Since writing this, and after reading a little Kaballah, I’ve occasionally wondered if some minor angel suffered reprimand over the incident described below.
I wasn’t on drugs at the time, nor was I drunk or feverish
About six years ago I was sitting in the living room of a house I was trying to sell and noticed a rusty drywall nail poking through the ceiling. I could see it very clearly, could see the small gap between the nail head and the ceiling, could even see a pattern in the nail’s rust and cracking in the paint around the hole it made. I noted the location carefully, intending to fix it. But the nail disappeared over night. When I brought a ladder in the next day, not only was the nail gone, but there was no hole either. It was as if it had never been, as if I had imagined the entire incident.
I tell this tale not because it is extraordinary, but because it’s not—it’s mundane. I wasn’t on drugs at the time, nor was I drunk or feverish. My sensory apparatus for interpreting reality, such as it is, was perfectly functional. And yet, I saw a rusty nail that wasn’t there. Or possibly, saw a rusty nail that later disappeared.
When I talk about this with others, I fairly often get nods of recognition—it seems that lots of people occasionally notice minor glitches in the workings of reality. Perhaps you’ve noticed them as well. It’s easy to assume, when these things happen, that we are simply mistaken, that we misinterpreted sensory evidence. But I wonder if it’s actually that simple. In my case, I am quite sure I saw the nail; it was as real as the chair I was sitting in at the time. True, I could have been mistaken but if I was, I could just as easily be mistaken about everything I see and assume to be real—and that’s a little unsettling.
It’s almost easier to believe that the nail vanished, that this minor detail got lost in some cosmic paper shuffling. Why not? There are bigger oddities clamoring for our attention, such as UFO phenomena or Marian apparitions, and they seem to have a certain undeniable validity… so is it actually inconceivable that trivial phenomena might also be subject to occasional miraculous restructuring?
But back to me. When the rusty nail obstinately refused to be present, I was tempted to assume that I had been ‘seeing things’, whatever that might mean. But instead, I decided to believe that I was a qualified observer, that the nail had existed, and that it was reality that had proven to be unreliable.
This simple decision—to believe my own eyes—has made rather a large difference in my life. I have come to believe that the world I exist in is not a rigidly invariable construct that I am suffered to observe, but is instead an artwork that I am privileged to co-create. I don’t know if this idea is ‘true’, nor can I tell you what ‘true’ might mean in this case. But I do know that adopting this belief has made my life considerably more interesting.
Did you like this essay? You’ll love my books!
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }