synchronicity

in linklater's excellent, if a little boy-trippy, film Waking Life, the-character-who-is-ethan-hawke-in-animé is lying in bed (of course!) with the character-who-is-julie-delpy-in-animé and talking about crossword puzzles. there are studies, he claims, that show that crossword puzzles are easier to solve the day after they've been published, because the answers are already out there.

as a skeptic (some would say cynic), i'm often caught deriding the suspension of disbelief necessary for leaps of faith. i'm wary of the free-fall of fervent devotion, be it to an ideal, a person, a single way of being in the world. i'm fearful of fixing myself to any one cross, or, in a more mundane way, of hanging my clothes on any one hook. but if i'm being truthful, i have to admit to a surreptitious paradox in this reluctance to believe.

i don't believe in the empirically unfounded because i believe that i can't know. or, to put it in a less convoluted kind of way, i can't believe in the supernatural explanations put forth to explain the Great Mysteries of Life because i am so committed to the idea that humans can't possibly hope to understand the machinations of the universe because we're too small. i.e., there is something bigger than us. i told you it was a paradox.

so every now and then, there are things that both affirm my implicit sense that the something bigger than us is at work, and challenge my commitment to skepticism. like coincidence. or what j calls synchronicity. for example, yesterday i make my brief entry into blog world, and put up a snippet of glenn gould's goldberg variations. and yesterday night, j asks me if i have looked at our friend ralph's blog recently. i hadn't, though ralph has been much on my mind as he has been weathering his own storms lately. and lo, there, on feb 25th, this entry. a small coincidence, but kind of weird, since it's not like i'm a gould afficianado, and i really have been thinking about ralph lately. and the skeptic in me says "yes. coincidence. so what?" and the believer says "yes. coincidence. so there."

ants, apparently, and bees, and even some species of moles, exhibit something that biologists and psychologists call dispersed consciousness - a sort of atomically located brain, where each ant functions in a way that is analogous to, say, the different neurons in our brain. each performing, unconsciously, its part in a script that is much bigger than it. and the faithful part in me, the one that notes coincidence and synchronicity, likes this model very much. because, well, why not? why couldn't this be true for us, if it's true for the ants?

and then, true to form, that other part of me says, "prove it."


everything but the girl - time after time