highest elevation is only 128 meters!), not the freakin' Rocky Mountains, here.  Why did both of the children think they'd been transported far away -- far enough away that they couldn't just walk back across the hill and then home?  (It's possible, of course, that they had been abused and didn't want to go home.  But still.  Surely if all they'd done was cross a few hills, someone would have recognized them as locals.)

So the prosaic, rational explanation of the story doesn't itself hold up to scrutiny.

Likewise, claims that the story of the Green Children was a moralistic tale invented as a social commentary on "the threat posed by outsiders to the unity of the Christian community," as historian Elizabeth Freeman put it. seem as far-fetched as suggestions that they were aliens.  As I said earlier, the independent accounts of the children, as well as their interactions with real historical figures, indicate that they did exist -- whoever they were, and wherever they'd come from.

So we're left with a mystery that I doubt will ever be resolved to everyone's satisfaction.

Understand that I'm not advocating for any kind of paranormal explanation; whatever did happen back in twelfth-century Suffolk, I'm sure it had a rational, scientific cause.  I'm just saying we don't know what it is.  Odd to think, though, that since Richard Barre and Agnes had children, very likely there are people in Suffolk (and those with ancestry there) who descend from the surviving "Green Child."

If you're one of them, consider where that drop of your blood might have come from.  And let me know if you ever find yourself with a craving for raw beans.

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Halting the conveyor

Today we have three stories that are absolutely horrifying in juxtaposition.

The first is a paper that came out a couple of days ago in Nature, describing a study by Jade Bowling (of Lancaster University) et al.  It is an analysis of a strange and sudden change in the topography of the Greenland Ice Sheet that happened in 2014 -- a two-square-kilometer part of the sheet dropped by as much as eighty-five meters.  The question, of course, is what happened to all the ice that used to be underneath it.  And what Bowling et al. found was that it had melted -- that the underside of the Greenland Ice Sheet is riddled with subglacial lakes and rivers.  In this case, downstream of the collapsed region, a flood burst through the surface, and within ten days ninety million cubic meters of fresh water gushed out as the cavity emptied.

We usually think of the melting of the polar ice sheets as a gradual process, something like the way ice cubes slowly melt in your glass of tea in summer.  But what this study shows is that the process proceeds quietly -- until it doesn't.  The tipping point between a gentle trickle and a massive flood can occur suddenly, and be due to factors that are largely out of sight.

The second came out in the same issue of Nature, and has to do with a study of the paleoclimate by a team led by Pedro DiNezio of Colorado University - Boulder.  DiNezio and his collaborators looked at the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), sometimes called the "Atlantic Conveyor."  The AMOC is an enormous ocean current, of which the Gulf Stream is only a part, moving a greater volume of water per second than all of the rivers of the world put together.  It is driven by the combined effects of evaporation (making the water saltier) and cooling as the current flows northward; both of these result in the water becoming denser, and south of Iceland it becomes dense enough to sink.  This draws more warm water northward -- and is why Ireland and the United Kingdom, which are on the same latitude as Alberta, have mild climates.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons R. Curry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution/Science/USGCRP., OCP07 Fig-6, CC BY 3.0]

But freshwater intrusion, like the one the prior study considered, lowers the density of the surface water, eventually making it too fresh to sink.  This can slow down -- or halt entirely -- the AMOC.

The focus of the effects has usually been on northeastern North America and northwestern Europe, where that heat transfer slowdown would be expected to trigger a dramatic cooling similar to the sudden crash that initiated the Younger Dryas 12,900 years ago, during which a warming climate was plunged back into the freezer for over a thousand years.  But what the DiNezio et al. study considered was what happens to all that excess heat.  Just because we here in upstate New York would probably be freezing our asses off doesn't mean the rest of the world would be.  The heat energy, of course, doesn't just go away.

And what they found is that when the AMOC slows down, that heat remains in the tropics -- triggering a spike in temperature and a drop in rainfall near the equator.  "This is bad news, because we have these very important ecosystems in the Amazon," said DiNezio.  "The Amazon rainforest contains almost two years of global carbon emissions, making it a major carbon sink on Earth.  Drought in this region could release vast amounts of carbon back into the atmosphere, forming a vicious loop that could make climate change worse."

But of course, no story about climate change would be complete without some breaking news describing how the Trump administration is determined to make it worse.  Lee Zeldin, head of the Environmental Protection Agency (which should have its name changed to the Big Oil Protection Agency, because under his leadership they couldn't give a flying rat's ass about protecting the environment), has just announced the overturning of a 2009 declaration stating that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare.

His justification?  What do you think it was?

"It cost Americans a lot of money," Zeldin said.

The declaration was the foundation of climate change regulation in this country, and the impetus for rules limiting emissions from cars, airplanes, and power plants.  If the "endangerment finding," as the declaration is called, is overturned. it gives corporations carte blanche to ignore previous guidelines and mandates.

Zeldin, of course, thinks this is just hunky-dory.  "This will be the largest deregulatory action in the history of America," he crowed.

Because short-term profit is apparently more in need of attention than the long-term habitability of the planet.

I wish I had a hopeful note to end on, but I don't.  The whole thing puts me in mind of a comment from a student in my Environmental Science class, maybe fifteen years ago.  The question I put to them was, "At what point do you think that the majority of Americans will be motivated to address climate change in a meaningful way?"

Her answer was, "It won't happen until average Americans are directly and harshly impacted by it.  When there's no food on the shelves in the grocery stores.  When the rivers dry up.  When the sea level rises enough to flood major coastal cities.  Until then, it's easier to pretend nothing's wrong."

Another student, aghast, said, "But won't it be too late at that point?"

She responded simply, "Of course it will."

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Rain Woman

I was asked a curious question by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, one that intrigued me enough I thought it was worth devoting an entire post to.

Here's the relevant bit of the email (reproduced here with permission):

I know you're not superstitious, and you've written more than once about the necessity of looking for scientific (or at least logical) explanations for things that might seem paranormal.  What I'm more curious about, though, is how you actually feel.  You've probably heard about objects that are haunted or cursed or bring devastating bad luck to their owners.  Sure, your rational brain might be certain that the idea of a cursed object is stupid, but would your emotions agree? 

Let me put it this way; let's say there was something that had a wide reputation for carrying a dangerous curse with it.  Multiple people had reported scary stuff associated with it.  Would you be willing to have it in your house?  Late at night, when you were alone in the house, wouldn't you experience at least a little bit of doubt that maybe you'd put yourself in danger?

So put my money where my mouth is, eh?  No armchair skepticism allowed.  Head into the attic of the haunted house at night and see if I can still talk so blithely about rationalism.

It's an interesting question, because all my life I've felt like I had two brains -- an emotional one and a logical one -- and they are not on speaking terms.  I've sometimes wondered if I went into science as a way of dealing with the fact that my emotions are constantly picking me up by the tail and swinging me around.  And I'll admit he has a point.  All the rational skepticism in the world doesn't make it any less scary when you're in the house alone and you hear what sounds like the creak of a footstep upstairs.

I asked him if he had any particular cursed object in mind -- that it sounded like he was thinking of something specific.  He admitted that this was spot-on.  "Have you heard of Rain Woman?" he asked.

I hadn't, so he told me the story, which I checked out, and it appears to be true -- at least the non-paranormal bits.

As far as the paranormal bits, I'll leave you to decide.

In 1996, a Ukrainian painter named Svetlana Telets was sitting in front of a blank canvas, and an image appeared in her mind of a pale-faced woman wearing a broad-brimmed dark hat, eyes closed, standing in the rain.  Telets found the image strangely compelling, and she began to sketch it out -- later telling a friend, "I felt like someone was controlling my hand as I drew."  She spent the next month refining and adding color, and the result was Rain Woman.

Telets displayed the piece in a local gallery, and it attracted a lot of (positive) attention, garnering several offers of purchase.  She sold the painting to the highest bidder -- only to have the purchaser request a return and refund shortly afterward.  It had triggered waking nightmares, they said, of a figure following them around, always a little out of view, and far enough away that details weren't easily visible.  The figure, they said, never let itself get close.

Immediately put me in mind of the mysterious old woman who follows Ruby Sunday around, in one of the best and most atmospheric Doctor Who episodes ever -- the shiver-inducing "73 Yards."

Telets bought the painting back, and sold it again -- only to have the same thing happen.  It went through multiple purchasers over the next few years, always with the same result.  One terrified temporary owner even offered to pay Telets an additional half of the purchase price to take it back, saying that ever since buying the painting he'd seen white eyes suddenly opening in ordinary objects, eyes that watched his every move.

Eyes no one else was able to see.

In 2008 the painting was purchased by musician Sergei Skachkov, and he kept it, although he reported that his wife made him put the piece into storage after repeatedly seeing a ghostly figure walking around their house at night.

The Russian Orthodox priest Father Vitaly Goloskevich, who knows Telets and several of the temporary owners of the painting, said he is in no doubt that there's something supernatural going on here.  "A person has a spirit and a soul," Father Goloskevich said.  "There are truly spiritual works of art, and there are soulful ones.  And the painting you are talking about represents just such soulful art.  And it doesn't come from God...  The artist puts into the work the mood in which he was at the time of his creation.  And it is not known who led Svetlana Telets at the moment she created Rain Woman."

So, my correspondent asked; would I be willing to purchase Rain Woman and hang it on the wall in my house?

My initial reaction was, "Of course!"  First, I think the painting is kind of cool.  Second, having something with such a strange reputation would be a great conversation starter when my wife and I have guests (being diehard introverts, not a frequent occurrence, but still).  I have a nice collection of beautifully-illustrated Tarot decks, an avocation which comes from the same impulse.

But that wasn't what my correspondent asked.  How would I feel about having the painting in my house -- especially if I was alone with it on a stormy night?  Would my breezy rationalism be quite so staunch then?

If I'm being entirely honest, probably not.  It's not that I think anything real and paranormal is going on with Rain Woman; I suspect the odd occurrences reported by purchasers come from a combination of superstitiousness and suggestibility.  Once one person has claimed the painting is haunted, it makes it more likely that others will experience the same sort of thing (or at least, that they'll attribute anything odd to the painting's evil effects).

But honestly, deep down I'm as suggestible as the next guy.  It's part of being human.  Our distant ancestors' brains evolved to interpret anything out of the ordinary as being potentially dangerous; the well-worn example is that if you're a proto-hominid on the African savanna, it's better to freak out over a rustle in the grass when it's only the wind than not to freak out if it turns out to be a hungry lion.

We're all weird amalgams of logic and emotion, aren't we?  I'm reminded of the probably-apocryphal story about the brilliant physicist Niels Bohr.  Bohr was being interviewed by a reporter shortly after he won the Nobel Prize, and the reporter noticed that in Bohr's office, over the door, there was a horseshoe nailed -- with the points upward, of course, to "catch the good luck."  The reporter said, "Professor Bohr, you are not going to tell me that a scientist of your caliber believes that horseshoes bring you good luck."

"Of course not," Bohr deadpanned back.  "But I'm told that horseshoes bring you good luck whether you believe in them or not."

So yeah.  I say I'd be thrilled to own Rain Woman, but truthfully, I'd probably be just as likely to have scary dreams about her as the other owners.  But that's the benefit of having a basically rational mindset, isn't it?  Okay, I'd be scared in the moment, but skepticism is a kind of barrier that stops you from racing too far down that path.

Maybe I'd see ghosts at night just like the other owners did, I dunno.  But what I'm pretty sure of is that the next morning, when the sun was out and the skies were clear, I'd be able to laugh about it -- and leave the painting hanging on the wall.

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A glimpse of the surreal

Haruki Murakami's odd and atmospheric short story collection First Person Singular looks at those moments in our lives where something inexplicable happens that alters us forever.  Often it isn't the exact nature of the event that matters; it's that touch of weird surreality, the feeling that somehow we've just side-slipped into a place that is outside the realm of the ordinary.

All of the stories are good, but none hits the target quite so spot-on as "Cream."  In it, a young man gets a printed invitation to a piano recital from a woman he'd known a few years earlier when they were both students of the same music teacher.  The narrator wasn't nearly as good a musician as the woman was, and he'd always gotten the impression she didn't like him much, so the invitation was a complete surprise, especially since they'd had no contact during the intervening years.

He decides to go, and even buys her a bouquet of flowers.  He takes the train to the remote village where the recital hall is, but when he gets there, the recital hall is padlocked, and appears not to have been occupied for some time.  Odder still, he seems to be the only one around.  There's no one out in the village, no cars passing, nothing.  He goes to a nearby park and sits on a bench, and closes his eyes for a few moments.  Then he becomes aware of a change.  He opens his eyes to find an old man standing there.  The old man gives him some cryptic instructions -- "Look for a circle with many centers and no circumference" -- and after a brief discussion of what that could possibly mean, the old man, too, is gone without a trace.

Ultimately the narrator gets back on the train toward home.  There is no closure; he never finds out why the pianist had invited him to a non-existent recital, who the old man was, or what the odd message meant.  "Things like this happen sometimes in our lives," the narrator concludes.  "Inexplicable, illogical events that nevertheless are deeply disturbing.  I guess we need to not think about them, just close our eyes and get through them.  As if we were passing under a huge wave out on the ocean."

The entire collection, but especially "Cream," put me in mind of one of the weirdest experiences I've ever had.  Like the narrator in the story, I still don't have an explanation -- and on some level, it's been worrying at me ever since.

The events in question happened about forty years ago, when I lived in Olympia, Washington.  I was about twenty-five at the time, working a stupid desk job I hated, and to lighten the daily drudgery I decided on a lark to take an evening art class at Evergreen State College.  Now, I'll say up front that I'm not much of an artist. My attempt in my biology classes to draw an animal on the whiteboard led to its being christened by students as the "All-Purpose Quadruped" because no one could figure out if it was a cow, a dog, an armadillo, or whatever.  But even considering my lack of talent, I thought an art class could be fun, so I went for it.

One of the students in the class was Laura L______.  Laura was between thirty-five and forty, at a guess, and in very short order she kind of attached herself to me.  There was nothing remotely sexual about it; I never got the impression she was coming on to me, or anything.  It was more that she hung on my every word as if I was the smartest, most fascinating person she'd ever met.  We discovered a mutual interest in languages -- and it was off to the races.

Now, I hasten to state that at twenty-five, I simply wasn't that interesting.  I was a young, naive guy who had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, and at that point was just kind of flailing around trying to make enough money to pay for rent and groceries.  So as flattering as it was, even then I recognized that there was something weird and over-the-top about Laura's attentions.  Still, it was a sop to my ego, and I didn't do anything to discourage her.

About three weeks into the art course, I wrote a letter to a college friend of mine (remember, this is in the days before email and texting), and along with the usual newsy stuff, I mentioned the art class and "this weird woman named Laura."  "Next time we talk, I have to tell you more about her," I wrote.  Nothing more in detail than that -- a passing couple of sentences that didn't capture how peculiar she was, nor even in what way she was peculiar.

Around that time, Laura asked if my wife and I wanted to come over to her house, that she and her husband were throwing a party for a few friends, and that she'd love it if we came.  I said okay -- again, with a mild feeling of trepidation, but not enough to say "oh, hell no" -- and she seemed really excited that I'd agreed, and was bringing along my wife.

Saturday came, and we showed up at Laura's house.  And... Laura's husband, and the other guests, were all the same kind of way-too-bright-eyed intellectual that she was.  The topics were all over the place.  Science, linguistics, art, history, philosophy, you name it.  And just like conversations with Laura, everything I said was met with "that's fascinating!" and "wow, that is so cool!"  Looking at it from the outside, you'd have sworn that I was Neil deGrasse Tyson or something.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons David Shankbone creator QS:P170,Q12899557, House party in Denver Colorado, CC BY 3.0]

After about forty-five minutes of this, both my wife and I got freaked out enough that we decided to leave.  We invented some kind of excuse -- I forget exactly what -- and told Laura we had to go.

"Oh, I'm so sorry you can't stay," she said, her forehead creasing with dismay.  "Are you sure?"

I said I was sure, was "so sorry, too," and told her I'd see her next class.  She didn't argue more, but definitely looked disappointed.  Way more disappointed, in fact, that the circumstance seemed to warrant.  My wife and I talked all the way home about how bizarre the evening had been, and how relieved we both were to leave -- even though nothing happened.

Two postscripts are what make this story even creepier.

About three or four days after the party, I got a letter from my college friend.  Best I can recall, the relevant passage went something like this:

I know you'll probably think this is ridiculous, but I felt like I had to say something.  When I read what you said in your letter about your classmate Laura, I got a real premonition of evil.  There was immediately a feeling that she meant you harm.  I know how skeptical you are about this sort of thing, so you'll probably laugh and then throw this letter in the trash, but I felt like I couldn't simply not tell you.

The second thing is that Laura never came back to the art class.

The first time she missed, I just figured she was sick or something (and was actually a little relieved, because I didn't want to get into it with her about why we'd left her party).  But then another class came, and another, and she never showed up.

I never saw her again.

My wife said, "Maybe she realized that she'd missed her chance to get you, and you weren't going to trust her enough to give her another opportunity."

I actually thought, several times, about driving past her house, just to see what I could see (I had no inclination to knock on her door).  But each time, the idea that she might see my car driving past gave me such a chill up my backbone that I didn't do it.  Where she lived wasn't on my way to work or anything, it was quite a bit out of the way, so I never did go back.

To this day, I don't have a good explanation for this.  Were they just weird, over-enthusiastic intellectual types, and it was all just innocent overcompensation for social awkwardness?  Was it a cult?  Were they planning on drugging our drinks or something?  If we'd stayed longer, were they going to drag out a display of Amway products?

I honestly have no idea.  But even though nothing happened that evening -- "strange, extremely happy smart people freak out young couple," is really about the extent of it -- I still can't think of this incident without shuddering.  What happened afterward (the letter from my friend, and Laura's odd disappearance) only add to the mystery.  Even though my rational brain balks at the idea, it's left me with the sense of having had a momentary glimpse into a surreal and dangerous world of which I'm usually unaware.  I've many times considered turning it into a short story or novel, but I have never been able to come up with a convincing ending.

Life can be strange sometimes, and I suppose not everything has to have an explanation, at least not in the larger scheme of things.  I'm just as happy that most days, my life is refreshingly ordinary.  It reminds me of another quote from a favorite author -- this one from Umberto Eco, from his masterful labyrinth of a novel Foucault's Pendulum, which seems a fitting place to end: "Life is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is only made terrible by our determination to treat it as though it had any underlying meaning."

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The edged tool

Today's post comes to you from the Odd Bedfellows department.

Okay, so all of you probably know all about the Harry Potter series.  Kid finds out he's a wizard, gets an invitation to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, has a variety of adventures while under the tutelage of Albus Dumbledore, and eventually duels with and kills the evil Lord Voldemort.  The series is beloved by some, criticized by others (especially for Dumbledore's repeated cavalier attitude toward putting the child he's supposed to be protecting into situations where he could get killed), and rejected completely by an increasing number because of its racist tropes and author J. K. Rowling's vicious homophobia and transphobia.

You may also be aware of the fact that ever since the publication of the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, in 1997, the entire concept has been under attack by evangelical Christians.  It's all about magic, celebrates witches and wizards, and never portrays any of the characters as believing in God.  With regards to the last-mentioned, the omission is as good as an admission; the Harry Potter series isn't just non-Christian, they say, it's anti-Christian, and inspired by Satan.  Because of this, the books are frequently featured in book bans and book burnings.

It was bad enough that when the staunchly conservative Reader's Digest interviewed Rowling shortly after the skyrocketing success of her first book, they were inundated by irate letters to the editor.  One of the ones they printed said -- this is from memory, so it's just the gist -- "I am outraged that you would publish an interview with J. K. Rowling.  Her book has led to a million innocent children being baptized into the Church of Satan.  I know this because I read it in an article in The Onion."  The editor, showing remarkable restraint, responded, "You might want to be aware that The Onion is a satirical news source.  Its articles are meant for humorous effect only and should not be taken literally."

As you might imagine, this had little effect on the evangelicals, who went right on screeching about how evil Harry Potter is, ad nauseam.  Then, in 2014, one of them, a woman named Grace Ann Parsons, decided to take matters into her own hands.

She rewrote the story, as... um... anti-fan-fic.  The result was called Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles.  Hogwarts is recast as a Christian school run by Dumbledore -- and his wife Minerva McGonigall and daughter Hermione.  Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia are evil atheists who have hidden from Harry that his parents were Christian martyrs.  But Hagrid, an evangelical missionary, finds Harry, tells him the sad story, and converts him to Christianity.  Voldemort is there, doing his evil work -- to make Christianity illegal.  The Good Female Students are always subservient to the men; the Bad Female Students are the ones who speak up and/or have talents outside of cooking, sewing, and cleaning.  The four "houses" -- Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw -- represent four different sects of Christianity, with Slytherin being intended to represent Catholics.

Oh, and there's a bunch of stuff about how Voldemort loves Barack Obama.

Well, the whole thing went viral, both amongst true believers and people who found it funny.  It even attracted the attention of book reviewer Chris Ostendorf of The Daily Dot, who said the writing style was so bad it "makes E. L. James [of Fifty Shades of Grey fame] look like Shakespeare."

But the reason this comes up today is that I just found out that Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles has recently been turned into a comedic stage play.

I'm not entirely sure what to think of this.

It's not like Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles was satire from the outset, the way Trey Parker and Matt Stone's musical The Book of Mormon was.  At least most people don't think so.  There are a few who believe that Grace Ann Parsons never existed, and the whole thing was written to be deliberately and laughably bad.  But the majority of the folks who've expressed an opinion seem to think that Parsons was honestly trying to create something that would have the draw of Harry Potter, but sanctified.

And if that's the case, isn't turning her work into a stage play that's meant solely to mock kind of... I dunno, mean-spirited?

Don't get me wrong; I think the evangelicals are largely a bunch of dangerous loonies, and their book bans, book burnings, and lobbying for censorship are horrible.  At the same time, I'm no fan of Rowling either.  Not only is her anti-trans work horrifying, just taken on their own merits the Harry Potter books are far from perfect, with numerous plot holes, some big enough fly a Thestral through.  (My opinion is if you want to read some good fiction with the Chosen One trope, Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy and Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain beat Harry Potter by a country mile.)

I'm also not arguing against satire, here.  Well-aimed satire -- such as the recent torching of Donald Trump and his sycophantic toadies on South Park -- is a time-honored way of pointing out the flaws of the powerful.  But good satire always does what I call "punching upward."  It's David-versus-Goliath.  The ridiculing of Parsons's book, on the other hand, is punching downward.

Better known as bullying.

I'm reminded of the sickening nastiness surrounding the novel The Eye of Argon, by Jim Theis.  Argon was written when Theis was sixteen, and was published in the Ozark Science Fiction Association's fanzine the following year.  It was picked up and publicized in the 1970s as the Worst Science Fiction Novel Ever Written, and excerpts were read aloud at science fiction conventions to gales of uproarious laughter, and even republished in magazines.  Fifty years later, it's still happening.  It has become a party game -- people take turns reading excerpts, and are eliminated from the game if they laugh.

All this derision, aimed toward a novel written by someone who was sixteen years old.

And the sad postscript is that Theis was interviewed in 1984, and described how hurt he was by all the ridicule -- and stated, unequivocally, that he would never write again.  And he didn't.  He died in 2002 at the young age of 49, determined never to expose himself like that again.

How fucking sad is that?

And ask any writer, and you know what?  Every damn one of us will corroborate that we were all writing complete tripe when we were teenagers.  Many of us, myself included, wrote tripe well beyond that.  (There's a reason that there are no extant copies of anything I wrote before the age of thirty-five.)  They'll all also confirm that when we write, we're at our most vulnerable, showing our hearts and souls, and that nasty critiques sting like hell.  I still remember a "friend" telling me, after reading the first two chapters of a manuscript, that it was "somewhere between a computer crash and a train wreck."  Because of that, I abandoned the story for years, but unlike poor Theis, I did eventually come back to it -- it became my novel The Hand of the Hunter.  

Yes, as creators, we need to be able to withstand some criticism.  Well-meaning and intelligent critiques are one of the main ways we learn to improve, and I have really valued the input of the editors I've worked with over the years (as hard as it is sometimes to hear that My Baby isn't perfection itself, as-is).  But singling out a work simply to laugh at it isn't helpful, it isn't productive, and it isn't kind.

And I'm in agreement with the Twelfth Doctor on this point.

So, yeah.  I find myself in the odd position of supporting the evangelical Parsons over the people who are ridiculing her.  I guess I just don't like seeing people embarrassed.  It's why I find a lot of sitcoms unwatchable.  I hate being a bystander while someone is put in a position of being laughed at, and that seems to be a mainstay of comedic television in the last couple of decades.  I once told a friend I would rather be physically beaten than humiliated, and that's nothing less than the unalloyed truth.

Anyhow, let's be careful who we choose to target with our laughter, okay?  Satire, sarcasm, and ridicule are edged tools, and they can leave lasting marks.  Use them with care, and if you're not sure, don't use them at all.  We humans are fragile creatures, and too damn many artists, authors, musicians, dancers, and other creatives have been turned away from a lifetime of self-expression by an ill-timed nasty comment.

Ask yourself if you want to be the reason someone gives up on creativity forever.

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