The Curse of Curses
I remember hearing, once, about an experiment in which a roomful of scientists were presented with a t-shirt once belonging to Charles Manson. The group was asked if anyone among them would volunteer to put on the shirt. Supposedly, no one came forward. Out of all these clear-thinking, rational people, all were afraid of – what, being tainted by Manson’s residue?
After many years of vaguely assuming this story to be true, and even rehashing it in conversations about logic vs superstition, it occurred to me to google it. And although I couldn’t find any references to the Charles Manson t-shirt experiment, I did come across a psychologist and neuroscientist called Bruce Hood. Hood, based at Bristol University, was – at one point – famous for producing a cardigan once owned by serial killer Fred West, during lectures. As in the apocryphal Manson experiment, Hood would ask his students if anyone would come forward and put on the cardigan. It’d been cleaned, he’d tell them. So there’s no chance of – say – coming into contact with the blood of any of West’s many victims. However, according to Hood, most of his students couldn’t even be paid £10 to put on this totally innocuous looking, clean piece of knitwear. Not only that, but people would recoil from the minority who did put on the cardigan.
As it happens, the cardigan didn’t even belong to Fred West. It was just a prop through which Hood could prove that superstition can override the logic of even the most educated people. But, would I put on (or even touch) an item I believe to have been owned by Fred West, or Charlie Manson? No. Not even for a tenner, or to demonstrate to a roomful of people how rational and enlightened I am. People’s possessions must, even on a molecular level, take on something of them. And am I prepared to come into physical contact with whatever it is in a person’s essence, whatever curse, or fog of evil, made them the way they are? Again, no. Our belongings, particularly our clothes, marinate in us for years. And, in some cases, that means marinating in murder juice.
My belief that objects can be cursed came to a head about three years ago. I was going through one of those periods – a month, maybe - where everything I touched turned to shit. Work had dried up, I was having gruesome nightmares, and I was arguing with pretty much everyone I knew. Gradually, I started to blame all this on Agathe. Agathe is an elderly, bonneted, Breton woman, rendered in watercolour, in a chipped, gilded frame. I bought her in a junk shop, in my girlfriend’s mum’s village in France. I saw her, surrounded by old kitchenware, obsolete electronics, and ugly vases, and enjoyed her expression of abject misery. She seemed disdainful of everything around her, including me, and I liked that. Basically, I thought she was funny. And sort of stylish in an anti-fashion way. My girlfriend thought she was terrifying, and still brings up the €60 I spent on her as a prime example of my unhinged spending habits.
Back at home in London, Agathe seemed to watch me as my life fell apart. Her scornful expression wasn’t funny anymore – it was saying, from up on my bedroom wall, “you’re lazy and sinful, and you’ve brought all of this upon yourself”. In my mind, Agathe became this vessel of everything hateful. And what a cliché, right? A cursed painting of a grim-faced woman. Unoriginal or not, I reasoned that everything had started crumbling the moment Agathe arrived in my house. I thought about other supposedly cursed paintings; The Hands Resist Him, the Anguished Man, the Crying Boy. I filled my head with stories about tormented artists painting in their own blood, and figures in oil and acrylic that seemed to move. One night, eyes stinging from lack of sleep, I moved on from being suspicious of Agathe to fully convinced she was the source of all my problems. In my pyjamas, I carried all €60 of her outside, to the communal bins on the estate. And there I stood, in the cold – an educated, adult woman – acting out her own James Wan film. It was at this point, dithering over whether to chuck a painting I’d paid good money for into a wheelie bin, that self-awareness crept in like an exasperated parent of a toddler. The painting wasn’t evil; I was a person who’s seen too many horror films having a mental breakdown.
Standing there, holding the painting, I looked at what was actually going on in my life. My premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) paired with approaching the first anniversary of losing my mum to cancer had turned my brain into a mayonnaise of pure paranoia. Scanning my surroundings to check no one was sitting there with a bag of popcorn, enjoying my meltdown, I took Agathe back inside. Her expression seemed sort of funny again. I’d say she looked relieved I hadn’t binned her, but – trying to cut back on the magical thinking – I settled for “Ceci n’est pas une femme”.
I’ve since moved in with my girlfriend, and Agathe scowls at us both from our living room wall. The former has come to sort of like her. Or, if not that, accept her as a cantankerous great aunt, watching us WFH with the look of someone who thinks coddled young people should be back in the office.
Don’t get me wrong though, I’m still deeply afraid of cursed objects. At the British Museum the other day, I waved goodbye to a Congolese figure of a two-headed dog after looking at it, suddenly afraid I hadn’t show it enough respect. The figure, a 19th century magical object, spiked with nails and jagged pieces of scrap iron, is one of many objects housed at the museum, reported to be a source of paranormal activity. And, bearing in mind the brutality with which most of this stuff was snatched up, curses (if you believe such things to be born out of unimaginable suffering) seem inevitable.
With curses, it all comes down to Pascal’s Wager. Pascal argued that we should go through our lives being Godfearing, just in case God exists. If he doesn’t, then – worst case scenario, you’ve wasted a bit of time sitting in church. If he does though, and you just had to be one of those “atheism is my whole personality” dudes, you’re going to Hell. Forever. Pascal was a mathematician and, to him, this made mathematical sense. So, ultimately, I’d rather be seen as a superstitious rube for waving at statues and hypothetically steering clear of serial killers’ knitwear, than end up in a James Wan film of my own making. It just doesn’t help that this kind of thinking is exacerbated by mental illness and confirmation bias. Which I guess is the curse of curses.