Synchronicity

There’s a line somewhere in the Philip K Dick biography I read earlier this year that says that the more PKD you read, the more synchronicities begin to appear. Synchronicities – those uncanny seeming coincidental moments when something, often abstract and formless that you’ve been kicking around at the back of your mind suddenly presents itself out in the real world. PKD took such premonitions very seriously, perhaps too seriously, given that he eventually convinced himself that these moments of unsettling precognition were, in fact, fragments of past often historically and indeed spiritually significant experiences coming back around again. He took this as evidence that time was running backwards and that he was a prophet.

If you have the patience for it, his Exegesis is filled with this kind of stuff: theories of the Noösphere, holy magic and planetary mind. It’s a mad read, but also a poignant one knowing how his mind was unravelling at that time. It is an attempt to document a reality that was fast getting away from him. In a particularly revealing moment towards the end of the book, he writes that prophets are those who remember what everyone else has forgotten. ‘We are all sleeping avatars of God, with amnesia’, he writes, not so much a gift of foresight than a curse of remembering. Elsewhere in the Exegesis he writes about how God imposed a veil over the world that filters out those aspects of reality that would otherwise terrify us beyond all comprehension, but occasionally something breaks through, forcing a different kind of visionary consciousness. Anyone familiar with Plato’s Cave or the Freudian unconscious will recognise the ruse.

Suffice to say, it’s easy to get lost in the Exegesis.

I can’t recall why I picked it up. The previous year I’d been working my through a decent amount of Carl Jung’s back catalogue, ending on a reading – well, partial, aborted reading truth be told – of his Red Book. The Red Book was a private labour of love that he never wanted to be published. Like PKD, who was also familiar with Jung’s work, what you find in the Red Book is a spiritual journey, at times playful yet always within touching distance of the classics, endowing the thing with a weird gravity that is uniquely its own. Simply put, its Jung’s attempt to move towards a core sense of self, whereas there is a quiet desperation in the Exegesis, accompanied by the creeping sense that the author’s time is running out. I think that both men saw themselves as prophets, although for wildly different reasons. Both claim to have seen ghosts.

Around the time I was finishing up with the Exegesis I started to see synchronicities. In the practice of Choas Magic (another tangent) this is seen as something of a rite of passage and evidence that the mind is beginning to open. Rather than reaching for supernatural conclusions I recalled the warning outlined in the PKD biography – this was something to be expected when you spend so much time in his world.

I started to see little breakages. You know how you sometimes think of a song and then a few moments later you hear it on the radio? It’s something close to that but not quite the same thing. I recall that I was thinking a lot about PKD’s theories of time, and how he theorised that time was moving in many different directions, all of them relative to where (and when) the observer happen to be standing at the time. I’m not sure I really understand what he was tilting at, but it interested me to the point that I started sketching visual representations and became preoccupied with the idea of the more complex a pattern becomes, the more difficult it is to discern the point of origin.

I then happened across a Werner Herzog interview where he was talking about the Kuleshov Effect, which is where a filmmaker uses a combination of two shots that create a third, new perspective or meaning that was not contained in the original shots. I started to dream about branching lines, syncretic notions of liberating messiness, tangled roots, labyrinths. I took notes and sketched ideas. All of it genuinely exciting.

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These I started to turn into a painting:

And then the synchronicity hit, arriving one afternoon when I was idly looking at art prints online and stumbled across Wassily Kandinsky’s 1923 painting ‘Circles in a Circle’ and my head nearly fell off.

This was the image that I had unknowingly been searching for. To me, it connected PKD and Jung, the Red Book and the Exegesis. Somehow and incredibly, it was the visual representation of something that I had been dreaming about and struggling to pin down. I don’t recall ever studying Kandinsky. Maybe I saw this painting at some point in the distant past, maybe I’m remembering what was forgotten as PKD says, but it feels more than just a subconscious footnote, more special and meaningful in a way I still can’t quite define.