The Magician and the Comedian

 
Gibbs Williams sent us a couple of synchroncities that he distinguishes as ‘apparent’ and ‘real.’ To us, the apparent one sounds like a synchronicity, and the real one is a story with another layer, or another degree, of synchronicity. Call them what you want, here are the stories:
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A friend of mine recommended a book called Magic. In answer to my question who wrote it, he said he didn’t know. I responded by telling him a story about my having worked at a summer resort in New Hampshire years ago as a bus boy. While there, I was fascinated with one of my fellow workers who soon retreated to his bunk room, isolating himself. Feeling concerned, I went to visit him. What I saw was a highly depressed fellow of about 25 years old compulsively flipping cards, making them fly back into his hands. During the few hours I visited him he never ceased flipping the cards along with showing me remarkable card tricks.

I thought this young disturbed man might turn out to be a great magician if he could somehow overcome his depression and keep on compulsively practicing his craft. The depressed  card flipper was named Ricky Jay. The next day I got a phone call from my friend who excitedly said the name of the author of the book on Magic was  Ricky Jay. This to me is only an apparent synchronicity as it is the outcome of a logical progression of cause and effect occurrences.

However, what follows for me fulfills the requirements to be a meaningful coincidence.The next day I went to a local bookstore to look at the book on Magic. The owner said they didn’t stock it. I looked around and soon spotted a biography of Einstein. In the same pile of books I also spotted a biography of Henny Youngman – the comedian. To me this was a meaningful coincidence. How so?

I detailed the coincidence to the simpatico owner of the bookstore, telling him the following events. Years ago, I had been a bus boy in a resort hotel wherein I met this depressed worker who compulsively flipped playing cards, and years later turns out to be a famous expert magician who wrote a book on magic.While working at that hotel,  I also had the opportunity to eat lunch with Henny Youngman, who had been entertaining at the resort.

I found the experience to be depressing, however. Instead of eating his hamburger, Mr. Youngman compulsively told one liners to the other people surrounding him. Their laughter seemed to be fueling his empty psychological gas tank. So here was another instance of a an exceedingly talented man compulsively transforming his abilities into a defining life purpose.

So what does this synchronicity have to do with me? I am conducting an event to launch the publication of my recently published book on Demystifying Meaningful Coincidences (Synchronicities): The Evolving Self, The Personal Unconscious, and The Creative Process. I have been searching for a good beginning, I had been thinking about asking the question: what would have been compelling enough for me to invest much of the 50 years of my life in investigating the perplexities of synchronicities? So now the story of the obsessive magician and the comedian provided me with a lead-in to my own story.

As a psychoanalyst, I could easily give myself a diagnosis of obsessive compulsive personality disorder, like the magician and the comedian. And, or, I could also judge my interest as parallel to  Blake’s observation: in viewing the whole world in a grain of sand. This second point of view has a ring of truth and reinforces my belief that at least for me my naturalistic theory of synchronicities is valid and therefore worth my continuing efforts to understand the nature of these amazing events.
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Earlier this week, we saw the magician/actor Ricky Jay on an episode of FlashForward. If Gibbs hadn’t sent this post, I wouldn’t have looked up a photo of Ricky Jay and wouldn’t have recognized him. That might be what Gibbs calls and ‘apparent synchronicity.’ Now if I bump into Ricky Jay in the gym, that will be a meaningful coincidence. – Rob