Apophenia

I can’t remember ever refusing to work on a show at ChumCity.

Soon after I started working there, I found myself transcribing an episode of SexTV, and I had to pause the VCR to catch up with the dialogue, and then the 60-year-old cleaning woman came in to empty the waste baskets and there I was, typing away, with a huge illustrated close-up of a clitoris frozen on my TV screen. So I’ve got a high threshold of embarrassment.

A few months ago I worked on a documentary by a Romanian expatriate about Vlad the Impaler, and learned that he’s regarded as a folk hero in those parts. Yes. Sure, his favoured method of execution was to stick a sharpened stick up through his victims’ rectums and leave them twisting on it until they died, and okay, maybe a diplomat once refused to take off his hat in Vlad’s presence so Vlad had it nailed to his head, and yeah, that impaling thing, he once did that to over 60,000 people from a single city in a day, but at least he kept us safe. Come on, it was the 15th century, everyone was doing it, he was just a little over-enthusiastic. At least he would have kept the trains running on time, if technology and progress wasn’t the work of the devil. And I kept blinking, and I kept shaking my head, and I kept looking at what I’d found on the Internet while researching the spelling of place names and thinking What?! And I finished it, because it wasn’t actually hurting anybody, because it’s not my job to say we shouldn’t be airing this kind of thing, because people can’t disagree with an opinion they haven’t been allowed to hear.

Last night, I start work on a documentary purchased from the CBC about 9/11 conspiracy theories. What did they know, and when did they know it? I run the video and start to type. It starts with the “poster boy” for the conspiracy theorists, a man who was up on charges of credit-card fraud when 9/11 happened, and whose lawyers entered into evidence a piece of paper that he’d allegedly given to his guards before 9/11, a piece of paper with words written on it like “World Trade Centre” and “Pentagon” and something that looks like it possibly maybe could be “bin Laden,” and they said it proves that he was in fact an undercover American spy who’d stumbled across evidence of the attack and had tried to warn his superiors about it and nobody had listened to him. The people making the documentary apparently tried to get in touch with him, except he’d jumped bail and had mysteeeeeeriously disappeared.

And I slow down as I type, and I stop.

You know what a Rorschach inkblot test is, right? It’s a random splotch of ink on a paper. There’s no meaning to it other than what we read into it. That’s what humans do, they look for meaning, they try to connect the dots. The air moves, one molecule hits another hits another hits another, the movement funnels through the human ear to the timpanic membrane, the vibrations are converted to electrical impulses, they hit the brain, and we cry because we’re hearing the Moonlight Sonata. It’s what humans do.

When it goes too far, it’s called apophenia. Seeing patterns where none exist and believing they’re actually there.

I went back a couple of weeks ago and sorted all of my old blog posts into categories. I was reading them while I did so. Look, I mentioned how much I like Quizno’s Subs, the franchise I would have gone to if I’d been hungry if the bus had brought me back to Toronto on Boxing Day. Look, a man embarrasses himself on TV while talking about murdered children, but life goes on. Look, some days I hang onto my faith in humanity by a thread. Oh, look, I thought Hallowe’en was disappointing this year because death is an end-of-the-week thing; you can’t celebrate death on a Monday, it’s too dull. And of course, many other entries that haven’t been twisted into entirely different meanings. But these curves of ink look like the ears of a bunny. To me. Not because they are, but because of how I’m looking at them.

Humans look for meaning, especially when they look at tragedy. Humans connect the dots. Superstrings tied into quarks, into atoms, molecules, photons, energy and matter, interacting with the eye and the ear and the skin and being transformed into amazing, beautiful things. Fuck water into wine, a living human being can turn Everything into Even More. That’s a miracle. You can’t go around every day thinking about it, you’d trip over things, but yes, sentience is a miracle; thinking, interpreting, creating.

And here’s a man in jail for fraud, who produces a list of landmarks and known terrorists in his handwriting, and he claims that this proves he’s really a good person who should be let go, and people desperate for meaning look at it and think, yes, that makes sense.

I e-mail Adrienne and ask if I can swap to a different show.