Is Susan Really A Bat?

Paranoia

Part 28 of 30

I feel like I learned something like this at the state university, although it’s been so long ago that I can’t remember the details.

There was a theory or speculation questioning whether what we see is reality in any real sense (whatever that’d be) or if the things we see are completely different, right down to shapes being utterly different, etc. If you think about it a while, it makes sense, but we’re very resistant to it because "reality" appears to be a given. Our hands feel something, we jump to conclusions. Like the story of  the blind men feeling up the elephant. He has tree trunks for legs, a necktie for a tail, and a sturdy windsock for a nose.

The theory -- a naysayer’s dream ever there was one -- is that every assumption is to be questioned, because we can’t be sure what reality is. I would’ve taken the professor on, but my vocabulary was pretty limited around smart people. But I still could’ve gone out on a limb: “Uh, professor, I notice that you express your thoughts with the same words we use. If everything is to be questioned, don’t you think you ought to come up with a vocabulary that isn’t part of the same farce? And your clothes appear to fit your body as though it’s shaped in such and such a way?” Where should the questioning begin? "What do the clothing know about your body that my eyes are missing?" OK, enough of me flaying the guy to no profit. Because I actually flunked that class because of other issues; honestly, I skipped all the tests on the theory that the tests, though required were actually not required. Which would be more true to the spirit of the class. But according to the professor -- against his previous scruples -- the tests were actual tests in the traditional sense!

Our guy in the graphic has something of that mindset going on. And probably all of us have been there a few times. It hits me occasionally, out of the blue, that I think things are the complete opposite of whatever everyone else thinks. It might be tricks with my eyes; I can’t make out what’s right in front of me. For me it's a serious side effect of paranoia. Your senses just go wacky, or perhaps they’re indeed fine tuned according to what reality really is. Even if that's the case, I’m still happier when reality goes back to its good old false self. Because I have most of the rules of that reality memorized and anything new I'm forced to "learn" I’m automatically against. If not because I can't accept its reality, but on general purposes, I'm just too mentally exhausted to accept new things.

I know I’d hate it if someone mistook me for a bat. And Susan here must be the same. “Look again, Buzz, does it really look like, does it really feel like she has a furry face like a bat and little beady eyes and a bat-cave that she returns to every night? You know where she is, right by your side, not hanging in a drizzly cave with the occasional bat flitting by.”

The People You Miss-See

This is about all the hundreds of people that I've miss-seen over the years. I haven't kept a record of them, of course, but they know who they are ... or would know, if they existed.

I'm also referring, tangentially, to the hundreds and thousands and millions of ancestors and contemporary family members and friends that those people would have had, had they existed. But the existence of all these folk is a non-existence, ephemeral, a matter of my limited perception and imagination filling in the blanks.

Certainly, I know this happens all the time to us, probably, although you hardly ever hear it mentioned in polite company: "Guess who I thought I saw today, a guy who didn't exist." You come to understand you didn't see anyone. Or did you? I'm not saying he wasn't there. I'm not saying he didn't vanish in a second. I'm just not saying.

It happens like this: You're sitting there minding your own business, and you think you see someone out of the corner of your eye, then when you turn for the full gaze it turns out to be someone else. Like one day recently, I thought I saw a mystery woman sort of lady, like out of the movies, carrying a birdcage. Then I turned and it was a regular man in a dark shirt, carrying a baby, a blanket hanging down.

Obviously, for it to have been the mystery woman, which would've been cool, she would've had to have existed, with all the factors leading to her, including grandparents and other ancestors, and possibly student loans for attending unknown mystery schools. Then when she didn't exist, all the grandparents and ancestors vanished, and whatever loans she might have had were instantly paid off. On the other hand, it's tough to wish away the actual man and baby, just to conjure up a mystery woman. He has relatives, too!

There's even people I think I see who turn out to be a stack of something, or even a file cabinet, maybe with a plant on top. The leaves of the plant are their hair, etc., until I look, and once I see it's not a person, it's tough to imagine them again. It feels sort of semi-tragic, like I said above, all their schooling is gone, their teachers never existed, their fellow classmates, their pets, gifts they got from grandparents, and their fears of the future, etc., all gone!

It's actually a little easier, if you wear glasses, to take your glasses off if you want to see people who aren't there. I can sit in public without my glasses and look across the room and see all sorts of people. A couple days ago, without my glasses, I saw a guy who looked like an old childhood friend. I knew it couldn't be him. The guy was younger than my friend is now. Fortunately, my old friend is still alive; I see him on Facebook. But for a moment he had a younger twin. Then with my glasses the resemblance wasn't as close.

A few minutes later there was a guy with a beard who looked like a cross between one of my brothers and Solzhenitsyn! He had that Solzhenitsyn beard, but the top of my brother's face. Then when I put my glasses on he still looked basically like this. But younger than Solzhenitsyn when he was most in the news, and a little puffier in the face than my brother.

Getting back to the mystery woman carrying the birdcage, you never see a mystery woman carrying a birdcage. So I essentially knew that when I turned she wasn't going to be there. But what if she was? Maybe she'd be headed to a detective's office to hire him. Her cool, dark mystery clothes, a 1940s outfit, a funky little mystery woman's hat, and a dark cloth over the cage. What a thing to be carrying! These are the kinds of things I want to see more of.