"The Eerie Synchronicity, Sir!"

 I've mentioned before on this blog that perhaps no other media property in existence has given me as many experiences of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon as the Ken Jennings/John Roderick–hosted podcast, The Omnibus Project. As you may recall, this is the psychological illusion that occurs when you learn about something for the first time in one context, and then suddenly start to notice it everywhere.

I suspect a large part of the psychological basis for this effect is that we tend to overestimate our own front-end knowledge, due to our naturally ego-centric bias as individuals. Thus, if we have only just learned about something for the first time, at what feels to us to be a late or recent date, then we tend to assume that the thing must have been astonishingly rare and obscure—otherwise, why would we not have already known about it long ago? (I'll never forget or live down, for instance, the time in high school I had just learned the phrase "jumping the shark," and hastened to condescendingly explain it to a friend, only to have him roar in outrage that he knew about "jumping the shark" years before I did). Then, if we subsequently see this thing in other contexts, instead of assuming it must simply be less obscure than we initially thought, we feel that something mysterious is afoot. 

But no matter how convinced one may be that the phenomenon is a purely subjective one, and that there is really nothing mysterious in it that cannot be explained by ordinary psychological bias—still, when it happens to you, it can't help but seem uncanny. 

As stated, I encounter this effect routinely while listening to the Omnibus Project (which, fittingly enough, has itself done an episode on the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon—as well as a separate episode on the New Left terrorist group for which the phenomenon is named, and who had nothing to do with cognitive biases, but whose unusual and memorable name happened to be the piece of information that was first used to illustrate the psychological phenomenon). And perhaps it should come as no surprise that I should experience this effect while listening to a show that is encyclopedic in nature, aiming to cover as wide a gamut of human knowledge as possible. With so much content crammed in, it seems inevitable some of it would manage to trigger the "I just saw that somewhere" feeling. 

But even conceding this point, tell me truly if the following coincidence is not just a little bit odd: on a given afternoon the other week I was reading My Ántonia by Willa Cather, and I had just gotten to the part where Jim Burden attends college and commences his study of the classics. He is talking about the fact that the poet Virgil, realizing that he would not live to finish his most famous work, the epic Aeneid, asked that the incomplete work be destroyed upon his death (as Cather phrases it: the poet had "decreed that the great canvas, crowded with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather than survive him unperfected"). 

Then, having read this passage, I closed the book to go make myself some lunch, and turned on the Omnibus (or, rather, one of its subscriber-only addenda shows) while slathering peanut butter and honey onto multigrain bread. Within minutes of me turning on the podcast, John and Ken were talking about how Terry Pratchett asked his friends to destroy any of his incomplete and unpublished works upon his death. This prompted Ken to rattle off a list of famous writers who had similarly requested that their unfinished works be destroyed if they died before completing them. Among the prominent figures on the list: Virgil! Ken even paused to repeat that one and emphasize it: can you believe that? Virgil!

Now, it may just be that there is a finite amount of literate information in the universe, and that the odds are therefore not so astronomically small after all that I might happen to read a passage by Willa Cather and listen to an unrelated episode of a Ken Jennings podcast that happened to mention Virgil's wishes for the posthumous destruction of his unfinished works within an hour of one another. I recognize that there is not anything truly supernatural going on. Still, it gave me a satisfying frisson. It was an instance of what Mark Leyner calls in his cult classic book of utterly sui generis postmodern short fiction, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, an "eerie synchronicity."

Leyner introduces this phrase ironically (as he does nearly everything in the book) by using it to describe a silly coincidence: the narrator (who is perhaps Leyner himself, since he, as Leyner then was, is married to a woman named Arleen) is reading a poem by John Donne that includes a line about the "burdensome corpulence" to which his lover "had growne"; and then soon afterward, he sees a poster on a wall advertising a band named "Big Fat Love." The narrator then editorializes: "the eerie synchronicity, sir!"

The anecdote, preposterous as it is, is a fine illustration of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or at least of something similar. And this in itself is a kind of synchronicity, since Leyner's book also includes a brief mention of a character who is plainly a take-off on one of the real-life leaders of the actual Baader-Meinhof gang. In place of the real-world Ulrike Meinhof, Leyner gives us (with a characteristic lack of capitalization and pronunciation) her fictional counterpart: "ulrike grunebaum, the chillingly eloquent marxist ideologue and machiavellian technocrat." 

And there's still another synchronicity too, because shortly before reading Leyner's book I had been tooling around the classical music streaming platform Medici, and had glimpsed and considered watching a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, and there on page 50 of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, when I opened it, was nothing other than a reference to precisely this work! And I was just thinking to myself, as I read on, "wow, I think I just experienced another instance of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon," and then there fifteen pages later, was an implicit reference to Ulrike Meinhof, and then there, ten more pages after that, was an apparent reflection on the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon and similar effects, with Leyner's reference to "eerie sychonit[ies]"! 

Maybe this too is ultimately unsurprising. After all, Leyner's books are a likely place to experience Baader-Meinhofs for the same reason the Omnibus Project is: both are crammed full of cultural oddments of the most diverse kinds. Leyner's fiction is, after all, a vast farrago of in-jokes, non sequiturs, cultural references both high and low, and stray bits of lore, all strung together by a kind of associative process that makes its own warped sense but could never be described as linear narrative—in short, it is postmodern bricolage at its funniest and best. It is perhaps small wonder that in this enormously heterogeneous stew—something on the order of an encyclopedia, a newspaper, and ten early-nineties TV guides thrown into a blender—there would be some piece of content that would overlap with whatever I was just doing. 

I make no claim, therefore, that I am receiving messages from the divine or outer space. I do not even claim that these coincidences are interesting (synchronicities—much like dreams—being of notoriously little interest to anyone other than the people they occur to). All I say is that they happened; they fascinated me; they gave me a taste of the mysterium tremendum; and they therefore imparted to me an irrepressible desire to share them with the world.