Pareidolia in the Time of Quarantine
Still Life with Pig Head, Bone, and Blood Curd
For a while I heard the sound of the baby crying everywhere.
It was faint, indistinct, hidden in the drone of the bathroom fan, the hum of the refrigerator, the rattle of the ductwork. The sound of a crying child lurked everywhere in the ambient noise of our home. This was a few years ago, when my daughter was much younger, before she was sleep trained. At first I thought it was just me but, sure enough, my partner could hear the crying also. We dubbed this “phantom baby syndrome”.
The effect is well-studied in psychology. It’s called pareidolia — our tendency to perceive something we find meaningful, buried in random stimulus. This why we see faces in the dust of mars, hear secret messages in 80s hair metal when it’s played backwards, find demonic faces in the plumes of smoke that rose above the fallen towers on 9/11. Hidden messages, secret codes, deeper meanings. We look out into the noise and chaos and meaninglessness of the world and, if we look hard enough, we can perceive our own consciousness, reflected back.
Right now, at this moment in history, everywhere I look, I see death.
It’s always there, waiting just below the surface, indistinct, buried in the white noise of the daily grind. There’s the pear I forgot to wash, the bit of granola bar I thoughtlessly let her eat after it fell on a public bench, my unconscious tendency to touch my face, run my fingers through my beard, tighten the beads on the jewelry in my septum. Don DeLillo put it better than I ever could: all plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.
Outside, in the desecrated city, people wander out, tentative, alone or in small groups, garbed in the fashions of impending death. They wear face masks and latex gloves to the grocery store, the liquor store. A woman wearing pyjamas and carrying an armload of toilet paper opens her apartment door using a diaper wipe. A young man, at most 25 years old, walks his labradoodle wearing a vintage gas mask and a pink Von Dutch hat.
He crosses the street when he sees me on the sidewalk.
We’re waiting.
All of us.
Waiting.
And I wake at 5am and piss and try to decide if I think my throat is dry and if so does that mean I’m coming down with something. I drink water from my cupped hands, lay in bed.
The furnace kicks on and there’s the hum of the fan, the rush of air filling the ducts, the moan of metal fittings expanding and contracting.
And there it is.
Her cry doesn’t sound like that anymore, hasn’t sounded like that since she was a baby.
And I know for sure that she’s asleep.
But still.
Still.
I hear her crying.
We’re waiting.
All of us.
And, in this time, I find myself thinking a lot about Beckett’s famous absurdist play, Waiting for Godot. In the first act of the play two vagabonds stand in a ditch in some empty expansive wasteland and wait for a someone, or something, named Godot, who never arrives. While they wait, the two vagabonds amuse themselves by sharing stories, telling dirty jokes, struggling to find meaning in their lives, contemplating suicide.
In the second act of the play, our two heroes await Godot’s arrival yet again.
Again, Godot does not arrive.
The play opened in France in 1953 to boos and hisses. One reviewer derisively described it as: “A play where nothing happens. Twice.”
The piece has a reputation for being pretentious and difficult and it’s often suggested that the absentee character of Godot is meant as a heavy-handed metaphor for God. Beckett himself rejected this interpretation. “If by Godot I meant God, I would have said God, and not Godot.”
I have a different interpretation of the play, and of Beckett’s work in general. I think the play is anything but difficult and pretentious. I think Beckett’s intentions are so painfully straightforward that they are often overlooked by the kinds of scholars who tend to analyze this material.
I think it’s just this simple: the play is about waiting.
I think that ‘Godot’ isn’t a fixed metaphor, it’s a placeholder. I think that by ‘Godot’ Beckett simply meant to denote the thing that we are waiting for, whatever that is. Sometimes it’s a vaccine, or an end to quarantine, or the death of a loved one. But sometimes it’s rather less profound: a job offer, a publication, your turn at the barber.
What Beckett understood is that even when you’re just waiting for something that might never happen, you’re never really just waiting. Beckett understood that waiting isn’t just the absence of something happening, it’s an experience unto itself. Beckett understood that waiting carries emotional weight, meaning. Beckett knew that even when the world is dark and death haunts us at every turn, even when the life is cruel and arbitrary, even when our attempts to impose meaningful narrative on the chaos around us are absurd….
Even then…
We still have the time that we spend on earth, with each other, waiting.