January 11: Maybe Something to That Astrology Stuff After All?

By Paul Clark
(aka motomynd)

Zodiac. Astrology. Palm readers. Fortune cookies. Horoscope. They all go together. When I was growing up, our local paper printed the daily horoscope right next to the comics. That made the point, said all that needed to be said.
    At least that’s what I thought, until my son was about 14 months old. He was always precocious – took his first step a week before his seventh month birthday, insisted on walking into his 12-month doctor’s appointment on his own, “hands off dad, I got this!” – but shortly after he turned a year old, he began to outdo himself.

Synchronicity?

Yesterday I published an entry on intellectual property. This morning I read yesterday's newspaper and discovered that Ian McEwan has published a new novel, Solar, a portion of which I had read (and commented on back in December). A couple of sentences from Hephzibah Anderson's review (on Bloomberg News):

The story pivots on a freak accident that catapults a tubby physicist, Michael Beard, to the forefront of the race to find a sustainable energy source. Pursuing this worthy goal in the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change, the balding British boffin will clock thousands of miles and resort to intellectual property theft and worse. [my emphasis]

Isn't this just a coincidence? Or is it a Jungian synchronicity? A synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner.
    Or some emblem of divinity saying something like "God is watching over you"? In my manic excitement during Youie summer, I took all of the innumerable coincidences I was noticing as just such emblems. (There didn't seem to be anything of any more precise significance that they could possibly mean.) Coincidences have provided many a man and woman an assurance that life is not a matter simply of chance.

How could it be a coincidence [they ask themselves] that I could publish "Intellectual property" the very day that the personally most interesting book review in the local newspaper should use that phrase, and not just casually but by way of characterizing the pivot of the book! This cries out with significance!

Uh, yeah, but what significance? Remember that Carl Jung espoused the procedures of I Ching [The Book of Changes], a "system of divination" in which the adept meditates on potential meanings of chance juxtapositions.

Any juxtaposition can be used creatively to find hidden significance. We can, for example, open a book (any book, a dictionary, say, though a Christian might favor the Bible or a Muslim the Qur'an) and place our finger down at random on a verse. If we then read the verse (or the definition) with the expectation that something of personal import will be suggested, then it is highly probable that something will indeed come to mind.
    Note, though, that this works for almost any occasion. But we don't do it on just any occasion: it takes something like a striking coincidence to push us in that direction.
    Nevertheless, what might I make of this "intellectual property" coincidence? Do I have a valuable intellectual property in Moristotle that I am giving away free on Blogspot? Or should I focus on Michael Beard's theft, mentioned in the book review? Beware, Moristotle, quit including overlong quotations in your blog from the intellectual property of others!

Meaningful Coincidences

I admit that I left yesterday's post hanging there. I really need to say more about how and why we look for meaning in coincidences.

Could the precise mention of my 43rd birthdate be more than a meaningless coincidence? Is the only meaning it can have for me as reader whatever meaning I may care to invest in it? It appears that even if some occult shadow somehow engineered my being introduced to David Lodge and led me to this novel, where I would find the "birthday sign," its only more or less "objective" meaning would seem to be something elementary like, "Hey, pay attention!" I would still have to invent whatever further meaning there might be....

First, I point out that "meaning...for me as reader" is ambiguous. "As a reader"—that as, as an interpreter of a work of literature—I might have to acknowledge that the writer chose a particular date simply to support the plot. Within the world of the book, a particular date may have no "meaning" other than that.

So it was me as something other than reader who wondered whether there might be some occult significance in the date. This morning, in such "cold light of reason" as I can attain to, it seems fairly clear that in order to derive occult or any other "extra-textual" meaning from the experience of reading a book, I have to be disposed to look for it. And since the first thing I thought of looking for was that there might be a shadowy angel (some emissary of "God") trying to give me a message, it appears that my disposition might be to want to believe in angels, believe in "God," believe that "God" tries to communicate with people.

Coincidences have a way of getting our attention. So do anniversary years that end in zero (or, better yet, double-zero). We don't make a big deal about turning twenty-nine, but, oh, when we turn thirty! We ignore that the zero factor depends on the base of our number system for counting. Coincidences may have as little significance as that. All of the things that we experience as going on at the same time are occurring coincidentally. But we consider very few such pairings to be coincidences. Any date that Lodge contrived for a book set in the decade of my forties would have been coincident with some date or other in my life....

As far as being disposed to find "extra-textual" meaning in a book, what about Scripture? We'd better synchronize our understanding of that word by doing a dictionary check: "A sacred writing or book...A passage from such a writing or book."^* I had actually expected to find that "Scripture" meant a "writing or book" thought to be "the Word of God." I'm relieved to find that it isn't so, because the given definition seems to support my sense that to interpret a particular Scripture as "the Word of God," you have to be disposed to do so.

I am already well on record elsewhere as not being so disposed. I am rather disposed to interpret all such books as the works of men, works written, edited, selected, translated, intepreted by men (or women, of course).

Yet...I do seem disposed to expect "God" to communicate with me in some way or other. Curious.

I guess the question (or "a question," anyway) is: Is such a disposition part and parcel of magical thinking? And nothing more, that is.
________________
* A New College Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

Shadow Scheme

Reading David Lodge's "academic romance" Small World was a delightful romp, but the opening of its sequel, Nice Work, stirred up some unhappy memories. Chapter 1 introduces Vic Wilcox, the Managing Director of a general engineering firm in Rummidge. He's reading the Daily Mail, preparing to go in to the office.

He turns to the City Pages. HOW TO GET UP A HEAD OF ESTEEM.

What has been designated Industry Year has got off to a predictably silly start. Various bodies in Manufacturing Industry are working themselves into one of their regular lathers about the supposed low social esteem bestowed upon engineers and engineering. [p. 11]

What this brought to mind for me was my own years of going to work everyday "in industry." Ironically, I could never accept that our society paid programmers more to communicate with computers in their elementary language than it paid the teachers of our children to communicate in the language that had been Shakespeare's.

The other major character is Robyn Penrose, a scholarly junior English faculty member at Rummidge University. She reminds me of my "road not taken" forty years ago, when I dropped out of a doctoral program in philosophy and ended up at the International Business Machines Corporation. She represents for me what I might have been....

And then—as if to drive home the story's pertinence to me—the book mentions the precise date of my birthday during one of the darkest, most troubling of my years at IBM. Robyn's Head of Department (none other than Philip Swallow of "Swallow in Turkey") has just been reminded that his nomination "for the Industry Year Shadow Scheme" is due. He fishes from the bottom of his in-basket an unopened letter from the Vice Chancellor:

A Shadow, as the name implies, is someone who follows another person about all day as he goes about his normal work...Shadows will be asked to write a short report of what they have learned at the end of the exercise. Action: Nominations to teach the VC's Office by Wednesday 8th January, 1986. [p. 54]

Well, in case you haven't already guessed, Swallow nominates Robyn Penrose.

Could the precise mention of my 43rd birthdate be more than a meaningless coincidence? Is the only meaning it can have for me as reader whatever meaning I may care to invest in it? It appears that even if some occult shadow somehow engineered my being introduced to David Lodge and led me to this novel, where I would find the "birthday sign," its only more or less "objective" meaning would seem to be something elementary like, "Hey, pay attention!" I would still have to invent whatever further meaning there might be....