Synchronicity and the man behind the curtain
Sometimes the things we’ve been mulling over as we go about our daily lives are the very things we come across somewhere else. Maybe it’s a bit of dialogue spoken by a character in a movie or something a friend says on the morning walk or maybe it’s something we read. However it happens, it always takes my breath away. For a minute I think, “Wow—the universe is conspiring to tell me something, I’d better listen.”
This happened just the other day when I read an interview in Image Journal with Christian Wiman the editor of Poetry. For those of you who don’t know, Poetry is the “it” of poetry journals. It’s been around forever. It’s one of the places most poets aspire to be published some day. And no I haven’t, not yet., Here’s what he said,” We can know no man’s work until we know how, whom, and to what end he did or did not love.” It is so close to a quote I had just copied down for the remake of my website by Wendell Berry “…the significance (and ultimately the quality) of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part.”
And then Wiman went on to discuss “the- man- behind- the- curtain” effect. If you’ve seen the Wizard of Oz, and who hasn’t, there’s that wonderful line, ”Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” I like it because I think that much of life happens “behind that curtain.” That there are things going on around us all the time that we just can’t see. We are limited creatures. Wiman says, “What we call reality is utterly conditioned by the limitations of our senses, and that there is some other reality much larger and more complex than we are able to perceive.”There are certain writers who are able to remind of this. Wiman continues,”They are, for the briefest of instants, perceiving something of reality as it truly is.” It has become cliché in poetry circles to talk about that moment when the ordinary reveals the extraordinary, but the extraordinary is reality. We live in an invaded universe. At one point in time the Extraordinary did invade the ordinary and nothing has been the same since. Every day we live with the reality of multiple dimensions, things are always going on behind the curtain. Every story, every poem that reminds of this, speaks truth.