Synchronicity… and The Knot

Synchronicity is one of those interesting-sounding concepts, but when it comes down to it no one can explain exactly what it means. Jung is supposed to have started it. He was trying to analyse a lady who was very resistant to analysis – sceptical; firmly rooted in the practical, provable world. During one session, so the story goes, she was telling Jung about a dream she had had, involving a scarab beetle. At that moment a rather gorgeous beetle appeared outside the window, which Jung opened so that it could fly into the room. From that moment, the woman was able to accept the possibility of non-logical, inexplicable happenings and her analysis could proceed. I wonder if Jung made that story up? If so it’s a good one. Synchronicity – strange but meaningful coincidence.

I have never struggled with synchronicity. I read a lot, and I have always noticed that bits of information pop up in unexpected places – unexpected books, but also films, television programmes, overheard remarks, dreams – and these pieces of information tend to be connected, with one another, and with whatever problem one happens to be trying to solve at the moment.

I am currently re-reading my huge collection of ancient paperbacks before they, or I, crumble to dust.  For want of a better system, I am going from A to Z. There are an awful lot of A’s. Today it’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, my copy of which is pretty near disintegrated already. I am reading about Zaphod Beeblebrox, an irresponsible, manic, two-headed and three-armed gentleman who has been appointed President of the Imperial Galactic Government.  He is described as ‘ideal Presidency fodder’. He has been chosen for his qualities of ‘finely judged outrage’, his ability to fascinate and infuriate. He has no actual power – no one knows who or what actually has the power, though something does. Beeblebrox’s role is to ‘not to wield power but to draw attention away from it’.

And I suddenly thought – well, the obvious. Who does that remind you of? A bit prophetic, eh? Especially when you remember The Hitchhiker’s Guide was published in 1979 and Douglas Adams died young, in 2001. But then – I couldn’t think exactly who – or what – might be wielding actual power in America, that You Know Who would be needed to distract from. And I mean, quite a lot of people must actually have voted for him. So that didn’t fit.

(Another bit of synchronicity: I was watching a Sandra Bullock/Hugh Grant film on Prime last night – Two Weeks Notice. Not a terribly good film, but free, therefore good enough. And lo and behold, the ghastly Trump popped up at the end, looking younger but sounding just as smug. He was playing himself, naturally, a cameo role. You’d think a Hugh Grant film would be a reality-free zone, all floppy hair and romantic charmingness… Is there no escape? I thought.)

And then I thought – Zaphod Beeblebrox – or rather the concept that a figurehead leader could be appointed solely to draw attention away from power, actually fits my country better. I have often wondered exactly what our monarch and her extended family were for, nowadays. Don’t get me wrong, I have always been glad they were there, for history’s sake, and at least vaguely interested in their improbable and expensive ‘doings’. I have always had great respect for the Queen, who has been on the throne for my entire lifetime, and is the same age as my mother, just as her mother was born in the same year as my grandmother.

But we are constantly reminded – and recently more so – that the Monarch has no real power. Hence, if the Prime Minister recommends that she prorogue Parliament, she has to do it. I am very glad Parliament was prorogued, and would be very happy if they stayed permanently prorogued until someone bundled them all up in a big sack and made off with them, preferably in the direction of the River Thames, but it occurred to me at the time – what if she hadn’t wanted to prorogue? What if she had put her foot down and said no?

Part of me so wants her to put her foot down. Part of me wishes we could have a Queen – or King – with all the powers of Queens or Kings of old. I know it’s dangerous, but right at the moment, wouldn’t it be a relief to have a Monarch who could actually do stuff, rather than wearing fancy robes and strings of pearls and drawing attention away from the politicians, civil servants or – worse, even – those nameless, faceless others who actually wield the power? Someone who could stride into the Houses of Parliament wielding an axe or a – something really big and scary-looking.

I was also reading about Alexander the Great. He wanted to be ruler of all Asia but there was this prophecy. The future ruler of all Asia, it was said, would be the person who untied a fiendishly complicated Knot, to be found in a place called Gordium, the capital of Phrygia. (So, the knot was called the Gordian Knot.) Alexander marched to Phrygia and tinkered around with this appalling Knot for a while, but he, just like all those who had tried before him, could not undo it. This was annoying, because he jolly well intended to be ruler of all Asia.

And then the answer came to him. Simple! He raised his great silver sword above his head and brought it down on the Knot so that it simply fell apart. Problem solved, he said. Now can I be ruler of all Asia? And eventually, he was.

Well, we now have the Knot – oh, the mother and father of all Knots. And surely Her Majesty could lay her hands on a great silver sword. Isn’t the Tower of London supposed to be full of them?

Strangeness

I occasionally attempt to write about subjects randomly generated through a subject generator website. It rarely ends well.

The idea, of course, is that one tends to get bogged down in one’s little domestic world – feeding the birds, tripping over the cats, visiting Mum in the Home, memories of stuff there seems no particular reason to have remembered and even less reason to inflict on anyone else. After a while, you begin to get bored with yourself, or the sound of your own written voice. You start to suffer from bloggers’ angst with angst-ridden questions drifting randomly through your mind, like

Who on earth is going to want to read all this old gubbins anyway?

Should I do everyone a favour and publish something useful, such as ‘Yet more recipes for cleaning stuff with baking powder and lemon juice’ or ‘How to look after your terrapin’?

(Does anybody know what a terrapin is? I have a feeling it’s something that lives in an aquarium.)

Anyway, this afternoon the Random Subject Generator has flung this one back at me:

Strange experiences, that can’t be explained rationally.

Oh dear. The trouble is that although I am very interested in spookiness and strangeness – as a one-time drippy hippie, why wouldn’t I be? – spookiness and strangeness never seem to have happened to me; always to other people.

For example, my younger sister went babysitting over the road, in the company of the (admittedly fairly strange) girl next door. They had not been in the house long when shrieking started and stuff got thrown around. The (admittedly fairly strange) girl insisted that it must have been poltergeists. The owners of the house seemed more inclined to believe that my sister and the (admittedly fairly strange) girl next door had decided to throw a wild teenage party in their absence, and that was why the house was wrecked. However, considering that the girls were twelve or thirteen at the time and knowing my sister’s placid and gentle nature I am more inclined to believe it was poltergeists.

Ex told me a story once, and Ex wasn’t one for fanciful tales, in fact he was compulsively and depressingly honest. No point asking him ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ He would have said ‘Yes, in fact it does’ and wouldn’t have understood why that was the wrong answer.

He told me that he had been visiting a school-friend at a remote farm in the Weald of Kent. Again, they were young teenagers. His friend’s parents were out on the farm somewhere so they stayed indoors, chatting. All at once a cabinet door flew open and shelf upon shelf of glass objects was hurled onto the floor, as if an invisible arm had swept along the shelves. Here’s me with all this imagination, and Ex with his pragmatic, down-to-earth seriousness yet he’s the one who witnesses the smashing glassware.

But why didn’t those poltergeists happen to me? I deserved them, surely, and I’d so have enjoyed them. I spent endless hours babysitting and not once did I encounter a ghost of any sort.

Maybe strangeness has happened to me, but in a different way, expressed through found objects or chance happenings that could easily have be explained logically, but which seemed to have a special significance, for me. In a way, these objects/events have felt like half-memories; clues to something, or perhaps to a whole series of somethings, long since forgotten and maybe irretrievably lost.

When I was a child I picked up a smooth stone in the middle of a piece of waste ground. It was almost buried in the pathway through some brambles so that I had to pry it loose. It contained a perfect fossil of something like a jellyfish, with clearly-defined legs and suckers and such. That stone got lost again. I don’t know what I did with it. I always felt I should have hung onto it, and that things started to go wrong when I let it go.

Many years later, at the end of my marriage, beachcombing mournful and alone (à la Princess Diana) in a little cove in Yorkshire I found amongst the pebbles a piece of white bottle glass worn away into a battered, lopsided heart.

One night, on a train, I found myself alone in the carriage apart from a young soldier. Talk to me, he said, please talk to me. I’m off to Northern Ireland tomorrow. At that time Northern Ireland was a kind of war zone and he might well have been going to his death. I don’t think I did talk to him, much. I think I was too frightened to. He got off the train at the next stop and I never saw him again.

The internet of other things

Synchronicities keep happening, but such vague and tenuous links nowadays that you could put them down as coincidences. Luckily, the older I get the harder I find it to believe in coincidences.

Recently I’ve got into TED videos. Everyone probably knew about TED talks a long time ago; it takes me a while to catch up/catch on. They are short talks, around ten to twenty minutes, from all manner of people on all manner of subjects, and they’re free. They are filmed at TED conferences which take place all over the world, but mostly in America and Canada. It astounds me that a person could get up on a stage at all, with all those people staring at them, let alone pace up and down, tell stories, put forward their wacky or not so wacky ideas, dance, expound, bewilder or make people laugh.

Recently I have enjoyed ‘TEDs’ on finding beauty in imperfection; a visual history of social dance; why you should talk to strangers; the art of human anatomy; not worrying about being fat (not that I am that fat – hasten to add – but it was an entertaining talk); how the making of masks can heal Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; blind soccer teams in Argentina; cosplay; and men ballroom dancing beautifully with men – a system for fluid changes of lead so that neither partner is permanently ‘him’ or ‘her’. Honestly, if you haven’t watched you ought to. You can learn so much.

Anyway, the latest talk was called ‘How trees talk to each other’ by a forest ecologist called Suzanne Simard who has spent the last thirty years studying communication between trees in Canadian forests. She explained how trees talk to each other underground, passing carbon, water, hormones and chemical warnings and information from one to another. Not all trees – some species communicated all the time whereas others seemed to be isolated. How could I have lived this long and not known this?

If one tree has stopped growing for the season it may begin to pass more nutrients/ messages to its neighbours. And the flow can be reversed – other trees in the network may feed it when it starts growing again. A dying tree will pass on chemical “advice” to others. A tree may broadcast a “warning” to other trees. A mother tree will preferentially supply chemical help to her own saplings that have taken root nearby. A tree can distinguish her own children from those of other trees! They share their surplus, and one way they do this is via a web of fungus roots. Fungi grow in the spaces between the trees and their roots tangle with the roots of trees. They live off the trees but the trees use them to connect with one another, chemically. So a forest is not just a collection of trees, it’s one whole, vast, communicating organism. Some trees are greater contributors to the network than others – a bit like servers as opposed to desktop computers, I suppose. You can cut down one and the system will recover, but if you cut down too many of the wrong ones a whole patch of forest can just – wither.

Something about this reminded me of the film Avatar. Wasn’t there something called the Hometree in that? This led me to wonder – vaguely, as is my wont – whether the writers of Avatar might actually have had this Canadian lady’s research in mind when they wrote the film.

And then I picked up my current read – Neil Gaiman’s 1996 dark-ish young adult fantasy novel Neverwhere. And lo and behold, another internet – this time a connection of sewers and secret doors, and messages passed from pigeons to rats to humans. Or are they human, these strange semi-Victorian characters going about their fantasy business underneath modern-day London – London Above, as they call it? If you like fantasy and  you’ve never read this one, go for it.

And get the TED app. So much entertainment for, in one case, nothing, and in the other the price of a second-hand paperback.

Featured Image: Within The Roots, by Janet Hoffman

Harlequin Dancers

 

They were harlequin dancers,

treading a gracious measure;

music-less, delicate, each of them being

the obverse of the other.

A fortunate conjunction, a synchronicity:

this side of time you may not see again

such symmetry.

α

 They were black and white to each other

snowfall on winter trees.

They were light and dark to each other; now

their days are pitiless, their nights are ice.

She lies bone-bare under desert sun; he

whirls in cold space.

∞

 Masked and bespangled, androgyne,

they spiralled down the years;

but now the aeons weigh them down,

seconds are centuries.

The elegance is broken, the fine pattern gone,

and each is half of each again,

and all of none.

Ω

Shepherds sorted, Wise Men plotted

Done – my Shepherds story for my new Angels & Other Occurrences sequence, which I’m scheduling to start on  1^st December. The Shepherds should come in on the 7^th.

Also – in the bath – along with driving, my best place for plotting – I suddenly ‘received’ the plot for my version of the Three Wise Men. Typed it out quick, before it disappeared. I looked at this plot outline thinking – that’s bizarre. That’s really weird. Can I really write something that weird? Yes, I think. If anyone can write something weird it’s probably me, and it’ll take my mind off the endless merry-go-round of upsets and complications that seem to breed in my family around Christmas.

Sometimes it pays to procrastinate, I’ve found. If you resist the temptation to start writing at once, often – it’s that Synchronicity thing again – see previous post: Synchronicity in Writing – a tiny new bit of information comes along and it’s that tiny new bit of information that the whole plot ought to have hinged on. Then of course you have to rewrite the plot but that’s all part of the fun.

This morning I was watching Countryfile and Adam Whatsisname, the handsome red-headed farmer chappie, was doing a piece to camera. He was telling us that, sadly, his father had passed away a few weeks earlier and this had reminded him of the Lock of Wool superstition. Once upon a time, he said, a Shepherd would be buried with a Lock of Wool clasped in his right hand; when he arrived at the Pearly Gates the angels, seeing the Lock of Wool, would let him in. They would know that a shepherd couldn’t get to church of a Sunday. He said he had done this for his Dad.

I was thinking, what a lovely story, and then I thought – I see – now I see how my Shepherds post is going to work, and how the Lock of Wool will be central. I see the characters, I see how many of them there are, I know their characters and their tragedies and why they are out on that hillside; I see who or what it is who will tell them…

That’s the joy of writing – sudden inspirations. More of a battle when the time comes to get them down on paper!

Synchronicity in writing

It seems to me that if you start looking for something in earnest you are almost certain to find it, or something weirdly related to it, and often where you would least expect. It’s a kind of coincidence thing – no logical explanation. Start reading and thinking and you will find that other, related stuff starts seeping out from under the skirting boards, wafting down the chimney and tap-tap-tapping at the window.

I am not the first to notice this. Famously, C G Jung talks about the coincidences that seem to happen in the world outside one’s head when something is going on inside it. This phenomenon he referred to on his good days as synchronicity; on his duller days he called it acausal parallelism. It is implied in common sayings like Seek and Ye Shall Find and When the pupil is ready, the Master appears. Anyway, enough of the Biblical/mystical stuff. I will give you an example of something synchronicitous that happened to me last year.

I had been writing about Sherlock Holmes and the justifications given in the novels for his rather shocking – to the modern reader – use of cocaine when bored. It happened to be my birthday that day and I was forced to take the day off, not to do anything birthdayish but to drive my car to a garage forty miles distant for its annual service. Car services take several hours and it was far too cold to be hobbling around the windswept streets of this distant town whilst waiting, so I spent part of the time in a nearby Tesco store, slowly filling a wire basket with birthday cards, cheese and pickle sandwiches, packs of fifty black biros and all those other things you tend to purchase when you just need to be somewhere indoors and heated in the coldest month of the year.

One of the things I spotted was a glossy science and technology magazine called Focus. I never normally buy magazines and had never heard of Focus, but it was in this randomly-purchased item that I discovered an article by neuroscientist Daniel Levitin (Professor of Psychology at McGill University, Montreal). There were several interesting bits. For example, did you know that human beings can only pay attention to a maximum of four things at any one time? So if you’re driving the car and searching for a parking space you may need to turn off the car radio to concentrate. (According to Cesar Milan the TV Dog Whisperer, by the way, dogs can only attend to one thing at a time.)

The two sentences that really caught my attention were these:

Ten thousand years ago things didn’t change very fast, so if something novel presented itself it was a good adaptive strategy to pay attention. We evolved a chemical system whereby we get a little shot of dopamine that makes us feel good every time we encounter something new.

and further down the same paragraph:

Dopamine is the chemical released when you eat chocolate, when gamblers win a bet and that gets people addicted to cocaine.

So do you see? Although Arthur Conan Doyle was a qualified doctor he could not have known about the neurotransmitter dopamine, since he died in 1930 and it was not discovered until 1957; yet he had Sherlock Holmes resorting to the drug cocaine when the stimulation he got from detection (encountering something new) was absent – spot on! The connection is dopamine, but the creator of Sherlock Holmes could not possibly have known this.

It’s a trivial thing, and would probably only be useful if you were writing a scholarly paper about Sherlock Holmes, but that’s what I mean about synchronicity. The more you read, the more you wonder, the more you become absorbed in, fascinated by and focussed upon a subject, the more related information will somehow pop up, get mentioned on the news or wander across the road in front of you. You will find that books fall open at the right page; the poster you glide past on the escalator will contain the quote you need; a random internet page will lead you to another and then another – and there some relevant something will happen to be.

All things which live below the sky

I never really thought about light pollution until I started to think about ghosts. It just occurred to me: if all the unnecessary light we generate nowadays hinders astronomers in their exploration of the heavens, might it not also hinder ghosts in their…manifestations? I mean, maybe they’re all around us but we can no longer see them because the shadows have gone, there are no dark corners.

Just out of interest I looked up photo pollution. It had never occurred to me that our man-made high light levels may be affecting things like our health, ecosystems and the life-cycles of animals, and may also be having subtler and as yet unknown effects. Spooky.

Digression/connection/synchronous occurrence:

A magpie has just landed on a telegraph wire right outside my window. There it sits – gosh, it’s huge – you never get to see magpies that close up normally – waggling about like a high-wire walker trying to keep its balance. Do you think birds could be coming closer? Yesterday I stepped out into my garden to collect the washing; perched on the clothes-airer, atop my washing but not as yet polluting it, was a huge pigeon and it didn’t fly away. I walked right up to it and asked it if it was OK. It continued to sit there for a moment or two, eye to eye, before flapping away in slow motion. Do you think this could mean something? I just keep thinking of birds being harbingers of death. All those folk-tales about birds coming to carry off the soul of the about-to-be-departed. Bear with me and I’ll look that up in Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain. Oooh…yes:

Many old highland families had particular death omens that came to them in the shape of a bird of unidentifiable species; at the moment of death, it was alleged to scream horribly. The bird was called an t-eun bàis. A similar bird, the tamhusg, appeared to people in parts of the Island of Skye. On Barra there is still a tradition of a huge, white-speckled bird whose nightly screeching is a sure sign of approaching evil or bad luck.

But then, the birds I saw weren’t unidentifiable. I mean, clearly they were a pigeon and a magpie. But there’s something else – something from a long way back, connected with The Garden by Andrew Marvell…

• Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,
• Or at some fruit tree’s mossy root,
• Casting the body’s vest aside,
• My soul into the boughs does glide;
• There like a bird it sits and sings,
• Then whets, and combs its silver wings;
• And, till prepar’d for longer flight,
• Waves in its plumes the various light.

So the soul, releasing itself from the poet’s body, perches in the trees like a bird.

But there’s a superstition, earlier than that…robins!

The robin was said to have tried to remove the thorns from Christ’s head during the crucifixion, injuring itself in the process. A drop of Christ’s blood fell on the bird and that was how it got its red breast. The red breast was also said to have come from robin having flown water into Hell for the burning sinners. The hand that kills a robin will shake thereafter. If you own a cow, the milk will become blood-coloured. If you break robin’s eggs something valuable of your own will be broken. Whatever harm you do to a robin, some equivalent harm is bound to happen to you. A robin flying in through an open window or tapping on the window is a sign of death being present. Strangely enough, I remember Ex rescuing a robin. He passed the house of a woman who didn’t much care for animals. She was sitting in her window-seat, talking on the telephone. Inside her house a robin was trapped, flying around in a panic, banging against the window pane right in front of her in its attempts to escape, while she ignored it. Ex being Ex – uninterested in humans but valiant in defence of the meanest of sparrows* – he marched into her house via the open front door and slammed open the sash window, while she was still talking, to let the bird out. And a year or so later she was dead, I can’t remember what of.

• A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
• Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
• Auguries of Innocence: William Blake

He also told me once that in his family a bird singing insistently outside a sick person’s window was taken for a sign that they were not long for this world.

How far we are wandering from ghosts and yet…not.

I wrote a couple of posts about doppelgangers (or doppelgänger) a while back, but I just learned something new, and that is why it is so bad to catch sight of your double. It seems the doppelganger, like the poltergeist, is another example of the ghost-that-is-not-a-ghost. Whereas the poltergeist is thought to be some kind of energy released by adolescents, the doppelganger is a form of fetch or wraith. It appears only once to its twin (you) before engulfing them (you) in the final embrace of death.

But what of classical ghosts – apparitions, real or imaginary, that are in some way connected with the souls of the departed? More to follow, dragons’ teeth permitting.

• *Beneath his heaven there’s room for all;
• he gives to all their meat;
• he sees the meanest sparrow fall
• unnoticed in the street.
• All Things Which Live Below The Sky: Edward John Brailsford (1841-1921)