Synchronicity August 12, 2005 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy

Cognac WellerlaneNo, I’m not talking about the Police album. I’m talking about meaningful coincidences. Carl Jung described synchronicity as an “acausal connecting principle,” i.e. there is no obvious explanation for such coincidences to occur, and yet they do. For example, two weeks ago I was going to the beach with my cousin and he told me our mutual friend, Cognac Wellerlane was recently hired to be in a music video. “Which band?” I said. “I forgot,” my cousin said. “But you probably would know the name of them.” So we headed out to the beach while my mp3 player blared music from his car stereo. Then, yesterday, Cognac calls me to chat and I asked her the name of the band. She tells me it was for the band Franz Ferdinand and their new album. I just happened to buy their CD a few months ago, and we had been listening to their songs in the car on the way out to the beach, unbeknownst to us that this was the very same band. It’s funny sometimes how the universe works. And for those skeptics who think this is just a random coincidence, you may be right, however, I prefer to believe the middle ground: that coincidences like this are not necessarily acausal (i.e. without cause and random) but have a causal factor that we can not obviously see. For example, if we all lived on a two dimensional world, like a piece of paper, and the paper was in reality curled into a tube, we as 2D citizens wouldn’t know this. Then, if along comes a three dimensional pencil and pierces the tube, we, as 2D beings, would see two distict yellow circles that would appear at first glance to be independent of one another but have a strange interconnecting factor which we couldn’t quite see. In other words, the causal factors of synchronicity may be outside of our perceptual abilities.

If you are a stargazer like myself, you might want to go outside tonight on this near new moon to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower. According to one source there will be approximately one meteor per minute. You have to be up at 2am though, but this may not be hard on a friday night. One time, while in upstate NY, I saw a green meteor, which might imply it had chunks of frozen oxygen ionizing as it burned through the atmosphere. The meteor had lit up the darkened night to brighter than the moon for about two or three seconds. It was quite a sight. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to see the Perseid’s from the light polluted city of Hoboken, but I’ll try.

Finally, I heard they’re making a sequel to Batman Begins called–you guessed it–Batman Begins 2. Um, isn’t that a kind of oxymoron? How about “Batman Graduates?” Or even better, “The Dark Night.” I hope this name is just a place holder.