93. The Why

Then, at the end of that sentence, we had to imagine a blinking cursor asking Why? 

A few summers ago, I was in a workshop with the poet and essayist Brian Blanchfield, and he led us through an exercise that I found so simple and profound. First we had to pick a sentence from one of our essays that, for whatever reason, held some power or mystery. Then, at the end of that sentence, we had to imagine a blinking cursor asking Why? The next sentence should answer the question. After that, there was another Why? The answer would once again beget the question.

That first time, I pulled this sentence: Lately I’ve felt more creatively insecure than ever before, second-guessing every word, every thought, every comma.

Then the blinking cursor: Why?

My answer: Writing my book literally brought me to my knees more times than I can count.

Why?

My answer: It’s difficult to write about your own life and things that feel very personal, but it’s even more difficult to write about others who have experienced those things with you.

And again, and again: Why?

I loved this exercise and find myself going back to it. It’s such a useful tool at every stage of the writing process. Often when I’m just beginning to follow an idea—maybe something I’ve scribbled down in my journal—I have to write through to the end to figure out what I’m trying to say. This exercise puts me on a more direct route. 

Other times, I’m confident I’ve already figured out what I want to say, but there’s actually something just below the surface that I haven’t excavated. I’m reminded of the four-year-old asking her eternal questions. You tell her something that seems basic, like the fact that the sky is blue, and she asks you, Why? And you find yourself digging deeper, searching for the answer.

Prompt:

Look through your past journal entries. Without overthinking it, choose a sentence that intrigues you. Imagine a flashing cursor (or some annoyingly precocious four-year-old) at the end of it, asking why? Answer the question, then ask it again. Continue until you’ve gotten to the heart of the matter.

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Ashley Bethard

Location: Dayton, Ohio
About: I've always been intrigued by the human drive to create narrative, especially around their own lives. The idea of narrative -- and both the benefits of telling one's story and the pitfalls of creating something that obscures truth -- factors heavily into my creative work of writing essays and creative nonfiction. During this pandemic we find ourselves living through, I found it difficult to connect with that particular reality within my writing -- until I stumbled upon this prompt, this app, and it all sort of came together.
Age: 34

The streetlight sparked furiously, out of place against a still-blue sky. It was so visually erratic I felt like I could hear it — the zzzt-zzzt, a buzz dissolving into a whine. A small black cat darted quickly across the street beneath it, disappearing into an alley. 

A question: What does it take to transform something utterly unordinary — a church on a street you’ve driven a dozen times before, for example, or a sputtering streetlight — into something special? Some might say it’s your own intent. 

Humans spend so much time creating narratives, wanting to string together disparate events into something concrete, something patterned. Story: we crave it. We weave a tale out of bits of information. It’s a kind of electrifying alchemy, to feel as though you’re inside your own real-world choose-your-own-adventure. Does the story we build make us feel important? Does it make us feel like we’re in control? Does it give us a sense of confidence, teach us how to navigate the world better?

*

I stumbled on the first mention of the app as I was trying to close Facebook on my phone, and accidentally hit the News tab instead. There, the lead headline caught my eye: “TikToker says Randonautica led her to a shooting victim when she asked for ‘Death.’” The Daily Dot article detailed a TikTok user who claimed that, after setting an intent of “death,” she was led to a shooting scene where a gunshot victim was lying in a gutter. The article’s lead photo was of the 18-year-old woman, her face twisted in a sob. The text overlay of her TikTok video, where she details her findings, reads: “please do not go randonauting.”

The simplest way to describe Randonautica is this: it’s a choose-your-own-adventure app combining a randomly-generated location with a personal “intent.” This could be anything from a word or phrase (“message of peace,” “a sign,” “creativity”) to a question. You share your location with the app, but you keep your intention to yourself. The app will generate a random location, and you follow GPS instructions to get there. The idea is this: a random, often insignificant location can become meaningful just by your intent. A Bustle article summed it up like this: “Randonautica explorations are short walks or drives to completely uninteresting places that inspire you to think differently.”

The “random” element of the app works like this: using quantum random number generators, like the Australian National University Quantum Random Numbers Server, it generates a real-time set of numbers that are turned into coordinates. You can set some limitations, of course — the distance you’re willing to travel, and whether or not you’re willing to visit water spots.

After spending some time down an Internet rabbit hole, I came across the r/Randonautica thread on Reddit. The low-key excitement was contagious — it was less about sweeping signs and more about the pleasant wonder of discovery. A user posted a photo of a wooded swamp with the caption, “My intent was Shrek. Didn’t disappoint.” One post set my arm hair on edge: a woman who visited 3 quantum sites looking for answers about a missing woman. Two of the three results took her to a local river; another took her to a road with the same name as the river. That night, she wrote, she saw a post on Facebook. The woman’s body had been recovered from the river that showed up in her Randonautica results.

I told my husband about the app, how it worked, and some of the Reddit posts. “Download it,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Intent #1: “a message of hope” 

Our first location was smack dab in the middle of a green at the Dayton Country Club. We took several twists and turns through a residential neighborhood until Google Maps navigation led us to a bumpy, narrow service road: a hidden entrance to the golf course. It was a place in the city I had never been before, a place I didn’t know existed. On the drive in, I admired the beautiful houses set high on a hill, surrounded by woods, overlooking the tranquil green. A picket fence lined the course. It was extremely picturesque, a tiny slice of peace tucked away on the outskirts of the city. We looked, but maybe not hard enough — I was too chicken to get out of the car, climb the fence, and start marching across the green. 

The verdict: Peaceful, certainly. But not quite the obvious, hopeful message we were looking for.

Intent #2: “ghost”

We drove downtown for our second attempt, coordinates leading leading us to the front of the Federal Building, where a black cat darted across the street in front of us. 

“That’s a ghost,” I say. “Do you believe that’s a ghost?” I am electrified by our wholesome Sunday night adventure and find that I want to believe in some sort of magic this can conjure. My husband says he’s never seen a black cat in downtown Dayton. We drive past the Federal Building and slow as we pass Westminster Presbyterian Church. We park and the first thing we notice is a flickering streetlight, almost strobing. “Energy disturbance,” I joke. We walked around the perimeter of the building, admiring the architecture and the well-maintained landscaping that appeared slightly overgrown — aesthetically pleasing, adding a darker, woodsy vibe in the middle of the city. There, among the darkened shrubs, we saw the first fireflies of the evening light up. The black cat crossed our path again, this time darting in front of the flickering streetlight, then disappeared into a parking lot next to the church. We got in the car and followed it. As we slowly drove past, the cat sat and stared at us a moment before getting up and walking away.

Later, when I look up the church, I learn it has a Te Deum window that was designed by Tiffany studios. It was given by Susan Stoddard in honor of John Stoddard, founder of Dayton Motor Car Company, which launched Stoddard-Dayton automobiles in 1905. The window was commissioned from the New York studio of Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1918, completed in 1919, and was on display in New York before being shipped to Dayton and installed in the church. The window underwent a complete renovation starting in 2014, and was completed in 2016.

The verdict: Spooky vibes, an animal familiar, and some Dayton history? Success.

It’s not difficult to explain the allure of something like Randonautica, which promises something unseen, even if it doesn’t measure up to your expectation. And it would be impossible to talk about the excitement of such a promise without mentioning the context of experience: in this case, living during a global pandemic. Our contact with others has been limited, and the way we move within the world has changed so radically in such a short span. I notice this especially when I’ve tried to write about it, this existence, and come up blank each time. It is hard to write through change, especially for me. So I was grateful to come across something like this, that challenged my previous boundaries as well as the current state of my restricted COVID ones. I felt more mentally open in a way that I hadn’t in months. I can’t view my Randonautica experiment without a pandemic lens. Its impact has required us to relinquish so much control — all the ways we used to live — and rendered us, at least in the interim, with a sense of powerlessness as we figure out the new way.

*

According to an article in Wired, the app creators “believe that human intentions can influence the output of the quantum random number generator (QRNG).” The idea that human intention can change a fixed outcome isn’t new. From New Year’s resolutions to prayers, from fortune telling to reading the world for signs, the search for meaning — and the desire to control the outcomes of our own worlds — runs deep. It’s how we’re built. It’s a counterpoint to the scary unknown. Joan Didion wrote a sentence that has echoed in my head for years: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” In other words, you’ve got to pick something to stick to so you can get on with it.

Where is the crossover between setting intentions, searching for meaning, and creating our own narratives? At first thought, they all sound discrete. But the more I think about them, the harder they are to separate. There are all sorts of examples of this meaning-making in the world.

The Winchester Mystery House, a mansion in San Jose, California, was built so that its mistress Sarah Winchester — widow of firearms magnate William Wirt Winchester — could outrun her ghosts. She moved to California after her husband and daughter died because she believed her family and fortune were haunted by ghosts. Allegedly, she had the house built on to so many times — and so haphazardly — so she could escape them. It’s quite a story: a woman builds a house for the ghosts that haunt her, but creates staircases that lead nowhere and hidden rooms so that she can hide from them when she needs to. This narrative, borne out of grief and guilt and many other things, became such an obsession that she spent most of her life on creating this house. Was it true that she was haunted by spirits? She certainly thought so, and her own story held uncontested power over her for decades.

Another example of the way that a self-constructed narrative takes over is in the case of Gary Stewart, a man whose search for his biological parents leads him down a path of stitching together clues that seem to indicate his father is the Zodiac Killer.  “The Most Dangerous Man of All,” a FX docu-series on Hulu that shows Gary Stewart’s process as he attempts to trace his genealogy. The first couple episodes present the “facts” in clear, even detail. Stewart takes you step-by-step through the way his search progressed, the way he layered clues one on top of the other, until you’re pretty much convinced that this guy knows what he’s talking about. Things shift gears in episode 3, though: we start to see more perspectives from other family members and the true crime writer who has signed on to help Stewart write his book (which of course, goes on to be a bestseller). The tidy, tightly-knit story that you want to believe begins to unravel, showing its weak spots. Suddenly, you realize the docu-series isn’t quite the story you thought it was: instead of a man who traced his lineage to a serial killer, it’s the story of a man desperate for his own story — so desperate that he’s willing to do anything to construct it, to make all the parts fit, and to give up so much of the rest of his life to do it.

*

As a writer, the fascination with story, for me, lies in the tension created here: being drawn into the mystery and staying open to the unknown, but also exercising an element of control in your own adventure. There’s also tension between one person’s narrative and how that fits into the larger landscape of facts. History becomes a collaboration — shared experience never looks the same filtered through different voices. Over time, I notice the themes I’m drawn to again and again ,either through intent or unconscious bias. These themes layer themselves into patterns. Patterns create meaning. The resulting narrative, then, is mine, and mine alone.