On the Face of Things

Life is a pattern and the pattern creeps

I see dead people. But it’s not what you think. I see dead people being creepy. I see living faces blowing raspberries. I see animals of every species, extinct through whimsical. I see every shape and pattern imaginable in every cloud, patch of wallpaper, inkblot and…even this wet tissue that so artfully mashed its sad pulp into the Sleepy Hollow sidewalk.

I saw so many things in this roadside attraction that I had to stop in mid-walk to have a little reverie, albeit by putting on my reading glasses and getting into a crouch at midnight when I got off the train, which is already way past my bedtime. But I had to know. What’s going on in here. A tree, but also some creatures kissing, or maybe a suckling swarm of ghost rats.

I wrote in recent weeks about shapes in clouds. How humans see faces (particularly human faces) in everything, a phenomenon called pareidolia. The memory of the madness of wallpaper patterns is forever stamped in my feminist lit class brain from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s somehow timeless story of 1892, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” A women likely suffering from post-partem depression (before such a thing was known to exist) is locked in a room by her doctor-husband, supposedly for the sake of her healing, and goes nutty when all she can do to amuse herself is stare at this painful patterned paper trying to decipher what the hell it’s up to.

I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

The language she uses to try to describe this mad wallpaper explodes with wild lyricism: curves that “commit suicide,” “irritating,” a “vicious” pattern that “lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes,” a “kind of ‘debased Romanesque’ with delirium tremens” that “go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity,” the “sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase,” the color is “infuriating,” the design “torturing,” “interminable grotesque,” “tramples upon you,” “like a bad dream,” a “florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions,” “creeping,” and “creepy.”

To read all of these passages kindly creep through the footnotes below¹ in which our protagonist eventually discovers that the pattern has entrapped a woman, like her, who emerges and escapes and…creeps. She sees herself of course in all of this.

I remember the face I found once in a banana. Not Jesus, just a face for no one in particular. I have the photo somewhere but a keyword search in my files for “banana face” isn’t working. Finding this face staring back at me over breakfast doesn’t make me unique, as I mentioned, as you know from your own experience, it’s our human condition to see faces—echoes of ourselves—in everything. We anthropomorphize. We animate. Given two dots and a line we see eyes and a mouth. We turn everything into life we recognize. We find patterns and the patterns repeat. Which isn’t much different than religion.

Was there magic or miracle (or circumstance) in the Sleepy Hollow tree, which for a moment in 2012 looked to the Catholics like the face of the Virgin and became a monument? People started to congregate to this tree from all over the region, pray, take pictures. I happened to be the reporter then for the local Patch site, capturing this shapely breaking news and interviewing the believers. To this day, many years later, the dynamic knot has now long straightened and grown out, yet is still the site of religious tchotchkes and prayer candles if not the Virgin herself.

Mars has a famous face you can choose to see as a sign of alien interference, or just a happenstance conglomeration of light and shadow on a particular day at a particular time. Look at the difference between the “Face on Mars” as first captured by NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter in 1976 (left) with a more recent and clearer image of the same spot from Mars Global Surveyor in 2001 (right):

Unfortunately it’s not that the face went away but that it was never really there to begin with. These shapes are shifty as are our minds and this fast mental math we make to connect this to that, naming what is only an illusion. Our fast face recognition is a byproduct of an evolutionary advantage that helped early primates detect living things quicker than other objects (1/10th of a second vs. 1/4th second). Because of the speed of these detection areas of our brain they are sometimes wrong, but they are also quick to figure out they are wrong. We know it’s not a face but a pockmark on Mars. Still we can see the false face illusion and the fact of Mars, appreciating the difference in the same 1/4 second it takes to name any other object. So it’s worth it, notes this Ted-Ex video, to be wrong 35% of the time (finding faces in nothing but a pure noise image) when something so essential for existence as face recognition is at stake.

“There is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves.”

_David Hume, The Natural History of Religion

Shakespeare’s Hamlet was mentally nimble (or mental) enough to see all kinds of creatures in the same cloud, egged on by his compliant cohort:

HAMLET: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of a camel?
POLONIUS: By th’Mass and ‘tis, like a camel indeed.
HAMLET: Methinks it is a weasel.
POLONIUS: It is backed like a weasel.
HAMLET: Or a whale.
POLONIUS: Very like a whale.

What we might perceive to be the Man on the Moon might look more like the Moon Rabbit to East Asian and native American cultures. Other groups (Germa, Haida, Latvians) might see the same thing and make their myths around a “walking figure carrying a wide burden burden on their back.”

Clearly there’s no right answers to this, no clarity or cosmic conclusions, only shared stories or isolated illusions.

The most iconic face of New Hampshire (on their historic stamps, license plants, and more) is the Old Man on the Mountain, cliff ledges on Cannon Mountain in Fraconia Notch that resembled a man’s profile until the face tragically collapsed in 2003.

And then, oh mein gott, there was a teapot in 2013 that unfortunately created a social media outcry when folks realized it resembled Hitler. It was promptly removed from the J.C. Penny inventory.

Have you seen any faces similarly surprising?

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1. This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had! There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breaths didn’t match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.

[…]

This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so—I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.

[…]

I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of. It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise. Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes—a kind of “debased Romanesque” with delirium tremens—go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity. But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase. The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its going in that direction. They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion. There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,—the interminable grotesque seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction. It makes me tired to follow it.

[…]

Of course I never mention it to them any more—I am too wise,—but I keep watch of it all the same. There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit.

[…]

I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wallpaper till I felt creepy. The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.

[…]

On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind. The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream. The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions—why, that is something like it.

[…]

I really have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white! If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.

[…]

I think that woman gets out in the daytime! And I’ll tell you why—privately ­ I've seen her! I can see her out of everyone of my windows! It is the same woman, I know, for she’s always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight. I see her in that long shaded lane, creeping up and down. I see her in those dark grape arbors, creeping all around the garden. I see her on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines. I don’t blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight! I always lock the door when I creep by daylight.