The Snake at the Top of the Stairs
Snakes do not like to go above the ground floor
I know we’re all sick to death of conspiracy theories which is why I want to tell you about a new one I might have invented.
Or perhaps I experienced a sequence of mental events that could, all things being equal, have had me going around the house with a hammer knocking holes in the drywall instead of typing on my MacBook Pro.
We all probably have a particular conspiracy theory we hate more than others, the one that makes us roll our eyes like Anderson Cooper, impatient and scornful. My own least favorite is perhaps a touch niche-y, far less destructive on the face of it than some, but even so it makes me say bad things and curse people I don’t know. That’s the idea that William Shakespeare did not in fact write the plays and poems that bear his name but instead his huge body of work, that foundation of prosody and dramaturgy in English, was written by some feckless aristo. Or Francis Bacon. I don’t know why anyone should want to believe what is so clearly impossible but they do, including some quite distinguished actors who not only should, but do know better. But we’re just asking questions, they inevitably cry. Can’t we ask questions? Why do you hate free speech? And so now we have the Authorship Question, where no such question exists.
To point out that the ‘debate’ was popularized in the later 19th cent by an American teacher and intrepid seeker of Truth, Delia Bacon, advocate of the ‘group authorship’ theory which proposes that a bunch of ‘dissatisfied politicians’, as wikipedia puts it, got together to secretly write the plays in order to promote the ideas of Francis Bacon. To point out that such a theory depends on snobbery and a complete ignorance of how plays get done, how stuff gets written, what politicians are, and how human beings behave, gets you nowhere—because where’s the fun in that? Because a lot of the attraction of these beliefs has to do with boredom and fun, and the need to believe in something greater than ourselves: like chemtrails.
To put this in perspective, we all believe all kinds of nonsense about all kinds of things all the time. A necessary part of living in the world is the ability to believe nonsense: that ‘cats love you, or God is kind’, as Kemp puts it in Nine Day Wonder. Fortunately, our brains seem to be particularly well adapted for this by millions of years of evolution… and so on, we don’t need to go there. Let’s just say we’re good at it. Art can’t exist without this ability. Neither can commercials or religion.
What is my new theory, or theory in the making, my proto-theory? I’ll do a dry pass first, no comments from me, though feel free to roll your eyes at any time.
Right. So. The snake.
Last week I’d been working one evening, what I don’t normally do, preferring to work in the morning, but I’m approaching the end of a project I’ll start posting here soon—a re-imagining, a re-telling of three of Conrad’s better-known stories—that I’ve found to be engrossing. So anyhow, I was working in the evening. I stopped around 9:30, left my study, and while on my way to start getting ready for bed (see above re working early), at the top of the stairs, half-on/half-off a small rug was a snake. It was right there. I couldn’t tell what kind. It didn’t look like anything I’d seen in the garden. Including that large black one that jumped up in the air—no, seriously. About a foot and a half long. A copperhead? Strangely mottled, a chunky color that wasn’t so far from the rug. Was that why it was lying where it was? It felt at home? How did it get there? All good questions. Remembering other animals in the house I’d helped exit—bats, birds, and one raccoon in the temporarily flooded cellar crying out for help—I figured the best thing to do was check google. Actually I now use Duck Duck Go which, in my innocence, I think of as being less satanic than what google has become.
Anyhow, I found lots of pages with info on how to remove snakes that didn’t involve either shovels or shotguns. One site, I noticed while scrolling, pointed out that it was very unusual to see a snake indoors above the ground floor. Well okay: good to know. I went downstairs to the kitchen for rubber gloves, a broom handle, a cardboard box, and a towel (for smothering?). Properly equipped, trying not to think of the time I unsuccessfully tried to catch a small bird in the guest bedroom with bubble-wrap, I went back upstairs. There was no snake. Gone. Vanished. Where? I looked around under furniture for a time. In a closet or two. The attic? The walls? Had it been out there lying on the rug before and it was only this time I’d happened to see it? Were there more? Was there a nest? Was I going to have to start bashing holes in the drywall?
I left my equipment handy and got myself to bed, making sure the night-lights were working. If I got up in the night would it be lying in wait? Was I afraid of snakes? Well, not really. Not like a friend who won’t even say the word. Half awake, I began to idly speculate on the reality of the snake, on its oddness, on why it should be at the top of the stairs. I don’t remember the exact link, but I do remember considering hallucinations and Lewey bodies dementia. Did I have Lewey bodies dementia? It often manifests itself in hallucinations. How long did I have to live? What did my future hold? How do you get those pills from Mexico I’d read about a few years back. Should I throw a farewell party or just go up in the woods? And so on.
Next morning, once I was properly awake I reconsidered the snake, looking back over the aspects of its appearance I’d thought strange. Which made me think of the incident with the stool, the old stool that lives at the other end of the house that showed up one evening in the kitchen for no reason. I had no memory of putting it there, could think of no reason why I’d have put it there, making me wonder for about a half hour if the house was haunted. Similarly, if the house wasn’t haunted (Are you sure? friends like to ask.), then perhaps… perhaps the snake wasn’t really real. Next morning I was fairly sure it wasn’t dementia, Lewey bodies or other, so what else might the very solid if odd-looking snake be… a waking dream?
Back to not-google and pages on hypnogogic hallucinations, aka waking dreams, which are basically harmless and much more common than one might think. I reminded myself that I really am overtired, a good thing would be to stop everything and maybe go someplace for a while (that’s not going to happen right now because wherever I go I’ll be there waiting). Also, I’ve recently begun volunteering for hospice, and my most recent patient does in fact have Lewey bodies dementia—a condition that was new to me—that does in fact cause him to have hallucinations. I’d been visiting that morning when his wife, pointing to a stick, said, ‘He could look at that and see a snake’. I’d been impressed. There’s the link. So. No snake. Hallucination. End of story.
Where does the conspiracy come in? Living through this, at every point, at every turn, I’d been open to going off the deep end. Let’s take a look, I think it’s interesting and was intrigued to catch myself teetering for a moment on the brink of one of those rabbit-holes we hear about without falling into it.
My state: as mentioned, overtired, plus I’d been working and was still half in the half-trance state that happens when your imagination and concentration are engaged. Doing something so routine as packing up for the night, actions done without thought, I saw something unexpected. I didn’t think I saw it, I did see it. It was right over there. And here’s the first active inflection point: how to react.
1: shriek and run away; emotions engaged, an investment made.
2: take a closer look and check google, emotions not engaged.
If emotions had been engaged I’d be more inclined to look on the snake as real, as a threat, otherwise why would my emotions be engaged? I’m not the sort of person who sees things, I would be telling myself. Because we all like to think we’re more realistic than we are, more level-headed, that we tend not to react emotionally. So why would someone like me who is not easily fooled react emotionally to something that isn’t there? It had to be there! My reaction proves it. The snake is real.
On the other hand, going with option 2, If the snake is real why haven’t I seen it before? Where does it live and are there more? How did it get there? Is this why I haven’t been getting mice in the house (not that I’m complaining)? If the snake is real what do I do? It’s too late to call an exterminator. Check google. Get info from google about what I need to trap the snake so I can get it out of the house. Prepare the kitchen for an easy exit for when I come through with the snake. Go back up to trap the snake using my google smarts. Questions and actions talk me down. There is no snake.
Again there are two options: one, there never was a snake. In which case… well in which case what?
Or, there is a snake but I don’t see it because the snake is hiding.
But where? Could it have gone back where it came from? Where is that? I remember that it’s very unusual to see them above the ground floor, so why would it be in the attic? If I’m emotionally invested, part of my self-credibility—that part we use to define ourselves to ourself—depends on the reality of the snake; because either I have to revise my original certainty to admit doubt, a state of not knowing that can be uncomfortable, or I can retain my certainty, insist it’s real and that it’s out there lurking. Should I now talk to someone who doesn’t roll their eyes but is inclined to believe me, I’m going to become further invested, more than ever convinced that I’m right. Should an exterminator come and tell me there’s no snake then what do I believe? That for some reason the expert(s) is(are) deliberately misinforming me? Have I stumbled on a plot?
If this is my reaction, I’m already half way to believing in snake conspiracies, Snakes Getting Into Homes!, and cover-ups, Why Is No One Reporting Snakes Getting Into Homes???, and the obvious dangers, Snakes Getting Into Homes and Attacking Babies! By this point we’re off to the races, Fox News, Newsmax, and Twitter. Every time I have to defend my initial reaction my emotions become more engaged, bolstered by YouTube videos and the Snakes In Homes communities I’d be bound to discover as I do my own research. Are Snakes In Homes Actual Democrat G5 Replicants Sent by Hilary to Spy On You?? might be the RFK/Musk contribution. Are Snakes in Homes a Sign of the End Times? might be another way to go.
At each stage there are options: to believe or not, to trust or not, to do your own research or not. Every time I’m forced to choose I must use more energy to continue believing. The stronger the evidence grows that I’m mistaken, the stronger I must assert my own expanding reality. Because I know what I saw with my own eyes. But what if I didn’t see it? What if I accept that the snake wasn’t there and that perhaps what happened was that I had a waking dream? Again there’s a choice. From my own experience I’m familiar with what I think of as ‘guided dreams’: when I’m working and reach a certain point when I dream about what I’m what I’m working on, step into my dream and shape it. Or dream that I shape it. Either way works for me.
The difference between believing or not in my snake and, say, believing the earth is flat after having flown to Disneyworld with the kids, or that the Earl of Essex wrote The Tempest after he was dead, is perhaps only one of degree, not necessarily one of kind. It seems to me that the same basic mechanisms underlie them all. With me it was that first investment in the reality or not of the snake. While I tended to believe it was there—I saw it, after all—I also noted an oddnesses about it, and if I was prepared to scoop it into a box and put it outside in the garden, I retained a certain distance that next morning let in daylight. Much depends on that initial exposure: going from wondering why are there white trails behind that plane flying over, to believing that the government is culling the population isn’t perhaps a very large distance. Though it might seem to be a leap of faith that vaccines will kill you, once you invest in that first slippage into belief, into dreams, you must keep upping the ante or rethink your idea of yourself.
If, as Anil Seth writes in Being You, we live in a controlled hallucination created millisecond by millisecond by our brain as it predicts our three-dimensional, sensory world from pretty scant information, it should come as no surprise that when I’m tired that hallucination might unravel just a little.
Of course, I’m going on a pretty small event. Snakes don’t take up much room. At least, my snake didn’t. I don’t know how I’d be feeling had it been, say, horses; or a gang of people with pitchforks outside the house. And of course, when hallucinations jump the fence and start to spread, each convert adding to and expanding on the original snake, we can end up with the periodic infestations of flying snakes with feathers that crop up in Herodotus. Or in the accusations and trials for witchcraft of the 17th century that gave rise to works like the Malleus Maleficarum; The Hammer of Witches, first published in the late 15th century, that had a long and disturbing pedigree before it became a staple of the New England witch mania. Or, more recently, the Satanic panic that spread in the ‘80s, causing day care providers to be arrested, and for some to be sent to prison for lengthy sentences, on evidence that wasn’t so much cooked up—though it was—as obvious fantasy. Like the recent Pizzagate, or the Democrat Drinking the Blood of Babies malarky. The more ludicrous such accusations become, the more entrenched believers must become in their belief. Because the opposite would mean that they have to revise that initial moment of certainty, and instead not only question whether or not they saw the snake, but whether or not the snake was there at all. And what fun is that?
No matter how much Fox and Newsmax might pump them up, such beliefs have a natural life-cycle. People get bored and look for novelty. In the 14th century, there was a mania for dancing that spread from Germany across Europe. For no discernible reason—being inveterate killjoys historians today are skeptical about the ‘spontaneous, no reason’ aspect of these manias—people would dance till they dropped, going from village to town to city. It continued for long enough to become a crisis in the church and then it stopped. Not because it was stamped out—there have been several revivals since, along with laughing contagions, or unstoppable attacks of hiccups that infect schools and whole towns—but because people lost interest. It became ‘that old thing we used to do’, like hula-hoops or ouija boards.
So, no snakes, no Edward de Vere, no Nazis on the moon, no vitamin C… hold on, wait a minute, we all know, I mean it’s a fact, a proven fact, that if you take vitamin C in sufficient quantities you won’t get flu, or if you do you’ll recover faster… well, no it isn’t. Neither are the benefits of that green muck we all drink. Or brain boosters. Or yoghurt (I now make my own. It has magical properties).
Like I said, we have to believe a lot of stuff that isn’t necessarily real just to exist in the world. I’d also like to say that we only get in trouble when we try to make other people believe our fantasies are real. But what do I know?