Dreamy and ambiguous

"The highway is for gamblers,
better use your sense.
Take what you have gathered
from coincidence."
- It's All over Now Baby Blue, Bob Dylan

As the original ragged-hobo-troubadour, Dylan (much like the archivist of the Serpentine Slagheap) appreciates that if you're gonna survive in this rough ole world and make sense of the everyday chaos that surrounds you, you have to be open to every possibility that life throws your way.

If there was some underlying theme to this erratic and somewhat slapdash blog, it would be driven by this impulse to make sense of connections between seemingly disparate things, which crop up in the course of your average day. To literally "take what you have gathered from coincidence", unpack it and see if you can make sense of it. Carl Jung called this all too human impulse to attribute significance to random events, or "meaningful coincidences", as the "acausal connecting principal". However, this phenomenon is more commonly known as the synchronicity.

Case in point: earlier this week I bought "Oh Mercy", which is a woefully under appreciated Dylan album; not least by me who was given a vinyl copy of the album by my dearest friend shortly before he decided to end his own life.

For whatever reason, I never actually listened to the album and it has lain in the attic ever since.

Then, the other day, I decided to get it and listen to it. I've been listening to it all week, it's a beautifully produced floor-stompin' record. One track in particular with its mournful harmonica and percussive beat, crawled under my skin - the gorgeous "What was it Wanted?" Despite not consciously knowing anything about the album itself, I seemed to have a nagging recollection of reading something about its creation in Chronicles. So I picked up my copy and, sure enough, I found a wonderfully evocative account of the creative process that went into making Oh Mercy, which singled out the very song that had been pulsating in my head all week and making me play 'air-harmonica' like a possessed fool:

There aren't any lyrics in the interludes, but there probably should have been. At the time it was more important to get the theme of the lyrics across and to keep the rhythmic pulse going.. I'd cut stranger songs. The way the microphones are placed makes the atmosphere seem to be texturally rich, jet lagged and loaded - Quaaludes, misty. It starts mixed and cooked in a pot like gumbo, right from the downbeat, dreamy and ambiguous. We had to keep the song level and right-side up. Danny's sonic atmosphere makes it sound like it's coming out of some mysterious, silent land.

Aside from Dylan's evocative use of words, the rhythm of his hipster slang, the thing that interested me about this passage was the way in which it depicts the messy collaborative process, which is often at the heart of most acts of artistic creativity.

Impressed, but thinking nothing more of it, I decided to put another CD on. Reaching out I picked - at random I hasten to add - U2's The Joshua Tree. An album which, although I love, I haven't listened to for years. Stretching out on the floor, letting the swirling melodies wash over me, I was struck by the the same dreamy atmosphere that Dylan describes in Chronicles. Curious, I flipped the album over and discovered that the same guy produced both albums. A Quebeccan called Daniel Lanois.

Coincidence or merely a manifestation of my subconscious mind at work?

In truth I don't know, and I don't give a fuck.

But I do love it when those connections creep up on you. Aside from the delicious sense that you have ordered another piece of the puzzle which we call life, there is something eminently satisfying, not to mention human, about making connections between the seemingly random. And in that single moment my friend who gave the album to me, the echo of my father singing Dylan to me as a child, the memories and sensations I associated with Joshua Tree, images of my Quebecois friend Francis in Japan, not to mention the new found knowledge - all merged into one.

What's my point?

Nothing except to say keep your eyes open and join the dots. Who knows, maybe a pattern will emerge will emerge from the Serpentine slagheap.