NANDINI NAYAR
 May05 Enid
Blyton II
Apr05 Enid
Blyton I
PENI GRIFFIN
Mar05 Last
Column
Feb05 What's
In Your Notebook?
Jan05 Read
A Little Louder
Nov/Dec04 Creativity
IV
Oct04 Creativity
III
Sep04 Creativity
II
Aug04 Creativity
Jun/Jul04 Social
Angst and All That
May04 Reading
In Public
Apr04 Elephant
In The Living-Room
Mar04 Literary
Synchronicity
Feb04 The
Most Important Thing in the World
Jan04
Year-End Wrap-Ups
Dec03 Editors...
They Ain't Want You Want, They're What You Need
Nov03 The
Secret Formula for Originality - Revealed!
Oct03 An
Incoherent Message Concerning Narrative Structure; or 'Reality. What a
concept.'
Sep03 Preaching
to the Choir
Aug03 FanFic
on ACHUKACHAT, the website discussion board...
|
Literary Synchronicity
by Peni Griffin
I read Summerland
by Michael Chabon, the other day. The next day I read Tracker
by Gary Paulsen. The first book is a long fantasy which features baseball,
Sasquatch, a personal zeppelin, and a scrambling together of American tribal
lore, Norse mythology, and European-American fakelore (i.e., Paul Bunyan, Pecos
Bill). The second is a short realistic novel about a teen-age boy who "walks
down" a
doe. They are both about paying attention and recognizing the beauty of the
world around you, on the one hand; and about coming to grips with mortality,
on the other.
 
This sort of thing happens to me all the time. I've already mentioned one such coincidence here - reading Coraline and The Wee Free Men one after another, and recognizing them as, at one level, the same story. When researching, I continually find that a book I choose to read as a distraction will instead illuminate the topic for me. I read a book containing an idea I never heard of before, and then I go online and encounter a thread or a query to which this idea is directly applicable. The book on extinct birds which informed me that I needed to completely re-research and re-write the Paleo-indian story came into my hands while the manuscript was being read by the very editor who would believe in the story enough to hound me into making space in my life to do the work. And so on.
"Don't tell me the odds," I say with Indiana Jones; but whereas he doesn't want to know how hard what he's about to do will be, I wouldn't understand even if you told me. Whether a particular coincidence is astonishing or not may be mathematically demonstrable, if you understand math, but I don't. Therefore I make no claims as to the peculiarity of my synchronous reading experiences. As many books as I read,a lack of coincidences might be more surprising. Coincidences are important because my recognition of them affects the way I think, not because they are unusual.
I picked up Tracker and Summerland at the same time wholly by accident. On the day I went into the library, Summerland (about which I had been hearing conflicting buzz) happened to be face out. Gary Paulsen is one of the authors I am reading unsystematically, grabbing a new one every time I walk by his shelf, and Tracker was the one I picked up this time. But, if you examine YA literature, these two themes are not particularly hard to sniff out. We start working on them in our teens (if a family death has not forced us to start earlier) and continue to sort out the relationships among mortality and happiness, work and play, beauty and practicality, for the rest of our lives. Nobody is ever done learning to appreciate the world, and most of us have to come to terms with mortality and pain anew every time something awful happens.
I read in the backyard, barefooted, during the week that I took vacation in
order to revise (for the last time?) the Paleo-indian story about which I've
been obsessing for so long. I was palpably, vividly, marvelously happy as
I read, because I was systematically sorting out every problem my editor had
with the manuscript, because the weather was perfect, because the lettuce
was lush and swallows were scouting and the golden-fronted woodpeckers were
courting, because of wildflowers and cats and the fish in the pond; because
the new Melissa Etheridge album - Lucky - is
mind-blowingly good and because, at the moment, the Paleo-indian book was
an award-winner again. (It
fluctuates;
this week I think it'll be roundly ignored.)
At the same time, my Gramma is dead. My niece is still in the hospital after
her car accident in December. My friend is having a difficult pregnancy. My
husband chronically feels bad, my house urgently needs repairs I can't afford,
and let's not talk about politics.
But here were these books, telling me to grab onto the pain, to use it, because it was part of the happiness. They provided literary confirmation of principles which sometimes work and sometimes don't (depending partly on biology): That beauty is greater, not less, because it is fragile. That mortality does not remove the value from life, but renders its values more urgent. That greatness is achieved by overcoming imperfections and incorporating them into ourselves, not by eliminating them.
It doesn't take much hunting around in the lyrics to find the same affirmation in the Etheridge album.
This sort of emotional dovetailing is not the only, or most tangible, coincidence that audiences encounter. Researchers have a term for the influence of random chance on their work - the Library Angel. We all have our stories. How the fact or figure or illustrative item we had been looking for in vain for months suddenly, miraculously, appeared before us in the window of an antique store or in a document accidentally filed where we would find it instead of where it belonged. How new vistas opened before us when a book fell off the top shelf and landed, open, at the very page containing the bit of information that would send us in the right direction. How life rearranged itself to make facts accessible and connections possible.
When I first conceived The
Music Thief, I assumed that I would never write it because I knew nothing
about Tejano music, and not nearly enough about the culture of my Hispanic neighbors
- but then the temp service sent me to work in the bilingual/bicultural center
at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where they set me to proofreading
books and articles on Tejano music and the culture of my Hispanic neighbors.
They were also producing a special issue on gangs which made me realize a whole
new level of plot.
That's the sort of thing that leads people to believe in fates and gods and other amorphous directors in their lives.
I call The Music Thief, on that basis, "part of my contractual obligation to the universe," but at base I'm an agnostic. The Library Angel, or the fairies, or some omnipotent being may or may not have objective existence as entities, and may or may not be interested in my achieving a certain state of mind or a certain book. Whether some outside force is acting on me, or random chance creates opportunities for accomplishment, happiness, and insight cannot be proved one way or another, and I don't care which is true (if either is). What I can be sure of is that I exercise free will.
If a book falls on my head, I can put it back on the shelf without reading a line. I can chart out a line of research and focus on it exclusively, ignoring any side vistas, in order to retain control of my own achievement. I can reject what Michael Chabon and Gary Paulsen and Melissa Etheridge unwittingly come together to tell me; either because I'd rather postpone happiness until nothing whatever is left for me to be unhappy about, or on the grounds that coincidence is automatically trivial.
Synchronicity.
This term (coined, I believe, by Dr. Jung) may be loosely defined as "meaningful coincidence." That it happens with some frequency does not seem to me odd, because my theory of the meaning of life is similar to my theory of the meaning of literature. Meaning is created by the mind perceiving it. These letters strung across your screen only mean anything because you and I agree that they do; and you, as reader, may reject, accept, modify, or recreate the meanings I attempt to convey with them. We are constantly engaged in interpreting the world around us, forming it into meaningful patterns which we can exploit or enjoy. We have evolved* to recognize patterns, which is the same as creating patterns, since every data set can be arranged in more than one way as required. If I make my own meaning, obviously I make my own synchronicity.
With a little help from Chabot, Paulsen, and Etheridge, of course.
*Or created, if you prefer - for these purposes, it makes no difference
March 2004 © Peni Griffin
|
|
