The Sunday Letter #23: Patterns
On seeing things that aren't there, or might be there, or ARE there no matter how much we might try to believe otherwise.
In 1985, astronomers discovered a stick figure in the sky. It was not a constellation of a stick figure, but rather a collection of galaxies, many millions of light-years across, that had clustered together into a pattern that looked just like a stick figure. Two legs, a disappearing head, and arms that spread out into many millions of strands of stars. The project that led to this discovery was called the CfA Redshift Survey, and it began in 1977.
Redshift refers to the way that gaseous signatures in stars move toward the red part of the light spectrum. In 1859, physicists Robert Bunsen—he of Bunsen burner fame—and Gustav Kirchhoff noticed that if you filtered different gases through a prism, each gas (hydrogen, helium, and so on) had a distinct signature of lines that crossed through the light spectrum. They then applied this method to looking at the light that comes to us from the stars, and discovered that it was possible to measure the distinct signatures of different gases in the light that they recorded through their telescopes. (This is how we know what gases stars are made of.) This field of study is known as spectroscopy, named for the instrument—a spectroscope—that the physicists invented in order to study that light. Using this method, it is then possible to understand how light is moving because the signatures of the various gases in a star move closer to the red end of the light spectrum when that star is moving away from us. Shifting to the red. By contrast, a star that is moving closer to us will show gas signatures that appear closer to the blue end of the light spectrum. This is what’s known as blueshift. All of these things are what helped astronomers of a century or more ago determine that the universe is expanding—because many of the stars that we see are travelling away from us, as evidenced by their light signatures.
Neat, isn’t it.
The discovery of the “stick man” in the Redshift Survey helped astronomers determine something that they’d started to suspect—namely, that the galaxies in our universe don’t come about randomly, but are pulled into being and pulled together according to various patterns. What those patterns are, and how they come about, are very slowly being unraveled. As this article shows, astronomers and scientists are having to think creatively about how to interpret this data; having to engage with other models and structures (spiderwebs! slime molds!) in order to determine the forces that bring this about. A lot of it comes down to gravity and how other forces (dark matter and dark energy foremost among them) move on these early galaxies and filaments to pull them together into clusters.
And yet, at the end of it all, the thing I’m most fascinated by is the possibility that someone out there will look at that image of a stick figure in space and say, See? What more evidence do you need of a supreme kind of purpose and rhythm than that?
In psychology, the term pareidolia refers to the tendency of human perception to impose meaning on random images and pictures. This is what happens when you see a happy face in an electrical socket, or in a cloud, or (perhaps) when you see an image of Jesus in a piece of toast. The image isn’t there so much as your perception of it is, but that perception can go a long way toward orienting someone’s life and individual meaning depending on what they see. I am fascinated by this most of all. Regardless of whether there is actual literal meaning in that face you see in a socket, the fact that your brain interprets it as meaning is something that can actually have real, long-lasting consequences in your own life.
I have thought about this a lot in these years after Jess, these at times murky and terrible and at other times less terrible but still murky spaces of time in which I veer between a specific kind of spiritual meaning and purpose and the vast maw of whatever else might be out there and waiting. I feel like a galaxy filament in its first million years being pulled, inexorably, this way and that. Sometimes (more often than not!) into the realm of “There’s so much more meaning to all of this than my tiny human brain can ever fathom.” And sometimes I am pulled in the opposite direction, the one that says, “This is all chance and physical laws but isn’t even this beautiful? Isn’t this even more extraordinary, this possibility that we all arise from nothing and go back to the same?” From redshift to blueshift and back again without even time for whiplash.
Yet even this is disingenuous in a way, because there is always a small part of me that’s going to stand firmly in the realm of I believe, I believe, I believe. I’m a skeptical believer and not a skeptic who believes.
It’s a small semantic difference, but one that sometimes feels as vast as that space out there between the stars.
What do I believe in? I think it changes every day.
Part of the work of patterns is to help us protect against fear. Noticing a pattern in something is often one of the first steps we take in understanding the world around us. The patterns wrought by the orbits of planets and comets were a huge part of what helped early humans form the basis of their own astronomical observations—and this basis, in turn, helped early cultures understand and create patterns within their own lives on Earth. Understanding patterns and rhythms in the sky helped people the world over establish when to plant crops, when to determine optimal hunting cycles, and so on.
First this comes, and then this, and then this. There’s a huge comfort in seeing things this way. It’s a kind of bulwark against the smallness that we feel when standing under the vast night sky—or when standing anywhere, really, because to be a human on this earth is to be small and tiny and (seemingly) inconsequential.
I am small and tiny but I am a part of something. However small that is. First comes this, and then this, and then this. The more I pay attention, the more I’ll be able to understand.
Despite being someone who’s been drawn to the spiritual side of things all her life—a seeker, yes, definitely, that’s me—losing Jess was my unwanted, un-looked-for, you’ll-never-take-me-any-way-but-kicking-and-screaming shove into paying attention to the world. It’s still a shove I would give back, if that makes sense. These last four years of raw, open tender-heartnedness at the beauty and impossible fragility of the planet we’re all living on? I’d return it all in a flash to have her back, even though the grief has taught me so much. Even though the pattern of grief, its rituals and its unexpected treasures—glimpses into another part of the universe that none of us understand, the door to somewhere different opening a crack and spilling light out into my grief-soaked hallway—has brought me into a whole new way of being.
But this is not the bargain that we get to make with loss. (Patterns and ritual: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, reconstruction.) You don’t get to sacrifice something else in order to get back what you’ve already lost. Instead, all you can do is try to make sense of, and perhaps see patterns in, the world that you’re left with. The hazy grey of the grief world that we all traverse eventually, looking desperately up at the sky so we can navigate our way.
Patterns can be dangerous. We can’t acknowledge them without also acknowledging this fact. How many injustices and atrocities have been and continue to be committed by humans against other humans (and animals) because someone essentially thought that someone else adhered to a pattern that meant bad, because we impose meaning in ways that hurt and divide? Wrong skin colour, wrong religion, wrong language, wrong actions. Behaviour that is unusual and therefore is mistrusted.
Sometimes, we see patterns that do not appear as patterns to other people and we are convinced that this puts us up above, and others below. We become convinced that we’ve divined meaning in something that no one else has seen.
On an institutional level, patterns all too often appear when someone comes to challenge them.
We say, Thing X has Pattern A and Pattern A means trouble. Therefore, we must do away with Thing X.
Or we say, Person X has come to challenge Pattern A. And Pattern A helps us understand our place in the world. Who are we if this is not true? Therefore, we must do away with Person X.
In other words, we hold tight to our patterns—and reject the patterns of others, or the patterns we do not understand—because letting them go often means embracing chaos and change. Understanding that there’s mystery all around us and we’ll only ever know a small fraction of it.
We don’t like feeling small, at the end of it. There’s so much within us that always wants to understand. And so we look at the dots of a cosmic man in a redshift survey of the stars and some of us say there is a figure of a man in space! There has to be a larger explanation than gravity at work here. And some of us say, but this is what gravity means! This is proof that the gravitational models, on a large scale, do exactly what we expect they’d do. We don’t understand all the rules yet, but we will eventually. All you see is what you want to see, because that’s how the universe makes sense to you.
And still others look at this and say, well—isn’t it neat that we see that structure and automatically think it looks like a stick figure? What does that say about us? Why do we so desperately want to see ourselves reflected back in the stars, to make the unfathomable into something that we recognize? What meaning—real or imagined—are we reaching for when we do that?
How are the patterns that we’re seeing around and above us teaching us to love the world?
A little over a year after Jess died, I went to a friend’s wedding in Toronto. It was a lovely outdoor ceremony and I had a wonderful time while there, and then I cried in the train all the way back to Hamilton because the grief felt so heavy. Once upon a time Jess and I had dreamed of our own weddings—of standing up for each other, of preparing and laughing and sharing in the excitement that those days and rituals would bring. I got to go to her wedding in 2016; she’ll never be at mine now, at least not in the same way.
Taking the train back to Hamilton that day, I couldn’t stop thinking about how this Toronto wedding had been the first wedding I’d attended since I’d been at Jess’s wedding four years earlier. She was diagnosed with cancer just over six months after she got married; those few days with her at her wedding were the last time I saw her in person.
I sat on the train and felt the longing and the grief rise around me like a cloud, or perhaps a cloudy kind of beacon stretching up into the sky.
I can’t do this alone anymore, I remember thinking very distinctly. I can’t do it. I won’t.
After I thought this I opened my phone and Googled “mediums”. You know, the people who say they can speak to the dead. The first hit in that Google search was a woman with dark hair and a bright smile who seemed warm and kind in a way that shone out even from her small photo. But I didn’t have money for a reading with a medium, not then, so I tucked my phone away in my pocket and I tucked the woman’s name and her website away into a pocket of my mind and I rode the train the rest of the way home, looking out the window and seeing nothing. But wanting to see something.
Wanting, in whatever way I could, to understand.
It occurs to me, these four years on from Jess’s death, that the work of grief and loss—and any kind of trauma—is also the work of trying to impose patterns on the world. Or of trying to tease out the patterns in the world. (Impose, tease out—the end result is always to discover meaning in something where there didn’t seem to be meaning before, so maybe the method is essentially the same, even though structurally they appear very different.) Sometimes we tell ourselves that we see stick figures in space because it is comforting to imagine that there is something out there that is larger than us pulling those stick figures together. Ordering the world and the universe in a way that makes sense. And sometimes we tell ourselves that it’s all the work of gravity, and we see stick figures in space because we have trained our survival brains to think this way—and this offers us the same kind of comfort.
And sometimes we tell ourselves that maybe the gravity that pulled that stick figure together is itself only part of something much larger. Something we’ll never be able to grasp entirely, no matter how many surveys we conduct.
At the end of the day, there’s still a stick figure in space according to the CfA Redshift Survey. It is there for all of us to ponder, regardless of what it might mean.
In the immediate days after Jess died, a few strange things happened. These specific things aren’t my story to tell, and so I won’t share them here, but I will say that strange things continued to happen in the months after this—sometimes to me, sometimes to other people Jess had loved. One morning I woke up from a dream where Jess had seemed totally at peace with her death and when I opened my phone it opened immediately onto Jess’s mother’s page in my Contacts, despite the fact that I had not been looking at my contacts before going to sleep. (Needless to say, I messaged her mother and told her about the dream.) Another time, I sat with her family and heard about her love for rubber duckies and then, a few days later, found myself at a literary festival and unexpectedly upgraded to an executive suite, complete with ensuite hottub and a rubber duckie waiting for me on its edge.
There’s also, as I’ve talked about before, the blue butterfly.
I latched—and continue to hold—onto these things the way that we latch onto patterns in the stars. When I think of these things, I think of how they hint at a world so much larger than the world we know, something about which we have only the faintest trace of understanding, the way that we have only the faintest trace—truly, in the big-picture scheme of things, even when seen only through the lens of science—of how the things seen in the CfA Redshift Survey came to be.
But instead of making me feel small and tiny and helpless, thinking about these things makes me feel small and tiny and loved.
It’s entirely possible that I’m doing the work of imposing meaning onto things that don’t have any. Stringing a necklace out of coincidences and telling myself that they mean something. Making a pattern for myself—one small infinitesimal corner of the universe to understand—because the alternative feels too huge and scary. But it’s also entirely possible that there is a meaning here—one small infinitesimal glimpse of it, and that’s all I’ll ever get, and that’s okay.
It is frustrating, sometimes, being in this liminal space. I want to believe so wholly in the reality of life after death and the fact that my soulmate friend can send me signs from whatever awaits us beyond. I want to believe that this pull to watching the stars and the sky and taking trips across the ocean to watch the stars fall over a Dark Sky Island means something even more than working through grief. I do! Over these last few years I’ve had so many glimpses of this. And somehow even in spite of this there are times when I find myself pulling back, thinking well you don’t really know either way, Amanda, so ease up on the woo-woo and let’s not get carried away.
Skeptical believers gonna skeptically believe, I guess you could say.
But a few days ago, while I was walking Sitka, something else said it this way: you’re a doorway. Your job isn’t to go all the way in. Your job is to hold the door open for as far and as long as you can so that someone else might be able to see through it too.
Maybe that requires a little bit of all the worlds, together. Some of the skeptic and some of the believer and maybe a large dose of the person who just says, flat out, there’s mystery all around and I’ll never understand it all and so I’m just going to get comfortable, here, in the mystery’s shimmer.
I’ve always thought shimmer such a beautiful word.
Currently Reading: Being Nobody, Going Nowhere, by Ayya Khema
Currently Watching: Season One of For All Mankind. Love!
Currently Eating: This Red Lentil & Pumpkin Dal, courtesy of @SophsPlantKitchen. (Side note: how am I going to leave Instagram this year if it means leaving all of these recipes? I. Just. Don’t. Know!)
Currently Substacking: From the Margins, by Katy Loftus. Perfect dose of love and realism vis à vis writing and book publishing.
Loved this Sunday letter. So much in it speaks to me. The grief, both sides of a paradoxe being true and holding both truths, the shimmer, the need for patterns and understanding. Thank you for sharing!