Coincidentally Yours

 Within our little lives, there are mysteries.  Why things happen can have an obvious causality, or at least a logic.  Or the causality can elude us.  Our usual ways of thinking don't quite work.

I'm a big fan of coincidences (and coincidentally, someone in college nicknamed me Big Coincidence, playing off the syllables in my name.)  I've always maintained that as the kind of writer I was professionally, serendipity--useful coincidence--was my most valuable research tool.  So I think about these things, and notice them.

 I have a few recent examples to ponder.  One of them involves George Orwell.  For a forgotten reason--probably because it was mentioned in something I was reading--I had a sudden hankering to read a particular essay by George Orwell, and I knew I had a book of Orwell essays.  But when I looked in the Orwell section on one of my bookshelves, it wasn't there.  I kept looking everywhere I could think of it might be but could not find it.  And as I browsed I would wander back to the shelf where other Orwell books resided.  One title I did have was Coming Up for Air.  I realized that I'd never read it and knew nothing about it.

Shortly thereafter, perhaps that same day, I was browsing the latest additions to the Arts and Letters Daily, an online selection of current articles with links, just to see what was new that might interest me.  Near the top was an article on Orwell.  The Daily, like a lot of Internet sites now, is not as useful as it once was, since many of the publications it links to keep their articles behind a pay wall or otherwise restrict them.  But I found I could read this one, and it dealt largely with Orwell's early and neglected novel, Coming Up For Air.

This is an authentic coincidence, seemingly made more strange because the novel is so obscure.  It is a personal coincidence--that is, a coincidence only to me.  It's difficult to judge the extent of the coincidence: that is, just how unlikely it is, with the strong implication that the less likely, the more meaningful.  I suppose math experts in probability (like one I know) would say that out of the many, many events of our lives, a coincidence is bound to show up at some point.  We just don't notice the many non-coincidences, and so we are astonished at the one rare instance of coincidence.  Still...to what extent is a coincidence truly random?  And what does that do to the odds?

 Maybe at least some coincidences are something like an intuition.  And intuitions are (I would argue) seldom random.

 Another such coincidence happened to me since.  I had finished reading a contemporary novel that I found admirable, until the end jolted me with a troubling and seemingly artificial but terrible fate to an endearing character.  I felt betrayed, and especially given my age and the times, this is not something I want to encounter in my reading anymore.  

So I sought out a story to clear my emotions--the kind much less likely to offer such a gut punch.  I got down my volume of Sherlock Holmes stories, and happened on one I don't remember reading before, called "The Adventure of the Yellow Face."  Watson starts off noting that most of his stories are about Holmes' triumphs of deduction, but he's also been wrong.  In this case his theory is completely wrong.  In the end it is revealed that a wife was trying to conceal something from her husband that turned out to be a child from a former marriage--a marriage to a black man that resulted in a black child (who was seen standing at a window wearing a yellow mask--hence the title.)  Much to the wife's astonishment, her husband immediately accepts the child.  It is a very short and singular Holmes story that I've never seen dramatized (and I've seen pretty much all) or heard referred to, or knew anything about.

The next evening I was looking at a YouTube video interview of Nicholas Meyer, writer and director of several Star Trek projects, the proximate reason for checking out the video, though I also liked hearing him talk, as he is an intelligent talker.  He also has written several Sherlock Holmes novels (I knew of only his first, and didn't consciously remember it), and this interview seemed to be on the occasion of his latest.  He was commenting on instances of casual stereotyping of Jews and non-white races in the Conan Doyle Holmes stories, typical of his times.  But there was an exception he said, a little story called "The Yellow Face."

That I picked out a video from everything on YouTube that mentioned the obscure story I'd read the night before is certainly a coincidence.  But coincidence, like serendipity, is about attention.  In this case, I felt a shiver as I anticipated (based on what he was talking about) that Meyer was going to mention this story just before he did.  This was a coincidence because I knew it was.

Serendipity, at least as a research technique, is also like that: it's about attention.  Perhaps it is remarkable that a book pertinent to research on my latest project was sitting there on a sale table in front of the Harvard Bookstore--a book (in the case I'm thinking of, a kind of anthology) I didn't know existed, with authors I did not know.  But had I not been paying attention to books that could be relevant to my research, it might have escaped my notice entirely.  It was the convergence of my interest and attention, and the presence of the book (and then later, how useful it became--I contacted several of its authors), that made it serendipitous.  It may also be akin to Jung's theory of synchronicity, summarized in a song by Sting as: "if you act as you think/the missing link/synchronicity."

But that doesn't explain everything about coincidence or related phenomena. And my Orwell story isn't over. 

Eventually I concluded that my book of Orwell essays had been among the books I sold in Pittsburgh before I trekked to California (although a moment's further thought would have told me I'd used it since.)  But since I had became so obsessed with the idea of reading Orwell essays, I went on Amazon to buy a collection.  I paused over a definitive and expensive collection, but after more research I honed in on what seemed to be a more than adequate selection in a fairly affordable volume.  I chose it for my shopping cart and was about to complete the purchase when I just stopped, for no particular reason except that I didn't want to complete it at that moment.

Within the next few days my eyes strayed from my computer to the bookshelves on my right--and there it was.  Not only was it my book of Orwell essays, it was an earlier edition (that I bought used) of precisely the selection I was going to buy. 

So what do we call this?  An intuition of some kind in one part of my brain telling my fingers not to press the purchase button?  Or a simple coincidence?  I'd certainly made that particular error before--of buying a new copy of a book I couldn't find, and then finding the copy I already had. Had that subconsciously influenced my hesitation to not risk doing it again, at least not yet? Or should we just call it luck?

The final odd event seems to be in a class by itself.  One evening at dinner my partner Margaret told me about a strange dream she'd had.  All she remembered was an image: of brightly colored bowls of different sizes, nested in one another.  She remembered this image because she had no associations for these bowls--they weren't from her childhood or had she ever had them herself.

But as soon as she said it, a memory was awakened in me.  Even though I'd recently written about the home of my childhood and its contents in the 1950s, including our Fiestaware and 1950s aluminum tumblers, I had completely forgotten the bowls of various sizes, each a single bright primary color (brighter in memory than these contemporary photos), that my mother used in our kitchen in the 1950s, with at least some of them in use for decades more. As soon as Margaret said the words, I suddenly saw them. I remembered them right down to which size bowl was which color.  That night, I looked them up on the Internet, and sure enough, there were photos of these early Pyrex bowls, sets of which are now collectors items.

So Margaret had a dream, not of her childhood, but of mine.  I wonder what to call that? 

Learning a Dead Language

There is nothing for you to say. You must

 Learn first to listen. Because it is dead

 It will not come to you of itself, nor would you

 Of yourself master it. You must therefore 

Learn to be still when it is imparted,

 And, though you many not yet understand, to remember.

 

 What you remember is saved. To understand

 The least thing fully you would have to perceive

 The whole grammar in all its accidence

 And all its system, in the perfect singleness

 Of intention it has because it is dead.

 You can learn only a part at a time. 

 What you are given to remember

 Has been saved before you from death's dullness by

 Remembering. The unique intention

 Of a language whose speech has died is order,

 Incomplete only where someone has forgotten.

 You will find that that order helps you to remember.

 What you come to remember becomes yourself.

 Learning will be to cultivate the awareness

 Of that governing order, now pure of the passions

It composed; till, seeking it in itself, 

You may find at last the passion that composed it, 

Hear it both in its speech and in yourself.

 

 What you remember saves you. To remember

 Is not to rehearse, but to hear what never

 Has fallen silent. So your learning is,

 From the dead, order, and what sense of yourself

 Is memorable, what passion may be heard 

When there is nothing for you to say.

--W.S. Merwin

From his first post-college days, W.S. Merwin made his living mostly by translating.  He published many translations of poetry written in many languages, from ancient Chinese poets to Dante to Pablo Neruda.   So this poem can be read in one way as applying literally to learning dead languages, such as Latin. Perhaps it can be applied to reading any poem. But it seems to me that at least some of it applies to memories themselves.

 Anything in the past existed in a context, a kind of language, that has slipped away with that past. It was a context of things, places, people and happenings, and also of feeling.  But we mostly and in a sense necessarily translate our memories of the past into the language of the present.  Yet part of those memories may carry with them something of their context, if we don't try to decide what they mean too quickly.  I think certain powerful lines in this poem apply to all memories, and to memory itself.  But the poem hints at even more powerful ways of apprehending memories, within their contexts and perhaps the wider contexts of our entire lives.  

The photo: The arrow points to the apartment where my parents lived when I was born in 1946, and where the three of us lived for a few more years, at the top of what was then an apartment building in Greensburg, PA on College Avenue, so called because high on a hill opposite this building--and visible from that window--was Seton Hill College.  The building I suspect had been a residence, for this area was once populated by the rich. Up on that hill was a ridiculously large mansion, which came to house the college, and remains part of it.  While still a residence, it contained the first library that a young Andrew Carnegie ever saw.  The building that housed my first home no longer exists.  The writing on the photo is my mother's.