Synchronicity can afford uncanny, and sometimes remarkably beautiful moments in our lives. In the psychology of Carl Jung, Synchronicity is “the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.”
The little narrative which follows may show how it functions, or perhaps a better phrase “how it comes to pass.”
I’ll start from the beginning.
I listen to a lot of ambient music when I am drawing and sometimes writing. My knowledge of the extremely wide genre of ambient music began, appropriately, with Brian Eno. To compress, I have been listening to a lot of Biosphere lately.
Biosphere is the name by which Geir Jennsen goes. He’s a Norwegian composer and performer. I stumbled over him thanks to AllMusic, which recommended him as a “similar artist” to Eno and Susumu Yokota. I was especially intrigued by his landmark album Substrata which features samples from Twin Peaks. But there was another album of his I then discovered called The Petrified Forest.
The Petrified Forest comprises music inspired by (and samples from) The Petrified Forest, a 20th Century Fox film released in 1936 starring Leslie Howard, Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart, and based off a Broadway play by Robert E. Sherman.
Briefly (because you can look this up elsewhere) the film is about an itinerant drifter who walks into the somewhat lonely life of Bette Davis’s character: a young woman who works in the family café, a lone outpost on the edge of The Petrified Forest in Arizona. Humphrey Bogart plays a gangster based on John Dillinger.
I’ll pause here to record a few impressions. Most discussions of the film concern how it was Bogart’s breakout role and, to a lesser extent, how it was a proto-Noir film. To me, it is a remarkable distillation of Modernism. The film is saturated with the kind of nihilism that had crept over the world after the First World War, and especially in the Great Depression. The screenplay even quotes T.S. Elliot’s “The Hollow Men,” and in Modernist fashion, arches over back into the Middle Ages for snippets from the works of François Villon. Both Howard and Bogart’s characters are hollow men, respectively worn down from intellectualism and crime. Bette Davis plays a young woman dreaming of somewhere else, France specifically, and her dreams come true, but owe their freight charges to tragedy.
There is no doubt the dialogue heavy film, which mostly takes place inside the dining room of the café, is a play at its heart, but there are some establishing shots and external scenes that could be blueprints for any number of David Lynch’s desolate cafes.
The wide open vistas of the Arizona desert and the wastelands inside the characters—this is all beautifully realized by Biosphere on the album. And I had been listening to it while drawing this picture, a Rainy Day in Bremerton.
I had never seen actual film Biosphere based his work on so I finally got a copy of it on DVD to watch. Earlier in the week, I finished the picture (a 24×36 metal print of which is now available at Griffin Gallery in Poulsbo), and on Friday night, April 22nd, I decided to watch it. It was around 9:30. Time is central to Synchronicity. The chronicity refers to it. Timing is important.
My TV set up is not that fancy. I have a nice Sony receiver and separate Blu-ray player. The Bl-ray player feeds into the TV and the TV then feeds the audio out to the stereo. (In this way I can run regular streaming audio content out of the TV, or the Blu-ray). I’m pointing all of this out because it explains the conditions which follow.
I turned on the Blu-ray player first and put the disc in. While it was spinning up, I turned on the TV. Just as the film was about to start, I realized I’d left the receiver off, so there was no sound. So I turned it on but was immediately surprised by the soundtrack.
It was a haunting, solo piano work over the credits and opening scenes: establishing shots of Howard’s character wandering in the desert replete with obligatory tumble-weeds. There was the gas-station and café. The music wasn’t desolate, but it wasn’t cheery either. It was melancholy, contemplative. I wondered if this was some accidental bonus feature that I’d activated by mistake.
And then I looked at the display on the receiver. It was still set to KING FM, the classical radio station based here in the Pacific Northwest. The music was literally coming from somewhere else but it fit the film so beautifully that I just let it go. Later, I looked up the playlist at KING.org and learned it was Simone Dinnerstein playing Richard Danielpour’s An American Mosaic. (See below for links)
There is a somewhat famous story that Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon can be played over the beginning of The Wizard of Oz. It does work pretty well. Perhaps it was a similar discovery by someone to mine?
I don’t know. All I know was the World was speaking to me through several contexts. I can’t say causality, because that “coincidental” timing of the broadcast, the start of the film, my negligence over “setting up” the DVD did not seem connected in any way, but it all worked together beyond any experience a deliberate act could have afforded.
And the meaning of it all? That’s somewhere inside of me as well. I don’t know. I’ll have to explore by letting it come. Perhaps a picture. Perhaps a story. There is a story of Ada and her ex driving together in Eastern Washington (another desert) that has been slowly growing. The key thing is not to question it or analyze it any further. I just have to follow it and be ready for when She starts talking.
Links:
Richard Danielpour
Samples of the music can be found here.
Synchronicity
A good essay by Harry J. Stead on Medium (and not the Police album, although it was inspired by the concept)
Photo of the Petrified forest from WikiMedia Commons.
Scotwriter21, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons