Objective Correlatives

 I've never been a good barfer. I can count on one hand the number of times in my conscious (post–five year life old) life when I've thrown up. 

Once was when I was on a bike ride for a DACA advocacy action for work, and I misjudged ahead of time my ability to bike several miles uphill without having the slightest prior physical training or exercise. 

Once was in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport when I had probably had too much hot coffee and not enough water on a hot day. 

And once in college, when I tore into a bathroom in the downstairs of Bartlett Commons in order to hurl up the rubbery scrambled eggs I had just consumed at a dining hall breakfast. 

That day marked the first and last time I ever tried antidepressants. "Nausea can sometimes be a side effect" had been glancingly mentioned. 

What I'll always remember about that third incident—the bathroom one—were the sounds coming from the stall next to mine. 

Someone was in there sobbing. Not just a little bit. Like horrible, howling wails. Moaning Myrtle stuff. 

I've never encountered that again, in any other bathroom across the land. 

It's like the universe felt the need to provide an objective correlative in that moment for my inner state. 

Like a paid mourner at an antique funeral, that guy in the stall next to mine was giving voice out loud to what I felt inwardly. 

So too, I recall the night my dad went into the hospital with near-fatal sepsis. The situation on its own was bad enough. 

What was weird was that I got a voice mail that same night from a total stranger—some lunatic phishing scheme or spam call—excoriating me in the most vile language. "You sound like a 'peed'" was all I can recollect. 

I've never gotten another call like that before or since. 

Likewise, in Philip Roth's memoir of his father's illness, Patrimony, he talks about how the night his mother died, his dad suddenly started getting insane hectoring calls from an antisemitic neighbor who had never bothered him before. 

It's like the universe has an instinct to pile on. "Oh yeah, you're already going through this? Well, how about this?"

The universe is not a kind one that cares for our needs. But it does appear at times to have an instinct for artistic unity—cohesiveness of theme. 

I wrote when my dad first got his brain cancer diagnosis that I felt like we were having a confrontation with Arthur Koestler's concept of "Ahor"—the "ancient horror" hiding beneath the superficial appearance of calm reality. 

We had fallen through a trapdoor—"stumbled" over "a manhole under the hollyhocks," as Louis MacNeice put it. And now we were seeing the world as it truly was. 

The world had borne a kind of enchantment, a glamour hiding the withered crone's face. Now, the spell was gone, and we were seeing what had always been there. 

And as if to reinforce the point, the universe has a way of providing its objective correlatives at the right moment. "Here, here is something tragic and hideous to correspond to how you feel!"

Probably just confirmation bias, I know, I know. 

But still...

To quote Thomas Lovell Beddoes: 

... Methinks 

The look of the world's a lie, a face made up 

O'er graves and fiery depths ; and nothing's true 

But what is horrible. If man could see 

The perils and diseases that he elbows

Each day he walks a mile ; which catch at him, 

Which fall behind and graze him as he passes; 

Then would he know that Life's a single pilgrim. 

Fighting unarmed amongst a thousand soldiers. 

It is this infinite invisible 

Which we must learn to know, and yet to scorn, 

And, from the scorn of that, regard the world 

As from the edge of a far star.