I first learned about the concept of synchronicity when I read and heeded some of the invitations in The Artist’s Way a couple summers back.
I find synchronicity thrilling and humbling; disarming almost. For the foreseeable future, any congregation of gerunds will summon Alexander Chee’s recap of Annie Dillard’s admonition (god forbid it be a warnING...) that where two or three gerunds are gathered linguistic tinnitus ensues. In other words, sharper verbs if you know what’s good for you, if you want vivid.
Synchronicity unnerves me. I wonder if I am actually open to it. I wonder what I’d need to let go of to make myself available to it.
Just before the table of contents in John Edgar Wideman’s memoir Hoop Roots he writes “Different pieces coming from different places—read them in sequence or improvise” which was funny because we had gone back and forth in class about whether reading chapters out of order is sacrilegious. Funny, in this instance, is another word for relevant. Someone mentioned that reading out of order never would have occurred to them.
I saw the word concatenation in an article about secondary translation of the Arabian Nights on Thursday. Not long after, I saw the word concatenation again in My Meteorite.
Lately, I have taken to listing words in the back blank pages of books I read. I include words that are new to me and words that are older to me but whose meaning is not quite certain, just out of reach. Concatenation made the list. My Meteorite had a remarkably long list, I paused to calculate that I had listed more than one of these such words per page.
Concatenation means a series of interconnected things or events.
Synchronicity: the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.
I have a hunch: all synchronicity is concatenation but not all concatenation is synchronicity.
I thought that my two ‘concatenation’ encounters were synchronicity. Concatenation’s definition when I looked it up felt ironic. Later on, it just feels redundant, a tautology, if still perfectly connected.
I wondered if noticing the word again was just like how you notice everyone’s haircut after yours is cut, or people’s shoes when you’ve gotten new ones. What I’m trying to say is that there are encounters or experiences that alert us to what was already there, what has already been there. Now that I knew that the word concatenation was a word, I could more easily recognize it and the subsequent recognition had meaning. Yet if I hadn’t read the first article, I would have probably still added the concatenation to the list in the back of the book.
I checked out Hoop Roots from the library so I cannot make my word list in the back of it. I checked it out because a writer whose writing I love, Ross Gay, described in depth his love for the book. On Friday, a poet I follow on instagram posted a video of John Keene talking about love on instagram, one slide in a series. The caption: Shut the hell up when love is talking. I was struck by this sentence, by this imperative. I was astounded by the few pages I’ve read so far of Hoop Roots and My Meteorite. Both books provoked my own creation right away, little snippets bubbling and bursting to the surface of my consciousness. Something to do with awe and clarity. A reverence beyond containment, write that down.
Another part of my love affair with words lately is noticing words that were hiding in other words (to me). It took me until last Thursday to realize that the words empire and state are in the name of the Empire State Building. I had never noticed that those words were there, never made the association. Maybe it’s because I’m walking by the building a couple times a week. Empire and State and violence and colonization and knowledge and the building is very large. Or, ambivalence is also ambi valence, two valences, two directions and so of course you feel torn. To notice what was hidden before in the names and the words, wtf I didn’t see you there. The games people and words play.
This porous web we find ourselves in. Synchronicity as web remembering and as possibility attunement.