“Seeing Satan in the smoke of a burning building
slips from pareidolia to apophenia when the viewer
starts thinking that Satan is giving the world a sign
that he is alive and well.”
— Robert Todd Caroll
“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean
they’re not after you.”
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
I’m being watched. They (capital T) lurked
in the swirls of the mid-mod lino
in my folks’ bathroom, squinting
sidelong at me as I sat on the can:
swarthy gents with unruly hair,
visages fiercely planed, torsos
sinking back into bluegreen clouds
like some god’s forgotten body.
Everyone’s seen a minimal face
in the screws of a coat-hook,
or hooded dormer eyes
above a door’s pursed lips.
I’m scrutinized also from the folds
of sheets, shadow and angle suggestive
of an ogreish phiz, amorphous manbeast
keeping watch, enveloping me.
Everyone’s seen cloud shapes,
mountain peak profiles
or hilly waists and hips.
I spot skullish sockets and grins askew
in water’s fluctuations, fir-bough
cameos animated as figures
your hand might make against a light:
is it duck or rabbit?
The beach too is a fine and public
place, as filled with phantoms
as a necropolis: boulders’ eroded eyeholes,
whole logs studded with perfect worm-drilled O’s
or knot-holes for mouths, stubby snouts
of snapped branch over barnacle fangs.
Sinuous ficus trunks assume human limbs
mythic and faerie. What a shock
to find an actual face carved
in a garden oak: the Green Man
auguring fertile luck or warding off ill.
Our fears and our obsessions
demand action. Someone
reified their vision with an axe
or knife — no longer imagination,
yes we are being watched.
The belief that someone is
out to get us, our jobs, our
lives, we believe so hard we make it so.
Some of us buy guns to stop others
who have bought guns to stop others,
whose spirits may be ill or, for all we know, good.
“Ask questions later, let God sort it out.”
Those who watch us — neighbors,
government, our enemies, or
those not yet our enemies, who
we’ll make enemies by watching them,
by seeing them everywhere. We see
what we don’t want to see, or do.
We even see what
is, but our devilish minds remind
us, bring us back and inward
to our swirling mental floor.
The schizophrenic conjures
a convincing but false truth.
Magicians make us believe
what they’ve shown us. The pious
see Jesus in their toast.
Given our suggestible brains,
it’s easy to spin and shade the world
to sway each other. How easy
it is to convince! I saw a UFO (no, really).
An oasis is just over the next dune.
Paul is dead. Jews
secretly rule the world.
News is fake.
Appearances do deceive, or at least
don’t hint at the whole story:
the jovial teacher turns out
to be a raving bully. The DIY furniture
does not match the instructions.
The map is not the territory, trees
not the forest with its deadfalls
and cougars and quicksand oh my.
That aloof, snobbish guy is
merely timid. The placid, boring neighbor’s
garage bulges with machineguns.
It’s enough to make anyone
(well, some of us) paranoid,
leave the doorbell unanswered, look
sidelong at anyone who doesn’t look
like us. We see malign faces infesting
the clouds our heads are in,
there with all the other flimsy
shapes, evanescent, nebulous.
Like the carven Green Man, just because
you’ve imagined someone out there
doesn’t mean they’re not.
But neither does it mean
they are. Let us be
instead astonished.
Sean Bentley | This sentence is false.
Contents | Mudlark No. 72 (2021)