Al Young wanted me to drop the whole introductory scene in my work of fiction. Like scaffolding on a finished building, he said, you take it down. I found that difficult to stomach. The scene had actually happened and to my way of thinking, it was so amazing. He saw it differently.
Recently someone told me that scene would work better told as non-fiction. Ok, here goes. This is what happened for real!
I was writing about a former friend's near-death experience. He was electrocuted, or as he put it, "my insides was fried." He was in a ditch up to his ankles in mud and water, when a backhoe hit an underground power line. The shock threw him out of his boots, and as his soul rose up, he looked down on his body on the ground shaking. His soul went up to heaven where he met an angel who told him he was going back down.
I had met the man under unusual circumstances. He knocked on the door and introduced himself. We had just moved into the house. He wanted to meet the new tenants. He had known and liked the people who lived there many years before when he was a little boy. I was new to the area -- it was DC -- and being a curious sociology major in college, hungry for a little mischief, I wanted someone to show me around the underside of the neighborhood, someone to expose me to street corner society -- the most underclass bars, the places locals to buy pot -- so I befriended him. His name was McCall.
Fast forward ten years: I was recreating in "fiction" that first time McCall came to the door. I was specifically working on the phrasing of his knocking on the door, or ringing the doorbell. Just then -- IN REAL LIFE -- someone knocked on the door. The timing was immediately striking. I looked out the window and saw that it was, like McCall at his first visit, a black man I had never seen before. I opened the door and when he started to introduce himself, I smelled alcohol -- again, it was like McCall. In my mind, the next question was obvious -- had this man, Jeffery was his name... had he been through a near-death experience like McCall.
Jeffery told me about a chronic disease that he was suffering from, and how he needed money to get his prescription refilled. That gave me an opening to asked whether the disease had ever brought him close to dying. After a stunned pause, he said yes, he had been through a "near-death experience" (His words: I had been careful not to use the phrase myself). It happened in a hospital during an operation. Instead of telling me how it felt, Jeffery started asking me questions: "Have you ever seen trees with golden apples? Have you ever seen minotaurs?" I said no. There was a look of panic in his eyes. He said he did not want to talk about it any more.
After Jeffery left I was all excited and had to tell someone. I called, Kathy, a friend from a fiction writing group. She had read the McCall story and given suggestions for my revision. Specifically, where I had McCall saying that he had a "near-death experience," she suggested I change it. Kathy said "near-death experience" didn't fit black vernacular. So I rubbed it in a little the man at the door that day had used the phrase. Obviously there is no one black vernacular, but she was probably still have been right artistically: McCall was very different character from Jeffery in terms of use of language.
Kathy asked what was the name of the man that came to the door. When I told her it was Jeffery, she became indignant. She had suspected as much. She knew him. He had come to her door repeatedly after dark to ask for money. He tried to sell wooden dishes and other things. It frightened and annoyed her.
It was awkward between Kathy and me in that moment. I was loving the synchroncity, and she was finding it annoying. Painfully typical. I almost always like my syncronicity stories lot more than the people listening. Honestly, it is the same with me listening to other peoples synchronicity stories. Especially when they get excited, I tend to go downbeat.
I am rarely able able to agree with other people on how to explain syncronicities. Kathy, in a dismissive tone said, "Coinkidinks happen." I was impressed by her a cool phrasing.
Looking back over ten years later now, I have what is, for me, a new theory about what happened. It had to do with a subtile-body energy triangle between Jeffery, Kathy and me. Jeffery was in a relationship with Kathy, not a friendly relationship, not a close one, but a relationship nevertheless. When Kathy read my story, she already associated my McCall character with Jeffery at some level of consciousness. For his part, Jeffery picked up the vibration of the story in Kathy's mind. Since I too was sharing the same story in my mind, and since Kathy was my reader, the same vibration was in my mind that day of my revision work. I remember during the revision I was very relaxed and focused, almost in a trance state. I now think I was sending out an energetic signal like a radio signal, and Jeffery was picking it up. Mentally, my writing, and sending, made me the "flier," and Jeffery's receptivity, and responsiveness made him the "catcher."
My critical mind protests. Isn't it possible that Jeffery saw you and Kathy together? Yes. And isn't it further possible that he saw you going into your house, and so he knew where you lived? Well, that is less likely. Kathy and I lived only a 15 minutes walk apart, but in two very different neighborhoods, hers relatively poor and mainly black, mine middle class, and almost all white. Usually there was not much foot traffic between the two areas, and I generally drove back and forth. But, yes, it is possible Jeffery recognized me at my house as being the guy that visited Kathy. That said, there is still the uncanny timing, and the fact of the alcohol on his breath, and the fact of the near-death experience. I cannot prove that Jeffery came to my house at that time because I was sending an energetic signal and he was receiving the signal, but looking back, and understanding how that sort of thing works, it is my own best explanation of the synchronicity.
Back to Al Young. I sense that like Kathy, or anybody else besides me -- like you the reader? -- he was naturally less thrilled by the synchronicity than I was. That is one reason he advised me to drop that part of the story... perhaps.
But twelve years after that physical face to face meeting with Al Young, when I was in Lamont, California, at the carrot factory town, looking into Al Young's photographed eyes, another explanation came to mind. Al Young had a sense that in my life journey I would need to let go of one energetic resonance to move on to another energetic resonance, specifically his resonance. He and Jeffery, and McCall were at two different levels of consciousness and Al Young wanted me to move on to his less drug dependent, less addictive way of life.
Looking into Al Young's eyes in carrot land, I was Jeffery's position -- I was the "catcher" following the energetic resonance where it led me (without drugs). It led me to Al Young the writer and the energetic sender, the "flier."