Synchronicity for Bookworms

I read a lot of books. I’m not bragging—it’s just a fact. I don’t do it because I’m smart, or hungry for knowledge, or anything like that. I do it because I have to. The fact is that I’m an introvert, I’m mentally unstable, and books are my medicine.

I used to read a lot of fiction, but since I passed the middle-age marker, I find myself partaking mainly of non-fiction: history, science, and especially biography. I’m not sure how much real wisdom is imparted from reading this much, but I must say that I have, as one might expect, absorbed a huge amount of useless knowledge…(I mean, INCREDIBLY USEFUL KNOWLEDGE!).

Sometimes—and more often than I can rationally explain—this knowledge comes together in some weird and thrilling ways. Some hip neo-intellectuals might just call this a Nerdgasm, but I don’t like that term, for any number of reasons.  Rather, I call it Synchronicity for Bookworms, borrowing from Carl Jung’s famous theory of “meaningful coincidences.” My form of synchronicity is especially familiar to voracious readers. Take this example…

Not long ago I was watching The Terminator 2 with my son, Connor. Now Connor, being a teenager, had never seen the movie before, and so I got a chance to do what parents love—that is, relive a great old movie through my kid’s eyes. T2 a classic action film, obviously, right up there with the very best examples of the genre (think Friedkin, Don Siegel, Walter Hill, etc.). In fact, I had long considered Arnold Schwarzenegger to be the inheritor of the American film archetype first inhabited by the likes of John Wayne and Randolph Scott—the big man of pure resolve, striding his way across a barren Western landscape. In T2, the barren wastes are those of East L.A., but the effect is the same.

Like those western heroes of old, the Terminator rides a horse (okay, a Harley) and carries a rifle at his side (actually a shotgun). In fact, one of the most thrilling moments in the movie comes when Arnie is racing his Harley down the L.A. river and shooting at the T-1000 with his free hand. After he takes his first shot, you wonder what he’s going to do: how is he going to cock the gun?

Naturally, he cocks it one-handed.

When I first saw this moment, in a darkened movie house way back in 1991, the audience literally cheered. It was just amazing, one of those moments of spectacle that define great Hollywood film-making. When Connor saw it, he was just as impressed.

But that’s not the end of my story.

Just a few days later, something else amazing happened. I was flying home from a work trip (yes, from California) and was reading a book on my Kindle. It was Scott Eyman’s excellent bio, John Wayne: The Life and the Legend, and you can imagine my surprise when, on page 2, I read Eyman’s account of the filming of Stagecoach, the classic western directed by John Ford. Apparently John Ford was looking for a memorable way to introduce the film’s young hero, the Ringo Kid, in the character’s first scene.

Ford wanted him to do something flashy, but it couldn’t happen too quickly for the audience to take it in.  All the possibilities seemed to cancel each other out… And then Yakima Canutt, Wayne’s friend and the stunt coordinator on the film, offered an idea.  When Canutt was a boy he had seen Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.  As the overland stage raced around the arena, a messenger trailing behind the stagecoach had carried a rifle with a large ring loop which allowed him to spin the rifle in the air, cocking it with one hand.  The crowd went wild.  Canutt said that it had been thirty years ago and he still remembered the moment.  More to the point, he had never seen anybody else do it.

And so it was done. The prop department found a suitable rifle with a ring-loop cocking handle and sawed off the tip of the barrel (it was still too long to be twirled under the arm of their 6′ 4″ actor, a young nobody named Marion Morrison, of all things). The scene was shot, and the kid pulled off the twirl with breathtaking grace and panache, so much so that audiences gasped when they saw it.

This was, arguably, the first real taste that the world had of that kid Morrison, a.k.a. John Wayne. He went on thrilling audiences for the next 50 years.

So what does this particular “meaningful coincidence” mean? Nothing. Nothing, that is, if you asked a hard-nosed rationalist. As for me, it merely confirms my feeling—completely irrational, perhaps even atavistic—that the universe sometimes puts into contact with things that we need. I guess I needed to see the connection between Hollywood past and present, between ancient icons of masculinity and modern ones.

Also, as a writer, I have a natural affinity for these moments.  The kind which, when they occur in a novel or a short story, make the narrative come to life.

I have a theory that all great stories are about stories are about hitherto unseen connections. Some novelists, such as Nabokov and E. L. Doctorow, take idea to an extreme. As Douglas Fowler writes in Understanding E. L. Doctorow…

A certain kind of contemporary writer delights in the opportunity to create a universe fraught with powers and crisscrossed with symmetries which the larger God or the larger Nature have absent-mindedly ignored. Robert Scholes called this sort of artist-with-words a “fabulator,” and Joyce, Nabokov, Borges, Pynchon, Robert Coover, Gunter Grass, and Donald Barthelme are the writers who have perhaps drawn the most attention toward this aspect of their work. Clearly, Ragtime and Loon Lake are fabulations—narratives inside reimagined little universes of their own…. [In Loon Lake,] Warren Penfield’s life is the major means by which Doctorow expresses this synchronicity, almost always in conjunction with Joe’s life, for the novel shows us now Warren’s life, now Joe’s, with images from one life hauntingly resembling images from the other, as if “bleeding” over from adjacent channels of electromatic transmission.

Mr. Fowler puts it well, despite the palpable edge of condescension in this passage, as if guys like Doctorow (and Joyce and Nabokov) are misguided—perhaps even a bit precious—in their old-fashioned search for a cosmic order in the most basic of daily occurrences. Doesn’t Fowler understand that this is what all novelists do (all good ones, anyway)?

I guess my ultimate point is if you read enough books—or consume enough of any kind of art, and let it really penetrate you to your deepest level—some spirit will eventually visit you.

You just have to be willing to believe it.