In 2009, Wikipedia published the original images and interpretive research of the Rorschach test — now 90 years old, the test has been in the public domain for 20 years. As time has gone on, serious questions have been raised about its ability to predict or identify mental illness. What Rorschach blots are good for, though — excellent for — is triggering pareidolia, the human habit of seeing meaningful patterns in random or vague phenomena. Pareidolia is what creates all the grilled cheese Jesuses and faces in the moon, and I think it creates a lot of poems, too — a recent example that comes to mind is Timothy Donnelly’s “The Cloud Corporation,” which (among many other things) seems to be the record of what a particular mind does while looking up into a shifting sky.
But today we are not producing the gimlet, visionary poems of sober Sunday morning: today we prepare for the revels of Friday. On the menu: Outdated Psychology for Poets (party game version).
The first option would be to just print out a series of the original inkblots and sit them on the coffee table as people wander and mingle. Everybody’s more or less familiar with them, and they make reasonable conversation pieces:
I think a better plan, though, is the following: first, prepare your own Rorschachs. There are a few ways to do this — one is to get a stack of scratch paper, one or more bottles of ink (black necessary, colors optional, eyedropper-style bottle a big plus), crease the paper in the middle, drip the ink on one side, and kind of sandwich-smear it together. I employ a lower-tech method, which is to crease a piece of paper, then draw anything symmetrical with a black pen. The ones I make tend to look like this:
Second, acquire guests, paying attention to quality as well as quantity. Number each test and set out a pen and paper for people to write down their impressions. I prefer to add a formal restriction: description of the inkblot usually has to be “adjective noun” or “noun noun” (exceptions always welcome). Then, communally engage in the ancient poetic tradition of Li Bai and Baudelaire, jotting down whatever occurs during the process. Once you’ve chemically manufactured enough warmth and fellow-feeling to be able to judge without acrimony, select winners, write the winning phrase at the bottom of the paper, and gift it to the winner. Like so:
Alter as desired. If you have more performative/confident friends, they’ll probably be able to write longer pieces without encountering crippling self-doubt; for me and mine, two words comes in under the “I should really edit this” impulse (nothing kills a party faster than focused revision). But two words — reflected upon later, in tranquility — are easily enough to spark as much poem as you are capable of writing (cf. “Let Birds”).
Of course, feel free to email with your reports, or leave some comments — the best descriptions of the second image above will be edited into the image itself. Do not attempt to improve upon “Plague Clown”: the very idea is folly.
Next week: Introductory Memesmithery.