You saw a face in the flint, didn’t you?
Two sockets of sorrow, a slit for a mouth —
you stared and called it ghost or god.
But it’s limestone, chipped by frostbite and time.
Still, you felt it staring back.
Don’t flinch. That wasn’t madness.
It was memory playing charades with chance.
There’s a name for this
ritual of conjuring meaning from the meaningless:
Pareidolia.
The old cerebral trickster,
born of evolution’s anxious clockwork,
trained to spot the tiger in the tall grass,
and now spotting saints in toast.
Yes, you, with your clever cortex —
you are no less a primitive animal
when you see your dead gran
in the outline of a tea stain.
There is no sanctity in the splotch.
Only your synapses desperate for certainty.
Look at the moon.
Not with romance — with rigour.
Those are impact craters, not ancient eyes.
Yet poets and fools alike have sworn
they saw an old man weeping there,
some reckoning in the rock.
But he’s not there. Never was.
We see what we want,
or worse, what we fear.
Jesus in the wood grain.
A demon in the damp patch on the wall.
Whispers in the static,
like broken radios speaking truths.
But the noise is just that — noise.
We add the voice.
It’s not divine revelation.
It’s just apophenia’s softer cousin,
whispering comfort from chaos.
Making patterns of peril palatable.
Because we are pattern-hungry beasts.
We darn meaning where there is only fray.
Turner knew this.
In his storms, those apocalyptic skies,
you can almost glimpse
a veiled skull,
a bear,
a smirk in the sea spray,
figures rising from vapour,
not painted, but invoked.
He never confirmed it —
he let your imagination do the haunting.
Gainsborough,
elegant conjurer of sylvan dreams,
was no stranger to subversion.
In one soft-rendered landscape,
he slipped in what the critics
would not name aloud —
a penis, carved in bramble and bark,
not as jest, but as whisper.
A cipher for the carnal,
veiled by pastoral serenity.
You wouldn’t see it — not at first.
But stare long enough,
let your gaze drift through
the dappled light and dusky trees,
and it emerges:
not vulgar,
but vital —
like nature speaking in riddles.
Was it defiance?
A quiet rebellion against the polite gaze?
Or a challenge —
what will you see,
when you dare to look without blinking?
Even the ancients weren’t spared.
The Greeks saw gods in constellations —
Orion, not a random splatter of stars,
but a hunter forever mid-stride.
They sewed stories into the dark
so the heavens wouldn’t feel so silent.
Say what you will —
but the artist knows.
The poet knows.
Even the child staring at ceiling tiles
knows how to survive by seeing
what isn’t there.
But is that folly?
Or the only thing that makes life bearable?
Because if there is no face in the fire,
no figure in the fog,
then all we are left with is hush,
and the world becomes too loud in its vanity.
Hear this:
There are songs in the wind, yes —
but only if your ears bring the notes.
The murmurs in the kettle’s boil,
the speech in the whirr of streetlamps —
they are your loneliness,
begging to be sung back to.
And perhaps that’s the rub —
it’s not about seeing truth,
but the truth of our need to see.
A mirror for the mind’s illusions.
A trick — but one that tells us
where the cracks in our soul lie.
So next time you see
a weeping angel in your coffee foam,
don’t worship it.
But don’t dismiss it either.
Instead, say this:
“I know you are not real.
But I see you,
because I am real.
And that is enough.”
And walk on,
eyes wide,
knowing the world
wears your thoughts like a mask,
and sometimes the mask
smiles back.
The painting is The Fighting Téméraire, 1839, by Joseph Mallord William Turner.