In 1947, Niko Tinbergen, a man who described himself as half-scientist and half-artist, made an art piece that only seagulls could understand. This creation was part of "curiosity" experiment, a way for Tinbergen to play around with instinct as a living thing with malleable edges and a responsive temper. This is Tinbergen as a half-artist, seeing the life hidden under the life of things. Other scientists were satisfied with treating instinct as a binary mechanism, as either trigger and response or nothing.
The final product of his research was something like The Birth of Venus for birds—an object of near-mythological beauty, manipulating biological desire beyond natural bounds. Strangely, their avian Venus looked nothing like a bird. The work was more like a Rothko than a Botticelli. Moments like these expose the pity that is the separation of science and art, because this would have reasonably turned the art world inside out.
The experiment lived on an island off the Dutch coast, an island with far more birds than people. What started as one experiment evolved into many, and the project took many years to reach a conclusion. Test subjects were chosen by Tinbergen, who was teaching zoology at a Dutch university at the time, and his colleagues. They had to be herring gulls, hatched in the wild, young enough to be driven more by instinct than learned behavior. Herring gull chicks are a muddied gray with awkward limbs, not very seagull-like, but adults resemble a prototypical seagull, white and gray-bodied with—this is important—a little red patch on the underside of their yellow beak.
Tinbergen’s contemporaries found that the red spot is functionally necessary for the birds’ survival. The spot serves as a visual cue for the chicks' feeding instinct, which is an unlearned response that occurs thoughtlessly once cued. When chicks see the red spot on an adult’s beak, they peck at it repeatedly, and the pecking cues the parent to feed its offspring. They will sometimes peck at other red objects. They will sometimes, but far less often, peck at yellow beaks without this red spot.
Tinbergen worked mostly in the wild. He spent his childhood crouched on Dutch beaches to watch seagulls. By spending much of his life watching from afar, he found that animals' natural environments were richer with wonder than a lab-made environment. Early in his career he perfected a creative method of drawing strange behavior out of wild animals: by introducing them to crude imitations of themselves. He went to the dunes with a variety of cardboard birds and a hunch that instinct is imaginative.
Constellations of nests speckled the islands, so finding unsupervised hatchlings was easy. They brought the chicks to a hideaway and warmed them in the folds of their sweaters. As chicks were brought out individually, they mimicked the mew call of the parent while gently waving a bird-like model in front of the chick's face. After thirty seconds they counted the number of pecks directed at the model.
First they were curious about their instinct's attention to color. (Gull chicks, importantly, have well-developed color vision and spatial awareness, maybe better than ours.) They showed the chicks realistic white heads and yellow beaks with different colored spots. Hundreds of iterations proved that red was the strongest stimulus, but black and blue spots also worked just fine to trigger the pecking instinct. Then beak color—the chicks pecked more at an all-red beak than at a natural yellow beak without a spot. This point in the experiments was pivotal; this instinct doesn't care if the bird that carries the red spot is a seagull or a predatory hawk. The trigger can be manipulated to the point of disfiguring the reality surrounding it and be just as—if not more—effective.
The next test proved the color of the head to be irrelevant. Whether the head was black, green, or the natural white, the chicks directed all their attention to the beak rather than the head. They performed a few more tests in shape and positioning and found that the chicks pecked at flat lines more than a three-dimensional model with the correct bone structure and markings.
A picture of instinct starts to form. The picture, like any other picture, suggests by the virtue of having edges that a world lies outside the range of focus, a world that will never be knowable as a whole. What I mean is that these results held Tinbergen in a state of fascination for the rest of his life.
The trigger isn't a red spot alone but a collection of elements that form a composition. Red was chosen by natural selection because it provides a strong contrast against most backgrounds, but instinct must also consider saturation, arrangement, dimensionality, size, and shape. And then, still, there is the question of the relationship between elements, of their power dynamics and tensions and willingness to budge (or dance with each other).
Another peculiarity: once an instinct is triggered, the chick is virtually incapable of seeing anything except for the stimulus and its immediate surroundings. The world goes dark, or pure light, a museum with white walls.
Stimuli can be exaggerated to the point of overriding the basic drive of self-preservation. Instinct, the biological process that develops and sustains all life, both a result and a creator of it, has what appears to be a massive Achilles Heel. Animals are not only easily deceived by artifice, collage, manipulation, and exaggeration, but they leap at it with desire and an articulated aesthetic sensibility. This innate vulnerability to being put in a trance must stunt an animal's chances of survival. But this crack is too deep to be an accident of nature.
To "hallucinate", the hallucinator must have some form of consciousness (whether AI can "hallucinate" is the contentious question of our time). However, Brian Massumi applies the word "hallucinate" to the non-living force of instinct. He rejects the mechanical language that treats instinct as a machine rather than as a hybrid living-non-living-thing with a temperament. The inner world of instinct, like the mental theatre of a dreaming person, lives too far under the surface to be read by others. Not even the waking brain of animals understands why instinct pulls them in this way. But it does, it pulls, intensely and compulsively, toward something new.
A necessity for hallucination is the ability, and desire, to play in a way that brings about mistakes. Machines lack this capacity. I think about words like "optimal", and "good", and what they mean to the living brain of life itself, which doesn't seem to want to be good at all. And what "desire" means. Desire doesn't cleanly follow the path toward something "good"—this is not the point of it. You know this as well as I do.
Our
Story
When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and there came a great earthquake; the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree drops its winter fruit when shaken by a gale.
(Revelation 6:12-14)
Before shooting stars were meteors, they were messages from gods, or the sky peeling open so god could glance at Earth, or the gods themselves dancing and falling through the sky. In the Book of Revelation, the Biblical apocalypse, the four horsemen shake the world into chaos. As the sun turns black and the earth splinters, the stars fall from the heavens like figs shaken from tree branches. The impossible becomes possible and cannot be reversed.
The truth of shooting stars is that they are old rocks and not gods. We know now that most shooting stars formed 4.6 billion years ago. Most are old enough to have witnessed the birth of our solar system, made from the iron cores of ancient planets that shattered after collision. These orphaned fragments become asteroids on a journey with no purpose or end. In the liminal room between planets where there are no eyes, no light, no up or down, just a space to be passed through, the fragment crochets a pattern in its interior. Gradual cooling over millions of years allows for a silent and slow change. Under the meteor's skin, in its organs, crystals grow in a precise architecture.
When, if, the meteor hits our atmosphere, it dies as it is born, in a blink, in a brilliant burst of fire. As it plunges, the air pressure heats its shell and forces a metamorphosis. The exoskeleton molts and peels off, over and over, showering the sky behind it with a trail of melted iron. One million years crack open and die as perfect round droplets in its path. Its death roar can be heard up to one hundred miles away.
Most of the time, a meteor disintegrates before hitting the ground. The pieces that survive land as bits of rock called meteorites that are usually no larger than a fist. Not much time lapses between burning up in the atmosphere and landing, but the surviving pieces will always be frozen by the time they land, an outsider camouflaged in the rocky earth.
In 1808, a Viennese scientist heated a meteorite and its extraterrestrial skeleton became visible—an overlapping, interlocking geometry of bands of crystals, a five-million-year painting. The crystal pattern found in iron meteorites was named the Widmanstätten pattern after the first observer. There is no way of reproducing the crystal lacework on Earth; it must form in space, deep in the core of a body, over the life span of a galaxy.
The truth of shooting stars is that they are old rocks and not gods. The difference is negligible.
Tinbergen wasn't the only or the first scientist to find that exaggerated stimuli produce an exaggerated response. He was, though, the only one mapping out its complexities and naming it. He coined the term supernormal to describe exaggerated stimuli that elicit more biological desire than reality, pulling both the desiring subject and the desirable object into a game of mutual transformation.
His tests on birds gave him everything he needed to find the material limit of this biological desire. He compiled the results from his tests and built the most biologically stimulating features of a gull's beak into his most avant-garde creation yet, a test in abstract art for the eyes of animals: the super-gull.
The final experiment was conducted with a white-headed, yellow-beaked, red-spotted three-dimensional model as the control and the super-gull as the experimental model, tested on many chicks from many different nests. The super-gull won against the realistic gull’s head by a ratio of 126:100 pecks. It was a red knitting needle with three yellow stripes on the bottom edge.
When I was a ten-year-old atheist, I woke up from an uneventful dream with a new belief in God. Most Sundays before then, I sat in the pews of a Presbyterian church in New Jersey and felt that God was missing. Nietzsche would have corrected me and said, more definitively, that God was dead, he was murdered, and we are the guilty ones. But Nietzsche didn't really say it; his fictional madman did, crying through the town square that we have divine blood on our hands. Guilty as they are, the townspeople are bored of the event and unresponsive. The speech came at the wrong time, as it always would. Too early, the madman said. Too late is also true.
I know by now how memory distorts anything that passes through it, and I hope I never return to the church where I grew up. Childhood memories grow fluorescent edges that tear easily when handled. From what I know, the inside is a warm shell of wood, cherry oak maybe, that splinters morning light into delicious slices. The rooms are one, two hundred feet long and carved like temples, and the organ behind the pews is the largest in the world. Sometimes, because books were always interesting little treasure chests, I would open the leather-bound Bible and turn the translucent leaves of paper anxiously. I remember none of the sermons—the words confused me, and I found it odd that they liked to hover one degree outside of reality, in the past or the future or a metaphysical realm that I can't touch. Religion, I thought, should not be so talkative. When church felt sacred, the feeling came from passing old paper between my fingers and walking between shards of glitter. I would have enjoyed Sunday service more if the priests talked about light, if during each service they held a silent moment to watch the way it fell just then.
Faith asked me to suspend my belief in the real world I felt warm and moving under my palms. God forgives, God loves, God has no use for a body or brain. The crack in the floorboard can’t heal itself like an angel can. On my Etch-a-Sketch, I turned the knobs until I saw the outline of a cross, a rudimentary shape, an easy one.
Outside of church, I was exposed to a divine wrath that faced me and waited, accumulating in an invisible pile at the threshold of death. I prayed on my own only when someone was sick or stuck in the path of a tropical storm or because my tongue slipped and I feared Hell. Otherwise, I prayed twice a day when our family sat down for dinner and before bed. Ten cumulative seconds of daily ritual. The dinner prayer is the only religious practice that survived my family forgetting about Sunday service once and for all, if you can call it forgetting. A blameless action halfway between forgetting and giving up. We moved away and the luster was nowhere, not even back where we left it. Thus: sacred means rare, in my mind.
God is good,
God is great,
Thank you for the food we eat.
Amen.
The severing of God from everyday life was compulsory but it frustrated itself. Presbyterianism, as well as modern life, have a distaste for fluid interpretations and metaphors. Metaphor makes knowledge complicated and slippery. So I tried, over and over, to reconcile the theory of evolution with the story of Adam and Eve, without metaphor. Because I lacked the room for invention, I gave up on believing in a God.
Most of my unanswerable religious questions were about bodies; about what age I would be in the afterlife and where god's nervous system is and if angels are made of gentle flesh like we are. Others had to do with maps. God was supposed to live in a shell of white paneling, one street over and one street up from our house on Elm, next to the intersection where metal whines a mechanical song and just down the road from the strip mall that would never be demolished, and I couldn't find him, and wasn't he supposed to be a God? Not a man? Why would a God wander New Jersey?
Our rendition severs the prayer from its last lines and mangles it so that the sounds are lopsided and land an arm's length away rhyme. Usually we are not synchronized.
My religious upbringing was typical, and this is the most important point— it was a tired simulation of religion, decorated in drab colors, following the well-trodden path of suburbanites occupied with the neighbors' crumbled marriage and the emptying of the strip mall on the edge of town. I've been thinking about symbols lately, about the catastrophe of symbols eating everything and then cannibalizing other symbols, until everything we see is a nesting doll with a central meaning obscured by a wall several layers thick. Wood over wood over cracking wood. God as an empty signifier is mass once a week, a prayer before dinner, and sometimes a spoken reminder of religious morality.
Punk rock and Western Christianity—if you think about—died from the same sickness.
In my dream at age ten, the world is exactly as it was. There are twelve hundred miles between that church in New Jersey and my bedroom in Minnesota where I would paint the walls yellow then cyan then sage green. There are twelve hundred miles between the place where I feared Hell and this place where I was still afraid, not of Hell but of whatever I couldn’t see crouched in the dark opening of my closet. When you’re young it can be easy to believe that mystery will produce something that kills you. The nightlight by my dresser kept darkness out.
In my dream, the orange glow is unusually thick. The air melts like warm honey and buzzes with life so thick my skin prickles. I stand in the center of my carpet and feel portals grow where empty space used to be. Under my window, which faces north, which shows nothing but the night that swallows everything, my doll watches me with eyes too glossy. I am not afraid. I lean down, and she whispers something in my ear that I would never remember.
I wouldn't try to explain to anyone, much less myself, what happened when I awoke. For the first time, I felt something that I imagined to be God. I didn't care much for what it was. Here is the end of it: for the next few months, until I couldn't remember the feeling of light weighing me down, I wasn't scared of dying.
Friedrich Nietzsche was a nihilist at the proper time to be a nihilist, at the catalytic moment when existence became strange. In the nineteenth century, as machinery swallowed the West, thinkers sprouted up with revolutionary ideas about non-religious living. Science and industry presented a prophetic future in which the transcendent universe is flattened into a single plane that holds all answers. Religion was still popular, but God seemed less useful than one hundred years earlier. The psychological and sociological effects of Heaven disappearing are not well understood.
This secularization of the West marks "the decline of magic" or "disenchantment" on a historical timeline. William Franke describes this as the actualization of the "world as simply world" rather than as a symbol of some higher power. But the problem with a simple self-contained world is that no such thing exists, that a series of a dozen "why"s will bring any logical explanation to the edge of the magical.
It is easy to operate a camera, to take a slice of the past and flatten it and carry it into the present as a god would. It is easy to, at the same time, wonder why we are alive at all. I can sometimes understand nihilism better as a way of keeping the soul from fraying. Imagine the world behind your back, whatever you think you would see, and assume that there is really nothing there at all.
Any project of disenchantment will fall back into a god-shaped hole. "Enchant" is in the word. Inversion still acknowledges an opposite.
It should be noted that Nietzsche hated theology. When we affirm the existence of God, he thought, we uphold a hierarchy of knowledge and power that keeps humanity perpetually insecure. He was more opposed to the effect of self-degradation than the gaps in scientific reason. It should also be noted that when he declared God dead, he wasn't suggesting that we were approaching a time without religion. The death of God marks a rebirth, not an end. Greek mythology would be nothing without the death of gods; Jesus died on the cross and rose again; history is rich with religion growing from divine bones. Humanity wouldn't be rich without it.
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In 1882 Nietzsche published The Gay Science, a book of aphorisms that reads like a disorganized journal. Nested in the middle is something irregular— a parable, the book's only one, and one of the few passages about religion. In the short scene, a fictional madman has a panicked outburst in public:
"Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns?
There is, of course, no single moment of death, no slowing and stopping of electrical signals in the brain, but God must be anthropomorphized for the weight of the event to be understood.
"What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed..."
Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher and a Christian who declared that "the day Christianity and the world become friends, Christianity will be done away with", interpreted the death of God as a call to look inward for spiritual fullness. Hegel believed that God was incarnated in all of us, in an Absolute Spirit that envelops everything. Where these thinkers are optimistic, Nietzsche is more attuned to the effects of anxiety and vertigo, effects which intensify as time passes. A coup dissolves the boundary between human and Other: we pull the bloodied fragments of God down to earth and sew them together.
Around the time that Niko Tinbergen made the super-gull, abstract expressionism was born. A modern and yet war-ravaged world called for a new form of expression that could mirror absurdity. The shapes of reality just weren't cutting it. The new movement collaged pieces of color and geometry to access a collective unconscious. To some, the shapes and colors were so simple that they couldn't possibly symbolize anything real.
Pioneers of abstract expressionism, Rothko, Gottlieb, and Newman wrote:
“To us, art is an adventure into an unknown world of the imagination which is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is critical.”
Tinbergen observed supernormality in other species before the seagull chicks.
50,000 tests on mating grayling butterflies proved that males prefer fluttering black squares of construction paper to the bark pattern of females' wings. Eurasian oystercatchers would abandon their own eggs to try to incubate a speckled fake so large that they could not sit on it. In a plaster-model test on stickleback fish that attack the red bellies of their enemies, the red-drenched fakes were not as stimulating to the sticklebacks as a red postal truck that drove by the window and lured the fish to crash into aquarium glass. A wide range of animals, he found, mirror a trait that we typically understand as exclusive to humans: a creative desire without rationality.
Tinbergen is considered a founding father of ethology, the study of animal behavior usually through naturalistic observation. But by the time he won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the impact of his herring gulls, he was beaten down by the increasing rigidity of science and gave up on defending his methods. Critics pointed out his inconsistencies in reporting on the experiment, which faltered and changed over time, the watercolors bleeding down the cardboard bird heads, and the over-affectionate handling of the birds.
Popular definitions of "religion" include an institutional structure and standardized practices within a community. "Spirituality", on the other hand, strips away the structure and requires only a sense of spirit or soul. Some movements toe the line of distinction. Dark green religion is what Bron Taylor defines as an elastic genre of spirituality that treats nature as intrinsically sacred and worthy of the same respect and autonomy given to humans. Dark green religion, he says, is visible in the passion of surfers and the work of biologists and the writings of the early transcendentalists. This is where the line blurs so much that it ceases to exist: was Thoreau a philosopher, a spiritualist, or a religious man?
Six years after that God-sparking dream, the summer I turned sixteen, I felt another window opening. I moved 361 miles away from the bedroom where dreams laced through waking. 353 of those miles are the stretch of I-94 that connects Minneapolis to Milwaukee. The drive is four and a half hours if you don't stop. My first impression and the one that stuck: where Minnesota is green, Wisconsin is a muddy gold. The stalks of grass that grew in the highway medians seemed to always be in the middle of dying.
Moving far away reminds you that love is not contained in your body. Love, like other immaterial things, is anchored to geography. If I plot my love on a map, there are three irregular shapes with blurred edges that run along a diagonal axis connecting New Jersey to the Midwest. And between the three hearts in the Midwest: a long winding vein, with big clotted areas where the freeway grows limbs in the form of metal towns and I frequent the same gas stations.
One of them I return to constantly despite trying to avoid it, as if the universe spites me. I am always the only sign of life within my view, and the same fidgety cashier works every time I'm there, and twice now I've bought a pack of ciders. At the other lifeless end of the lot is a shapeless building with a single doorway glowing deep red under a single light. All of the windows are curtained. And I wonder if anyone crossed this plot of land two hundred years ago, in the same stale dead of night, and felt comfortably alone.
Moving far away also makes space and time melt together into a fluid. Whether the world disappears with your back turned to it becomes a pressing question. Your best friend redecorated, and the mountain in front of your house is a hill now, and there are no fireflies in August. Memory does something peculiar to space: it folds it up, scrunches it like a fabric, so whole streets are swallowed up while others stretch into thirty miles of green and brown clutter. Paying more attention to in-between spaces prevents the fabric from collapsing but takes conscious effort.
Imaginations of post-religion—not quite religion, but a forward version of it for which a new word doesn't yet exist— use words like deconstruction, splitting, virtualization, and collage. Finding bones and sewing them together.
I spend 60 hours every year in that winding vein of freeway. I hated the ritual before I learned to pray in a physical language, that it was good for me. My muscles ache around hour three when I hit the area of Wisconsin where the hills rise into cliffs of exposed rock, just before the military base. Aching is a sign of devotion—I deserve a satisfactory ending now. I wanted so badly for the world to remain intact and static for me, to go to sleep while I was away.
I expected the drive to be an impersonal space of transition. As if any space of transition is impersonal. I forgot what attention does to a place, that passing through somewhere is much like dancing with a lover, watching each other's feet so as not to stumble. Attention works as a mirror. If you look at the world as if it hid magic somewhere, maybe everywhere, as if magic rested in the dark chamber of a molding barn, something enchanted will offer itself up whether you expect it or not. Science isn't always disenchanting; every action has an equal opposite reaction.
When I learned about Christianity again, it was a college art history class about medieval Catholicism. The devotion of pilgrimage lodged itself in me.
Seven hundred years ago, when a woman fell sick and weeks passed without improvement, her husband would give up on local healers. He would paint an image of the Virgin hovering over her bed in a shroud of halos. He would walk, maybe without shoes, carrying the art and less than enough food, to the far edge of the country. The geography around him glows with micro-magic. Strangers on the road become guardian angels; birds are divine messengers; the air is msot ripe with miracles at the destination, in that cathedral on the shore where the membrane between here and Other is especially thin. Maybe the miracle would come, and the early printing presses would spread the word of the Virgin hearing a plea and recovering a woman from her deathbed. Maybe he would walk through his door on a rainy night and find that she had already passed.
The act of pilgrimage lost its dramatic potency by the 16th century—now the definition bends to any journey imbued with meaning, though traditional religious pilgrimages will be common as long as the ground is there. One could argue that tourists emulate the spiritual motivations of pilgrims in their curious wandering.
I imagine myself walking along I-94 for fifty days. Holding a plaster model of my heart and a scrapbook with a prayer for us, next to the picture from last year that was tacked on my wall. Kicking the gravel just beside the wheatfield, weaving through the little inlets in the forest where the sun bakes the grass in perfect circles. Going to the rotting yard of cars that I see from I-94, finding the name etched in metal and saying it ten times out loud, climbing the trees between cornfields like ladders. Walking as a séance—as reaching into a fog.
Pilgrimage is the act of turning oneself inside out. The inner journey manifests in an outward reality and they validate each other in a feedback loop. Or, really, pilgrimage is the act of discovering that there is no "inside" and "outside" at all.
I can't say that I certainly believe in a god. If I do I worship a Frankenstein kind of god, metal parts screwed in the head and all. I do wish on shooting stars.
And what is the difference between wishing and praying?
It is easy to say that prayer implies a receiver of the message and wishing doesn't. But if this were true, I don't think we would make wishes at all. Despite science, despite the bones of gods rotting under our feet, we tend to expect answers, or at least a conversation.
Wishing on shooting stars is made possible by witnessing a small miracle that cannot be predicted or willed forth (thus the basis of a miracle). Shooting stars fall constantly but it's the witnessing that produces the window between the real and the magical, a window that you can slip through with ease. There is always a sense that, because you saw it, it was meant for you. This also goes for religious miracles.
Other conditions for wish-making or praying: a sacred location. A fountain full of coins or a sun-bathed chapel. Some are simple and abundant: a dandelion full of tufts or an eyelash resting on your hand. A cake full of birthday candles and a bedroom dressed in nighttime are temporary conjurers.
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Sociologist and poltiical scientist Hartmut Rosa made the word “resonance” more precise by developing a theory about how it strengthens our relationship with the world. He describes a resonant event as one that inspires visceral emotional transformations, and has three qualifiers: it cannot be willed forth, its effects cannot be predicted, and it is mutually transformative. You can assume that a painting will move you but you could never know that the obscuring fog in the background will give you goosebumps and linger in your mind for weeks. The final qualifier, that of mutual transformation, is most striking. Rosa sees it as obvious. How could you assume that the art affected you, and you did not affect the art in return? Imprint your memory on the blue-gray? The world is built of mirrors. Dead rock cannot be dead if we are wishing on it. Gods don’t die naturally—they are killed, victims of affect just like us.
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In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche says that the absurdity and torture of existence are justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. In the absence of any other objective meaning, life makes sense as a dazzling performance or the subject of a painting. Greek tragedies were a perfect expression of the meaning of life if life is accepted to be a brief dance on a stage. He was likely saying that we invent narratives to organize life into patterns and cope efficiently. Instead, I imagine ants running frantically around the huge curve of a shadow as a child lifts their hand over the grass.
Watch and wonder—wonder with a passion, wonder in a way that draws you forward. This is how the mind of biology desires. This is how the loose rocks in space spend their idle time. God is a three-letter word because we have to use language to talk about it, but we could just as easily leave the topic alone.
On a stretch of freeway, or the dense air of dreams, or a beach in the Netherlands: spoken language gives away something ancient. I am not teaching you to feel something new. I am trying to show you—turn yourself inside out.