Bumble Bee 1989

According to the American Heritage dictionary a synchronicity is a coincidence of events that seems to be meaningfully related. Conceived in Jungian Theory as an explanatory principle on the same order as casualty a synchronicity is something in the field of everyday life that is freighted with an unexpected meaning. A Synchronicity fills in the gap between the story a person tells himself about his everyday life and the contingent or accidental working out of this story in real time. It is a happening that appears as something more than itself.

Here’s an example of a synchronicity:

During the summer of 1989 I discovered a bumblebee sticker on the cement floor of my friend’s basement while secretly washing my blue jeans at two in the morning. I was there in my friend’s parents’ house because in those months between high school graduation and before college my relationship with my own parents had broken down. There were too many restrictions at home, while my friend’s parents seemed okay with everything. For example, I’d been out with my newest girlfriend until around one. I spent a few hours at Dennys, then a few hours in her 1967 Ford Falcon, and I’d come back to my friends parents house to crash expecting that there would be no trouble as long as I didn’t make too much noise.

So I tried to be quiet as I snuck into their basement. I only had one last thing before crashing in their guest room. I’d try to make it quick.

If normal causality works on the level of billiard balls smacking into each other a synchronicity works on the etymological level. Words don’t smack into each other, but relate to each other in a symbolic chain. Watching my Levis tumble behind a glass bubble, worrying about how I would explain standing by their washing machine in nothing but a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt and a bath towel if Professor Myers should investigate the noise from the radiator vents I felt absurd. I was in a limbo point between childhood and adulthood, and things were happening that seemed well beyond my control.

My new girlfriend, for instance, had surprised me on the front bench seat of her Ford. She was just the most recent girl in the series of girls who’d been interested in what I might manage in a backseat or on sofa cushions while parents were out, but as I watched suds behind the glass bubble of the washing machine I realized that she’d managed to change the game on me. She’d managed to shift the way I perceived her. I had desired her before, and now I hardly knew what I wanted.

In Lacan’s Seminar “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis” he introduced his idea of jouissance as something opposed to mere pleasure, and something quite apart from desire. Desire is defined by what is missing. It is a drive defined by language, by the symbolic order of a person’s society. Desire always seeks its object, and the arrival of that object is always made possible by something outside.

“Man’s desire is the Other’s desire. The subject desires only in so far as it experiences the Other itself as desiring….” pg. 42, How to Read Lacan, Slavoj Zizek

Looking back I can easily trace how I discovered that the Other desired my new girlfriend in 1989. It’s like this: She was the ex-girlfriend of my best friend, the very best friend whose house I was living in during the limbo time of 1989. I’d discovered my desire for her during the final months of my senior year, when she’d been dating my friend.

The three were in the same drama class at Palmer, the two of them had been paired together for an acting excercise, and after I watched them perform a scene from Neil Simon’s ‘Barefoot in the Park’ I knew what I wanted.

Corie: I’ve got so much to say to you, darling.
Paul: (Taking more clothes out of the suitcase) So have I, Corie…I got all the way downstairs and it hit me. I saw everything clearly for the first time. (He moves up left to behind the couch.) I said to myself, this is crazy…crazy…It’s all wrong for me to run like this…(he turns to CORIE ) And there’s only one right thing to do, Corie.
Corie: (Moving to him) Really, Paul? What?
Paul: (Jubilantly) You get out!
Corie: (Holding him) Paul, you’re ice cold…you’re freezing…what have you been doing?
Paul: (Pulls up his pants leg revealing his stockingless foot) What do you think I’ve been doing? (He puts his foot up on the seat) I’ve been walking barefoot in the goddamn park!

Neil Simon’s play placed both my best friend and the girlfriend into the precise roles that best fit my perceptions of them. My best friend was practical. He made decent if not excellent grade; he was Captain of the Track team. A conventional sort destined for sameness. It was, in fact, what he strived after. The girlfriend, on the other hand, was often literally barefoot in the halls, and while she was not as boisterous as Corie, while her rebellion was quiet even shy, conventional sameness simply was not something she was even capable of producing, much less something she seemed to want.

This was the framework for the fiction that supported my desire, but washing my blue jeans after our date indicated that the framework was failing. What I’d encountered in her front seat was not the realization of my desire, but an encounter with surplus-desire known as jouissance.

“Let’s get back to the idea of jouissance as sexual enjoyment, and it’s connection with suffering. If you ask someone to tell you about their experience of orgasms, usually they will tell you what a wonderful thing orgasm are. But imagine an experiment: if you were to stop someone having their orgams just five seconds before they had it, what do you think they would experience? Extreme discomfort and pain.” -pg. 55, Lacan for Beginners

What is a synchronicity? It is nothing more than a symptom. That is, it is an image or set of images that covers over the impossible disruption that jouissance brings. In the moment of blue jean washing my fuzzy synchronicity appeared in the form of a bumble bee sticker that was stuck impossibly to the concrete floor. This bumblebee was stuck half under the Maytag, and was just visible when I leaned over to open the door and transfer my pants to the dryer.

I recognized the bumblebee sticker as a memory from the previous summer. In 1988 I’d worked as a caddy at the Broadmoor hotel and the very same bumble bee sticker had been ubiquitous. The sticker was handed out to club members before they teed off, and this was how caddys and waiters distinguished between a club members who were likely to tip and lowly paying customers.

My best friend’s parents were not members of the Broadmoor country club, they did not even golf. There was no logical reason for one of these bumble bee stickers to enter their house and for it to appear their house. To find one as I did, for one of these special bees to appear precisely at that moment, as I stood there thinking about the way my new girlfriends hands fit together, the way her breath had been visible in the front seat of her Ford Falcon, it made me wonder how much power I was handing over to her. It seemed, somehow, to be a meaningful coincidence. It was an image that absorbed my real desire and covered over the gap in my desire.

I put my pants in the dryer, picked it up, and stuck it to the lid of dryer. I watched the bee buzz and vibrate as the mechanism inside the dryer whirled.