'Oh, I Never Made That Connection...'
Or: the universe is a giant Lego set
Some people like to say that the connections we make add up to one of life’s great pleasures - if not the greatest pleasure of all - if not the very meaning of life. I think they’re right. But I’d apply a broader meaning to the word “connection” than the usual one of “relationships between people”.
Some connections certainly involve emotional ties to other people, but possibly an even more important form of connecting involves reaching insights about your own personality, fostering inner peace, making friends with yourself. Then there are the connections we have with particular places and times. Or our favourite hobbies. Or the works of art that speak to us most. As implied by the literal meaning of the word, all these instances of connecting involve the separate subject reaching out beyond its self-imposed confines to touch something else, explore its contours, allow itself to be acted upon, moved, affected.
With particularly strong connections this touching becomes a kind of merging, feeling one-with. As I’ve written about before, there’s a reason we talk about “losing ourselves” in our hobbies. Or how about being absorbed in something? Both phrases suggest that a truly profound engagement with people, things or activities involves dropping the ego, being subsumed in whatever it is that’s captured our attention. A walk in the woods or a good book or ancestry research or a nice meditation sit - just like the pleasure we get from good company, they all lessen our illusory sense of being fundamentally alone in the universe. The goal is to forget you’re you, or at least who-you-think-you-are.1 Love doesn’t mean never having to say you’re sorry, it means hanging out with creation without worrying about who’s me or you or this or that.
This self-transcendence is a vital part of even the most supposedly un-spiritual life. To me, it involves not one but three journeys of return. It brings us back not only to the blissful pre-existence enjoyed by our real-selves, but the primeval innocence of our pre-conscious ancestors, and the equally primal innocence we all enjoyed as infants.
The foetus knows they’re part of everything else as they swim around in the amniotic fluid, connected to their mother in the most literal sense, responding to the sound of her voice. The newborn baby feels similarly united with everything around them, at least if they’re getting the attention they need. (Here’s where I always link to Freud’s and Romain Rolland’s concept of “oceanic feeling”, or the sense of ‘being one with the external world as a whole’.) Animals without higher-order cognitive abilities are similarly immersed in their surroundings. As for our selves-before-we-were-selves, well.
We exit the soul’s Eden when we assume corporeal existence, the animal’s Eden in the moment when our species develops complex cognition, language and self-reflection, and our individual human Eden when we first learn to say “I”. All these exits involve the trauma of splitting the one into the many. A physical body is a case that excludes everything outside the case. A highly developed prefrontal cortex splits you off from all the other animals who can’t reason like you do, don’t fully grasp who they are or what they’re doing, can’t own their own actions, don’t possess the knowledge of good and evil. And the word “I” severs your union with everyone and everything that’s “not I”. Our happiest adult moments come when we forget about the personal pronoun’s suspicions and competitions long enough to get ourselves ‘back to the garden’.
Like I said, we traditionally see this “getting back” from the many to the one as involving relational love: romantic love, love of family, love of your children, love of friends, love of community. (The spiritually inclined may favour a more mystical union with the divine: prayer, ritual, meditation, imitatio Dei, tat tvam asi.) And like I said after that, I think these are just some among many forms of connection that help us transcend the ego and return to Eden. Now I’m going to go a step further and say that I think we’re grasping at the fundamental transcendent oneness of everything every time we make even the most everyday “connections”: a number to a number, a name to a name, a name to a place, a place to a memory, an idea to an idea, an idea to a sound, anything at all. The less obvious the relationship between the two objects or concepts is - the more original you are in daring to connect them - the bigger the thrill you get. And “thrill” is the word: fusing two or more things together is an absolute joy, whatever shape it takes.
I’m not sure I’m explaining my Theory of Connection very clearly, so here are some examples of what I mean. Let me know if you think of any more…
When we use a metaphor or a simile, or otherwise poetically associate something with something else, we’re breaking down the barriers between things and affirming their underlying metaphysical unity. That’s one reason why the symbolism and chains of images in poetry, fairy tales, fantasy and mythology give us so much pleasure.
The arts in general are particularly good at connecting, juxtaposing and transforming elements. See Cubism’s deconstruction of objects into their underlying forms and shapes, or sculpture’s transformation of heavy stone into beings that are lighter than air, or the miracle of music’s ability to represent physical substances using a completely insubstantial medium. (I could write a whole separate essay on the way music thrills us by connecting different elements to each other: a note fuses with another note to make a chord, melodies weave in and out of each other via counterpoint, modulation guides a single melody from one key to another, motifs recur and change over the course of a piece…) Just yesterday I was talking to someone who likes to challenge himself to come up with stories that use every word in that day’s crossword puzzle. Creativity thrives on introducing things to each other that aren’t usually on speaking terms.
Ironically, the “everything in the universe is connected” mentality is even more obvious in modernist and postmodernist art than it is in work steeped in the more “enchanted”, but also more rigidly hierarchical, worldview of times gone by. In Ginsberg’s Beat poetry or Dylan’s mid-’60s “electric period” or Zappa’s “conceptual continuity” or Joyce’s freeflowing interior monologues, you get this ecstatic, even mystical sense that there are no divisions between things or rules classifying them, that anything in the universe can be related to anything else, any word can be used as an adjective for any other word, a noun can be a verb or a verb a noun, you can run words together, turn them upside down, whatever you like. The ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. Upon four-legged forest clouds the cowboy angel rides. A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay. Is that a real poncho or is that a Sears poncho?
I’m gonna devote a whole bullet point to Ulysses here, because I’m finally braving it at the moment - with the aid of a lot of online glossing - and find myself in absolute awe of the novel’s relentless inventiveness. Joyce obsessively links one part of Dublin to another, one character’s thoughts and actions to another’s, his heroes to countless other figures from world history and literature, and his themes to a dense network of concepts drawn from Western metaphysics and theology, while a dizzying array of quotes and even writing styles recall countless other texts stretching back through the ages. The sheer number of mundane motifs he’ll introduce early on, then reintroduce again and again and again over the hundreds of pages to tie the book’s various themes together! It’s like a literary ecosystem where a butterfly’s wingflap on page 30 causes a hurricane on page 562. Or as Richard Ellmann puts it in the essay that accompanies my copy of the book, ‘Ulysses [affirms the human spirit] by discovery of kinship among disparate things, whether these are mind and body, casual and important, contemporary and Homeric, or Bloom and Stephen. The universe is, if nothing else, irrevocably interpenetrating. Joyce takes an almost mystical pleasure in convergence - of times, persons, qualities.’2
A lot of humour is based in wordplay, which is basically connecting a word to another random word that sounds like it: ‘A man sued an airline company after it lost his luggage. Sadly, he lost his case.’ Many jokes also feature creatures and objects that don’t usually have much to do with each other being juxtaposed in silly ways: ‘Why is a bear big, brown and hairy? Because if it was small, smooth and white it would be an egg!’ Or as some guy on Quora puts it (thanks Jason Whyte): ‘The essence of humour is in making connections that aren't obvious to other people. The structure of a joke is that you set up a situation that causes you to think in terms of one set of connections, to assume that one thing is going to happen, and then you reveal a different set of connections.’ I think a lot of the delight we take in humour is similar to the surprise and joy we get from poetry’s smashing together of words and ideas. Oh, I thought these things were separate! But they’re not! Hallelujah!
Of course, dreams excel at connecting, juxtaposing, blending and transforming. But some waking minds get a taste of the same thing with synesthesia, which dissolves the individual senses until you’re seeing sound and hearing colour. It’s well known that you can induce this in yourself using heavy doses of psychedelics, though seasoned meditators often learn to bring it about using gentler stimuli. For instance, here’s
describing how sound baths make him “feel” sound in ways that go far beyond the usual loud-bass-in-the-club-making-your-body-vibrate. Fascinatingly, this sense-blending is tied in with an even more profound merging: the dissolution of the feeling of having a separate body at all. Either I have a lot more meditating to do, or I’m not going to the right sound baths.
For a more everyday example of things-connecting-to-other-things, look at logic, science and mathematics. There’s an interesting tension here. On the one hand, the rational mind divides the things of the universe up where mysticism and paradox unite them; science demands rigid classification while art resists it; both break things down into separate components where the right brain blends them together. But on the other hand, logical deduction is about connecting one statement with another, so that premises lead to conclusions and new insights are reached.3 Same with maths: you wouldn’t have thought A over here would lead to B over there, but let me walk you through the reasoning step by step. Before you know it, you have these vast spiderwebs weaving entirely different fields together using the most unimpeachable reasoning, linking one end of the universe to the other.
Meanwhile, science may be about dividing things into categories and subcategories, but it’s also about understanding the building blocks that make up all things, plus the universal laws and principles that guide them. Physics in particular is obsessed with interconnections and fluid boundaries, whether it’s matter’s conversion into energy, light expressing itself as both particle and wave, the invisible forces and fields that act on observable objects, the constant subatomic motion that underlies all the apparent solidity in the universe, the interactions between the micro and the macro worlds, and the elusive Theory of Everything that would tie all of this together. The joy of science and maths is in gazing at the universe and finding patterns and connections wherever you look.
Bringing it back down to earth a little, ever noticed that triumphant little thrill you get when a song you’re listening to reminds you of another one, or you realise someone you’ve been introduced to looks a bit like a famous actor, or they have the same name as someone you knew in school, or their surname sounds a bit like yours, or they grew up in the same neighbourhood as you? Personally, I hate it when I’m told I look like someone else (which happens quite a lot), and I also hate it when people keep making the same couple of stupid puns out of my real name (which happens even more).4 But I know why it keeps happening. Making these stupid connections gives us a genuine rush. I felt it just recently myself when I realised a girl at a retreat I was on looked a bit like Mae Martin. And I’ll never forget how silly I felt that time I was introduced to a couple who had nearly identical names - something along the lines of Karl and Carla - & I pointed out the similarity, & they said ‘...Yeah’, and I instantly realised that this little coincidence has been pointed out to them so many times that they’ve probably been tempted to either change names or break up just to get away from it. We’re so pleased with ourselves for noticing these insignificant links and resemblances! We burn to communicate them! Why? Because they take That Which Is Separate and Make It One.
And of course there are romantic connections. Maybe someone’s drawn to a potential partner because they’re very similar people, and seem to “go together” as naturally as a premise and a conclusion in a logical syllogism (‘We just have so much in common!’). At the other extreme you have ‘opposites attract’, which is more similar to the fusing of unlikely elements in artistic creation (‘They don’t know what I see in you, but they just don’t get it’). And then there’s everything in between: the codependent relationship where you try to mould someone into your idea of what they should be; the long-term couple (or even owner and pet) that become more and more alike over time; the messy process of adapting-to-each-other-without-compromising-your-core-values that accompanies all healthy relationships that go the distance. As many varieties as there are partners.
Some of these examples are more profound than others, but they all go to show me that we as a species are absolutely obsessed with connecting This to That. So much so that we often overdo it, whether it’s those articles that note that a couple of vaguely similar things happened lately and declare a new sociological trend, or byzantine conspiracy theories that rely on dense thickets of pseudo-correlations, or cognitive tasks where we get beaten by rats because we’re so determined to see patterns where there aren’t any.
Why the fixation? Well, partly our evolutionary history, of course. But also because everything is fundamentally interconnected. Stars and rocks and people are all made of the same stuff, and everything in the universe does exist in relationship with everything else.
The whole Innocence-Fall-Redemption arc of our existence has taken us from an initial naive wholeness (our transcendent pre-existence / the unawareness of our pre-hominid ancestors / our own blissful ignorance as infants) through the current shattering and splitting (being born / becoming self-conscious as a species / becoming self-conscious as individuals), and is slowly but surely guiding us from there to an ultimate kintsugi reconciliation, where people who know what it is to be broken are reintroduced to wholeness. First the automatic goodness of innocence, then the badness of knowledge and experience, then a richer goodness that’s been fleshed out by that knowledge and experience.
Rather than being passive observers of this process, we’re actively hurrying it along every time we pick up a couple of the pieces of this infinite Lego set that surrounds us and slot them into each other. It’s all part of the great project of Tikkun Olam, gathering up the broken shards of creation and putting the cosmic egg back together again.5 Which all seems like kind of a grand way of talking about the process that animates dadjokes just as much as it does making a marriage work or looking for the Theory of Everything, but then again, who said the universe was such a serious business? If you’re surrounded by a giant Lego set, shouldn’t you be having a little fun with it?
So good luck joining as many random dots as you can this weekend, whatever form that may take. If you turn up any interesting connections, I’d like to hear from you.
Thanks for reading and catch you again soon! These days I’m trying to divert more and more of my time from normal work to this, especially as I find writing the kind of post I want to write very labour-intensive. So if you’ve already subscribed I’d really appreciate it if you considered upgrading to paid at some point. Other than that keep doing what you do, you beautiful soul you.
In his classic Awareness, Anthony de Mello imagines a girl who, having been entirely caught up in a movie, exits the cinema with her friend, who’s then collected by her boyfriend. And just like that, total forgetting-yourself absorption turns to she-has-someone-and-I-don’t, and the girl is right back to being ruled by her separate self and the stories it uses to maintain its separateness.
See “Ulysses: A Short History”, in the ‘60s Penguin edition.
Special shout out here to Hegel, whose dialectical system set out to connect just about everything in the universe via “Absolute” concepts that contain all other sub-concepts within them, even apparent contradictions. Some of the rigour of logic plus some of the counterintuitive originality of paradox, in one neat package.
Yes, this is a pseudonym! Shocker right?
OK, I’m mixing metaphors here, but I like the phrase “cosmic egg”. Besides, it lets me work a common mythological motif, an allusion to
’s interdisciplinary megaproject, and a Humpty Dumpty reference into a single phrase - how’s that for making connections?