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What I like about Ron Drummond is that he just comes right out and says things, no ambiguity, and usually (with a few exceptions) an incredibly positive spin on something that everyone else is reading negatively.
His post about the bright-shining sense of synchronicities he gleaned from Thomas Disch where everyone else found deep Midwestern cynicisms (see the New York Times obituary today) expresses, of course, topics of synchronous occurrence that I have tiptoed around for two years or more now. But whereas I test the waters, throw up some smoke and mirrors to confuse the unwary, toss out a few jokes to render the situation as unclear as possible, and then conclude that not only have the uninitiated been kept away, the initiated haven't seen anything either.
Procul, procul, o profane, or some such that I am sure utopyr will remember accurately and Rodger Cunningham will correct my Latin grammar on.
Well, actually, it popped right up on a Google search and I see that I omitted "este."
Anyway, I am so allergic to sounding like the sort of person I actually am that I bend over backwards to accommodate a 21st-century readership raised on things like all the other fictions of Tom Disch as the New York Times writer described them. It is hard to believe that Drummond and the obituary writer are talking about the same novelist.
And now I might as well say that though there will be no evidence to support it in my lifetime, I suspect that in another century the sort of synchronicities Drummond describes will be explicable and supported by empirical evidence, at least as empirical as with the notion of malign winds that we now know arrive bearing changes in air pressure and loads of mood-altering charged ions. I think of Nietzsche, traveling all over Europe in search of the climate and conditions that would allow him to think and write. (And being undone in the end by syphilis, but that is another story.)
And there will indeed still be further mysteries, of which nothing can be said except the question asked by the character in Crowley's Daemonomania, "Do you see what is happening? Have you noticed it too?"
And those who notice them will have different ways of describing and deciding. And perhaps different ways on different days.
Which reminds me that I thought this morning that it would be funny to write a series of parodies of famous horror novels wherein a skeptical character would, say, stride confidently through the halls of Miskatonic University and the hills of Arkham and, defended by an ability to deny every ominous clue presented to him, would have nothing whatsoever happen during the entire narrative.
His post about the bright-shining sense of synchronicities he gleaned from Thomas Disch where everyone else found deep Midwestern cynicisms (see the New York Times obituary today) expresses, of course, topics of synchronous occurrence that I have tiptoed around for two years or more now. But whereas I test the waters, throw up some smoke and mirrors to confuse the unwary, toss out a few jokes to render the situation as unclear as possible, and then conclude that not only have the uninitiated been kept away, the initiated haven't seen anything either.
Procul, procul, o profane, or some such that I am sure utopyr will remember accurately and Rodger Cunningham will correct my Latin grammar on.
Well, actually, it popped right up on a Google search and I see that I omitted "este."
Anyway, I am so allergic to sounding like the sort of person I actually am that I bend over backwards to accommodate a 21st-century readership raised on things like all the other fictions of Tom Disch as the New York Times writer described them. It is hard to believe that Drummond and the obituary writer are talking about the same novelist.
And now I might as well say that though there will be no evidence to support it in my lifetime, I suspect that in another century the sort of synchronicities Drummond describes will be explicable and supported by empirical evidence, at least as empirical as with the notion of malign winds that we now know arrive bearing changes in air pressure and loads of mood-altering charged ions. I think of Nietzsche, traveling all over Europe in search of the climate and conditions that would allow him to think and write. (And being undone in the end by syphilis, but that is another story.)
And there will indeed still be further mysteries, of which nothing can be said except the question asked by the character in Crowley's Daemonomania, "Do you see what is happening? Have you noticed it too?"
And those who notice them will have different ways of describing and deciding. And perhaps different ways on different days.
Which reminds me that I thought this morning that it would be funny to write a series of parodies of famous horror novels wherein a skeptical character would, say, stride confidently through the halls of Miskatonic University and the hills of Arkham and, defended by an ability to deny every ominous clue presented to him, would have nothing whatsoever happen during the entire narrative.
