The East bases much of its science on chance and considers coincidences as the reliable basis of the world rather than causality. Synchronism is the prejudice of the East; causality is the modern prejudice of the West. The more we busy ourselves with dreams, the more we shall see such coincidences—chances. Remember that the oldest Chinese scientific book [the I Ching] is about the possible chances of life. —Carl Jung, Dream Analysis seminar, 1928

“Hah!” Eris thought. “Here shall be a new game.”  —Principia Discordia, 1970
 

Apologies for the long delay. Elegant new laminate floors in our house evidently trumped metaphysical concerns. But now we can say a few words about synchronicity.

A few words. Humph. I figured I’d just go through the relevant books in my personal library one by one and blow everybody away with my formidable knowledge on the subject. Turns out it’s no longer that kind of subject, if it ever was. And my knowledge of it is more fragmentary than formidable. Nevertheless, let’s dig in and try to bluff our way through, as if we were holding forth at a cocktail party.

We begin today with the first book on our list, and the foundational one: Carl Jung’s Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. You can read and download an image pdf of the 1955 Pantheon version here.

Jung coined the term synchronicity in the late 1920s while leading a six-part seminar on dream analysis, wherein he recounted one dream experience that made a great impression on him, involving a female patient whose “highly polished Cartesian rationalism” was preventing any progress on an emotional level. Then, as he tells it:

“I was sitting opposite of her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab–a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window and immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer, whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words ‘Here is your scarab.’ This broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.”

Here we have the essential Jungian conception of synchronicity: the inner content of the mind and the outer content of the world synchronizing in time and without any empirical connection, making the coincidence meaningful and acausal. A further, implied, conception is that the shock and perhaps even awe-inspiring patterning of such incidents will be numinous, with a potential for psychological release, perhaps in turn facilitating personal growth. This insight has meant that synchronicity has persisted as a topic of interest for Jungian analysts, even more so in the present century. One such analyst is Joe Cambray, whose brief article on this topic is well worth a look.

Jung was never the most scintillating of writers (trust me on this), but he did cultivate a wide range of interests and friends, including Sinologist Richard Wilhelm—whose translations into English of the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching are still well regarded—and physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a pioneer in quantum physics. When I first read Jung’s book in 1985, I totally missed these two aspects, probably because I was intellectually unprepared for them at the time. Nor did I have the lucidity of Joe Cambray’s prose to light the way. But we will be messing with these strange matters soon, as we move to other books in our series.

Another way of looking at coincidence as it occurs in daily life–my way, as it happens–is to divide it into two types: (1) seriality–a series of events, linked in meaning, that occur over a period of time and tend to persist unexpectedly once first noticed; and (2) simultaneity–a pattern, or constellation, of events linked in meaning that appear within a very brief time frame, so brief that they may seem almost simultaneous in retrospect.

By 1930, Jung and Pauli were already familiar with the intensive studies of seriality undertaken by Austrian botanist Paul Kammerer, published in 1919 as The Law of Seriality: A Theory of Recurrences in Daily Life and World Events. They were not convinced that Kammerer’s obsessively compiled examples fit their conception of synchronicity, since, despite their often uncanny sequencing, they could easily be explained as functions of everyday probability distributions, and thus were not truly acausal but merely statistical. Typical of these is a series of fish-related events that Jung recounts early in his book. But “fish” is a pretty generic symbol-complex, and thus liable to occur in any number of contexts and forms, unlike, say, a relatively obscure historical figure like Simon Bolivar, who popped up out of the blue one day in 1990 and followed me around for a week (an upcoming synchro snack!).

Cambray notes that, in addition to defining seriality as a necessary but not sufficient condition for true synchronicity, “an important step taken by Jung and Pauli was to formulate the notion of the psychoid archetype, imagined as the deepest layer of archetypal reality where the psyche and matter meet and become indistinguishable. Synchronistic phenomena are thought to arise from activations of this level of reality.” This is a powerful concept that we’ll return to in upcoming posts. Powerful because contact with this layer of self might be what provides the emotional charge that makes these events seem so numinous. For just a moment, when we feel that emotional current up and down our spine, the world seems better arranged than we’re used to; it seems drenched in metaphor. Let Joe Cambray tell it:

“Just as the capacity for metaphor has been linked with the formation of mind, synchronicity could be treated as a specific kind of metaphor-forming process when reflected upon from outside the event—an “objective” metaphorizing tendency of the world itself. Disparate elements without apparent connection are brought together or juxtaposed in a manner that tends to shock or surprise the mind, rendering it open to new possibilities, for a broadening of the view of the world, offering a glimpse of the interconnected fabric of the universe.”

In other words, psychoid archetype or not, synchronicity brings the “woo-woo.” So much so that Joe has big plans for it: “Ultimately synchronicity will prove to be a concept for the 21st century, requiring new paradigms to help us explore its range and value. This may include synchronistic phenomena for larger scale events, not just for individuals, but for groups, cultures, and even worlds.”

Given my own experience, I’m not inclined to doubt him on this score.

PROUST QUOTE OF THE MONTH

Good-bye, I’ve barely said a word to you, but it’s always like that at parties—we never really see each other, we never say the things we should like to; in fact it’s the same everywhere in this life. Let’s hope that when we are dead things will be better arranged. [spoken to Marcel by Mme. de Guermantes]

PROUST QUOTE (SUPPLEMENTAL)

It’s worth noting here that my Virgilian guide through the dark forest of Jungian prose, Joe Cambray, has a surname that’s one letter’s difference from Combray, Proust’s fictional name for the family country retreat of his childhood, Iliers. And the Proust family’s two customary walking paths in Iliers would be fictionalized as Swann’s Way and the Guermantes Way. But wait! We know Charles Swann was Charles Haas in real life, but what about the Guermantes family? Well, . . .

Attentive readers will note that Eman, the real-life Guermantes, is one letter’s difference from MY surname, which was one reason among many that my old blog’s title was One Letter’s Difference.

SYNCHRO SNACK

A quarter century ago I worked in a small independent bookstore for a few years. It was a busy neighbourhood, lots of street traffic, and people would sometimes pop in to ask a quick question, as if merely glimpsing the bookstore sign had brought something suddenly to mind.

“Ever read a book called Go Ask Alice?” A young guy had popped his head in the door, and his smile hovered there in mid-air, as if disembodied.

“I’ve heard of it, but no, I haven’t read it. Computer says it’s still in print. We could order it for you.”

“Nah, that’s okay. Great book though, you should get it.” And his head and smile disappeared out the door, as if magicked away.

A short time later I opened a box of books to begin processing a shipment of new titles. First clump of books on top? Something called What the Dormouse Said.

Now, the odd thing about this pair of books popping up almost simultaneously, besides the obvious (see Song of the Month, below) is that neither of them has, in the usual sense of the word, a proper author. As you already know if you clicked its link, Go Ask Alice, purporting to be the diary of an anonymous teenage girl swallowed up by the drug culture, was actually written by a Mormon youth counsellor striving, I guess, for the early 1970s version of Reefer Madness. She later wrote other pseudo-diaries in the same vein, including one about dabbling in Satanism. What the Dormouse Said is a selection of quotes from famous children’s books, whose presenter is at least scrupulous enough to insert the term “selected by” in front of her name to make it clear that she is not actually an author. Speaking of quotes, let’s remember that our Dormouse never actually says “feed your head” in the Lewis Carroll books; it’s only Grace Slick’s authorial licence in “White Rabbit” that linked the two book titles in my mind. Well, that and the fact that they appeared to me almost at the same time. Almost.

SONG OF THE MONTH

Before the charismatic and pulchritudinous Grace Slick joined the Jefferson Airplane in mid-1966, she fronted another popular San Francisco group called The Great Society (a satirical jab at President Johnson’s promotional tag line). Her husband at the time, Jerry Slick, was on drums, and his brother Darby was a pretty decent eastern-modal-type psychedelic guitarist. This early version of “White Rabbit” was recorded live in April 1966 at a club called (ahem) The Matrix. You may want to water some plants or do some dusting during the extended guitar-and-sax intro, or just relax and enjoy the pseudo-hypnotic atmosphere, a whiff of ancient near eastern mystery cult, before Grace steps in with her friendly advice. This may have been, as one fan has said, the only time she ever sang off-key, but having to play bass while the bass player was on sax might have disoriented her a bit. In any case, she certainly nailed it in the corporate studio a year later with the Airplane. For a more contemporary live performance, check out Grace Potter and the Nocturnals in 2009, where a suitably retro-sounding band with a notably tall female bassist** lend it the requisite je ne sais quoi. I like the Great Society original because it sounds more organic and grounded, even chthonic if you will, a taste of what that music sounded like before the record producers got hold of it and set about turning psychedelia into psychedollara (sorry). But of course I would never have heard of the Great Society if those greedy record companies hadn’t made “White Rabbit” such a money-making hit..

Grace Slick’s exit for the Airplane brought The Great Society (and her marriage to Jerry) to an end. But Columbia records had recorded their live stuff at The Matrix, and released two LPs of it in 1968 to capitalize on her now-famous and, let’s face it, marvelously mellifluous moniker. I scooped one of them from that Mecca of secondhand records, The Market in Wolfville, NS, in 1976.

**The super-talented Catherine Popper, who has played with everybody who’s anybody and is also a singer-songwriter. And as long as we’re having fun with names, a bit odd that Grace Potter had a bass player named Popper. Potter, Popper; it’s basically one letter’s difference. Okay, I’ll stop now.

Let the old world make believe—it’s blind and deaf and dumb. But nothing can change the shape of things to come. —”Max Frost and the Troopers” (1968)

Our opening photo today is from the groundbreaking adaptation of H.G. Wells’s 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come—groundbreaking more in terms of production and set design than accurate predictions of things to come. Impending world war, yes. Devastating bombing of cities, yes. These, after all, had been experienced in the recent past. But then it veers into utopian realms of fancy that, despite their breathtaking visual impact in the film, no longer wield much credibility or exercise much hold on our imaginations.

Our opening quote is from a pop song also titled “The Shape of Things to Come.” It was the centrepiece of the 1968 satirical exploitation flick Wild in the Streets, wherein 14-year-olds get the vote and all sorts of, well, wild things happen. Especially in the streets. The phrase reductio ad absurdum comes to mind. The famed husband-and-wife songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil infused the lyrics with the utopian flavour of the time, seasoned with a dollop of revolutionary apocalypse. The group that “performs” the song in the film is fictional (hence the quotation marks in the attribution above), but it was released as a single and nestled itself in the Top 40 for many nonfictional weeks that year. (The vocals were dubbed by Harley Hatcher, known for his biker movie film scores— and yes, his first name really was, coincidentally, Harley.)

Past intuitions about the future rarely hold up in the present. Or, to quote baseball zen master Yogi Berra, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Unless, maybe, you’re Nostradamus. Which leads us to the real reason for the title of this month’s post. I want to drop some hints, lay down some markers, make some utopian predictions that may or may not hold up, about what will be appearing here in the coming months.

First, I’ll only be posting monthly from here on, with occasional interim surgical strikes when I experience spasms of brilliance that demand to be shared. Unfortunately, the vast tracts of free time I had anticipated in retirement have turned out to be just another utopian mirage.

Second, I’ll continue talking about some of the books I’ve been reading, and try to catch up with a backlog that’s accumulated. As you’ve likely surmised by now, by “talking” I mean commenting impressionistically on the books in a conversational fashion, not writing full-length reviews. If we’re meeting for coffee and you ask me what I’ve been reading lately, you’re not expecting a 3,000-word oral essay. So.

In my tag line I’ve promised you synchronicity, and by Grabthar’s Hammer, by the suns of Worvan, you shall have it. In digestible portions, mind you. Our synchronicitous guests will include:

• Carl Jung, who coined the term “synchronicity” to signify “an acausal connecting principle.”
• Jung’s collaborator Marie-Louise von Franz, who will talk about its connections to divination and the cyclical and patterned time experienced in ancient and Oriental cultures.
• Ira Progoff, another Jungian, who’ll explain how archetypes can constellate events and how to keep track of this mischief with synchronicity notebooks.
• Notable weirdo of yesteryear Robert Anton Wilson and his curious 1988 essay collection Coincidance: A Head Test.
• The most notorious weirdo of them all, Philip K. Dick, who will say “a few words” (about a million of them, actually) about his Exegesis of the uncanny events that dominated the last decade of his life.
• Polymath Arthur Koestler and an early glimpse of the New Physics in The Roots of Coincidence (1972).
• A “surprise” guest—the only living, contemporary author on our panel—who will try to pull it all together for us but will also throw the occasional glass of cold water in our faces. (No, it’s not me.)

And that’s not all, as the infomercial guys say. I’ll talk about two stimulating recent reads on artificial intelligence:

• Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI (2019) [scientists and thinkers who’ve spent most of their careers in this field]
• Moral AI and How We Get There (2024) [a computer scientist, a data engineer, and a philosopher]

I also want to blather vaguely about some of my favourite short story writers, and short stories in general. E.g., why are some of them so unforgettable, and most of them barely register even while I’m reading them?

It’s going to be a busy fall and winter. You won’t want to miss it!

SYNCHRO TALE OF THE MONTH

This month’s encounter with coincidence is no mere snack, but rather a fully rounded, quite poignant tale of life—complete with a past, a present, and a future.

Just before noon on September 2, I heard a ruckus of magpies and looked out our big front bay window to see a dozen or so across the street, milling around an obviously deceased one of their number. I had heard about such “magpie funerals” but never witnessed one. I grabbed my phone and headed out the front door hoping to record a video. Just as I was about to cross the street, a car pulled up right across the driveway, blocking my way. “What the . . .?” I muttered testily to myself.

A cheerful pre-teen boy rolled down the passenger window and waved at me, and the older lady who was driving leaned over him and said, loud enough for me to hear, “I lived in this house in 1975!”

She introduced herself and her 11-year-old grandson who had waved and got my attention; “otherwise we might just have driven on!” he exclaimed. He was bright, articulate, and poised. I silently wished I had been like him when I was his age. I invited them in and introduced them to Jana, and we gave her a tour of the ground floor and Jana’s gorgeous backyard garden.

She told us this was the first house she and her husband had bought. They lived here for a few years until their first child was born, then moved to something bigger in a newer neighbourhood. Their first monthly mortgage payment in 1975 was only $125, by no means a slam-dunk for them in those days. She’d had the bay window installed soon after they moved in. (We thanked her for that!) The back door, which now opens onto the deck, had been off the kitchen, where our fridge is now. There’d been no garage, so her backyard was much bigger. And so on.

While she shared with us part of the mysterious past of the house we’ve lived in for 22 years, we were sharing with her the future of the house she’d left almost 50 years ago. It was an emotional visit for her; there were some tears, as her husband had recently passed away after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s. Patting her grandson’s shoulder, she emphasized how wonderful he had been to his grandpa during that time. Jana and I were not surprised. As we adults drifted in time, he remained astonishingly stable, sparkling. We were contemplating the past and future; he was living the present. He was what is called nowadays mindful. He hadn’t yet learned to be any other way. Even our sceptical cat Max trotted forward, seeking his benediction. They were both lovely people, and, as we said goodbye, we felt we’d received a gift that day.

So it turned out that the bereavement of the magpies was but one part of a diptych. A causal element, perhaps, since without their funeral I wouldn’t have found myself outside to invite the lady and her grandson in for a visit. As we’ve seen, synchronicity is supposed to be acausal. But I think we can wink that wrinkle away this time: after all, who’s to decide what’s a “cause,” and what’s just another piece of the puzzle?

PROUST QUOTE OF THE MONTH

[Marcel, in the story, although nowhere near drunkard territory, has indeed had a few. That our notions of the future are conditioned by the reflections of our past is hardly surprising. But sometimes it takes a slightly tipsy poet to show us what’s right in front of us. Emphasis mine.]

I was enclosed in the present, like heroes and drunkards; momentarily eclipsed, my past no longer projected before me that shadow of itself which we call our future; placing the goal of my life no longer in the realisation of the dreams of the past, but in the felicity of the present moment, I could see no further than it.

SONG OF THE MONTH

This was a huge hit for Carly Simon in 1971, and I was besotted seeing her perform it live on the David Steinberg show. I dug her hesitant onstage presence, mistaking for a disarming shyness what was actually a lifelong battle with debilitating stage fright for her. I’m relieved that the song holds up after a half-century, because I love how she flirts with tense in the individual lines of the lyrics. First verse: future/present/present/prospective future. Second verse: present/present/past/prospective future. Third verse: future/present/present/retrospective future. It’s sort of a shell game or three-card monte she’s playing here with the tenses, culminating in a devastating zen paradox that Yogi himself would be proud of. These are, indeed, always, the good old days.

The word “novel,” at root, means “news,” and no novelist, even if he explore no further than the closets or back stairs of his own home, can be without some news he wishes to bring. —John Updike

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

English novelist L.P. Hartley said that “the past is a foreign country,” but the foreign country for me has always been the present. In school, never a quick study outside the classroom, I couldn’t quite catch up to the cool kids, and eventually let that train go by and settled myself comfortably about 12 years in the recent cultural past, which seemed more stable and amenable to negotiation. Thus, a time-slip in 1976 landed me in 1964, smouldering and pulsating with the Yardbirds at the Marquee Club. Now I was really behind, and facing in the wrong direction to boot. Adulthood eventually demanded its tribute, though, and the ensuing decades brought a tsunami of technological and social change that found me, like the character in Nigel Dennis’s hilarious 1955 novel Cards of Identity, “staggering indignantly backwards into the future.”

Today I’ve made my peace with the present, but the lure of the past, like my penchant for synchronicity, is something I need to be mindful of. So when a close friend, well versed in contemporary lit, advised me recently to “stop living in the last century, book-wise,” I listened. “Read what the cool kids are reading for a change,” she said. “The worst that can happen is that you find it all boring. But then at least you can tell us why.” A challenge had been laid down. I accepted, and we agreed on two recent prize-winning bestsellers.

So I juiced up my jaunty Pocketbook™ e-reader and launched myself into Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2022), a conscious echo of David Copperfield set in contemporary Appalachia. Sounds gimmicky, I know, but it was surprisingly engaging, if a bit overwrought and overdetermined in places (much like Dickens). It was only after I’d finished that I found out Kingsolver was born and raised in Appalachia, which no doubt accounted for the authentic feel. As the protagonist suffers a football knee injury and becomes addicted to Oxycontin and other painkillers, there are some harrowing but, one supposes, necessary scenes. It’s at times an uncomfortable read, but I certainly don’t regret plowing through all 205,000 words. Just glad I didn’t have to copy edit it, at that size.

The second book was Nathan Hill’s Wellness (2023), definitely more of an urban epic, with some pithy sociological and intellectual tangles to sort through (the title is from the name of a company in the novel that does research on placebos). Parts of it reminded me of Thomas Pynchon’s early novels—if Pynchon had been writing with the goal of becoming an Oprah’s Book Club Pick.  It’s a clunky sort of machine, the pieces of which don’t always fit together that well, a fact that interfered with my enjoyment but apparently not that of the general literary crowd. There are Pynchonesque gems, though, like the chapter describing how Facebook algorithms work to distort and derange the life of one elderly computer addict. And at 195,000 words, it landed me squarely on the 400,000-word mark for the two books, almost as if they were a matched set of quite informative contemporary fictional-sociological treatises. Which, for me, they were. And I wasn’t bored!

Then one day soon after in the library I stumbled upon Deep Cuts, which, as we’ve seen in our previous post, also carries news of our present century.

Thus have I found myself, despite myself, transformed within a very short time into a veritable beacon of the NOW.

SYNCHRO SNACK—IN THE NOW

To pick out our new Proust Quote of the Week, I decided to flip to a random page of the first volume of my three-volume Random House box set in hopes of magically finding something suitable. When nothing jumped out at me from the first, second, or third selected page, I retreated instead to a notebook of mine from 1992, the year I started reading À La Recherche. A little flipping and scanning through the pages of my hand-copied quotes yielded a dandy. The page number I’d specified in the notebook, 169,  was from the paperback Penguin Classics edition we all read from in those days. Curious as to whether my hardcover box set would have the same pagination, I looked up page 169 there, and, yes, it did. But when my eyes darted up to the first line of the page I recognized this as the first page I’d flipped to earlier. The quote I was going to use was there all along! My random aim had been true!

PROUST QUOTE OF THE WEEK

[Our new quote brings us a familiar Proustian trope. A youthful Marcel has just experienced a little epiphany while reading and, instead of pausing and reflecting on it, rushes outside for a high-spirited walk in the woods whereby his newfound inspiration is soon dissipated in exuberance. Here, retrospectively, he’s reminding himself (and us) that often we think we’re doing something when we’re actually doing something else. Or doing nothing at all.]

The confused ideas which exhilarated me . . . had not achieved the repose of enlightenment, preferring the pleasures of a lazy drift towards an immediate outlet rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation. Thus it is that most of our attempts to translate our innermost feelings do no more than relieve us of them by drawing them out in a blurred form which does not help us to identify them.

SONG OF THE WEEK

This week’s song brings an even stronger connection to Calgary than last week’s. I was lying on my couch one afternoon in 1984, listening to a Polydor sampler (The Guitar Album). When this track began to play, I sat bolt upright and, I dare say, slack-jawed (as long as we’re bandying clichés of amazement about). Little did I know that barely two years later I would be watching her live, and dancing like an ecstatic dervish, at the legendary King Eddie Hotel downtown. She was Ellen McIlwaine, and Calgary was to become her home base in the coming decades. I won’t attempt to do her justice in a single paragraph, but you can find out more here, and see and hear her whole story here. All of us at the Eddie were smouldering and pulsating with her that night in 1986, and in this unforgettable track from her second album, We the People (1973), she is the very personification of the song’s title, Sliding.

“I had this dreamlike feeling of nearing some place I’d been looking for—a vacancy just my shape, hidden inside an enormous puzzle.” —Holly Brickley, Deep Cuts

COME ON IN

Welcome to New Stanza. As this is our first post, I’ll say a few words about what we (the editorial we) will be doing and not doing here.

DOING: Casually and amusingly discussing books we’ve read, reading in general, our favourite authors, music we’ve heard, movies we’ve watched, and aught else that snags our attention. “Casually” because I am no expert, on anything, not even myself (see below); in fact, I don’t think I’ve even attained dilettante status yet. “Amusingly” while allowing that amusement is in the funny-bone of the beholder.

NOT DOING: Discussing religion (except in a cultural sense), politics, or sports. You can explore such topics elsewhere with folks who actually know something about them.

We’re aiming for a good-natured space here, a refuge of sorts from the customary sturm und drang. So, not exactly Pollyanna, but at least dependably rant free.

We’ll have regular features, some of which you’ll find in this post, and some deeper dives into things I’ve thunk about more than once.

A WORD ABOUT SYNCHRONICITY

Synchronicity: the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection [Oxford English Dictionary].

“Know Thyself,” advises Apollo on the portico of his Temple at Delphi. Easy for him to say, being after all a god. For us mortals, life can present many puzzles, not least of which is ourselves, especially while we’re still finding our place in the world. Little did I know back in Grade 12 that my hastily conceived but curiously satisfying English essay “The Dubious Role of Coincidence in Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago” would foreshadow aspects of my later life in ways that in retrospect seemed inevitable.

Synchronicity, existing as it does outside the bounds of probability and often on the borders of believability, can seem like a gift or a challenge, offering us a piece of the puzzle whose solution might unlock our destiny, clarify some deeper meaning, reveal our true selves. A friend of mine used to call such unexpected coincidences life’s “ha, ha, made you look” moments. And when you look, maybe you see a choice you hadn’t yet made, an association hitherto unconsidered, a new plot point in the story you’re always making of your life in the everyday, non-synchronous world. Philip K. Dick claimed that he used the I Ching to make most of the plot decisions in his masterpiece The Man in the High Castle. Now, jaded veteran that I am, I consider divination techniques like the I Ching to be the DoorDash of synchronicity: coincidence dialed up to order isn’t quite the real thing for me, valuable though its insights might be, and have been for me. But I admit I may have been the teensiest bit guilty over the years of doing something analogous to what Dick was doing—but with the plot of my own life. That’s because the frisson that synchronistic moments bestow on us can be habit forming, often at the expense of our free will and sense of responsibility for our own destiny. If I may mix metaphors clumsily, within these nuggets of wisdom lie seeds of temptation.

With me being the easily tempted sort, you can guess where I ended up. I realized I needed to dial back my focus on synchronicity and deal with life on its rational, boring, everyday terms more than I’d been doing. After hammering out hundreds of thousands of words on my old blog, I—and the universe—needed a break from my obsession. But a little nip now and then won’t hurt, right? After all, synchronicity is always there, part of “the buried strangeness that nourishes the known,” to quote poet Richard Wilbur. Best learn how to deal with it rationally and moderately rather than trying to ignore what might by now be an inescapable, essential aspect of myself, so deeply embedded that to try to perform a radical synchronectomy might lead to one of those “the operation was a success but the patient died” scenarios. Which leads us to the first of our regular features. These little stories are all cross-my-heart true, and hopefully improbable enough to whet your appetite for more:

SYNCHRO-SNACK OF THE WEEK

Walking in my neighbourhood one evening in September 1990, I ran into Larissa, the near-twin sister of a young woman I was infatuated with at the time. As always, her name (and, yes, her beauty, I’m only human) brought to my mind Doctor Zhivago, the movie and the book. We exchanged pleasantries and I continued on my way, to meet a couple of guys for drinks at the pub. Over the next few hours we were joined by others, two of whom introduced me to their girlfriends. One named Julie, the other named Christie. Amazingly, it didn’t hit me until the next day.

Maybe it was Pasternak’s retort to my jejune little essay 17 years earlier. (“Oh yeah? Too many coincidences? Watch this, ya little malyavka.”)

BOOK OF THE WEEK

For our next regular feature, we’ll say a few words about the novel that provided our introductory quote, Holly Brickley’s Deep Cuts. She’s Canadian, and that, along with the subject matter (pop music) and the delicious packaging from Doubleday Canada—inventive cover image showcasing the table of contents wherein each chapter is a song title; sturdy, fragrant paper; French flaps; those wonderful scalloped pages—lured me onward. It’s her first novel, and her bio indicates that in this romance the female protagonist, Percy Marks, is in some sense reliving that bio in a different form.

The deep cuts in the title refer to recordings, or songs, that might not be the most popular or most played on an album or in an artist’s repertoire but nevertheless stand the test of time, over many, many listens. Percy, the young pop music aficionada, stresses that she “didn’t get into music . . . I got into songs.” An important distinction if the deep cut is a stand-in for a deep person or a deep, lasting relationship with such a person. She winds up helping such a person write songs—some of which become deep cuts themselves. There are the inevitable obstacles—deep cuts to the spirit—before Percy’s destiny unfolds, and her puzzle is finally solved.

I liked this enough to have read it twice. Brickley has a way with the unexpected, inventive image: “We kept talking and couldn’t stop. Time stretched like pulled taffy, dipping and clumping.”

As the story is set in the first decade of this century, I encountered a lot of pop music and trends I knew little or nothing about. In some cases with good reason, I’ve since surmised, but it did remind me—for a few terrifying seconds there before denial reset itself—just how old I actually am. Thanks, Holly, I needed that. Really. But only for a few seconds.

I’ll say more in the coming weeks about this book, and about my recent reconnection with contemporary lit in general.

One more thing you should know about me: I’m a Prousthead. Marcel Proust, that “old teahead of Time,” as Jack Kerouac calls him, has taken up honorary permanent residence in my notebooks these past 30 years, so we’ll be giving him his own segment:

PROUST QUOTE OF THE WEEK

You remember the story of the man who believed that he had the Princess of China shut up in a bottle. It was a form of insanity. He was cured of it. But as soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies which we must not seek to cure, because they alone protect us from others that are more serious. [Spoken by the irrepressible Baron de Charlus]

SONG OF THE WEEK

Finally, we’ll try for a deep cut ourselves, and end up where we started from, with The Yardbirds and their late-1965 “For RSG.” This is their studio version of a Bo Diddley B-side called “Here ‘Tis” that had been their most frenzied live “rave-up” number at the Marquee Club in Soho in earlier days. RSG here refers to Ready, Steady, Go, which was a hot TV show featuring current pop stars, sort of the Brit version of American Bandstand. There’s a Calgary connection here, as one of the original presenters was David Gell, who eventually ended up here hosting CBC local news for years.

In the studio the group was meticulous about building their rhythm/backing tracks (“the buried strangeness that nourishes the known”), and the propulsive effect here is typically “Yardmerizing” for its time. As they used to say then about such new releases in the UK music press, “A lively effort with inventive production and the customary wizardry from guitarist Jeff Beck; should do well for the boys.”

So, without further ado, here ’tis.

JUST ONE MORE THING, COLUMBO-STYLE

Just after I finished this post, I was rooting around in the storage catacombs of our basement for a small box to store my Pocketbook e-reader and its cable and documentation. I pulled a likely looking one out the dark, unfathomable depths and found this: