Friday, February 15, 2013

Just Tote Up the Odds...........part one 2012


Carl Jüng, one of my many heroes, would have loved the following tale. It’s true, every word; accounts of the many curious events in my life need no embellishment. 
Despite much admiration I’m no student of his work (nor psychology in general). His books are dense, dry, and loaded with obscure references but I’ve read bits here and there plus a volume of selected letters. His autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, was a real pleasure; I’m more interested in the man, his way of bringing that enormous store of arcane knowledge to bear on such thorny subjects. Though Jüng’s worldview was so much deeper than my own we share some of its preoccupations: the convoluted, layers-upon-layers nature of the human psyche (so little of which we’re consciously aware); the perceived flow of this thing we call “time,” the cosmos at large. It is vast and we are small but gifted with an array of amazing sensory equipment, for us to use—for us, at times, to even savor with delight—in our interaction with a world full of wonders. All this….What for? I still like to bat that tired old question around, just for fun. I wouldn’t expect any answers but there’s no harm in sniffing at the edges of The Big Ones. (In truth, few things interest me more.) Topping the list, this cagey mystery:
            During my brief tenure on Earth I’ve seemingly had the lion’s share of highly unusual experiences and, years ago, started a list which gets added to on occasion. Those crazy coincidences, just-plain-weird incidents and meetings-in-strange-places  have inevitably led me to reject the philosophical stance that randomness and pure chance rule over all. No. Something else is going on here—something most subtle—woven elegantly into the fabric of reality. I have absolutely no idea what “it” might be but recognize that, puzzling and uncanny as all these occurrences seem, they’re just another manifestation of the fantastically intricate whole. I also realize my notions are abhorrent to the likes of Richard Dawkins—author of The Blind Watchmaker, arch Neo-Darwinist, teleology-denier—who blithely (and with maddening condescension) assures us that such wishful thinking is merely a protective device for staving off fear of the pitiless truth: All of this is no more than a cosmic fluke. It just happened, for no reason.
I’d have no difficulty embracing such a cold-hearted outlook, grim as it is…if it were true. There’s nothing negative about randomness; chance is an essential lubricant helping make the world go ‘round. We live, quite comfortably, cheek-to-jowl with chaos but amidst all this disorder sense a kindly harmony, some sort of Unnameable Principle that pervades everything. It both amazes and saddens me that a thinker as brilliant as Richard Dawkins doesn’t perceive this, too, and apparently isn’t bothered in the least believing that his presence on our exceptionally fine planet is devoid of significance.  He has stressed that living in a world without meaning or purpose doesn’t impede appreciating its beauty and intricacy. But, what then, does he make of the fact that none of this even “needs” to exist? If conditions at the Big Bang had been ever-so-slightly altered the universe could be an amorphous soup of subatomic particles instead of there being all this nifty…stuff. So Richard gets to be here with the rest of us enjoying (and suffering) the fascinating vicissitudes that come with the package-deal of life. After a life devoted to observation and contemplation I’ve seen not one sign of The Grand Plan but it seems terribly obvious that something is going on here. The phenomenon that Jüng called “synchronicity” has, for me, been crucial in affirming the actuality of some sort of purposeful force—or influence. A long string of fortuitous events, splendidly-timed, made my most momentous decisions easy ones and gave the trajectory of my life its fine arc. What’s transpired has lent my worldview a comforting conviction that there is meaning linked with being granted a chunk of time to actively participate in The Great Swirl. Not only are we here, now, but live in a world that in so many ways seems too good to be real. I saw a bumpersticker recently that expresses it perfectly:   
IF YOU’RE NOT IN AWE
YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION
I’m fine with not having the slightest idea about the hows & whys; we have only so much perceptive equipment—acute as it can be—to make use of, after all, and it’s obvious our capacity for Understanding is fairly limited. But on some level those absurdly improbable synchronisms—just another aspect of what I call “the given”— must be explicable. Whenever one happens my reaction is a frisson of delight; knowing the whole shebang is flowing and unfolding in its proper, inexorable fashion.

            A classic example of one of these random gifts-from-the-Universe:
            My father used to bring home stacks of these little time-and-expense notebooks from his workplace. They have a stiff cover and about twenty 3½”x 5½” lined pages bound by two staples. He used them to keep track of all kinds of things: gas mileage, vehicle maintenance logs, needs-lists. I’ve gone through quite a few myself. For more than two decades they’ve served as handy Name&Address books.
            But, being chintzy little notebooks, they’d wear out every few years and need replacing. My father is gone and with him went the endless supply; about four years ago I used the only one left for a new contacts-book. To help make this last one last longer did two new things: at the top of each page a I wrote a big letter (or two) in ink but the names and coordinates in pencil this time. That way, as they changed or the person left my world, an entry could be erased instead of crossed out. And, to protect the thin cardboard cover, a layer of clear cellophane packing tape.
            I’d never done this with previous editions and thought to decorate (and further stiffen) the cover with a photo before applying tape. Got out a box of old three-by-fives, looked for one I could sacrifice, and picked a rather odd image but one that could be trimmed to fit on the cover and still leave space for tape to hold it down. It was taken through a macro lens with my Father’s Minolta, summer of 1976, on a family vacation to the Santa Rita Mountains near Tucson. Our reason for visiting this little desert range, famous in “nature people” circles, was to see some of the exotic Mexican plants and animals that only show up in the U.S. there. The picture was a close-up of one—a type of scarab beetle, Chrysina lecontei—crawling up my left forefinger. This animated jewel, caught in the act of trying to escape with its life, was an inch-long, iridescent emerald-green-colored bug with metallic-gold highlights. Its stout legs were colored a similarly metallic-hued bronze. Like no creature I’d ever seen.…
 I trimmed down the thirty-year-old snapshot and “tried it on for size” but…it just didn’t look right. So, back to the stack. I finally settled on this picture of a former home right at the foot of the Sierra—my funky little shack, blossoming fruit trees; a guitar-playing friend seated beneath one in the foreground—an idyllic scene that somehow seemed much more appropriate on the cover of a homemade Name&Address book than a photograph of an insect so I trimmed then glued and taped it down.
            What to do with the scarab beetle? While not overly inclined to dwell on the past, I enjoy preserving memories (it’s in my blood…) and wasn’t about to just throw it out. Something like this—a random photo, an obituary, an old note—I’ll  tuck into one of my books. Most of them contain these mementos and it’s amazing, when I stumble on some such bit of flotsam (perhaps unseen for years), how it instantly becomes a ticket to a long-gone time or faraway place; a lovely little present from the living past.
            So I reached for a volume to cache my beetle in and pulled several that already held one or two items before finding an “empty” one: Jüng’s Synchronicity. Opened it, put the little bookmark-sized scrap of photograph inside, and slid it back home. I’d read its first half a few years before, naively hoping to get some smidgen of concrete insight into the phenomenon, but shelved the slender paperback when a chapter about his experiments with subjects guessing symbols printed on cards began. (I lost interest there, already knowing from other sources that the results had been inconclusive.)
             Fast forward two years or so. One day I happened to notice the book and pulled it off the shelf since I’d just been pondering the subject again—a matter long dear to my heart—and thought maybe to try again and finish this time. Not surprisingly, it opened naturally to the pages between which I’d stashed my picture of a golden-green scarab beetle and I absently began to read partway down the left one at random:
            I shall mention an incident from my own observation. I was treating a young woman who, at a critical moment had a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a Scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience.”
             Reading these words with mounting shock and wonder, I felt oddly numb, as if the day had come to a stop or gone silent. Of course I remembered this famous anecdote from my previous attempt (and a very similar version in his autobiography.) Finished, I gazed at the picture of my own golden scarab with a grin that had spread from my face  through my whole body. As mentioned, these events are a familiar element in my life. But this time I hit a synchronicity grand-slam…I won the synchronism sweepstakes. Just tote up the odds, Richard Dawkins, and read off that probability figure of ten-to-the-minus-whatever and tell me right to my face there’s not something just a little bit fishy going on here.
                       
For a few years of teenage-driven angst I flirted with believing the Universe was a cold, meaningless place “where nothing bears out in practice that it promises incipiently.” Things changed when I began to forge a life of my own; making choices, gaining an illusory (but necessary) feeling of control, and becoming “content with tentativeness from day to day.”[Thomas Hardy, diary] Then: amazing things started happening and at some point I began to feel like the Universe was really trying to lend a hand. Why me? I didn’t know…but began to conciously foster my gratitude for all these gifts. Eventually it was becoming downright ridiculous and, unavoidably, began to see a world that was operating under an additional set of subtle laws that couldn’t be explained scientifically but, by the same token, needn’t be attributed to a grey-haired, sky-dwelling deity. It just seemed so obvious that…something…was going on here. This story is merely an extra-good example of the unexplainable Something Wonderful that occasionally brightens an otherwise “normal” day. But there’s the trouble: just living is hard work, and to get by in our constant struggles we’ve been conditioned to not even notice that this planet and everything on it is altogether the One True Miracle. We seem to appreciate this fact only on rarest occasions (if ever). A pet theory maintains that my life—relatively, so easy and fortune-filled—has been granted so very much because I’ve been able to sustain durable feelings of wonder, appreciation and gratitude. I’ve also “been through the fire” and come terribly close to death, which has only strengthened my core beliefs. All the weird coincidences have served to affirm what I sense to be a fine thread of pure harmony that underlies everything. Even knowing I’ll never plumb this mystery, it’s the one truth upholding my essential and deep faith that this world we get to live in is a perfect place to be and everything, all of it, a gift not to be taken for granted— 
            Never to be taken for granted.
Lest the well run dry.         
                                                                                                                 19 Nov 2012, 14 Feb 2013



© 2013 Tim Forsell

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