Art and the Precognitive Imagination
Do artworks that foretell the future provide a clue about the nature of creativity?
Victor Brauner was a Romanian painter in Paris during the heyday of Surrealism. Over the early and middle 1930s, he became obsessed with the theme of blinding, and painted several portraits where one eye was blinded or impaled, starting with a 1930 Self-portrait with Enucleated Eye. Eight years after he painted this ghostly and weird self-portrait, Brauner interceded to break up a fight between two fellow painters, Oscar Dominguez and Esteban Francés. Dominguez hurled a glass at Francés but missed, striking Brauner in the left eye instead, leaving him blind in that eye the rest of his life. Needless to say, it was a major, even catastrophic turning point in the life and career of this artist, “impossibly” foreshadowed in his work over the course of nearly a decade.
Something similar was true, even more tragically, of the Jamaican-American sculptor Michael Rolando Richards. In the years preceding the millennium, Richards created an impressive body of work using motifs of airplanes crashing and colliding and people falling from the sky. His works expressed frustrations he experienced as a struggling Black artist in a white-dominated New York art world. His most famous work is a 1999 sculptural self-portrait called Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian (below): His gold-bronze body, in the flight suit of a Tuskegee airman, stands erect and levitates off the ground, and his torso is impaled by numerous airplanes. It’s a striking sculpture even if you don’t know that the artist was killed in his studio on the 92nd floor of Tower One on 9/11 — literally martyred by planes, along with 2,800 other people beginning their workday in the World Trade Center.
Many fans of the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky are aware that his 1979 sci-fi masterpiece Stalker uncannily foreshadowed the Chernobyl disaster that evacuated the area around Pripyat, Soviet Ukraine 7 years later. The film is about a perilous journey into a devastated area created sometime in the past by an unspecified “breakdown in the fourth bunker.” The Chernobyl disaster began with a meltdown in the power plant’s reactor number four and produced an “exclusion zone” that came to look exactly like the ruined landscape in Estonia where Stalker was shot. Youth “stalkers,” modeled on the ranger in Tarkovsky’s film, now lead paying clients into the radioactive area around Pripyat for thrills.
What is less known is that filming Stalker’s exterior shots downstream from a chemical plant resulted in the early lung cancer death of Tarkovsky’s star actor Anatoly Solonitsyn in 1982 (he was just 47) and then, a couple years later, in the death of Tarkovsky himself from the same inexplicable lung cancer (he wasn’t a smoker). Stalker contains uncanny prophecies of this double tragedy, including a parable about a master-stalker named “Porcupine” who led his brother to his death in the Zone and then killed himself from guilt. Other of the mystical director’s films foreshadow the tragedy too. His final film, The Sacrifice, was originally conceived (long before Solonitsyn’s illness, let alone his own) as a story about an artist magically trying to save his own life after a terminal cancer diagnosis. (In the final version, Tarkovsky changed the existential threat to nuclear Armageddon.)
Most examples of this sort of thing come from writers, thanks to their tendency to leave a dense paper trail of their lives along with their works. Philip K. Dick wrote several stories and novels that anticipated near-future cultural memes, singular turning points in his own life, or just articles on esoteric topics he was soon to read in magazines. For instance, in 1962 he wrote a novel about engineer-entrepreneurs building a robot Abraham Lincoln; no publisher was interested, but two years later Disney unveiled, with much fanfare, their animatronic Abraham Lincoln. This kind of thing happened so often in Dick’s life that he came to believe he was a “precog” straight out of his early, classic story “The Minority Report,” about a controversial police unit that uses psychics to detect and prevent crimes before they occur.
The most well-known example of alleged literary prophecy is Morgan Robertson’s 1898 novel Futility, about the biggest ocean liner ever, the Titan, which collides with an iceberg on an April night in the north Atlantic, most passengers perishing because of too-few lifeboats. The nearly identical Titanic met a nearly identical fate on an April night 14 years later. But disaster premonitions in novels are famously common. If you are old enough, you might even remember the brief media flutter around Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, about an “airborne toxic event” that causes the evacuation of a college town. Just a month before its publication (although obviously, some months after the novel was penned), an accident at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India released a toxic cloud that killed 8,000 people — still the biggest industrial accident ever (bigger even than Chernobyl).
It is maybe easier to ignore or dismiss these kinds of seeming coincidences when they come from low-status sci-fi (Dick and Robertson) or even postmodern literary playfulness (DeLillo), but what about when it happens with canonical authors, “the greats”?
I don’t find very convincing the notion that Franz Kafka prophesied the eventual rise of totalitarianism and the holocaust in his novels like The Trial — I agree with most biographers in thinking he was really describing absurdities of the bureaucratic surveillance state he already lived in, the Habsburg Empire in its waning years. But the Prague writer did have a habit of writing his own future into his fiction. For instance, the climactic scene in his inspired breakthrough story “The Judgment” depicted with uncanny accuracy a real-life confrontation with his father several years later, after he too-quickly proposed to a lower-class Czech Jewish girl (Julie Wohryzek) his parents didn’t approve of.
Undoubtedly because of that abusive, narcissistic father, Kafka had an intense love-hate intellectual relationship with Freud’s then-popular ideas, and he also wrote stories that seemed to impossibly “plagiarize” the Viennese psychoanalyst’s not-yet-published writings. And in more than one of his stories — “The Metamorphosis” and “The Hunger Artist” — Kafka described protagonists dying of starvation, which is exactly how he himself eventually died in an Austrian sanatorium in 1924: The tuberculosis he was diagnosed with in 1917 usually affects mainly the lungs and leads to a relatively painless passing, but his infection unexpectedly spread to his throat in his final months. He was literally starving to death on the last day of his life, while correcting the proofs of “The Hunger Artist,” and was in tears from the impossible sad irony of the fact.
This kind of thing happened to Kafka’s English contemporary Virginia Woolf too. For instance, she spent the summer of 1922 writing and polishing a short story, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” about a fictionalized version of a fondly remembered high-society family friend named Kitty Maxse, whom she hadn’t seen in years. Woolf was so consumed by this character that, immediately upon finishing the story, she decided to turn it into a novel. She initially thought of calling it The Hours, and her idea was that the Maxse character, Clarissa Dalloway, would either commit suicide at the end or learn of a suicide happening to somebody else. The very day Woolf started drafting the second chapter of what eventually became one of her masterpieces, Mrs. Dalloway, the real Mrs. Dalloway, Kitty Maxse, died after a fall over the banisters of her home that was likely intentional. Woolf wrote in her diary of a kind of stunned paralysis upon reading of this unbelievable, tragic coincidence.
Claims that artists and writers are sometimes prophetic are typically countered by the argument that people are just plain bad at judging probabilities — in a big world (including a big art and literary world), coincidences happen, and they stand out from the mass of things that aren’t coincidences. Yet as I try to show in my new book From Nowhere, the sheer ubiquity of examples of the phenomenon undercuts the statistician’s “law of large numbers.” Just as books have been written entirely on Dick’s precognition, books have been written compiling the many, many uncanny prophecies of 9/11 and the Titanic disaster. Hundreds if not thousands of people got whiffs of these impending news stories and seem to have worked them into their art (not to mention their dreams) in the months and years prior. Those “large numbers” are supposed to be in the denominator, but when the topic is fairly considered, it turns out they are really in the numerator.
The 1-Percenters
My latest doorstopper of a book purchase is Adam Moss’s The Work of Art, a thick and beautifully produced compendium of interviews with artists about their creative process, full of photos of sketches, notebooks, crossouts, and erasures. It scratches one of my longest intellectual and aesthetic itches. I love writers’ notebooks and artists’ sketches way more than I like the final products. I’m the kind of person who will devour biographies of novelists even if I have never even read their fiction. In a way, Moss’s book is a celebration of the “perspiration” that Thomas Edison famously claimed was the bigger (99 percent) part of genius — all the sausage-making that stands between some initial germ of an idea and the eventual finished product, the stuff artists usually try to hide. The subtitle is “How Something Comes from Nothing.”
A former editor of New York magazine and The New York Times Magazine, among others, Moss begins his book by cheerfully admitting his “secular” approach to creativity, avoiding the alluring and mystical business of inspiration, that other 1 percent: “The thought when I began was, if I can strip creation of its romance, and break it down into discrete and concrete parts, could hat help me (and you) to see art as a product of work, a structured mental process?” Moss’s title, The Work of Art, has a double meaning.
He’s right, in part: It is helpful, especially to someone first learning a craft, to know the mundane details of how other, more established creative people transform their ideas into reality.* But if Moss thinks he’s being novel or original in writing a book on creativity that bypasses inspiration, I’ve got some bad news for him. The big idea of almost anybody who writes about creativity — literally, over pretty much the last two centuries — is that it’s all about the perspiration, the work. Good luck reading any book on the science of creativity that does not reduce inspiration to neurobiological just-so stories about how the brain rewires itself. Good luck reading a biography of some great artist that does not minimize their own accounts of their inspired moments and instead underscore all the ways they were really unoriginal (i.e., tracing their influences, the business of much criticism), reduce their creative imagination to unconscious motives, or focus on their social contexts and collaborations. Inspiration, especially the divine or ex-nihilo sort, simply does not fit within the coordinates of Enlightenment science, psychology, or serious academic thinking.
It’s a skewed way of looking at humanity’s greatest gift. It reflects, in fact, exactly the bias that dominates the postmodern academy, which my friend Jeffrey J. Kripal sums up as “The truth must be depressing.” Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, and is the author of several books on what he calls “the impossible” — that is, the often stigmatized mystical and paranormal experiences that stand at the heart of religious traditions and other cultural currents. In his recent books like The Superhumanities, he imagines a reinvigorated academy that takes impossible experiences as real facts of individual and social life.
Creative inspiration, I believe, is one of those impossible experiences. Those stories of incredible prophecies arising from artists’ inspired moments point to something far more interesting and profound about creativity than most writing on the subject would have us believe.
Time’s Arrows
I follow a lot of lesser-known writers, artists, and musicians on Twitter, and it seems like every other day, some creative person in my feed comments about some perplexing way something they wrote or created foretold some news-story-of-the-moment or some unpredictable turning point in their own life. Since I began researching precognition and precognitive dreams over a decade ago, I’ve also received numerous emails from artists and writers sharing similar stories.
In his last year of English primary school in 1984, for instance, Kevin Archer’s teacher assigned the students to write a story from the point of view of some fictional ancestor, at some time in the historical past. Kevin had long been curious about the origins of his surname, Archer, so he wrote about being a fictional medieval solder. I quote from a recent post on his blog:
“I wrote at length about my equipment, including my sword, bow and arrows. I waxed lyrical on my unwashed hair, dirty skin and tattered clothing, and revealed the deep emotions that tormented an exhausted but resilient warrior. I recounted that I fought bravely, and I explained the tactics that helped us win the day, against an army many times larger. I concluded by saying that it was such an astonishing and unexpected outcome that the king personally congratulated on me on my martial skills; he smiled, patted my bow, and instructed me to adopt the surname Archer in memory of the victory.”
Kevin recalled that his teacher was so impressed with the vivid realism of his story that he met with Kevin’s parents and suggested to them that Kevin would likely go into history or become a writer.
Fast-forward forty years, to the present day: Kevin indeed became a writer, as well as a painter and a parent. And his young daughter is starting to wonder about her heritage. His daughter’s curiosity inspired Kevin to start hunting around on a genealogy website. (Such websites didn’t exist, obviously, in 1984.) Quickly, Kevin made contact with a distant relative who had compiled detailed information on the Archer family tree that went back to the early fifteenth century, specifically to the famous Battle of Agincourt. On St. Crispin’s Day, 1415, the greatly outnumbered English army, under the leadership of Henry V, won an impossible victory against the French, thanks in large part to their superior bowmen. (You might remember the rousing speech Shakespeare puts in the mouth of the king before this battle: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” etc.)
The very first entry in the extensive spreadsheet Kevin’s genealogist relative sent him was named Simon de Boys. This man was, it said, one of the bowmen in Henry V’s army who had secured the English victory against long odds. And here’s what stunned Kevin as he read the spreadsheet cell on de Boys: It said that, after the battle, the king awarded him an impressive annual pension of five Marks on one condition: that he change his surname to Archer. It was essentially the story that Kevin had written as fiction, at age 10, for a school assignment.
How was this possible? Was Kevin’s recollection of inventing the story out of nowhere wrong? Had he perhaps heard, back then, some version of this backstory of his ancestry, reproducing it in his story, and simply forgotten? Kevin did what anybody skeptical of this impossible coincidence would do: He called his parents and asked if they in fact knew any of this history about the name Archer when he was a child and might have told it to him. They didn’t — what he now told them about Simon de Boys and Henry V and the battle of Agincourt was as much news to them as it was to him.**
The Reality of Precognition
Although Kevin was amazed and delighted that his 10-year-old self had somehow precognized a real discovery about his heritage forty years later, it didn’t come as a complete shock. An avid dreamer and dream-recorder, he had experienced several striking dreams over the course of his adult life that had foreshadowed unlikely occurrence in his future. He shared some of these with me during my research on the topic of precognitive dreams several years ago. I included one of them (under a pseudonym) in a book on the subject — an impossibly precise dream about the circumstances surrounding a lottery win that did in fact happen to one of Kevin’s close relatives shortly after he had the dream.
As I argued several years ago in my first book, Time Loops, rehearsing the skeptical fallbacks of delusion, wishful thinking, and poor probabilistic reasoning no longer represents an honest or informed position on such experiences. Mountains of laboratory evidence over the better part of a century support the reality of precognition. Meta-analyses of the data put the findings in the “astronomical” realm of significance. But because physicists have yet to validate the idea of causes or information propagating in temporal reverse, the evidence just gets dismissed as impossible. It’s not because there’s a conspiracy to suppress our psychic reality; it is because all the sciences, including psychology, take their lead from physics, and physicists have yet to quite reach a consensus on the possibility of future events to affect the past.
That may be about to change, though. A growing number of physicists think that what the field has been mistakenly thinking of as randomness is really causes propagating backward in time, future to past. The unpredictable part of an electron’s behavior has to do with the next thing the electron will interact with; another way of putting it is that the physicist’s measurement of the electron is actually causing some of the particle’s prior behavior. Huw Price (Cambridge) and Ken Wharton (San Jose State University) argue that retrocausation provides an elegant (and simple) solution to many other quantum mysteries such as entanglement. It gives us headaches (even many physicists) to think in these terms, but we’re just gonna need a bigger bottle of aspirin.
Special setups where multiple particles are entangled (or act in unison) may scale up this retro-influence on the smallest scales and make it coherent and usable. Quantum computers might serve as “future detectors” or communication devices between future and past users — a possibility imagined by William Gibson in his novel The Peripheral. And the work of Stuart Hameroff and several colleagues is pointing to molecular structures in neurons called microtubules as actual, biological quantum computers. Hameroff is working with Nobel-laureate physicist Roger Penrose on a solution to consciousness that involves microtubules. Whether their theory pans out as they hope it will, a serendipitous side-effect of their consciousness-quest is likely to be an eventual picture of how neurons pre-spond to their own future states — the cellular rudiments of precognition.
Long story short, I think we all receive oblique and foggy signals from our future self when we are creating, just as folklore insists we do when we sleep. Whether it is a 10-year-old foreshadowing a future learning experience in a random school assignment, an avant-garde painter depicting a life-changing injury in his canvases, or an acknowledged literary genius somehow foretelling the manner of their own death, creative people frequently seem to act as seismographs for life-quakes ahead.
Even Moss admits that the experience of inspiration is a real one, and countless creative people over the centuries, not least of all in our own time, have described it as something mystical or indeed paranormal, something as inexplicable as seeing a ghost or a UFO. So I don’t think it is sufficient, nor is it honest, to reduce this experience to delusion, or pretend that somehow it’s in perspiration (or those neurobiological just-so stories) where the most important answers to the mystery of creativity lay. That’s especially the case when those experiences of inspiration result in some impossible prophecy of the future.
I’m excited for the future where art is no longer reduced to work, where creative prophecy is taken seriously, and where Superhumanities departments map the streams and rivers of future influence that shape the present arts (and sciences). The arrow of time, as Kevin Archer puts it in his blog post, will finally be broken.
NOTES
* I don’t know where I read this, long ago — maybe it was in something John Gardner wrote about fiction writing — but knowing that Hemingway ritualistically sharpened six pencils before sitting down to write every morning may not give much valuable insight into the process of writing, but it makes the writing life real. By its mundane concreteness, it helps an aspiring writer know that it is possible to be a writer. An artist is an ordinary human who sits down at a desk (or at an easel, or whatever) and works.
** Some people who are open-minded to the paranormal might suggest instead that Kevin had actually been Simon de Boys in a past life, and that young Kevin was really “remembering” his life as a bowman at Agincourt. But when Kevin delved deeper into the story of Simon de Boys, he discovered something else interesting, that effectively dispelled such a possibility: What the genealogist cousin recorded in that stunning spreadsheet wasn’t actually true. The name change to archer had happened decades earlier than the battle of Agincourt — so the story of the origins of Archer the surname were lore or mythmaking, not real history. If we don’t chalk it all up to “just coincidence” or perhaps to false memory on Kevin’s (and his family’s) part, then Kevin age 10 was more likely precognizing something striking he’d read decades later, at age 50.
