Here are a few of our own convergences. From Robin: the sparkling night sky and light filtering through ordinary house dust on a sunny day.
Cosmic Dust [Lestyn Hughes / Flickr]
Earthy Dust [Kangan Arora / Flickr]
What drew me to these images was the visual pattern of white speckles on a dark background, and the notion of particles floating in space. I wasn’t really thinking about what they had in common beyond that. One is sublime, I thought, the other, mundane. Then I remembered this: the stars themselves are just giant clusters of cosmic dust, and this dust is the very stuff of our universe. Whether floating in our homes or floating in space, dust is dust, and the way the sun illuminates dust in the cosmos is not so different from the way it filters through our living room window. The realization of the connections between these two disparate images made the stars seem more mundane, and the dust more sublime. And was a reminder that everything, here and there, comes from the same building blocks of matter. Which turns around and becomes sublime again.
And from Greta:
Flikrite atomicity unwittingly tagged this convergence himself. His caption to the window washers: “a construction site made of glass is like one huge ant farm.” But at best, convergences push further than the photographic analogies. The real convergence is the voyeuristic tradeoff of a nice plate-glass view– you can keep the binoculars on the windowsill as long as you can keep the thought at bay that the guy across the way is looking your way, too. It’s the way we meticulously put up and spritz and squeegee our own display cases. We’d like to think that we’re like the noble worker ants, hefting workloads of 50 times our body weight, moving them, sorting, processing. But in the white collar world, not much of that can be seen. At least to look at an ant farm you can see progress and change. The reason we’re not worried about corporate peeping toms is that for most of us, there’s no visual record of the work we do anymore. Maybe the inbox grows and shrinks, but for the most part all you’d see is the same ficus plant, the same computer and desk and pantsuit that’s been there for years.
[On a brighter note, it’s also nice to be reminded of our relative insignificance compared to ants. On our evolution show, E.O. Wilson said that if the human race was wiped out tomorrow, the world wouldn't really miss us, but if ants went extinct, we'd really be in trouble. Take a listen]
For more convergences, visit our flickr group.
Does this relate to Jung’s idea of synchronicity?
I think this may be another dimension of “memes,” those units of cultural tranmission described by Richard Dawkins:
/meem/ [By analogy with "gene"] Richard Dawkins’s
term for an idea considered as a replicator, especially with
the connotation that memes parasitise people into propagating
them much as viruses do.
Memes can be considered the unit of cultural evolution. Ideas
can evolve in a way analogous to biological evolution. Some
ideas survive better than others; ideas can mutate through,
for example, misunderstandings; and two ideas can recombine to
produce a new idea involving elements of each parent idea.
My world is much less visual – I find convergence points in philosophy, religion and science. These patterns repeat themselves over and over again…
Does this represent the same kind of convergence?
Robin, I freakin love your dust convergence; both the visual images and written description!
This is one of those shows that I wish you had let warm up for a while. We would inspire each other (as you just did for me) to recognize the convergences all around us.