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Through the Eyes of Chaos
Posted on 07 December 2010
Wow, that is an epic title. I mean, like, serious, I should have saved that for a NYTBS novel or something. Oh well, nothing says I can’t use it again, right? Anyway, I am going to exercise a bit of hubris here. Nothing so self-congratulatory than a majority of the world undergoes on a daily basis to presume it matters half a lick in this cosmos, but I will try and set myself and a group of people apart (not above or below, just apart) from the rest. And it all comes down to a simple thing. Sometimes, when I’m in my bathroom with its strange, random scattered-speckled tiles, and I see stuff in them.
And I don’t mean like Rorschach test style. I mean I look at a tile and very clearly see a demon, or a fairy, or a dragon, or a face, or a car, or something. I’ve looked at the tile numerous times in my time in this house, but something about it, on that particular day at that specific moment, registered a significance of certain speckles over others, bringing them to prominence while ignoring others. I’ll look at the tile the next day and wonder how I ever saw what I saw, but I did.
I’ve been doing things like this for a long time. I remember when I would be bored, waiting for a standardized test to start, and I’d look up at the ceiling or over at the walls and force myself to see patterns in the rectangles or squares. Heck, even today, as I sat at a stoplight, I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw a woman chewing on some bubblegum in the car behind me. I was drawn to focus on her and see details that shouldn’t have been prominent. By the time the light turned green, she looked like a completely different person to me than she had initially.
So, my hubris here is that I think writers, or creative people in general, are like this. I hope it is a trait of the creative, to force other meaning on what we see. I have often heard that writers/painters/etc see the world different than others, just as engineers do. Well, I have both, in that I’ve seen the world like an artist for a long time, and in college I learned to look at it like an engineer, which is an entirely other thing besides. I guess it makes me at least interesting to talk to at the bar, though. How many people can honestly say they have had people on the edge of their seats while they described quantum mechanics, and not in a physics lecture or lab?
I don’t really know what I’m going on to with this. It is more just an observation of myself that I want to throw out there because, honestly, it freaks me out sometimes. I went to wash my hands today, and a fairy was staring at me from the tiles. It kind of makes me wonder about my sanity, ya know? I mean, I didn’t think it was real, but I still saw the pattern that was, for all truth, not really there expect that my mind had supplanted it on the speckles. Strange stuff.
1 comment to Through the Eyes of Chaos
I think it’s quite true of creative types (science and non!) to see interesting things in other things–at a very basic level, it’s the exact same sort of pattern recognition that we use when composing a story.
I do this, too, but in different circumstances–twice a year, I get my hair properly colored, and I’ve so much that washing out all the fun chemicals takes a good long time. And that’s when I see foxes and clouds and moons in the ceiling tiles…