[Image: “Elephant Topography,” by John E. Simpson — chosen almost automatically to head this post, as soon as I saw the Mary Oliver quotation below. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) ]

Thinking this week about the abundant wonders of (relatively) small bits of (relatively) large contexts… thanks, in no small part, to whiskey river:

Make the Ordinary Come Alive

Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.

(William Martin [source])

…and:

Now it’s April, and the whales have come home. The finbacks and the humpbacks and the rare right whales, arriving along the coast, coming into the bay, sometimes into the harbor, their massive length and weight churning and breaching as though they, like us, know playfulness. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot, he maketh a path to shine after him, said Job, who, I fear, could not know that there is also a reasoning and a gentleness in these mountains of flesh. Once a whale tangled in line came into the harbor with another swimming just alongside, a companion that would not leave the roped animal but lingered, while brave men went out in little boats and were able to cut the entangling line away. The eye of the humpback is like all the darkness and hope and pain one sees in the eye of the elephant, in whose brain, it is avowed by those who know, nothing is ever forgotten. It is an eye deeper than the deepest well.

(Mary Oliver [source])

Meanwhile, not from whiskey river:

The biography of the actor Anthony Hopkins contains a striking example of a serendipitous coincidence. When he first heard he’d been cast to play a part in the film The Girl from Petrovka (1974), Hopkins went in search of a copy of the book on which it was based, a novel by George Feifer. He combed the bookshops of London in vain and, somewhat dejected, gave up and headed home. Then, to his amazement, he spotted a copy of The Girl from Petrovka lying on a bench at Leicester Square station. He recounted the story to Feifer when they met on location, and it transpired that the book Hopkins had stumbled upon was the very one that the author had mislaid in another part of London — an advance copy full of red-ink amendments and marginal notes he’d made in preparation for a US edition.

…You’re thinking of someone and, in the next breath they call you. You read an unusual word in a magazine and, simultaneously, someone on the radio utters the same word. Such occurrences might elicit a wry smile, but the weirder ones can induce a strong sense of the uncanny. The world momentarily seems full of strange forces.

It’s a state of mind resembling apophenia — a tendency to perceive meaningful, and usually sinister, links between unrelated events — which is a common prelude to the emergence of psychotic delusions. Individual differences may play a part in the experience of such coincidences. Schizotypy is a dimension of personality characterised by experiences that in some ways echo, in muted form, the symptoms of psychosis, including magical ideation and paranormal belief. There is evidence to suggest that people who score high on measures of schizotypy may also be more prone to experiencing meaningful coincidences and magical thinking. Perhaps schizotypal individuals are also more powerfully affected by coincidence. Someone scoring high on measures of schizotypy would perhaps be more spooked by a death dream than I (a low scorer) was. [1]

(Paul Broks [source])

…and:

I merely think that words, words, words and the Creation of the world are two different things, two incompatible things. I do not see how the Creation can be turned into words, let alone letters, hardly even a fiction. History is always entirely different to what has happened. The facts are all fled from you before you start the story. History is simply a fact on its own. And the closer you try to approach the facts through history, the deeper you sink into fiction. The greater the care with which you explain a fact, the more nonsensical a fable you fish out of chaos. The same applies to the history of the world. The difference between a novelist and a historian is this: that the former tells lies deliberately and for the fun of it; the historian tells lies in his simplicity and imagines he is telling the truth.

(Haldor Laxness [source])

______

[1] Note, by the way that the closing paragraph of the excerpt from Paul Broks’s article on coincidence is peppered with hyperlinks… hyperlinks, as it happens, being a perfect textual representation of worlds beyond the world — of big things in tiny, unfolding-origami packages. You don’t “need” to follow any of those links, but following one or more must necessarily open up your understanding of the text you’re reading (even if the footnote is meant as a distraction). You can of course choose not to follow a link; and, depending on the character and thoroughness of whoever added the link — and your own! — you won’t miss anything important… or you will. Maybe.

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