To the ones . . .

M. C. Escher, Hand with Reflecting Sphere

Communion is subtitled A True Story, and almost the first words out of the author's mouth are "It is a true story, as true as I know how to describe it." Elsewhere in the book, he states flatly, "I don't lie." (Note: This statement may not be strictly true!) But the book begins with a curious dedication in verse, culminating in a dedication to "the ones who must lie."

To the ones who have slipped into the mirror,

And the ones who reflect it in their eyes.

To the ones who must hide everything,

And the ones who lose what they hide.

To the ones who cannot be silent,

And the ones who must lie.

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Let's go through this line by line.

To the ones who have slipped into the mirror,

Slipping into the mirror recalls Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-glass, in which this is Alice's way of entering a sort of dream-world.

"Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through --" She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.

In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room.

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she enters the magical world by falling down a rabbit-hole. Here, while talking to her cat, she begins pretending or imagining, and then somewhere along the line what was pretend becomes real, and she is in a mist, and suddenly -- she hardly knew how she had got there -- she is in another world. The parallel to Strieber's own story is obvious, and at one point he directly suggests that his visitors have something of Looking-glass Land about them.

A visitor once said to an abductee, "On is off and off is on. We confuse the language." There is something of the mirror image in all this . . .

When Strieber reports his hypnosis sessions with Dr. Donald Klein, he titles that section of the book "Hypnosis: The Uncertain Mirror" -- presumably because hypnosis is an unreliable way of looking into one's own mind, and the risk of "slipping into the mirror" of delusion is non-negligible.

"What had my life really been," Strieber asks, upon discovering that he had long been living a secret life with the visitors, "and how many other lives have been lived like mine, skidding the surface of this dark mirror?" The dark mirror suggests St. Paul's famous lines: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Cor. 13:12). Given Strieber's evident interest in and knowledge of Aztec mythology (extensively referenced in Communion), perhaps there is also a hint of Tezcatlipoca, "Smoking Mirror," and the obsidian mirrors used by Aztec shamans to gaze into other worlds.

Why does the human mind wink back from the dark? Because there is something truly human about it, or because we are being fooled by our own reflection? When you look through a window, you see what is outside -- but when it is dark outside, the window becomes a mirror, and you see only yourself. Actually your reflection is there on the glass all the time but is drowned out by the much brighter stimuli coming in from outside, just as the stars shine all day but are visible only when the Sun has withdrawn.

When you study most things, you learn about the object of your study. But when you study a true unknown -- like the visitors, or God -- so little unambiguous information is coming in from "outside" that the bulk of what you learn is about yourself.

And let's not forget Anne Strieber' assessment of the visitor experience -- "this has something to do with the dead" -- and how that ties in with the window/mirror imagery with which Nabokov opens Pale Fire. (I'm sure Strieber is exactly the sort of guy who read Pale Fire at the age of 17, when it first came out.)

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate

Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:

Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass

Hang all the furniture above the grass,

And how delightful when a fall of snow

Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so

As to make chair and bed exactly stand

Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

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And the ones who reflect it in their eyes.

Very clever double meaning here. One reading is "the ones who reflect in their eyes the fact that they have slipped through the mirror." When Dante walked the streets, passersby in their naïveté used to whisper to one another -- not, "There's the man who wrote the Comedy!" but, "Look, there's the man who's been to Hell!" People swore they could see it in his eyes. Some even said his hair had been preceptibly (and apparently permanently!) singed and curled by the heat. When someone has spent time in other worlds, it shows.

Look, there's the man who's been . . .
uh, someplace really strange.

The other possible reading is "the ones who reflect the mirror in their eyes." Imagine putting on a pair of mirror shades and looking into your bathroom mirror. You'd see your reflection in the mirror, and in the reflection's shades a reflection of your reflection, and in that reflection's shades . . . well, you'd have an infinite series of reflections, like one of those Yaoi Kusama "infinity room" installations. (Strieber is exactly the kind of guy who would have gone to see those when they first appeared, the same year as Pale Fire.)

Now take off the shades. You may not have all-natural mirror-shade eyes like a Gray, but your pupils are dark. They reflect. Look closely, can you see your face in there? Stare as hard as you can. You might want to get a little closer to the mirror -- closer -- careful now, don't slip!

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To the ones who must hide everything,

This is presumably referring to those of Strieber's fellow close-encounter witnesses (surely a large majority) who feel that they can never reveal their experiences ever, to anyone, for any reason. Thinking you've been abducted by aliens is a byword for kookiness. Reveal that particular fact about yourself, and you permanently brand yourself as a laughingstock, never again to be taken seriously by anyone who counts. You can see a ghost, you can have a near-death experience, you can experience astral projection, whatever, and still not take as severe a blow to your credibility as you would should you ever be so gauche as to be taken aboard a flying saucer. (If I were an abductee, I would deny it. And no, I'm not one.)

Another possibility is that this refers to the government and the military -- who, according to some popular theories, are being forced to cover everything up by what they view as credible threats from the visitors if they do not.

Or it could be the visitors themselves. They certainly do hide. Is that what they want to do, or do they accept it as an unfortunate necessity.

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And the ones who lose what they hide.

It's probably just a coincidence that I was reading a Whitley Strieber book -- his novel The Grays -- when my attention was drawn in a seemingly paranormal way (related in detail here) to this passage in Helaman 13 in the Book of Mormon:

O that we had remembered the Lord our God in the day that he gave us our riches, and then they would not have become slippery that we should lose them; for behold, our riches are gone from us. Behold, we lay a tool here and on the morrow it is gone; and behold, our swords are taken from us in the day we have sought them for battle. Yea, we have hid up our treasures and they have slipped away from us, because of the curse of the land. O that we had repented in the day that the word of the Lord came unto us; for behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them. Behold, we are surrounded by demons, yea, we are encircled about by the angels of him who hath sought to destroy our souls. Behold, our iniquities are great. O Lord, canst thou not turn away thine anger from us?

(Do people still say "probably just a coincidence" non-ironically?)

One also thinks of the parable of the talents in Matthew 25.

Then he which had received the one talent came and said, "Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed: And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine."

His lord answered and said unto him, "Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed: Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury. Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents."

Yet another scriptural resonance is with the candle under the bushel (Luke 5, Matt. 11). If you try to hide a candle's light by covering it up, the light will go out.

Why do people lose what they hide? Well, in the simplest analysis, to hide something is deliberately to make it hard to find, and that also makes it harder for you to find. You might lose they key, forget the password, lose track of where you buried it. In Helaman 13 and Matthew 25, what is hidden is not so much lost as taken, by the Lord, as a punishment.

What is lost by close-encounter witnesses who hide their experiences? Do the experiences cease to occur? Do they lose their memories of the experiences they have already had? Or do they simply lose the thread? By hiding something away, compartmentalizing it, refusing to connect it with anything else you know or have experienced, you make it impossible to understand. Even more impossible, I mean.

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To the ones who cannot be silent,

And the ones who must lie.

You just have to say something, but you can't tell the truth -- largely because you can't admit it, even to yourself. Strieber describes this in Communion. He wakes up with "a very improbable but intense memory" of having seen an owl at his window during the night -- a memory he doesn't really believe himself but feels a compulsion to share.

I remember how I felt . . . when I looked out onto the roof and saw that there were no owl tracks in the snow. I knew I had not seen an owl. I shuddered, suddenly cold, and drew back from the window, withdrawing from the night that was falling so swiftly in the woods beyond.

But I wanted desperately to believe in that owl. I told my wife about it. She was polite, but commented about the absence of tracks. I really very much wanted to convince her of it, though. Even more, I wanted to convince myself. So intent was I on this that I telephoned a friend in California for the specific, yet unlikely, purpose of telling her about the barn owl at the window.

I have had a somewhat similar experience myself, which even involved a confabulated bird of prey. When I was perhaps 12 or 13, I was walking to Hell Hollow (a park near our home), going down a country road that gets very little traffic, when a Cadillac pulled up beside me and rolled down its window. Inside, an old woman with sunglasses held up her hand and beckoned with one finger. She looked really extraordinarily old and thin, and her fingers seemed unnaturally long, like those of an aye-aye. I was absolutely terrified and sprinted all the way home without looking back, running as fast as I have ever run in my life. Later I told everyone that while I was walking to the park, I had seen a red-tailed hawk perched on a telephone pole, and that it had flown down and landed on my shoulder. No one, including me, believed the story.

Later Strieber relates some improbable anecdotes he used to tell about his travels through Europe in the late 1960s, anecdotes that he now believes were never true, but may have served to cover up something even more improbable.

But why do I need these absurd stories? They are not lies; when I tell them, I myself believe them. I don't lie. Perhaps I tell them to myself when I tell them to others, so that I can hide from myself whatever has made me a refugee in my own life.

The apparent psychological purpose of this confabulation is to replace something deeply confusing and therefore distressing with something that, however improbable it may be, is at least clearly defined. Even after the fact of a close encounter has been admitted, the temptation remains -- the temptation to force the infinite strangeness of it all into some comprehensible frame, such as that of teams of alien scientists flying around in spaceships conducting experiments, or representatives of a galactic federation come to save us from global warming.

Among witnesses, Strieber is notable for his determination to resist all such temptations and to let the unknown be the unknown.

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Note added: On March 21, three days after writing this post, in which I tell a tangentially relevant story about a Cadillac I saw about 30 years ago, I was in Taichung with my wife (who doesn’t read this blog and has never heard the story), and a very old Cadillac drove past us. She said, “Wow, a Cadillac! I think the last time I saw a Cadillac was 30 years ago. From the looks of it, that might even be the same one!”

Incidentally, I never consciously thought of the car in my own story as a Cadillac until I wrote this post. I’ve never had the slightest interest in motor vehicles (except tanks), and I’m quite sure my 12-year-old self couldn’t tell a Caddy from an Olds. My visual memory of the car is still clear enough, though, that I can now say with confidence that a Caddy is what it was.