Apophenic Connections

Sir Isaac Newton's copy of a diagram of the 'philosopher's stone'

I live in a street called Newton Grove. The name Newton was used for several streets in my area of the city, because where we now live was at one time the New Town part of Leeds. The Old English words neowe (new) and tūn (farmstead, enclosure, or settlement), being the historical roots out of which the name emerged. Our house was built in the 1840s and we have seen maps of the area from that time that show that before then, the area was a rural settlement, fields occupying the space where our house was to be built. 

I am therefore primed to remember the name Newton as if it has some significance, as in Sir Issac Newton, a man who achieved the "first great unification", in which he brought together the understandings of the observable phenomena of gravity on Earth with the observable laws of behaviour of celestial bodies in space, formulating a fundamentally new, universal mathematical framework that it was thought applied to every particle in the universe. This was considered the foundational step in the quest for a unified theory of physics. This connection is in many ways an obvious one, as Sir Issac Newton is probably the most famous 'Newton' there is, but nevertheless the idea that someone set out on a quest to find a way to explain everything, is a powerful one and one that for myself has almost religious overtones. Newton was though also interested in what he understood as active principles in matter; which means that he did not view matter as as passive substance, using alchemy to investigate these "active principles"; the forces, spirits, or vital interactions within nature, that he thought might explain chemical changes. Therefore, metallic growth and change as a realisation of vital forces and his great moment of insight, gravitational attraction, were not in his mind of different realities, science and magic, were still bedfellows; science at this time, had not quite pulled itself away from old ideas of alchemy and spiritual forces.

This type of connected thinking, whereby you just let your mind pick up on whatever threads seem to become valid and for whatever reasons, is a psychological phenomenon which is known as apophenia, the tendency to perceive meaningful connections, patterns or relationships between completely unrelated things. It is also it seems to me the root of how magical thinking came into being, a belief that one's thoughts or actions can influence the course of events in the physical world, without any seemingly direct causal links. I'm both trying to show how apophenia works in my own case, especially as I write these blog posts and at the same time suggesting that perhaps there is some sort of magical something that emerges from the process of making these connections. Why might that be? I'm very aware that we are communal creatures and I have seen a lot of actions lately made by groups of people whereby I can't see any sense being made, except for the fact that people want to follow the implications of what others have said. This is the magic. We don't operate as creatures of reason, we operate as creatures of belief. This has long been understood by politicians especially and the art of rhetoric is a clear example of a system designed to shape people's actions by making them either believe what you are telling them or distrust what someone else is telling them. Rhetorical tropes alter the actual meaning of words. You can use metaphor to say that one thing is actually another, for example if you want to change the idea of a classroom from being an ordered centre within which learning takes place, you can simply say, "This classroom is a zoo". Notice how insistent the sentence is and how much easier it is to take on board. The classroom effectively becomes a zoo in your mind, an idea now completely eclipsing the more complicated idea that a classroom is a centre within which learning is taking place. If you use metonymy, you actually replace the name of an object with something else and that something else carries with it certain associations; for example if we look at the current U.S. President's administration, we might find that we begin to criticise it, but we can replace this complexity with a short term that covers a whole host of history and ideas and can call it 'the White House'. The White House' has decided that.... sounds far more neutral than so and so's administration has decided that...Sometimes we use synecdoche, whereby we use a part of something to represent the whole, such as there have been a lot of 'hungry mouths to feed'. Again this is a way of avoiding the actuality of the situation. There are starving people out there and they need food; that is the reality, but 'hungry mouths to feed' feels a little less urgent, less real. Perhaps the best example of how a rhetoric trope changes the way we think of words is irony. It can literally reverse a meaning, such as when we say "What a lovely day", when everything is going wrong. Another rhetoric trope is 'repetition', you state the same thing over and over again, until people begin to believe it. There is something called the illusory truth effect. Repeated statements are easier for your brain to understand and process than new information and your brain mistakes the feeling of ease and familiarity for actual truth, jumping from "I have heard this before" to "it must be correct". This is because in the real world of daily life, things you hear often (like your address or basic facts) are usually true, so your mind applies this rule to other statements even when they are false and it does have a pretty fast impact too, as believability increases after hearing a claim just two times.

Recently when reading Neil MacGregor's 'Living with the Gods: On Beliefs and Peoples', I came across another Newton, a John Newton, the man who wrote 'Amazing Grace' who was an English slave ship captain turned Anglican clergyman, who finally became a prominent anti-slavery abolitionist. Neil MacGregor was writing about the collective need we have to celebrate beliefs and in particular how prose can be activated for community engagement using rhyme and how when once rhyme is achieved, the associated rhythms lead naturally into communal song. In this case John Newton's poem, 'Amazing Grace' a poem with a message that forgiveness and redemption are possible regardless of the sins people commit and that the soul can be delivered from despair through the mercy of God, was set to music several times, but did not get traction until it was eventually in 1835 put with a tune named "New Britain", to which it is most frequently sung today.

When I downloaded a copy of the song-sheet I then found out something else new, but something totally central to the themes that run through this blog, the fact that the song was set out using shape notes, so that people could read music easily. Another example of the use of a visual language to help people think through a proplem.

"Amazing Grace" became widely popular in 19th-century America largely through these shape-note hymnals and songbooks, which like William Walker's The Southern Harmony and The Sacred Harp, used a visual notation system, whereby note heads are drawn with specific geometric shapes (triangle, circle, square, diamond) corresponding to the solfège syllables (fa, sol, la, mi).

The shapes make it easy for untrained people to sight-read and sing harmonies together in community gatherings. As well as this being another example of 'eye music'. Shape-note singing (often called fasola singing) is meant for group participation rather than passive listening and it is in that group participation that belief is constructed, alongside collective action and comradeship.

All sorts of ideas can be activated for communal engagement using rhyme, not least magic spells. We have all heard at one time or another Shakespeare's classic lines from Macbeth,

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Shakespeare that great shaper of the English language understood the power of words embedded into a rhythm. But contemporary media still uses the idea of rhyming spells to make them more effective; such as this rhyme from the TV show 'Charmed'.

I am light
I am one one too strong to fight
Go back to shadows where dark dwells
You cannot have this Halliwell
Now go away and leave my sight
And take away this endless night

I am light,
I am one too strong to fight.
So go away and leave my sight,
And take with you this endless night.

In order to make my votives more effective, I have also used short rhymes as a way of ritualising the transfer of the votive back into the hands of the person who initially wanted the votive.

And so we move from the name of the street where I live, via the invention of gravity, to singing hymns and witch's spells and end with my own attempts to help my votive images work by providing simple rhymes for basic ritual chanting. Connections are also the things out of which we weave stories. 

See also:

Eye music

The triangle

Memory drawing and hands

Wearable objects and curative things
The narrative tradition in drawing