Meaningful Coincidences?

 Everyone comes across those moments in life in which there seems to be an eerie correspondence between one's inner world and external reality—"synchronicities," in Carl Jung's terminology; which he further defines as "meaningful coincidences." (Hull trans. throughout.) But the benefit of keeping a blog for more than ten years is that you start to accumulate a written record of a few of the more memorable ones. 

Take a post I published on January 15, 2022. I was reflecting in the piece on Max Frisch's short novel, Man in the Holocene, with its images of human extinction and the notion of a dead cosmos. I wrote about an episode that some scientists believe occurred early on in human evolutionary history, when our entire species may have faced a bottleneck that nearly caused our extinction, due to a volcanic cataclysm. 

This got me thinking about the caldera under Yellowstone, the 1816 "Year without a Summer" caused by volcanic activity, Krakatoa, etc. 

I wrote about all of these things in the blog. And then, after publishing it, I read in the news that, that very same day, the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption had climaxed in the Pacific. 

Now, one might say: volcanic activity of some sort is going on all the time, and I probably just happened to notice it in the news on January 15, 2022 because I had already been primed to think about it due to my blog post (confirmation bias, in short). 

But, it has to be said, this was no ordinary volcanic eruption of the kind that might happen on any given week. According to the Wikipedia article, it was the largest in the world since 1991!

One may also point out: the volcanic activity in Hunga Tonga had already begun a few weeks earlier. It merely climaxed on January 15. So—is it possible I saw some other news report about the Hunga Tonga volcano prior to writing my post, and this had subconsciously primed me to think about volcanoes? Maybe; but, if so, I have no memory of seeing such an article; and I didn't reference any in my post. 

Nor was my volcano premonition entirely unique. On January 17, 2020, I had written a blog pondering the question of whether the nation might soon face some sort of external catastrophe that would test our national character. "I of course do not pray for catastrophe in America," I said. But I hinted that one might be coming. 

Less than two months later, the COVID-19 pandemic was declared to be a national emergency. 

Now, again, as with my volcano—did I see some earlier coverage of the mysterious disease outbreak in Wuhan, that was only just starting to be covered in the Western press? Did this somehow inform my outlook and prompt me to think about the idea of catastrophe? It's possible. But if so—it certainly wasn't consciously on my brain at the time. 

What other examples? Let's see. There was the time last summer when I wrote a post about Ferdinand Tönnies's concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Less than two weeks later, a friend randomly forwarded to me an email newsletter he had started to receive, which featured "Gemeinschaft" as its chosen "Word of the Day." 

I assumed at first he was referring to my post; but no, it was unrelated, and he had not seen or read my post.  

(This is an example of a subset of synchronicities: the "Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.") 

I am of course not unique in experiencing these events. Literary history abounds in examples. 

There is the famous story that Borges recounts of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's composition of "Kubla Khan," for instance. The poet is said to have formed his concept for the poem in an opium dream, as we know. The eerie coincidence of the situation, however, is that the Mongol ruler who built Xanadu is said to have likewise conceived his plan for the palace in a dream. 

Could Coleridge have known this? And could this knowledge have subconsciously informed his retelling of the poem's composition? Literary historians have considered that possibility too. But, Borges writes, in his essay on this synchronicity, that the information about the Khan's dream could not possibly have been known to Coleridge at the time, as it was not published in the West until much later. 

Do these "meaningful coincidences" actually mean anything? Perhaps not. One of the most notorious difficulties about such coincidences is that they always seem more compelling and important to the person who experiences them than to anyone else. This American Life even did a whole episode one time on the subject of how boring other people's "coincidences" always seem to you, the listener, whenever they try to explain them. 

Like the content of dreams, inside jokes, or vacation photos—"synchronicities" appear to be just notoriously hard to render interesting to a second person. And so—also like these—attempts to do so often provoke the line, "I guess you had to be there." 

Carl Jung's examples—which he gives in the book that introduced the term "synchronicities"—unfortunately fall into this category. 

To be sure, Jung cites one instance that impressed me—but only because it reminded me of one of my own. An English writer had a dream about an island destroyed in a volcanic eruption. Four days later, he saw a newspaper headline: "Volcano Disaster in Martinique." 

This immediately jogged my memory about my own experience with the Hunga-Tonga volcano—described above. 

But when Jung turns to his autobiographical examples, they tend to fizzle. 

He describes a case in which he was meeting with a patient, and she recounted a dream she had just had the night before, involving a golden scarab. At that moment, according to Jung, he heard a tapping against the window. It turned out to be a type of beetle that was buzzing about and trying to gain entrance. The beetle was, according to Jung, "the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes." 

I'm sorry, but that "nearest analogy to" caveat just sort of takes the air out of the whole thing, in my opinion. It deflates all that came before. 

Then there are the elaborate astrological experiments that occupy the central portion of Jung's short book. I read this section fairly carefully, and still, I have no idea, after coming away, whether Jung is actually claiming to have found any statistically significant correlation at all between observed events and his astrological predictions. 

He appears in places to do so. But then, he points out a number of errors in his original calculations, and observes: "The errors all tend to exaggerate the results in a way favorable to astrology." 

He appears to admit, then, that wishful thinking and confirmation bias played a role in his experiment. But he concludes that this merely goes to show that, in order to experience synchronicities, one has to be in the right state of mind. The "psychic conditions" must be just right. 

Well, that's one potential take-away. 

Jung also gives us an example of his dream analysis that fails to inspire confidence. He records a patient's nocturnal vision in which they were "traveling through the Siberian tundra and found an animal [...] It was a more than life-size cock, made of what looked like thin, colourless glass. But it was alive and had just sprung by chance from a microscopic unicellular organism which had the power to turn into all sorts of animals[.]"

Jung concludes: the dream is "obviously saying" something about a "meaningful coincidence of an absolutely natural product with a human idea apparently independent of it." 

Is this in fact what the dream is "obviously saying"? 

We will have to take Jung's word for it, because he insists in a footnote attached to this line that, while some "who find the dreams unintelligible will probably suspect them of harbouring a quite different meaning which is more in accord with their preconceived opinions" (for, he admits, "One can indulge in wishful thinking about dreams just as one can about anything else"), he for his part could never be suspected of doing the same. "I prefer," he writes, "to keep as close to the dream statement as possible, and to try to formulate it in accordance with its manifest meaning."

Mm, mhmm. Or could it be that perhaps the good doctor protests too much? 

Synchronicities constantly have this way of seeming so mysterious and compelling to the person experiencing them—even downright "numinous," as Jung at one point puts it—and yet somehow slipping through one's fingers as soon as one tries to explain them to a second person. 

I had this experience a couple months ago, when I was staying at a hotel in Rhode Island. A friend and I had just watched the Joker sequel, and—as indifferent as I was to most of the movie—I had come away obsessed with Lady Gaga's haunting, almost Gothic rendition in the movie of the 1970 Carpenters' hit, "Close to You." 

I hadn't heard or thought about this song in years, if not for more than a decade. Probably the last time I had heard any portion of it was when it was briefly sampled in the Season 2 episode of the Simpsons, "The Way We Was." The song itself is cloying schlock—insufferable in its original form. But Lady Gaga's creepy rendition of it is to die for. 

Anyways, I had just been obsessively re-listening to the Lady Gaga version, when I stepped out of my hotel room into the hallway to head downstairs. And there, on the radio in the hotel hallway, what else was playing but—you guessed it—the 1970 Carpenters's song "Close to You." And it was in its original version—so it wasn't pulling from the soundtrack of the recently-released Joker sequel. 

I rushed to tell a friend over the phone what had just happened to me. "It was the most amazing synchronicity!" I tried to explain. "You'll never believe it." 

He did believe it. All too easily. In fact, he yawned. 

I guess you had to be there.