songs of experience

Years ago I was really into the Jungian idea of synchronicity. I was hyper-aware of “charged coincidences,” and believed I was existng in a world of unseen connections … like the time I made a copy of Gaston (short story) for my freshman runner b/c I knew she wanted to be a writer someday and because I felt her spirit would respond to Saroyan. “Oh,” she said, in her typical blase fashion, “That’s my favorite short story.” How did my unconscious mind already know this? We had never discussed Saroyan, or any other writer for that matter. I was just getting to know her. Was it a coincidence that her name was the same as my first-born daughter? Was it a coincidence that her running resume from her high school senior year found its way to the top of a pile of recruiting letters that was a mile high? I don’t think so. I think we were destined to know each other.

An article I just read from the Nov. 7, 2005 issue of The New Yorker (on John Ashbery, the poet) has me thinking about synchronicity all over again. I’ve been too busy (and distracted) with three kids at home for the last 10 years to pay close attention … but the signs are coming back. Quietly this time.

“What he is trying to do (and here the metaphors get a little screwy, but these are the pictures that come to him) is jump-start a poem by lowering a bucket down into what feels like a kind of underground stream flowing through his mind – a stream of continuously flowing poetry, or perhaps poetic stuff would be a better way to put it. Whatever the bucket brings up will be his poem. Since he is always dipping the bucket into the same stream his poems will resemble one another but because the stream varies according to climatic conditions – what’s on his mind, the weather, interruptions – they will also be different.

There have been many times in his life when he felt completely stuck, when the poetry seemed to dry up completely, but the longest and worst began shortly after he graduated from college and lasted more than a year. Then he happened to go to a John Cage concert and heard “Music of Changes” – nearly an hour of banging on a piano alternation with periods of silence, as dictated by a score that Cage put together using the I Ching* so that it would be determined by chance rather than by his choice. The music seemed to him to be full of powerful meanings, and the idea of composing by chance made him think about writing in a completely different way. It made him want to go right back home and start work. Ever since, he has felt that what he calls “managed chance” is the right method for him.

It’s time to lower my bucket again.