I recently, randomly checked a bunch of books out of the library and one of them is called “EVERTHING THAT RISES: A BOOK OF CONVERGENCES”. Now I was an English major, but I still didn’t know what the hell that meant, but it is a very pretty book and so I took the thing home with me.
This is one of those rare instances in life when that which is at first purely aesthetically pleasing reveals itself to be not only surprisingly deep and meaningful, but ultimately intimidating profound (this - BTW – is exactly the experience that all of my narcissistic first-person male narrators keep having with women in my stories, but I will save that discussion for my shrink).
Anyway, I’m a smart and funny and mildly attractive man so of course I am spending my Friday night sitting on the balcony drinking wine and reading library books (natch) and I open this book to a random essay and start reading and it is a profound little piece about how when Albert Einstein was working in that Austrian patent office as a young man, how the technical endeavor of the moment was finding a way to precisely measure time.
With out universalized cell phone time and out GPS and nuclear clocks, we tend to forget that it was once very hard to stand in Vienna and know exactly what time it was in Beijing. Or, more to the point, it was difficult for a guy at a train station in Omaha to know what the hell time the train was going to show up if the train was on New York time.
The point that the author of the piece is trying to make is that of course Einstein was thinking about “simultaneousness” across great distances (which is a big part of the Theory of Relativity) because he spent all fricken’ day looking at patents that were attempting to measure exactly that.
Does that make sense?
And then it clicked and I understood what the hell this book is about. It is about “convergences”, just like it said on the cover.
I will give you a much better example that Lawrence Wescher used in the introduction (Wescher, it turns out, wrote all of the pieces in this book. For some reason I had initially assumed that they were by different authors. Anyway, this guy is way the hell smarter than anyone you have ever met.) He invokes a man named John Berger who wrote about the (apparently) infamous photo of Che Guevara’s corpse. Wescher described the photo, “Che’s corpse, gruesomely splayed out like that for public display, his military captors proudly arrayed alongside”.
I had never seen this photo and so I hopped on the google machine and here it is:
Then Wescher goes on (to paraphrase Berger) and explain that this photo is reminiscent of something. It is reminiscent of Rembrandt’s famous painting Anatomy Lesson (which I have seen before, thank you very much).
Wescher explains of Berger’s idea, “And of course he’s right: that’s undoubtedly the image (hot-wired, as it were, into all their brains) that taught all of the strutting officers how to pose in relation to their prize, and taught the photographer where to plant his camera in relation to his subjects.”
This is the point at which my mind melted a little bit and I fell in love with this book (you can expect to get a copy for your birthday, BTW). The point isn’t that these people were purposely or intentionally or even knowingly recreating something else, but rather that they were unconsciously doing what they thought they were supposed to, almost as if they were unconsciously playing the part in which they had been cast.
What is fascinating about these pictures, and about this entire book, is that when these convergences are identified, they seem so obvious that I feel like an idiot for never having seen them before.
I mean, OF COURSE Einstein had time and distance on his mind, that’s what he had to spend his whole day thinking about.
I have always believed that life and the world are beautiful not because of the jagged, chaotic randomness, but because of the strange, serpentine, half-invisible interconnectedness. This book is not a book, so much as it is a of map connections, the same way that the map of the living brain would be a snapshot of synapses firing off effimeral bolts of lightning.
In other words, it is a catalog of the connections we can find. It is an all-too-brief collection of moments of real understanding. And those moments of understanding make the whole of existence seem comprehendible and, somehow, delicately beautiful at the same time.
Anyway, it is a good book. You should go check it out from your library.
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