31 July 2022 | Issue 28
Speaking with my friend Isabella the other day.
"Remember me telling you about my aunt, the one I recently helped out with a reference check ? Well, she got the job.
"In the very line of work that the PhD I'm writing criticises.
"What are the odds of that?"
I'm a smart arse.
"97%," I replied.
A near certainty. I'm not joking. But I don't believe in coincidence. Nor do I believe in synchronicity.
As it happens, by coincidence — come on, you must have seen that one coming — I mentioned the aunt-not-coincidence-incident to Anne, as excellent binding for one of these rambles.
Not a word was said. Anne carries on tapping away on her phone. To then hold it up, presenting the screen to me. Where there, emblazoned on it, was the jacket for "The Roots of Coincidence" by Arthur Koestler. 1
"I read it in the seventies," she said.
If one were looking for recurring motifs to this column, my starting on a subject — see Zen and Archery, Hesse, Heidegger, Mann et al — ends with Anne saying "I read it in the seventies". Usually followed with a "I can't remember much about it" epitaph. Which seems to be another recurring motif when speaking to almost anyone about almost anything that occurred in the seventies.
A list of motifs Consume & Enjoy is mildly obsessed with, might read something like this
Making lists
Wittgenstein and Oulipo
Pattern seeking and the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon
The film "Magnolia"
Daoism and Zen
Music from the seventies
Multiple-selves
Epicurus and the Cyrenaics
I don't believe in coincidence. I do believe in pattern seeking. A few weeks back I was writing on silence, which led me to Kant’s part in the rise of German proto-hippies. Introducing me to Otto Gross, deviant extraordinaire. Whom, while Googling, I learnt is played by Vincent Cassel in David Cronenberg's "A Dangerous Method", his dramatisation of Jung and Freud's feud.
I adore Cronenberg. I like Vincent Cassel. Anne loves Viggo Mortensen. I have to confess I am not averse to the idea of watching Keira Knightley getting spanked. Which I suspect is the major selling point of the film. My law of three had been triggered.
Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.’
Ian Fleming "Goldfinger" (1959)
It's the only Cronenberg film I haven't seen. Now I know why. It's rather dull, spanking aside. Just as it gets interesting — Jung's belief in the paranormal, and whether psychoanalysis can cure or merely expose the neurosis to the patient — it ends.
Jung did not believe in coincidence. He believed in synchronicity. In fact he coined the term. To explain coincidence. In a sort of paranormal quantum entanglement way. He also did the I Ching a lot. Synchronicity has found a home in modern magick. And Sting. It's led to a field called Synchromysticism. A field out all on its own. Which is where we're going to leave it. 2 3 4
In 2009 I shot an series of magical psychosexual creature portraits called "The Jungian Woods"
I don't believe in coincidence. I do however have a fascination with the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. Also known by the more prosaic term confirmation bias. Suddenly seeing something previously unknown appear everywhere. Another form of my rule of three. 5 6
Take Kant for instance. Never really been on my radar, and then writing about Hermann Hesse, up he pops, the same week Daily Philosophy does a feature on lying (dailyphilosophy.substack.com/p/is-lying-ethical-216), and daughter mentions him out of the blue, having quoted him in her M Phil. Except she pronounces Kant more colourfully.
The reason I don't believe in coincidence is a speculation that every time you leave the house, you plant a seed. A possibility. Or perhaps it's a burr rather than a seed. Every conversation exhaling spores, every deed, leaving a seed. Every action disseminating burrs, clinging to shop assistant's coat, a customs official's attention.
Arthur Koestler led a rather fantastic life, in the unlikely sense of the word 7. His wikipedia entry tells me he took acid with Timothy Leary who featured in my piece on Kant, and in the seventies one of his lectures inspired Salman Rushdie.
The following day after watching "A Dangerous Method" I spotted David Cronenberg has a new film out this September. A return to body horror, the genre he's considered to be a principal originator of. His last body horror outing was Existenz in 1999, the plot of which was inspired when Cronenberg interviewed... Salman Rushdie.
Apophenia is a term coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad to describe "unmotivated seeing of connections accompanied by a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He saw apophenia as a prodrome to schizophrenia. I could point out Cronenberg made a film called Videodrome, but that way lies madness. A prodrome, by the way, is a posh word for an early sign or symptom of a disease. 8 9
Or as it's said in Paul Thomas Anderson's film Magnolia “These strange things happen all the time.”
This could be a good time to mention "Symbols and Signs" by Vladimir Nabokov. His shortest story and something of an enigma, with books written about its meaning. It perfectly encapsulates coincidence, synchronicity, and apophenia. 10
www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/05/15/symbols-and-signs
Kant wanted to create an ethical framework without needing the threat of hell fire and damnation. Oversimplified, it runs like this "don't do something if you don't like the idea of everyone doing it". The example I read was pilfering from the stationary cupboard. It fails for me because it puts the onus on other people. What if everyone does it? There'd be no paper in the stationary cupboard. But I’d have mine.
Statisticians have a law of truly large numbers, which rather counterintuitively says beware really large sample sets, as highly implausible events will occur. Penn Jillette of the magicians Penn and Teller very elegantly describes it as "Million-to-one odds happen eight times a day in New York". The Big Apple having a population of eight million. 11 12
What with apophenia, and distributing a large number of event seeds and burrs, the odds of one's aunt getting a job in a "coincidental" field are pretty high. 97% if you're a smart arse.
Instead of Kant's “categorical imperative”, I suggest not stealing from the stationary cupboard simply because sooner or later you will meet someone whose assistance you need, and sod's law, having picked up a burr along the way, they'll have knowledge of your stationary thieving days, and boom! Assistance denied.
I give you Kantian Coincidence Ethics. It's all on you.
Littlewood’s Law
A person can expect to experience events with odds of one in a million (referred to as a "miracle") at the rate of about one per month.
Recommendations
“Crimes of the future” directed by David Cronenberg (2022)
As the human species adapts to a synthetic environment, the body undergoes new transformations and mutations. With his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux), Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), celebrity performance artist, publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances. Timlin (Kristen Stewart), an investigator from the National Organ Registry, obsessively tracks their movements, which is when a mysterious group is revealed… Their mission – to use Saul’s notoriety to shed light on the next phase of human evolution.
Cannes Competition Official Selection 2022.
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart
“Magnolia” directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (1999)
Because every week is Magnolia recommendation week.
A small ask
I’m currently interviewing a few more authors , who have kindly relented agreed to humour my inquisitiveness. I feel rather sheepish in the number of subscribers, and would love their words and work to reach a wider audience.
If there’s anyone you know who you think would enjoy these posts, please forward this edition on to them, or a different one you think better suited to wooing. Better still, ring them up, harangue, shout, threaten and coerce them into subscribing. Nicely, of course.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Koestler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roots_of_Coincidence
George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, about the Spanish Civil War, sold poorly; he decided after reviewing Arthur_Koestler’s Darkness at Noon that fiction was the best way to describe totalitarianism, and wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
I am glad that your cupboard is stationary..