The last thing I read at Seattle Public Library before the region’s public libraries shut (the University of Washington campus and coffee shops had already shut) for coronavirus pandemic panic was a disappointment. The April 2020 edition of Psychology Today promised an article on “coincidence” on its cover, and I hoped to encounter other serious researchers in the field of Jung’s synchronicity theory. Instead, the author started with a few anecdotal stories disproving his own bias, before asserting he’d read “all” the literature, without citing any of his readings, and thoroughly “debunked” Jung’s theory. According to him.
If he’s read all the literature, then he must be Artificial Intelligence, as I continually encounter references to synchronicity, or causally unrelated coincidences, in the field of literature, and I haven’t run out of readings. Perhaps he meant written up within the same 10 phallologocentric academic journals only read by the same 100 dry academics desperately trying to pad their CVs with their bibliographies? Before readers here dismiss the field of literature as a field of rigorous intellectual inquiry, may I remind the tools I’m using to type and the tools you’re using to read this writing existed at one time not too terribly long ago only in the imaginations of science fiction writers?
So it was with much delight I encountered surgeon Leonard Shlain’s 1991 book Art & Physics within a Little Free Library, coronavirus panic notwithstanding, leaving me feeling for the first time that maybe I might perhaps finally understand Einstein, but I’m not sure, because what if, exactly as the author warns, he didn’t explain the physics any better or worse than he explained the art, and wondering why every physics lab – or STEMs more generally – in the world isn’t breathlessly recruiting a resident artist to add to their payroll? While realizing from my experiences supporting the research sciences while working on my BFA at the University of Utah for sure the physicists aren’t going to be socialized enough to come to me, and completed my MFA on critical theories of identity, trauma, and the taboo with Margrit von Braun’s perfunctory signature, so I’ll need to go in search of the physicists. Again.
By December 2021 I stumbled across another trade paperback by psychoanalyst Elizabeth Mayer, who thankfully left behind Extraordinary Knowing, itself another Little Free Library “random” find that I’d earlier predicted via coincident data, which references the work of Ingo Swann, Harold Puthoff, and Stanford Research Institute, among a host of other cross-disciplinary colleagues I’d hoped to encounter.
I take it Psychology Today is to the field of human psychology that Scientific American is to the hard sciences? And what do the editors suppose becomes of the academics excluded from academia?
This post is submitted not as precognition, then, but as potential connection to other colleagues, evidence, and queries: why would I want to upload all of my data to your database?
Evidence of a dream from perhaps a decade earlier, and test: will WordPress allow me to embed link to Vimeo within this submittal form?
<iframe src=”https://player.vimeo.com/video/553414307?h=ac78f0e046&loop=1″ width=”640″ height=”360″ frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p><a href=”https://vimeo.com/553414307″>self portrait after portrait of francis bacon dream 42</a> from <a href=”https://vimeo.com/studio6other”>studio6other</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p>
If not, then here’s a direct link to visual evidence of a dream that took a decade before it finally came true, but what a decade! While I was at first of course disappointed by my laptop failure, as I thought about it further, I realized I could view that loss another way, that I’ve hacked into an internet without hardware, screens, wires. Coming, like Ingo Swann, from the field of art, I title this piece Self Portrait After Portrait of Francis Bacon Dream 42: https://vimeo.com/553414307