Looking Under the Bed

Have you ever noticed that if you have a particular subject on your mind, you seem to encounter things in life that speak to that subject directly?

Take for instance yesterday’s post about how religion has gone wrong by focusing too much on ideas rather than deeds. This afternoon, I went to Amazon to buy a book of poetry by Tony Hoagland. They suggested that I might like a book by a guy named Bob Hicok, of whom I had never heard. I looked up some of his poetry on Plagairist and found one entitled, “By Their Works,” about the waitress that served the Last Supper. She observes of subsequent patrons: “What a mess they’ve made of their faith” with all their talk of “Rome and silk and crucifications.” She contrasts their manner of speaking with the way Jesus acted toward her. Interesting.

Consider also that today’s episode on my new favorite podcast, The Writer’s Almanac hosted by Garrison Keillor, focused extensively on the work of Karl Popper, who was born on this day in 1902. Though I’m not familiar with Popper’s writing, I learned that in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, “(Popper) argued that political leaders like Stalin and Hitler shared a mindset with philosophers like Plato and Marx in that they all believed that ideas were more important than individual people.” You’ll note that this is precisely the same criticism I levied against the Church in yesterday’s post: the church’s decision to focus on ideas made their subsequent human rights abuses almost inevitable.

And while the degree of parallel between my post yesterday and this morning’s episode of the Writer’s Almanac is interesting, it is dwarfed by the measure of coincidence shared by this blog and a previous episode of that same show. I went back and listened to the episode from June 18th, which, if you scroll down, you will note was my birthday. On that day, the poet being featured was no other than one Tony Hoagland, whose book I was to purchase this morning, when this whole ball of happenstance starting tumbling. Not only that! But the last time I mentioned Amazon, or Tony Hoagland for that matter, was back on August 21st, shortly after I purchased the book containing the very poem Garrison Keillor would later read on my birthday. The title of the book, if you recall, is, dun dun dun. Donkey Gospel. That’s right, Garrison Keillor, who, by at least one internet account, is the son of Batman, knew to read from Donkey Gospel to commemorate my birthday!

Because all happy accidents desire to be ruined by explanation, and because I have Rives’ presentation - also from yesterday’s post – on my mind, I’m working on a theory that Garrison Keillor is hiding under my bed and stealing my thoughts. He then sells them to Amazon or the American Poetry Foundation after somehow employing Google advertising. I’m still working out the kinks, but I think I’m on to something.

Dan Gilbert, in anticipation of this very post, I suspect, wrote a book that attempts to explain our tendency to attend to aspects of our environment that relate to matters already on the brain: “The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.” Gilbert draws his conclusion based on years of empirical research, which, to him, suggests that people have a very difficult time being truly objective, because their pre-cognitive biases determine which facts to attend to and which to ignore. This may, in part, explain why humans have a tendency to stumble upon so many coincidences. A fair point. However, in my defense, I’d like to point out that most of Gilbert’s research is conducted via questionnaires distributed to Harvard undergraduate students, and as far as I know, he is yet to look under my bed to determine what is or is not there.