Reacquainting myself with my old collection of vinyl recordings I came across a version of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. This was one of the first records I ever bought, and takes me back to my days as a student at Leicester, where I was introduced to it by another student living in an adjacent flat. It’s wonderful stuff. In fact, one of the few occasions on which I have ever tried to sing in a proper choir came about many years later. The University Choral Society was doing a performance of this piece, and I decided that if there was one thing I had to do before I die it was sing in Carmina Burana. Tonight I was thinking of the great opening chorus Oh Fortuna! …. the hymn to the importance of luck. It’s an appropriate way into today’s theme, on the importance of coincidence.
I had a great evening yesterday. The Leeds Climbing Wall has taken to screening climbing films in the late evening. I’ve never been to one of these sessions before, but decided to see what they were like. That was an inspired decision, because I was led to think thorough the evening, not only about the extremely marginal role of and sense of “landscape” in climbing films, but also (where it is possible to speak about this) about the idiosyncratic manner in which the idea figures in this particular branch of cinematography. I have not really managed to get my head round this at the moment, but by coincidence it has given me plenty of material for reflection.
Today was the monthly meeting of the regional Italian Circle, and quite by chance I got into conversation with a relatively new member. He mentioned my earlier talk on Trieste, and was telling me about a radio programme he had heard about James Joyce’s time there, and the friendship which developed between Joyce and the Italian novelist Italo Svevo (probably best known for his novel Zeno’s Conscience.) That really was a coincidental encounter, and I gather Svevo was responsible for a good deal of Joyce’s information about Jewish culture. (One of the central characters of his Ulysses was Jewish.) Coincidentally also the conversation has whetted my appetite to read Svevo’s novel.
Sorting through some old photographs and sketches this afternoon I suddenly lit upon some material I collected about two years ago. Again, quite by chance it feeds directly into some ideas I’ve been developing in a casual way about both painting techniques and the subject-matter for future work. I need to make some decisions about a support before I start to work on it, but suddenly I’ve caught a glimpse of a way out of the rather fallow period into which I’ve fallen. Also by coincidence I got back today to an answerphone message from one of my framers, telling me that work I left with him recently is now ready for collection. The success (or otherwise) of one of these pieces, in which I’ve experimented with mixed media, will have a direct bearing on how I approach my new task.
“And so it goes”, as Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying. Wasn’t faith in coincidence one of the key items of belief in his fictional religious movement “Bokononism”? Maybe I’m becoming a Bokononist. I seem to recall that its central ritual involved two people caressing each other’s feet. Sounds quite attractive.