An Apology for My Superstitions
WAYNE GLAUSSER
The subject is something Montaigne would have liked. He might have titled his essay, “That Superstition Yet Takes Hold of a Rational Mind.” I use “apology” in my own title to embrace the contrary meanings of regret and defense, which mingle confusingly in my mind even as I begin to write.
On Thursday, October 1, 1959, about a year after my first Confession, I finally committed a sin worth confessing. The boilerplate kid-sins I rattled off for my monthly visit to the box came from a catechism list—things that counted, technically, but didn’t make me feel the least bit guilty: “. . . and I was late for Mass three times, Father. I am sorry for these sins and the sins of my whole life.”
But this time I really had one for St. Peter’s books. I told a shameful, calculated lie to my mother so that I could stay home from school and watch the first game of the World Series.
I felt perfectly fine—not even a hint of a symptom to work with. My mother was supervising our disjointed breakfast routines. Midway through a bowl of Trix, I short-circuited my examination of conscience. “My throat hurts,” I told her. “And my head feels sort of funny.” I somehow talked myself out of a doctor visit—luckily, I hadn’t gone overboard on the symptoms—and ended up on our couch at 11:00 in front of the television.
Soon, the Dodger team I loved started to play with disastrous incompetence. In the third inning alone, they gave up seven runs, helping the White Sox along with three errors. The Dodgers were known for excellent fielding: they didn’t commit three errors in a week! I looked at the lunch my mother brought in and had no appetite for it. A few minutes later, when a muscly first baseman homered to make it 11-0, I turned off the television. Now I really didn’t feel well. Paradoxically, I told my mother that I was feeling better: maybe I should go back to school for the last couple of hours. She was glad to hear it, but said, “Let’s wait for tomorrow.”
The nuns had trained me to watch for messages from the Holy Spirit, and here was a message as obvious as Constantine’s cross: it was my fault that the Dodgers had lost this game—and lost in such a humiliating way. There was no other way to explain it. This was not the real, natural Dodgers out there in Comiskey Park; it was some spectral substitute, a zombie crew breathed into being as punishment for a lying little boy in Arcadia, California.
With the little boy back at his desk in third grade the next day, the Dodgers played a neat, typical game to win 3-1. I remember feeling giddy with the news and, at the same time, absolutely convinced that my good behavior had caused the win, just as my sin had caused the loss. The rest of the series only served to confirm my irrational belief in personal agency. The Dodgers took three of the next four games to win the championship. After that ghastly three-error inning I had conjured up, they committed just one inconsequential error the next day, and then not a single error over the last four games.
The second time I lied to my mother—and really, there were only these two important occasions, I didn’t make a habit of it—I was almost a teenager and had felt the first stirrings of the secular ideas that would soon lead me to abandon religion. We had moved to a new house the summer before I started seventh grade. Seventh-grade social arrangements can be tricky to navigate even under the best of circumstances. As I made my way through the unfamiliar friendscape, I agreed to visit an unpopular boy, despite his quirky unpleasantness. The experience was a miserable one, almost frightening; to this day, I’m not sure whether his parents were part of some weird cult or just fundamentally peculiar people.
A few weeks later, this boy sent me an invitation to his birthday party. My mother called to accept before she even told me about it. I tried as hard as I could to persuade her to decline, but she insisted that I go. I needed an escape plan. This time I faked an injury. As was the case years earlier when I faked illness, I felt perfectly fine. But I started limping the day before the party. My left ankle, I explained, was very painful; I must have hurt it when I was hiking up in the mountains yesterday. I carried out the performance successfully enough that I was allowed to limp to the front door of the party house with a present and offer my regrets.
I figured to stick with the limp the rest of the day, for credibility, but early that evening my mother did something unusually assertive. She gathered my father to take me to the emergency room at the local hospital. I thought, shit, she’s calling my bluff. At the hospital, I repeated my weak story about hiking, pointed to where it “hurt,” and tried to hold my poker face while they wheeled me in for X-rays. After thirty minutes or so, a doctor came in with the results. “The ankle looks okay,” he said. “But two of your toes are pretty badly broken. I want to stabilize them and get you on crutches for the next few days.”
My mother hugged me, I’ll bet there was some degree of remorse and surprise. But she couldn’t have been nearly as surprised as I was. She only suspected I was faking; I knew I was faking. My foot still felt perfectly fine—and stayed fine through those days on crutches. As with the lie that led to a World Series loss, I had the strange feeling that my transgressive act had disrupted natural causation. My pretending to have an injury somehow called an injury into being.
This second event more or less reversed the consequences of the first, thereby subverting the principles of morality and piety I took from my lie in third grade. Thoughts of atheistic secularity were still too inchoate to effect any real change, but glimmers of impiety entered my mind. Not only had my sin gone unpunished, it produced a clear reward in what seemed miraculous form.
At the time, I had no vocabulary for talking about such a power in the absence of religious context. That changed as I studied philosophy and Romantic poetry. Recent evolution-based philosophy has a good explanation for the kind of cognitive phenomenon I had experienced, an irrational belief in agency that has no connection with real causation: Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD). Evolution has wired us to over-detect agency, because the reward for being right is so great, while the penalty for being wrong is trivial. If an early human hears a stirring in the leaves, for example, it could well be just the wind, but it might be a stalking predator; according to evolutionary economics, it’s better to assume predator and act accordingly. Philosophers use HADD to explain superstitious and religious thinking, not to condone it. I had to look elsewhere for an academic perspective that wasn’t simply dismissive of my lingering attachment to superstition.
I found it in Wordsworth’s poetry. Wordsworth wrote about moments from his boyhood when, having done something unethical, he feels that his actions have called up a mysterious punishment. Among several such examples in The Prelude, the most compelling for me is one connected with the death of his father. Wordsworth at age 13 grew fretful as he waited for his father’s carriage to retrieve him from school for the Christmas holidays. When his father died shortly afterwards, Wordsworth thought that the event “appeared/ A chastisement,” as if the boy’s impatience had actually caused his father’s death. The connection is entirely irrational, but young Wordsworth felt sure that his wayward insubordination had led to this tragedy:
With trite reflections of morality,
Yet in the deepest passion, I bowed low
To God, Who thus corrected my desires.
Like my World Series story, Wordsworth’s features sin, a strong superstitious belief in punishment, then repentance. But the most interesting part of this passage comes with Wordsworth’s mature reflections on the memory he just narrated. He tells us that he looks back on those moments of anxious guilt as a source of inspiration. The sense of having caused his father’s death aligns with the power he calls “imagination,” the faculty that gives us intimations of immortality and a kind of leverage against the disappointments of realism. Instead of looking back on that time with chagrin, he returns to it as a means of revitalizing his spirits when he feels depressed and discouraged. For Wordsworth, then, what began as superstition took on religious coloring, then metamorphosed into imagination. Underlying all three phases was a sense of personal agency that transcended the dictates of reason. From another perspective, of course, underlying all three is reliance on a primitive cognitive reflex that humanity should have outgrown by now.
The last time I taught the Wordsworth passage about the death of his father, the class was having a little trouble understanding the boy’s guilt. I thought about using my World Series story to illustrate his irrational sense of personal agency; but I shifted instead to a more recent, and secularized, manifestation of the same phenomenon. This was also a story about a sports event, one that mattered to me more than was seemly for a middle-aged English professor.
It was an AFC championship game between the Colts and Patriots. I was in Las Vegas for the weekend, staying at Bellagio. For the game, I took pains—in Vegas, this always means money—to arrange an excellent seat in the Bellagio sports book. The game began dreadfully for the Colts. At 3-21, I had an overwhelming intuition that I was causing their terrible play. My presence in that plush setting amounted to some sort of sin that was being punished by the secular powers-that-be just as God had punished my truancy long ago. So I bolted from Bellagio. My vague plan: to seek absolution by exiling myself to the cheap Eastside Strip properties.
And minute by minute, from one crummy casino to the next, I saw my efforts rewarded. At a sad old bar in Flamingo that smelled like Febreze, I peeked to discover that the Colts had closed to 13-21. It was at this moment that I let myself fully embrace the superstitious belief in my personal agency that I knew to be utterly irrational. As I edged my way back toward Vegas respectability—Bally’s, then Paris—the Colts finished off the Patriots with a touchdown and the near-miracle of a Tom Brady interception. In framing that story for my students, I kept the tone light. I am indeed superstitious, I told them, but only recreationally superstitious. Otherwise it would be just too embarrassing.
I hope to fend off embarrassment long enough to attempt a partial defense of my superstition, on two fronts. The first has to do with etymology. The word comes from Latin super, which means “above” or “beyond” at its simplest. As such, it lends itself both to pejorative and laudatory uses. The OED cites a “view held in late antiquity” that the word “superstition” in a religious context “derives from the idea that such practices were superfluous or redundant.” In this sense, the super in superstition means something like excessive. Advocates of reasonable religion or unreligious secularity will wield the term as an insult.
Super works just as well, however, as a tool for expressing admiration. It certainly carries that sense in its widespread colloquial deployment as an adjective. When super does not slant toward excess and therefore defect, it can indicate appreciation for something above normal expectations, like Superman’s powers or, more prosaically, the football game even higher than the AFC championship. We are not accustomed to thinking of “superstition” with this sort of favorable inflection, but is it completely out of the question? Wordsworth did not literally use super as he articulated what he meant by “imagination,” but he did define imagination as something above natural perception: “High instincts before which our mortal nature/ Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.” Perhaps superstition deserves to flirt for a moment with the praise encoded by its prefix?
I understand that this is a hard sell; and after all this work, I have not vanquished the embarrassment I feel about my lingering superstitions. I know that superstitious thinking is irrational and, given the wrong circumstances and contexts, potentially very dangerous for humanity. I would never have tried to make the case to my pragmatic, scientific father. In the process of writing this essay, however, I have come to realize something: without exactly meaning to, I have been writing with my mother as a secret muse. She’s the last defense I will offer for superstition.
My mother has figured directly in the narrative so far only as the recipient of my boyhood lies and the structural obstacle to their success. Yet it was her own affinity for the supernatural that inspired my dalliance with superstition. She was a faithful Catholic, believing in all the standard miracles, but there was more to her supernatural profile than mere doctrinal dictate. She especially liked stories of semi-secularized miracles that came from outside the catechism, like Miracle on 34th Street and the song “Scarlet Ribbons,” which she sang to me many times.
The only story that I remember vividly about her past involved a ghost. She had been engaged to a fighter pilot who died on a mission early in World War II. At his funeral, my mother lingered in the vestibule before entering the church, because she was crying. Suddenly, she heard a voice, the dead pilot’s voice, from just a few feet away: “Audrey, stop crying, you’re embarrassing me.” I would protest: didn’t you just imagine it? “No,” she told me. He was there. Really. I knew well enough not to argue the point, and I guess I liked the idea of a real ghost witnessed by my smart, sane mother. Even if I knew my father could never believe such a thing.
I don’t believe it, either. I don’t believe in her ghost any more than her Catholic myths I shed so many years ago. And I don’t feel any nostalgia or residual fondness for those myths, even when I visit the old churches. (Indeed, the last time I was in a Catholic church for real business—my mother’s funeral—the priest made me so angry with his refusal to allow our handpicked Biblical readings that I wanted to tear the place down, Samson-style.) But as I evaluate my attachment to superstition, I realize that it is my mother’s influence, more profoundly than Wordsworth’s, that keeps me attracted to something so embarrassing. I know that my superstitious practices do not connect with any real causation; but I enjoy them and draw comfort from them, almost as if I believed they did. I never actually believed in the “miracle” that happens in the song “Scarlet Ribbons”—a little girl wakes up with the ribbons she prayed for, even though her father couldn’t find any to purchase that night—but having my soulful mother sing me the song created a lulling simulation of belief.
I suppose it would be helpful to end with one more example, something more recent. I have to summon considerable willpower to quell my embarrassment over this one. Several years ago, my younger daughter gave me a stuffed animal for my birthday, a crow about six inches high. This crow when squeezed produced two sets of caws, three caws to a set. My daughter named him “Squawker” and I stuck with that. I put him on top of the dresser in my bedroom. Every so often I would squeeze Squawker for the pleasure of his cawing.
My relationship with Squawker changed after I received a terminal cancer diagnosis four years ago. My cancer is incurable, but doctors told me immunotherapy might fight it off for a while and give me more time. I have to go in every three months for a long day of scans and other tests to find out if my altered immune system continues to hold its own against the cancer.
Just before I leave for the hospital on those mornings, I carry out a brief ritual with my crow. First, I silently express my appreciation for the chi-like properties that I imagine for him—recreationally, let’s not forget! And then I risk a squeeze. Six neat squawks sends me off with my head up.
In the other three stories, my superstitions were activated by a sense that I had committed misdeeds. Here I did nothing wrong. But in contemporary American culture, where good health is often linked with virtuous behavior, a cancer diagnosis can feel just dimly, subliminally, like a failing. At least within my private imaginative world, superstitions of any consequence always come after a fall.
Squawker and I continue our work. I have outlived my expiration date long enough to see my first baby grandkids. It’s medical science and technology doing the work, obviously, but I will persist in my superstition right up to the end. If nothing else, it keeps me from fretting pointlessly about all those molecules and cells I cannot control, and lets me focus on the people I love, for every day that remains of my lucky life.
