26. Grokking the world

There's a universe between what you can see and you can't see; there's a multitude of noises between what you can hear and can't hear. What's just out of sight? What's just beyond your hearing?

Nothing? Or everything?

Be not afeard. This isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again. (Shakespeare's The Tempest, III.ii.)

When Caliban spoke these words, his dream world sounded so much richer than our diurnal existence. There's mystery, there's music; the clouds play with him. Above all, he glimpses a world he desperately he wants to return to.

Where does the line between sanity and insanity lie?

I walked out with my dog this morning, chatting to him as I went. He listened, as dogs do – half-an-ear cocked towards me, the rest seeking out the fresh morning – and occasionally bumped his nose against my hand in support of my words.

Hidden in the trees lining the garden, the birds sang out, full-throated springtime singing changing to other sharper calls as we passed below them. Now I'm used to these birds, I know when they're singing their territory into being or their burgeoning lust into egg-making, and I know when they're talking about me. They have a different tone for describing me that comes with a particular intensity cutting through everything else: The human's out again!

It's clear as I write that you comprehend me. You know what I'm talking about. You'll likely smile at my anthropomorphising the animals around me, but you will understand and you won't think me mad.

I'm showing symptoms of, at most, a mild form of apophenia.

Apophenia is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between seemingly unrelated things. (Wikipedia).

So far, so good. But the Wiki entry goes further. I paraphrase:

This word was first used (in German) by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad studying schizophrenia. He defined it as unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness. He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions.

To a psychiatrist every human experience is a symptom of abnormality, perhaps. But then where does his normality lie – doesn't our very humanity demand that we make meaning by seeing connections where there are, ostensibly, none?

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact. (A Midummer Night's Dream, V.i.)

Scallywag and I also go out last thing at night, for a scent-led exploration of the evening (scent-led on his part, I just follow). If it's a fine night, my eyes are turned upwards to the heavens^[1].

I have an app on my phone for the night sky. I can point it up towards a particular bright spot, and the screen will show me the star with name and a blurb. It also draws lines between neighbouring stars to identify the constellations they all belong to.

But, of course, they don't belong to constellations except in our imaginations. There's nothing to say that the constituent stars of Ursa Minor rest close to each other in the four dimensions of the universe, and there's definitely nothing between them that makes any imagined connection important, except the meaning and use we give to it.

Ursa Minor was known by the ancient Greeks as the Phoenician because it was the primary constellation that the Phoenicians used for navigation (the last star in the tail of the constellation is Polaris, the North Star). In other words, no matter what it was called, that collection of bright dots appearing in the sky had life-and-death meaning for ancient navigators.

Is that apophenia? Can it be apophenic if it proves useful to the seer? Where is the line between sanity (navigating home) and insanity (composing meaningful connection between those stars)?

Where do imagined worlds and hard science meet? Our psychiatrist might say that they don't, except as symptoms of abnormality. I dare to disagree. I seek meaning everywhere. I listen to the birds in case they wish to talk to me. I watch my dog as carefully as he watches me because he reads the world in ways I cannot.

Looking up to the heavens (yes! heavens, dammit!) in the dark, seeing the tapestry of glittering dots, is seeing both the history of the universe and the history of humanity at once. When I use this amazing virtual technology on my phone to locate and name a constellation, and in the same moment read of ancient Greek and Phoenician uses of the stars, I am truly apophenic.

“We ignore all kinds of things because we notice only what we think noteworthy. And therefore our version of everything is highly selective. We pick out certain things and say that’s what’s there, just as we select and notice the figure rather than the background.”

– Alan Watts

I edit my words fairly harshly sometimes, assuming that my readers will think I'm mad. But, thanks to Dr. Klaus Conrad and Alan Watts, I'm choosing to question what is noteworthy, and whether our sense of normality is the greatest constraint on what we notice.

Be not afear'd, the island is full of noises. And they are all for you.