I think one of the most fun things about people’s writing is revealing the quiet, personal mythology of individuals.
I’m not talking about their spirituality or their religion. I’m talking about the things that evoke immense emotion in us one way or another that we struggle to explain why and- thus- the symbolism in our stories that to one interpretation is really only for us, if I write a scene where a character as a child eats an orange sherbet push pop that maybe to everyone else it will be an irrelevant detail, and I feel alone in the overwhelming nostalgia and softness of sun-soaked childhoods at a very specific park and a routine I used to follow for no particular reason- but I like to think it’s not, only for me.
I think that, while it’s a folly to presume to know the mind of anyone you’ve only read the work of, there is a kind of intimate exchange in storytelling. We talk often about obscure or strange trauma triggers, people whose minds have somehow condensed an abusive experience down to the sight of eggs on a plate or a particular song but only when it’s whistled- but these forms of trauma simply reflect a broader truth in human understanding. We make patterns out of the strangest things.
“Pareidolia” is the proper term often used, and, as I so often like to do with words, I chew it apart into its pieces and look for pretty fragments. Pareidolia is simply the way that we look for, and see things- patterns, faces, hands- where they do not factually exist. The things that are most important to us make soap bubble distortions out of our world. But inside of that word is ‘idol’, like an idol for a deity. I am sure that presence has other meanings, but a part of me imagines it almost as a personal pantheon. The strange gods of the life that only we have lived, and that we share at a thousand small places with others.
The god of my childhood is orange sherbet push pops, eaten in summer, earnest attempts made to lap up all the sweet sticky syrup before it drips too far but never successful, and the plastic ‘umbrella’ (really the pusher, but it was always an umbrella to my eyes) taken to play with and turn in my fingers long after the cardboard tube was gone. Perhaps, somewhere in the world, there are other people that know that particular god.
A curious thing to call divine. Just one memory among many. But whenever I see them again, it’s like turning over a page in an old yearbook and there’s your best friend who you haven’t seen, who you wonder what they’re doing now. The vocabulary of our most intimate and personal experiences are littered with ostensibly meaningless objects that held our hearts once.
If I read a story, and two people eat peaches together, lovingly described, gently rendered, I wonder if the author’s first love tasted like peaches.
