Continued Connections

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"Making your way in the world today
takes everything you got
Taking a break from all your worries
sure would help a lot.
Wouldn't you like to get away? . . .
Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name
And they're always glad you came
You want to be where you can see
The troubles are all the same
You want to be where everybody knows your name . . .
You want to go where people know
The people are all the same
You want to go where everybody knows your name. . . "

~ Song from Cheers ~

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At some level, isn't that what we all want -- to be known? It's what Hafiz calls "that great pull to connect," to be in synch, to harmonize, to be part and parcel of the universe. Think of the photographer in The Memory Keeper's Daughter, placing one photograph beside another, hoping to find that "the entire world is contained within each living person. . . . he yearned to capture on film: these rare moments where the world seemed unified, coherent, everything contained in a single fleeting image" (similar project).

I know I've posted this poem before, but it [Red]bears repeating:

With That Moon Language

Admit something:

Everyone you see,
you say to them,
“Love me.” [Choose Me!]

Of course you do not do this out loud,
otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still, though, think about this,
this great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one who lives
with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,

with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye
in this world
is dying to hear?

Hafiz (1325 – 1389)
14th - Century Beloved Persian poet and lyrical genius

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Writing six centuries after Hafiz, the Irish poet, priest, and philosopher John O'Donohue (1956 - 2008) looks at "this great pull" in a different, unsettling way. Yes, of course, we all want to feel connected, but is that always such a good thing? In Anam Cara: A Book of Celctic Wisdom, O'Donohue analyzes our craving for connection. Like Hafiz, O'Donohue asks us to search our souls and "Admit something":

We assume too readily that we share one world with other people. It is true at the objective level that we inhabit the same physical space as other humans; the sky is, after all, the one visual constant that unites everyone’s perception of being in the world. Yet this outer world offers no access to the inner world of an individual. At a deeper level, each person is the custodian of a completely private, individual world. Sometimes our beliefs, opinions, and thoughts are ultimately ways of consoling [does he mean "deceiving"] ourselves that we are not alone with the burden of a unique, inner world. It suits us to pretend that we all belong to the one world, but we are more alone than we realize.

I feel somewhat dismayed yet intrigued by Donohue's suspicion that we are fundamentally disparate beings, despite our yearning for connection. Do I deceive myself that connection and coincidence govern our mutual existence? Possibly. Do I write essays and blog posts not so much in celebration of our similar outlooks but to console myself over a mutual failure to "connect, only connect" (see also: Commonplace Book, King & Queen, Handful of Dust, Heroine of Sensibility)? I hope not. Still, O'Donohue's words are haunting.

The Cheers song says we want to see that "troubles are all the same" and be where "people are all the same," but maybe, as O'Donohue suggests, we are incorrect in our assumption that this could ever be our reality. Perhaps such a place exists only on television or deep in our romantic imaginings. Yet, after ten years of blogging on this topic, beginning with my E. M. Forster - inspired Mission Statement, the connections keep on coming! They appear of their own accord, neither imaginary nor forced, woven daily through the Great Conversation. Only recently, after having all three read the same novel -- Jodi Picoult's Small Great Things [more on this later] -- my sisters and I were discussing our shared perceptions of literary coincidence:

Kit: Do you ever notice that sometimes when you read a book or see a movie or learn a new word -- all of a sudden it's everywhere!

Peg: I know what you mean about universe coincidences. I’ve sometimes wondered how this is possible because it seems to happen on such random topics.

Kit: Precisely!

Di: I love when things like that happen! Sometimes Tom and I will be talking, and one of us says something, then the person on TV will say it. Like the universe is singing together.

[Or as another friend put it: this infinite symphony of existence.]

How appropriate that they should both pick a musical metaphor to describe this phenomenon of universal synchronicity!

I am particularly fond of literary connections that fall into the category of "connections about connections." Take, for example, One Good Turn, a delightfully dense British mystery in which the endearing private dectective Jackson Brodie becomes obsessed with puzzling out the distinction between a connection and a coincidence:

Jackson: There's a connection between the two girls, there has to be. . . .

Louise: "Could just be a coincidence."

Jackson: "You're playing devil's advocate. And I don't believe in coincidence . . . A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen." (343 - 44)

Jackson: "You say coincidence . . . I say connection. A baffling, impenetrably complex connection, but nonetheless a connection. . . . he could see something that made sense. A tangible connection, not just a coincidence." (369, 374)

Louise: Jackson had been . . . Making his bloody 'connections' everywhere. (435)

Jackson: "You say connection, I say connection." (448)

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dialogue from One Good Turn (2006)
by Kate Atkinson (b 1951),
scholarly, spell - binding British novelist
****************
. . . and lastly . . .

"Boxes within boxes, dolls within dolls, worlds within worlds.
Everything was connected. Everything in the whole world."
(463)

This closing thought on interiority & connection . . .
TO BE CONTINUED . . .
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, April 14th

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