The human brain is a sophisticated tool for recognizing patterns. Thousands of generations have honed its ability to discern from the environment the details that mean the difference between survival and death. In a storm of neurological activity, the significant pops out from the noise, the face from the crowd, the needle from the haystack.
The brain never rests. When you're sleeping, your brain is trying to find meaning. Without its usual sensory stimuli, it assigns meaning according to memory, leaving tracks that the conscious mind can trace.
You don't have to be unconscious to dream. The brain is so pathological in its need to construct patterns that subjects floating in isolation chambers begin to hallucinate within a few hours.
For a less hard-core hallucination, if you've ever lived in a house sprayed with popcorn ceilings, you've probably lain on your bed, your eyes focused slightly past the ceiling and watched as a parade of animals, faces, and objects coalesce from the bumps and shadows. I hear that the same technique works for grassy fields and skies full of white, puffy clouds wherever people have grassy fields and lots of free time.
So the brain is not just a pattern-recognizer, it's a pattern-finder as well. You don't have to have a pattern for people to see it.
Creativity and invention come from seeing things that were not there before. This is good.
The not-so-good part of pattern recognition comes when you stir in culture and belief. Then you get skulls in the clouds of the collapsing World Trade Center towers, a fetus in a radar shot of hurricane Katrina, the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, and Dr. Frankenfurter on a Cool Ranch Dorito.
Add language into the mix and things get even more interesting.
Language is our medium of choice for transmitting realities. Witness:
"I had kippers for breakfast this morning."
Now you know a little bit of my reality as long as you can parse language and your vocabulary includes the significant words. Even if you don't know what "kippers" are or what "breakfast" is, so many people have agreed to their meaning that you can look them up in reference material.
Through language, we build our little cocoons of world view, suspended in a web of shared meaning, clustered about nexuses of commonality.
The spiders at the center of the nexuses, spinning and manipulating, both scare me and enrage me.
They pull words from the shared lexicon, bind them and distort them to their purposes, and then throw them out at us, hoping they will stick.
For example:
"We are at war."
The word "war", like the word "love", has a strong primary meaning. Both words have grown a little fuzzy with overuse. For example, you may love your husband, but it's probably more likely to hear someone say they like Cool Ranch Doritos.
I first noticed the drift in war's meaning in high school. Various groups, public and private, aimed their policy and propaganda at my age group as part of the "war on drugs." Even then, I realized how silly it sounds to have a war on drugs.
The primary meaning of "war" is still something like this: "A state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict between nations, states, or parties."
When I think "war", I think of Roman testudos, Swiss pike squares, and dignified men in top hats on the fantail of a battleship signing papers ending hostilities.
When you're in a war against drugs, what exactly are you fighting? The users? The dealers? The growers? The social and economic conditions that make drugs look like a viable alternative? The chemical components themselves?
A chemical compound cannot sign its name.
I think of this when I hear Secretary Rumsfeld tell me that we're at war.
Who are we at war with? Terrorists? Can you please point out on the map for me the nation of Terror?
Iraq and Afghanistan were supposed to be centers for terrorism, but we kicked butt there. Is the war over now? Can our men and women come home? Where are the top hats?
When I hear Rumfeld tell me that we're at war with a concept, I can only think of what war used to be. In the history of the U.S., open war was a temporary state of heightened agitation in which in was acceptable for great men like Abraham Lincoln to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and Franklin Roosevelt to send 70,000 U.S. citizens to concentration camps. When the secessionist state or the Asian empire surrendered, the war was over and liberties were restored. When will terrorism surrender?
War used to be a time when the people sacrificed their possessions and their very blood in the hope that the world would be a better place for future generations.
Now we have an administration that weaves its fabric of words, constructs realities du jour, and casts out that web of associations on the populace, catching the patriots, the desperate, the sincere, the good people steeped in the concrete mythos of the Greatest Generation, the people who can't relate the story of Samuel B. Roberts without nearly choking on the lump in their throats.
I grit my teeth and fight back tears as the bodies of our sons and daughters mount on the altar that Bush and Co. have erected from the sacred memory of my parents and grandparents.
Pakeha