Before we start this review, a personal anecdote…
Some years ago my two nephews, Mauricio and Adolfo, finally managed to convince me to play Dungeons & Dragons with them—what can I say, when it comes to games I’m something of a ‘lone-wolf’ geek—and after taking some time to explain me the basics of the mechanics and prepare our characters’ charts (I chose a Tiefling, in case you were wondering) we started the campaign and set out on our make-believe quest.
Mauricio, who was acting as the Dungeon Master, had carefully crafted the adventure for our two-person party. In it, we faced an evil crone who lived in a swamp, and although we actually managed to defeat her in the end, after several hours of dice-throwing and initiative-rolling, the victory took a heavy toll on both our characters; for the witch had used her dark craft to poison us almost to the brink of death.
Hours after the campaign had ended, though, all three of us found ourselves puking our guts out on our respective homes. Turns out the delicious seafood my parents had prepared for us beforehand as a special treat for our game evening was contaminated; in other words, the D&D poison attack our fictional characters had suffered in a game, was mimicked in real life with actual food poisoning.
That was the first and LAST time I dared to play D&D. “You need to dial it down a notch on the realism, Bro!” I (not so) jokingly chastised Mauricio the next day…
Skeptics would judge my anecdote as a coincidence and nothing more. Paranormal enthusiasts, who know a thing or two about Jungian psychology, would call it a synchronicity. But to my friend Joshua Cutchin, there’s another way to interpret our gastric grimness: Metalepsis, the narrative element employed by story-makers to ‘break the fourth wall’ between the story and the reader.
In his new book, Fourth Wall Phantoms, Josh takes this and other concepts taken from narrative analysis, traditional literary interpretation, and Jungian psychology, and applies them one step further into events that are said to have happened in real life, instead of just staying in the pages of a novel or in the celluloid of a motion film.
Josh doesn’t only explore so-called ‘fictional incursions’, when authors have allegedly interacted with their imagined characters (from suggesting appropriate dialog lines for them into the minds of their creator, to actually appearing before them as flesh-and-bone people out in the world). To Josh, pretty much everything could be interpreted as a fictional incursion: UFOs, ghosts, cryptids, what have you. Hell, even the whole freaking Universe popping out of the ‘Big Bang’ may be the ultimate metaleptic event of them all! (“In the Beginning was the Word” is not that different from “Once Upon a Time,” right?).
They say that to a man with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. Josh is a writer and a musician, so it may not come as a surprise that he chooses to weave his Unified Theory of the Paranormal from an artistic/literary perspective, rather than mathematical equations and advanced physics; Schrödinger’s cat meows occasionally in the book, but only to remind us nobody really knows how to take quantum mechanics’ implications to its ultimate conclusion—and because there’s no food inside the damn box.
But the academic meticulousness with which he builds his arguments (once again this is a door-stopper you wouldn’t pack for your summer holidays, y’all) and the elegance by which he raises his Southern middle fingers to the materialist debunkers, the FOIA nuts-and-bolters and the scat-collecting Squatchers, will make you realize once you finish FWP that the hammer Josh is wielding is mother-fucking Mjolnir.
What Josh (whose ‘voice’ appears appropriately enough in the first person throughout the book) proposes to his readers is to dare to perceive the whole world as a living text, and that everything—EVERYTHING—on this green good Earth and beyond are nothing but ideas made manifest—some with more convincing plots than others (hard not to be dissuaded by gravity, is it?).
FWP owes a great debt to the work of great thinkers like Charles Fort, Bertrand Méheust and Jeffrey Kripal, who previously acknowledged the connections between the paranormal and fiction. Decades ago, Jacques Vallée urged Ufologists to stop wasting all their energy trying to prove UFOs came from outer space, and to focus instead on what UFOs were doing in our world in the first place. Josh answers Vallée’s question thusly: UFOs (and all the things that go bump in the night) are here to help us tell new stories.
It is in our yearning for meaning that the power of story-telling lies. 4WP reinstates the sacredness of imagination as the conduit we have to perceive and communicate with higher levels of existence, where other forms of intelligence may dwell. If this sounds neo-platonic to you, philosopher nerds, is because it is; unashamedly so. Others might just give it a cooler name—Magic.
On a personal note, 4WP helped me realize why I find the prospect of ‘content’ created through artificial intelligence so abhorrent: because to debase the most sacred thing our species possess in the service of soulless regurgitation is not only illegal, ecologically inviable and unethical—it is a capital sin.
As usual with Josh, a heretic among heretics, 4WP will not be everyone’s cup of tea. To those with fossilized beliefs about these topics, whether on the ‘skeptic’ or ‘believer’ side of the fence, Josh’s speculation will sound like utter gobbledygook. Even for more open-minded people, following Josh’s advice to regard these phenomena in a perennial state of ‘Fortean indeterminacy’ may be nigh impossible. Was the Sandown Clown an alien, a ghost, a broken super-toy from an alternative future? “Who cares!” says Josh. The important thing is that it was an experience.
Indeterminacy is downright paradoxical, if you think about it, since part of the search for meaning is our penchant to catalog things in little conceptual boxes; but when you force the square Sandown peg to fit in your mental round hole, not only do you deprive him of potentiality to be whatever it wants to be, you’re also limiting yourself.
Josh’s ideas that the distinction between Reality and Fiction are more permeable than we were taught, by our parents and other authority figures in our lives, are not easy to unlearn; but neither it is to assimilate quantum entanglement, or many of the mind-scrambling notions in modern science that keep pointing to a vast substrata of potential energy that remains underneath everything we perceive with our senses. Josh is simply squaring the circle of the modern Western ontological problem we currently are immersed in, by monistically linking that ‘quantum foam’ with the Imaginal—or Fairyland, Neverland, Ideaspace, The Matrix, whatever name floats your boat; it’s the possibilities that matter, not the terminology.
I don’t know if Josh managed to find the exact source of paranormal activity on our planet. As parsimonious as his theory sounds to me, and how gracefully it deals with age-old issues around hoaxes and the ambiguity of the evidence gathered by researchers —hoaxes do play a key role in the paranormal no matter how much you hate them, the way Gollum plays a crucial role in the third act of Lord of the Rings— I can still detect a few holes here and there. Take ‘window areas’ for example: what makes a certain mythology take root (temporarily or more permanently) in specific geographic locations instead of others that are seemingly the same? I don’t think we’ll find the answers to that within Metalepsis alone.
Josh may not have found the root of the Fortean Nile, as it were, but damned if he’s not charting the right tributaries.
…And yet, he is the first to acknowledge these ideas are not easy—in fact there might be downright dangerous; like risking having your psychic foundation crumble by taking a heroic dose of psychedelics. There’s a good reason many great artists fell into madness, for hunting the pearls of wisdom from the wild depths where Jungian leviathans dwell is not for the faint of heart.
But the reward for recognizing yourself as the protagonist of your own story, and the sacred power of your own imagination—”All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells are within you,” wrote Joseph Campbell— is that not only do you ‘level up’ as a character, but your whole world transforms into a place much more interesting to live in; a place where anything might be possible.
Sure, the bad octopus we ate during that D&D campaign my nephews and I, probably didn’t have anything to do with the poison spell an imaginary witch cast against our imaginary avatars, during a fantasy battle that took place only in our minds. But acknowledging the power of the coincidence, how meaningful it is to me, makes for a much better story to tell. And meaningful stories is part of what makes life worth living, because we’re all seeking for our “happily ever after” ending, whether we like to admit it or not.
Reenchanting your life might be the best way to save it. Just ask Josh…
Fourth Wall Phantoms is available through Amazon. You can also visit Joshua’s personal page to enquire about signed copies.
[All illustrative images created by Miguel Romero, with quotes extracted from the book]
