With one breath, with one flow

It may be overstating the case, but I think I owe a debt to Sting for introducing big brained concepts into his music. Specifically I'm referring to the album Synchronicity that he and The Police released (as their last) in 1983. Besides providing them their biggest hit single, "Every Breath You Take," a creepy stalker ballad misused as both crush tape and wedding song fodder by folks who don't pay much attention to things, it had a pair of songs that weirdly tried to shoehorn a Jungian philosophical principle into a pop music format.

Here is its Description, courtesy of Wikipedia:

The idea of synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined as the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships that are not causal in nature. These relationships can manifest themselves as simultaneous occurences that are meaningfully related—the cause and the effect occur together.

Synchronous events reveal an underlying pattern, a conceptual framework which encompasses, but is larger than, any of the systems which display the synchronicity. The suggestion of a larger framework is essential in order to satisfy the definition of synchronicity as originally developed by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.^{[citation needed]}

Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." Jung variously described synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle", "meaningful coincidence" and "acausal parallelism". Jung introduced the concept as early as the 1920s but only gave a full statement of it in 1951 in an Eranos lecture and in 1952, published a paper, Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle, in a volume with a related study by the physicist (and Nobel laureate) Wolfgang Pauli.^[1]

It was a principle that Jung felt gave conclusive evidence for his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious,^[2] in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlies the whole of human experience and history—social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Events that happen which appear at first to be coincidence but are later found to be causally related are termed as "incoincident".

Jung believed that many experiences that are coincidences due to chance in terms of causality suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances in terms of meaning, reflecting this governing dynamic.^[3]

One of Jung's favourite quotes on synchronicity was from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, in which the White Queen says to Alice: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards".^[4]

Despite the complexity of the ideas what it broke down to for pre-University Eric is that there were freaky coincidences that signalled an unidentified universal force at work. The kind of weirdness socially awkward teens love, right?

All of that preamble to say that I've been experiencing some fairly freaky coincidences over the last week or so. This example is a multi-faceted little gem of a co-inki-dink.

I've been rolling around the kernel of an idea about teaching a course on the films of David Lynch for a little while. Initally I thought it could fit under a creative writing heading focussing on the creative uses of the unconscious/subconscious for inspiration in poetry. Lynch often strings along his narrative with symbols and imagery that are connected very tenuously by tone and other poetic devices. So there's that. On a trip down to and back from Saint John Marc B. suggested that I talk to Allan Reid about adding it to UNB's expanding Cultural Studies program which is folding in the Film Studies minor in the not-too-distant future. So, yeah... that made sense. That was back in January or February (I think). I let time pass.

In the meantime I'd been reading a book I'd gotten for Xmas called New Kings of Nonfiction, an anthology edited by Ira Glass of This American Life. One of the standout pieces was "Host" by David Foster Wallace that took an in depth look at the Talk Radio format. When I finished the book I decided to see what else Wallace had in print, only to discover that he had committed suicide last September. So there's that. Nonetheless I decided I'd order in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a collection of essays at Westminister Books.

In the meantime the weather was getting warmer, the snow was receding. A feeling of possibility seem to be escaping from the unfreezing earth. So I went ahead and finally e-mailed Prof. Reid about my idea for a David Lynch course. The next day the book came in at the store and I picked it up and flipped through it at work. Now I have to clarify... I did not research the book's contents before ordering it, beyond knowing it was a collection of essays... ok? So halfway into it the book has an essay entitled "David Lynch Keeps His Head," a lengthy piece originally written for Premiere magazine dealing with Lynch's Lost Highway. So there's that. That evening I checked my e-mail to see that Prof. Reid had quickly responded with a fairly affirmative tone. He suggested we set up a meeting. It was just before Easter weekend, so I sent him the list of days the following week I could meet.

Returning from Easter there was an e-mail that said the upcoming Friday would work well for both of us. So... cool. I thought of bringing up the coicidence about the Wallace essay... at least as an icebreaker. That Thursday (the day preceding Friday on the calendar) before work I drop into Read's to see the new magazines, and who's face do I see on the current Stop Smiling?



I know?!!!?

The interview was good, though fairly unrevelatory (Lynch seldom talks about his films), but in the introduction it mentioned two external references... the David Foster Wallace piece from Premiere and a book about Lost Highway written by Slavoj Žižek, a respected Lacanian Marxist who also is apparently somewhat of a film buff too (I'd bumped into him in the extras to the DVD for Children of Men). Mental note.

So the meeting went well... despite the usual and somewhat expected University jump-a-hoopiness that will stand in the way... optimism is still warranted. The weekend was a pleasant one. This morning I had some errands to run downtown and when they were done I stopped in at Read's again to get a Lemon/Blueberry tea, a copy of WIRE and to do a quick Google search on my iTouch for the title of the Žižek book. Sitting next to me, laptop open and on her cell phone is a student complaining to her friend how she had screwed up a question on a final exam she'd just taken. So just as the Amazon page with the book title comes up... at that moment... she says indignantly, "I know!!! It's just so ridiculous!!!" Swear to God.