PAREIDOLIA

      We all do it; we were programmed that way, not so much by our original humanoid genes but by that main driver of all life, natural selection. Carl Sagan wrote, in A Demon-Haunted World: “Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents, and less likely to prosper.” Little Taryn is an absolute champ, a master hypnotist whose eyes lock on, convincing her dad that she loves him more than anyone.

     It's doubtful her face-attachment is stronger than the average infant, but if it is, she got it from me. I see faces everywhere: in plaster cracks and tufts of gray cat fur and the shadowed leafy depths of a Brittlebush. I don't think there's a person in the moon, but there is a personality – mournful when full, or when gibbous, merely surprised. On clear nights thousands of years ago, nomads and Greek philosophers saw faces and whole beings in the thick stars and produced the beginnings of mythology.
     I could support the theory that rocks are alive, their apparent immobility due to an altered frame of reference in time. To them, perhaps, we move so quickly as to appear invisible or at most a blur, like the Srike in Hyperion. How else can one explain this?

     Not everyone knows they're here. Consider this young couple, enjoying the late afternoon sun on the top of a cliff face carved by the swirling of a hundred thousand high tides.

    Or is there something else – something not evil and perhaps very young? Something simply hungry whose cry remains physical long after the sound waves have dissipated. Something able to wait for hundreds of hours until one of the blurry feet above it slips. Someone who recognizes the rock face of a larger opposing cliff across the bay opening its own mouth in mimicking surprise.

  Dr. Sagan is rolling in his grave with agony over what he has done to me.