From one of my notebooks:
I have decided to keep a notebook of synchronicities. I was prompted to do this by a synchronicity that occurred yesterday. I had spoken to E— on the phone about… how old couples often die close together in time. I had also, that day, been contemplating another anti-science entry on my blog around the idea that science uses Newspeak techniques to eradicate all possibility of accessing spiritual experience. One of the phrases that is dying out because of science is the phrase 'to die of a broken heart'. I thought specifically of using that phrase as an example.
Later that day, on page 104 of Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island, I read the following:
"'It was my grandparents' house…' he told me. 'My grandmother died five years ago; my grandfather followed her three months later. He died of a broken heart, I think – I was surprised he even held on for three months.'"
1st Jan, 2006.
I was given two books for Christmas, wrapped up in the same parcel. One was Geoffrey Hill’s Scenes from Comus – I opened it and read the first poem on the first page, which ended:’and of our covenants with languagecontra tyrannos.’Idly wondering where he had lifted the latin from, I opened the second book, 1599 – A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. It fell open on page 59 and the first words to catch my eye were: ‘Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos – a Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants’, the title of an anonymous 16th Century book.
My stay at the Opera Community is one long list of syncronicities, begining with my arrival. Not the official one in 2003 but the real and active one in early December 2004.
That is quite a striking example. Of course, there are those who would say it’s all meaningless coincidence, but this reminds me (inevitably) of a quote from Burroughs. It’s from My Education: A Book of Dreams. I don’t have the book to hand, so I will have to quote from memory. Burroughs is writing about certain scientists who have asserted it is best to forget your dreams. It runs something like the following:”‘Dreams are nothing more than neurological housecleaning’ writes [the scientist in question], ‘Quite without meaning and best forgotten’. Assholes can’t even think straight, as if meaning exists in a vacuum without relation to subject and situation. He’s telling me that mydreams have no meaning, where I get some of the best sets for my stories. Sure, sure, forget your dreams, and make arrangements with a competent mortician.”There is another vague synchronicity in the fact that I discovered yesterday that Horace Walpole coined the word ‘serendipity’ (see the ‘synchronicities’ link in the post above), as I have been studying him a great deal of late.
Are you sure the phrase “to die of a broken heart” is dying out because of science? Some scientists seem to have taken it on board in this article which I read in the Guardian on December 5th:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1657882,00.html
Hello Robin. You’re quite right about that. I even wondered if someone would pick me up on that point. Perhaps one of the reasons I haven’t composed and posted that particular entry is that I thought it was a bad example, and I haven’t come up with any good examples that I can authenticate readily. I don’t want to sound like I have a one track mind, either, even although I apparently do. I just thought I’d post a ‘rough’ entry here that was mainly about synchronicity. I don’t ‘believe’ in synchronicity as such, but it interests me. It’s a way of looking at things that I find creatively useful. To be honest, I don’t really believe in much of anything, but that’s old ground.Hello Troels. Thanks for dropping by.
Thanks for the article, by the way. It’s always good to read something else on a subject that has been occupying one’s mind. I suppose the very ending of the article does back up, in a vague way, what I was talking about:So yes, one can indeed die of a broken heart. Or rather “heart-spasms”. Alas, heart-spasm does not sit so elegantly in a sonnet.On this subject, I am rather fond of a passage in The Passion of the Western Mind, that runs thus:For the Romantic, reality was symbollically resonant through and through, and was therefore fundamentally multivalent, a constantly changing complex of many-leveled meanings, even of opposites. For the Enlightenment-scientific mind, by contrast, reality was concrete and literal, univocal. Against this view, the Romantic pointed out that even the reality constructed and perceived by the scientific mind was at bottom symbolic, but its symbols were exclusively of a specific kind — mechanistic, material, impersonal — and were interpreted by scientists as uniquely valid. From the Romantic’s perspective, the conventional scientific view of reality was essentially a jealous “monotheism” in new clothes, wanting no other gods before it. The literalism of the modern scientific mind was a form of idolatry — myopically worshipping an opaque object as the only reality, rather than recognising that object as a mystery, a vessel of deeper realities.
ars moriendiDying from a broken heart is like dying of old age- nobody does it anymore. In becoming fixated on the “mechanical” issues of the body, we ignore the more abstruse afflictions that pinch the life out of us. I would rather die for love than because of it. It is easier for me to believe in the destructive power of love than to imagine a death wrought by the infiltration of tiny, invisible microbes. E
Hey, long time no comment. I’ve been re-reading Michael Talbot’s ‘Holographic Universe’ and things such as synchronicities and patterns have been forefront in my mind for the past few weeks. One of the assertions made in the book is that randomness cannot be scientifically proven to exist, and that apparent disorder is only a pattern of infinite complexity! I should say that I’m no scientist, nor do I have a background in science. Some sexy ideas in this book though. A synchronicity that happened to me recently was the recurrence of the phrase “Up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire,” which, as a young American I had never heard before. I first heard it in St. Etienne’s newest album (no accounting for taste, ehm..), then in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, where someone shouted it at the Floating Market. This was on consecutive days. I intended to look it up online, but then a few days later I read it in “The Centaur” by John Updike. Of course, now I know what it means, but it seemed strange at the time. Like being invaded by a phrase.-Ian
I almost died of a broken heart some years ago, but evidently it was not meant to be.
“I should say that I’m no scientist, nor do I have a background in science. “I’m no scientist, either, and the only background I have in it is the fact that it colours every aspect of my existence, and that I am surrounded by people who believe in or advocate it in some way.That’s an interesting idea about randomness, though. Of course, randomness is a human construct, a matter of perception like everything else, and, when one thinks about it, it’s a pretty absurd construct. It presupposes and intention or order for the randomness to be contrary to. It’s like the old atheist chestnut about the universe being an accident. It could be said to be ‘an accident’ if I fell off my bike, because I did not intend to. I intended to stay on it. In the case of the universe, does the fact that some claim it is ‘an accident’ mean that there was originally some primal intention for things to be otherwise than they are? Up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire – that’s a very evocative example of synchronicity. “I almost died of a broken heart some years ago, but evidently it was not meant to be.”The only thing worse than dying of a broken heart is surviving a broken heart. “In becoming fixated on the ‘mechanical’ issues of the body, we ignore the more abstruse afflictions that pinch the life out of us.”Precisely the kind of backwards reductionism to which I object. Who really believes that people are depressed because of hormones? Haven’t they looked around at the world? Are they incapable of doing so? To think that only quantifiable agitations of matter can be causes is one of the the most damaging superstitions of materialism.
Dr BLT writes:The chances of dying of a broken heart are greatest the first time around. As the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens once put it in a song that I cover here:The First Cut is the DeepestDr BLThttp://www.drblt.net/music/firstCut2.mp3