Coincidences

 My reading and blogging life is made possible entirely by a series of fortuitous coincidences—"Synchronicities," as the New Age types could call them. Here I am, talking to my sister about the problems with the modern educational establishment, say; and I just happen to be reading D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, which then includes an extended narrative section in which the heroine Ursula Brangwen goes to work at a miserable government-run school and compares it to a prison. The basis for some future blog post starts to form, for every Six Foot Turkey post is, in honesty, nothing other than a clump of three or four such occurrences pulled from disparate sources (literary, political, autobiographical) and strung together through some such dimly-perceived connecting line. 

This post is not the education post, however, which the above synchronicity made possible. I'm still waiting for a third or fourth element to come my way in order to finish that one. This post, rather, is about the more fundamental underlying phenomenon of the synchronicities themselves, because The Rainbow furnished me with two even more striking examples of the same. The education/schooling connection, after all, is easily dismissed. It is a common enough theme in English literature, school being a close-to-universal experience in modern society, and I knew going in to the novel that Lawrence had worked as a school teacher as a young man, so perhaps I subconsciously sensed the connection, or might have been able to predict, if asked, that this experience would figure in a novel he published at age thirty. 

But if you're not feeling particularly wowed by that synchronicity from my reading life, try this one on for size. When I was about halfway through Lawrence's novel, a friend happened to call me up. He explained that he was in the midst of a reading project of his own: he was working his way through the entire Christian Bible, both Old and New Testaments. I was immediately set off, pontificating about various historical-critical riddles in the text. "How about those two different versions of the creation story in Genesis, eh?" I asked. "Everyone already knows about that!" he said. Put out, I tried again. "Well, turn to Genesis 6," I said. This one was new to him; it was the section in which the "Sons of God" take a fancy to the "daughters of men." How about that, I said, anything strike you there?

He was suitably interested. It's an odd and intriguing passage, since it seems to imply that God had divine offspring. It is therefore generally understood by scholars in the historical-critical field to be a relic of pre-Yahwistic Israelite polytheism that the later Deuteronomistic author tried to bury in subsequent redactions (with incomplete success, for it seems he/they missed this passage and a few others). My friend agreed this was interesting. Then he tried on me something he had just noticed. "Take a look at this passage in Genesis," he said, reading aloud the section in which the Lord dictates to Adam what he can and cannot eat, enumerating fruits with seeds and leafy green vegetables, but making no mention of meat. "Was there something later on where meat became allowable again?" I asked. We weren't sure. 

That was all well and good; we had a pleasant Biblical conversation. Then I turned back to The Rainbow, aiming to make more progress on Lawrence's novel before the end of the day. Very shortly, I came to a passage involving the Bible. He is describing the reactions of the young Ursula Brangwen to her early encounters with the Book of Genesis. There are only a handful of passages that are mentioned in any kind of detail, however. In one section, Ursula zeroes in precisely on the bit about the "Sons of God" and "the daughters of men." Who are these sons of God, she asks, when Jesus was God's "only-begotten son"? Later on, she turns to the passage in which Yahweh instructs Noah in his covenant. Apparently, it comes with new dietary rules: Meat is mentioned for the first time, thus answering my friend's and my question. 

My friend texted me the next morning. "Update: after the flood, God says animals are also food." "Omg," I wrote back, and I explained that I had just happened to learn the same thing, albeit from a totally different source. I sent him pictures of the passages from Lawrence's novel. "I swear to you," I said, "I read these AFTER we talking about all this yesterday." He agreed this was striking. "What an odd coincidence," he wrote back. But to me—perhaps prepared mentally as I was by the mysticism of Lawrence's purpler passages—more metaphysical concepts came into play. I was put in mind of a passage from Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier that I could just barely recall: something about how we often call coincidence that which is really the operation of a mysterious Providence. A synchronicity, in short. 

Synchronicities are powerful things. It was a reading-related synchronicity, after all, that purportedly converted Augustine, the final time, when he had his episode in the garden. And it is is especially tempting to see the hand of Providence at work in a synchronicity that is itself precisely about the subject of Providence. The covenant revealed during the discussion about the permissibility of meat-eating, after all, —God's providential plan for Israel—is symbolized by the rainbow, as Yahweh explains to Noah. This image in turn supplies the central symbol and title of Lawrence's novel —a novel in which a flood plays a tragic role in the life of the Brangwen family, and in which the glimpse of a rainbow at the end of a storm yields Ursula's final visionary revelation at the novel's close. 

Now, I don't actually think there is anything divine or supernatural going on here. I am aware enough of the psychological mechanisms that allow for "cold reading" and similar mentalist techniques to have their effect on the unwary to realize that "synchronicities" and coincidences do not exist in objective reality. They are, to the contrary, more often the creation of our subconscious minds. While we go through the world taking in innumerable details and sensory experiences, our subconscious selves are ever at work trying to supply connections between these events. We then emphasize that within our experience that allows us to form such a connection, to establish a narrative linkage between the two—the fundamental activity of neurons. 

To say that all of this is true, however, does not make these connections any less interesting, or even any less mystical. William James long ago convinced me that to speak of the subconscious is already to admit of a kind of metaphysics, albeit one that is wholly compatible too with naturalistic conceptions of the mind. What is the subconscious, after all, but a substratum that is acknowledged to exist beneath or behind the waking life? To acknowledge its existence is already to speak of a realm of the numinous—i.e., something beyond our immediately-accessible phenomenal and conscious reality. This could well form the basis of all religious experience, as James allows.

Lawrence's protagonist Ursula, after all, does not receive every passage from the Bible equally. Her subconscious directs her attention to only a few, using these passages to address its needs. Of the vast multiplicity of things that occur in the Bible, or even just in the one Book of Genesis, Ursula seizes on those details that speak to her fixations: which, since she is a Lawrence character, chiefly involve a kind of mystic sexuality, a longing for bodily and spiritual union with the Other. The episode with the Sons of God appeals to her as the image of Jesus as companion later will—as a kind of spiritualization of the inner longing she feels for physical and earthly love. The section with Noah strikes her at first, by contrast, as distasteful—as an arrogating to man of natural forces in which he does not truly have a proprietary stake. 

Lawrence's project was both profoundly mystical and entirely natural; seeking to unite the two domains. And perhaps in the realm of the unconscious or the subconscious we can find a method for achieving such a union. Lawrence's novel is full of purple passages seeking to gesture toward inexpressible realities. They would be easy to mock; and the logical positivist in me says all of this is merely so much blather. The other side of me, however, is willing to admit that my heart is pulled toward these sections. In a historical moment of emergence from the long night of COVID, something in Lawrence's shimmering rainbow and the promise connected to it speaks to me. I feel that there is something Lawrence's words are saying, or trying to say, or pointing to, that is not wholly without sense or meaning. And in the workings of the subconscious, is perhaps to be found a domain in which these realities can abide.