Monday, March 30, 2009

Is a Sad Clown Still Funny?


"It is a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."
-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

I mentioned in this blog's inaugural post that I would likely write about "synchronistic events in my own life," and in the two months or so since I first started blogging, I haven't explored this topic yet. This is partially because I feel like I've had more interesting things to discuss, but also partially because over the course of the past four or five years since I first experienced synchronicity, the phenomena has occurred less and less in my life. I experienced a rather interesting event yesterday that I'd like to share, but first, for the uninitiated, a brief explanation of synchronicity.

Synchronicity is, to use Jung's own terminology, "a temporal[ly] coincident occur
rence of acausal events." Although the current of thought from which the idea of synchronicity sprang goes back rather far into Jung's career (and arguably, well before Jung was even born. . . .more on that later) it was not given its proper exploration until 1952 when Jung, then in his seventies, published the paper "On Synchronicity" (and included later in Vol. 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche of his Collected Works) which detailed what he believed to be a springboard into the study of the interrelatedness of the human mind and universe at large. A decent paragraph from the wikipedia article on the topic reads:

Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." Jung variously described synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle", "meaningful coincidence" and "acausal parallelism". Jung introduced the concept as early as the 1920s but only gave a full statement of it in 1951 in an Eranos lecture and in 1952, published a paper, Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle, in a volume with a related study by the physicist (and Nobel laureate) Wolfgang Pauli.
What differentiates synchronicity from mere coincidence, according to Jung, is the presence of subjective meaning for the individual experiencing the event. That is, if I run into the same person on the street three times in a single day, but this has no context within my own life, then it is only coincident; but, if I run into the person, and they say "Looks like it's going to rain" and then run into them again later in the day just as it begins to rain, then I could conceivably say there was something meaningful about these "chance" encounters. Jung is often a very misunderstood thinker, and occasionally this stems from Jung's own dense and jargon-laden prose, but synchronicity is often misinterpreted as some sort of metaphysical phenomenon that occurs because the stars are aligned in some way or because the universe itself is imbued with some sort of purposiveness that manifests itself in these seemingly random events. To be sure, some have in fact interpreted synchronicity in this manner - the aforementioned physicist Wolfgang Pauli believed it validated certain concepts related to quantum mechanics and some who currently subscribe to the theory of the universe as a hologram, such as physicist F. David Peat of Queens University of Canada, author of Synchronicity: The Bridge between Mind and Matter, believe synchronicity to be a "flaw in the fabric of reality" that could one day yield important knowledge about the link between consciousness and the material universe. However, these are few and far between. Jung, despite his vast exploration of the implications of the theory, did not mean for synchronicity to fulfill any metaphysical objective truths. In fact, even after delineating the similarities between astrological horoscopy and marriage, the relationship between the I-Ching and the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz, and the quantum physics of acausality ("...either the psyche cannot be localized in space, or space is relative to the psyche..."), Jung conceded that synchronicity was a subjective psychological experience, though he seems to have remained fairly agnostic as to what the theory may satisfy in the future - physical, metaphysical, or otherwise.

The traditional personal example of a synchronisitic experience for Jung occurred while treating a patient. She was a particularly closed off patient whom he seemed incapable of helping. She was rational to a fault and his attempts to get her to embrace her humanity were futile. On the verge of giving up, the patient told Jung that she
had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me her dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to the golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetoaia urata) which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience. (Jung, "On Synchronicity")

I honestly don't remember my first synchronistic experience, but I do remember the most vivid one. It was about three years ago, and I was working on a paper to submit as a graduate writing sample. The paper was on the differences between legal standards of witchcraft and astrology in Late Medieval Europe despite the similarity in many of the details of their practices. I had been working on it off and on for months and felt like I had everything except for an effective conclusion. The closing section of the paper described the cultural reflections of the two practices in Elizabethan drama (and Shakespeare in particular) and I was looking for just the right quote to tie it all together, to explain exactly what it was that saved astrology among secular authorities but condemned witchcraft. As I was driving down the road, on my way home from work, I saw a Kentucky license plate number JNG-122, and for some reason this number struck me and I had the sudden notion that it was telling me something. Of course, seeing JNG immediately made me think of Jung (the name without the vowel) and I had, only the weekend before, purchased a book on Jungian psychology by Gustav Jahoda entitled The Psychology of Superstition. When I arrived at home, I was compelled to turn to page 122, though I had yet to read page 1 of that book. And, in the middle of the page, was the quote I had been looking for:
The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, all in line of order;
And therefore in the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthron'd and spher'd
Amidst the other, whose med'cinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of the planets evil,
And posts, like the commandments of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad. But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of the earth,
Commotion o fthe winds! Frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate,
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from this fixture! O, when degree is shak'd,
Which is the ladder to high designs,
The enterprise is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in school, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenity and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, scepters, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place.
(William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.85-110)


These lines are considered to be among the penultimate in describing the Elizabethan wordlview of universal order and typifies the concept of the macrocosm-microcosm relationship, which the Elizabethans inherited from medieval and ancient philosophers. Needless to say, it was the perfect quote to tie my paper together.

So, after all that, here's the most recent moment of synchronicity I experienced just yesterday. I have two jobs. I substitute teach during the day and work part time at a coffee shop at night (OK, not every day or every night, but as often as I can). Monday, I subbed for an English class that was reading To Kill a Mockingbird, one of my favorite novels. We read chapter 22 in class, which occurs just after the courtroom scene (*SPOILER ALERT*). The kids are discussing the guilty verdict, and their faith in justice is badly shaken despite the fact that Atticus, despondent though he may be, considers the fact that the jury was out for two hours "progress." One line that I hadn't ever really thought about before, but which resonated with me as I read it yesterday is as follows:

"I think I'll be a clown when I get grown," said Dill. "Yes, sir, a clown.... There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off." "You got it backwards, Dill," said Jem. "Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them." "Well, I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks."
That night, at the coffee shop, I had a customer come to the counter and order a drink. At the store where I work, we have "frequency cards" where customers can accumulate points and receive free drinks after a certain amount of purchases. The card is also interactive, and customers can register them online and get even more deals emailed to them. Most customers register the card under their name, but they don't have to, and occasionally some will write quirky or witty things. When we swipe the cards, the registration "name" pops up on our computer screen. As I swiped this man's card, his registration name came up: "Is a Sad Clown Still Funny?"

I think Dill's is.

3 comments:

  1. Question: I've read several things lately that point out the way in which it was evolutionarily advantageous for us to develop brains that search for patterns. Correspondingly, because we are so hard wired to see patterns we often see them where there are none and at times our brain instinctively feels something to be true that is not. Could synchronicity be this or is there some element to it that I am not quite grasping?

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  2. It seems likely that this could be an explanation. As Jung said, he didn't believe that this could necessarily describe the universe in a physical or metaphysical way. But it's the subjective meaning found in the incident that makes it "synchronistic" and psychologically interesting. However, there are some physicists (some as respected as Nobel-prize winning Wolfgang Pauli) who literally think that it is evidence of a matter/pysche link at some fundamental level of reality. And this idea isn't entirely non-scientific, though admittedly, the scientists pursuing this research are a minority. Some aspects of quantum physics require human viewing to arrive at certain results: certain electrons behave like particles while being observed, but like waves while not being observed. Similarly, some electrons, regardless of distance, seem to be able to communicate instantaneously). Again, I'm not necessarily ready to make these sorts of philosophical leaps, but at the same time the phenomenon is intriguing enough, especially since I've personally experienced it, that I feel giving it a fair shake, even as just a psychological curiosity, is a good idea.

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  3. Hi, this is Nanami from Tokyo.
    I just want to ask where did you find this art of clown ?? Actually I have origimal of this.but cannot find who is the artist.
    there is a sign but cant read well....
    Do you have any idea of the artist ???

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