by Lei Wang
Lately I have the feeling that everything is speaking to me. This is concerning, not least because there is a family tendency towards mild schizophrenia. As a delinquent intellectual, I have read only a tablespoon of Jung and have never gone to analysis; in fact, I have resisted treating life like literature. I know that not everything is symbolic, that sometimes things happen for no good reason, or at least not any reason that I can claim to know. And yet recently I have been treating everything as a sign: IF the universe were speaking to me, what would it be trying to say?
And I have also been saying back to the universe, “Hey, I got your message!” When the toilet kept running after a midnight flush, disrupting my sleep, I thought it was trying to tell me I had been inconsiderate of my downstairs neighbor, flushing so late. “Thank you,” I said to the toilet. “I got it. Your job here is done.” And immediately the messenger quieted. Yes, every college student knows: correlation, not causation.
But tell that to my Hyperactive Agency Detection Device: what the neuroscientist Justin Barrett calls the part of our nervous systems that is alert for some kind of intelligence beneath reality, probably because once upon a time it was helpful to think the grass moved not from the wind but from something prowling inside it. The Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD) is liberal with giving away a sense of agency. It’s the mechanism by which we attribute essence and personality to our stuffed animals, even if they’re not “real”; it’s how people have AI boyfriends nowadays. Conspiracy theorists have a lot of HADD.
The other day, procrastinating on writing, I was fixing a beloved broken necklace clasp by transferring a clasp from a different, less beloved necklace (I have not gone so far as to believe my necklaces care about this hierarchy). Anyway—a tricky business, having neither pliers nor delicate fingers. I managed three steps in this way, but in the final step, the tiny lobster clasp flew off the desk. I heard it land on the hardwood floor. I swept; I scoured; I was late to my Zoom. I couldn’t find it anywhere in the world on my hands and knees and yet it was everywhere in my consciousness. For hours. My body, which usually finds many ways to be distracted and get itself snacks, had transformed into pure hunter.
“Okay, universe, I get it,” I said. Yes, I see all the dust around the baseboards; I’ll get to that. Thank you for showing me my obsessiveness: my wanting to complete the smallest of incompletions. Are you trying to tell me that’s why I like shopping maybe too much, because it’s a sense of completion? Because it’s a relief sometimes to have something to obsess over, one very specific goal with one very concrete outcome, versus a nebulous artistic goal with an uncertain outcome? And very funny also, how I keep looking for something that is definitely here, just out of perception: isn’t that what all the gurus say enlightenment is? Is that it? Is that what I’m supposed to learn? Have I learned? Please, can I find that clasp now? Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with meanings, and overwhelmed with loss.
A living room is so small, so finite, and yet so many nooks.
“Is everything that happens meant for my growth?” a friend asked on a psychedelic trip, and a psychedelic voice in her head told her yes, definitively.
“Even a paper clip falling on the floor?” she asked.
“Even a paper clip falling on the floor,” the voice said.
Does it matter if the voice was just her own voice telling this to herself? (“Learn to speak nicely to yourself,” another friend said, “because that’s the voice the universe is going to use to speak to you.”)
1 in 20 healthy, totally sober people experience visual or auditory hallucinations, according to World Health Organization surveys.
In a Yale study comparing those diagnosed with psychosis and those who considered themselves psychics—both of whom heard voices—their commonality seemed to be strong pattern recognition. When the scientists showed them a picture of a checkerboard and played a certain sound at the same time, they made a stronger association between the image and the sound than the control group.
When the scientists later showed them the picture without playing the sound, the control group correctly identified the silence, but the psychics and the patients with psychosis were more likely to hear the sound even when it wasn’t played. Their brains predicted it so strongly, they made it real. The difference being: when told the sound wasn’t being played anymore, the psychics could correct their perceptions, while those with psychosis continued to insist the sound was there when it wasn’t. The difference being: the psychics were not tormented by the voices in their heads. They could choose when to hear them.
Thus far my signs and symbols have been benign. May all my lessons come in such frivolous forms. A superstitious part of me hopes: if I can learn my lessons from the small things, maybe the universe doesn’t have to be so loud to get my attention. Maybe I have saved myself from a mid-life crisis.
I have a very good therapist who is not an analyst and who does not try to fix me. She is pro-symptom. When I tell her I am wasting my time shopping, watching a Chinese dating show, she says: “Well, what are you getting from it? What does it deeply satisfy in you?” And every time I cry because I still expect her to scold me.
The therapist Mira Kirshenbaum defines productive as anything that gives you energy and unproductive as anything that saps it, in the long run. “The price for anything,” Thoreau said, “is the life you exchange for it.”
Perhaps I am exchanging a lot of life right now for analyzing life instead of experiencing it; but isn’t analyzing also an experience? I think this makes me a bad Buddhist, certainly a bad Stoic. I am attached to a $3 necklace clasp. It is not just a clasp to me, interchangeable with other clasps. It is meaningful now, and the meaning does not inherently exist in the object; I have made it my guru. It is schooling me.
And I feel somewhat crazy and quite a bit skeptic and also a little bit gleeful.
Because I have to admit: I want it. I want the universe to speak to me, even if I have to throw away my rationalist hat. I want to live in a world where everything is meaningful, as opposed to a purely material, mechanistic world in which a cup is just a cup, atoms of cold porcelain. I hope that Frankl was right—the will to meaning—and not Nietzsche with power, Freud with sex. I want to believe that things happen for a reason, though not necessarily the reason we think, even though I have no way to back this up.
I still hold that there must be randomness, too. Sometimes an acorn falls on you because it is autumn and you are standing under a tree. (And I guess that is not even random: that is just cause and effect.) Twice I have heard stories about parents dying and a certain bird visiting—a blue jay, a red cardinal—that the person especially associated with the parent. Who am I to say if they are sweet delusions?
I only have Lisel Mueller’s poem, “Monet Refuses the Operation,” about how the artist refused cataract surgery for years because he didn’t want to lose the way he saw the world:
“I will not return to a universe / of objects that don’t know each other, / as if islands were not the lost children / of one great continent.”
(Monet did get the operation though, and his paintings got even better. He saw with more than his eyes.)
I found the clasp, finally, after writing the notes for this column. Thanks for the idea. I hope if you come across this it speaks to you in some ways that is not just me speaking to you, but you speaking to yourself, whatever it is you needed to hear.
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