Children of an Unseen Age

It’s called scrying. You take a handful of ochre dust or ash, or bits of old bone, or leaves in the bottom of a teacup. You throw the bones in the air, or cast the dust on the ground, you drain the cup and thump it down on the board and claim your destiny. You draw cards: feeling which ones stick slightly to your fingers, or call you to choose them. Always, there’s an invitation to an influx of chance — how else will you learn what you don’t already know? (Or, don’t know that you know?) We let the hand of mystery rearrange the patterns we enlarge. Always, it takes us beyond our capacities to describe, to leave an exact trail of breadcrumbs — that’s because of the incredible interwoven simultaneity of everything, and also because certain symbols, certain metaphors, are strengthened and empowered as the two objects of comparison migrate further from each other in terms of what they literally are, away from any chance meeting of each other in the same quotidian plane. And then, of cour...

  Who are you? No. Who are you, really? Do you have a certain answer, or is it a foggy cloud with wispy tendrils reaching far from the center of your normal? Is your answer held in the chalice of your ambitions, or does it rise from dark waters like a shark taking out a seal? Is who you are sending out roots that subtly connect you to the core identity of everything else? We are, as a people, mostly afraid to act. Henry David Thoreau famously declared: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Yet, “Most people lead lives of paralyzed ambivalence,” would be nearer the mark. We are afraid to act, both in the intensified glow of the stage-lights, but also  simply at all.  We try to be normal. Our range of expressive behavior generally stays within a narrow band of acceptable characteristics — an unwritten schedule of how to behave (for whoever we think we’re supposed to be). Alcohol loosens the confines a little or disastrously; so also, apparently, does chopping our head...

There’s a curious phenomenon that was named only as recently as 2005: Trypophobia. In fact, not everyone is in agreement that it encapsulates a true phobia, for many people who are affected experience disgust, not fear (an important point to revisit, later). Here is the nature of it — people with trypophobia have a skin-crawling revulsion toward clusters of small holes (or clusters of bumps). Things like the seed heads of certain flowers, honeycomb, groups of soap bubbles, or the surface of a sponge can elicit these feelings. The effect is particularly pronounced when the clusters of holes or bumps present somewhere on the body; full-blown panic and rejection can ensue. What might cause this reaction? What do holes and bumps mean to us, that we feel compelled to reject and escape them? Psychologists have been theorizing that  trypophobia  is due to our instinctive repulsion toward signs of disease, parasites — transmissible dysregulating dangers. This notion makes a lot of s...

In a way, it is hard for me to fathom the experience of someone who is asexual. I can imagine not being attracted to anyone in that way, but I’m a bit challenged to frame that state of being in any other way than “something’s missing.” It seems to me that a person who lives without experiencing the push and pull of erotic desire is a person who lives without experiencing  time . Let me explain. One of the curious things about sexuality is the compulsive attention we give it. The adage that “sex sells” is a marketing truism because most people can’t resist the impulse to investigate when something overtly or implicitly advertises that it has to do with sex. Research from 2011 suggests that a man will think about sex 17 times per day, on average, while a woman will think about sex 10 times per day. (Men typically also think more about eating and sleeping, according to the study.) It’s difficult to imagine there’s any other subject matter that spontaneously flits through our attenti...