A Meaningful Cross-Connection

In memory of Cormac McCarthy.

Tired eyes slowly spread open. Crusted skin cracked, exposing light in from the oblivion. An immediate shock of desperation and a shudder of despair. Aches spread through the man from his stomach to the spine before exploding to his temples.

Morning had come and with it, a new day of work to dread. Thoughts of past dreams dashed away by the slip on of one work boot. His old hopes pushed away with a tug of the other boot onto his sore left foot.

Through crunches of stale breakfast, light poked between the yellowed window shades. Humid air smacked him in the face as the front door clattered open.

The engine of his truck roared to life and carried him through dusty streets to the job site. His skin had already begun to burn under the hot Texas sun. Blisters split on his hands opened wider with each swing of the splintered hammer he bore.

Screams of angry foremen, breaking of wood, and buzzing of saws pierced the air. However, none of this registered. None of the outside was as vivid as the thoughts which burned in the man’s psyche as he worked.

Novel after novel of words of poetry delicately touching images of murder and destruction.

For whatever reason, on this day, this man in his brutal labors thought of a writer he had read in a happier and much better part of his life. A man who wrote earth shattering and heart wrenching novels that left you with the feeling of having lost everything, and being thankful for what you did have.

A writer who got his praise late in life. He had seen his name last a few months back. When the writer released a two part novel in his 89th year.

As the hammer swung up and down, the man thought of this writer. He wondered what it must have felt like to release that latest novel, knowing full well it could be his last.

Was there dread?

An existential feeling of despair? Of the end in sight?

Or was it a celebration? An accomplishment of many in a life well lived. And an excitement of what was to come next when he reached oblivion?

He hoped for the latter and the best for the old writer.

The engine of the old pickup sputtered off. A key was jammed into a dusty lock. The man was home from an exhausting day at work. He flipped the television on. As the static slowly fizzled off the screen the face of a newswoman emerged. She spoke of a death. Not just any death, but the death of the old writer that the man had remembered earlier that day.

Well that was fun. That italicized little excerpt was mine, and based on a true story. My story.

I said based, though. I’m luckily not a manual worker and do not believe I would succeed in that job for more than a few hours. However, the more important aspects of the piece were absolutely true.

Namely this part: Yesterday morning I was at work (shocker). While driving from project to project, Cormac McCarthy randomly popped into my head. This was around 10am.

I had been very tired and just returning from a trip out West. At that second, for no particular reason at all, I thought of McCarthy and what a genius he was.

I mean come on. The Road. No Country For Old Men. Blood Meridian. All three and countless others which happened to be some of the absolute best works in American literature since, well, ever.

One thing that struck me was the two-part novel that he had written and released earlier this year. Let me stop here. If you haven’t heard of McCarthy let me introduce him. Accomplished novelist, screenwriter, and Pulitzer Prize winner. This latest two part novel was released by him at age 89! That’s pretty old to still be putting out novels.

Well anyway, due to his age and my obsession with death (or is it fascination with what comes next?) I immediately wondered how he felt knowing that that was very likely his last novel after quite the illustrious career.

Did it scare him?

Make him contemplate his existence? Life in general?

Did the clutches of eternal blackness haunt him?

Or was he proud of his life? Perhaps even excited for death as the next chapter of an already successful journey through eternal existence?

I silently hoped for the more optimistic option of the two and continued on with my day.

BUT THEN! At 4:02pm I was suddenly hit by a freight train.

My fiancée just so happened to send me a message notifying me of the sad news of the passing of Cormac McCarthy. She asked if there should be a Thinking Man post in his honor (thus giving birth to what you are reading now, sorry to rob you all of yet another classic essay by Melissa).

I was practically gasping for air. The fact that I was contemplating the man’s thoughts on his own imminent death without knowing he had died that morning was too much for me to handle. Shock swept in like a fierce wind. It smacked me in the face and brought with it the realization that I had been caught losing faith lately. Faith in the muse, in the logos, in manifestation, in everything. (We’ll get to that later.)

This message from above was sent in the form of McCarthy’s energy tapping me on the shoulder on his journey from the death of his physical form to the next plane. THUS once again, truly bringing to form this which I’m writing right now.

Am I saying that Cormac McCarthy came to me personally when he died? Bypassing his friends and family to come to some random guy in New York? Well, not exactly.

Let me explain. The world around us is made up of vibrations. That much I know. We can communicate with others through feelings and thoughts. These happen in our subconscious and most people just brush it off as mere coincidences?

Are they? Perhaps, but I really don’t think so.

I first thought about McCarthy’s imminent death when I first saw the newly published first volume of his last novel at the end of 2022. The old man’s still got it! I thought. And then the thought of his demise crept in. Was he preparing for it? A two part novel? Was the second part going to be complete in time?

Well it was, and that was when I last thought about the man. Seeing the second volume on the shelves  made my mind immediately wander into an array of everything I already referenced above.

The next time I thought about all of this again was the day he died.

For someone so powerful and so accomplished to pass away—especially in the profession that I’m pursuing—his loss couldn’t be taken easily. He was someone who touched my life, and for that reason, on his way to the next phase in his giant burst of energy which he is now, he touched me again. Thus I remembered the man, just from the pure energy he put out into the world.

As a teenager and early young adult I feared death. The mystery of it all just seemed so awful and scary. While it still can be a scary thought, I truly believe in something else now. That’s thanks to things that have happened to me in my own life, like my encounter with Cormac McCarthy on the day he died.

These events are quite challenging to explain. Think about your own faith. What makes you believe in it? You can give some examples, I’m sure. But those sound a little silly when put to words, like mine do now. But regardless those events, along with hundreds of others that may have only registered in your subconscious have molded what you believe in now.

The best way I can explain a lot of my belief is through synchronicity.

To better define that, I go to one Carl Jung, who wrote extensively on “events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation.” He described these as “meaningful coincidences,”^⁠ and believed that “events in general are related to one another on the one hand as causal chains, and on the other hand as a kind of meaningful cross-connection.”^⁠¹ He borrows this idea from Arthur Schopenhauer, who described the phenomenon as “simultaneity of the causally unconnected, which we call ‘chance.’”^⁠²

Essentially, what these great thinkers are saying is that things can be connected without having any tangible link to one another, and they took the words right out of my mouth (well, perhaps I did from them). Anyway. This is what I’m talking about.

Synchronicity shows a connectedness of people and all living things. You may think my example in this essay is nothing crazy. But it feels meaningful to me.

Another example related to death from a few weeks back. On Easter Sunday my family convened at my parents house. My uncle asked my father about one of my father’s friends. My uncle barely knew this man, and hadn’t seen or spoken to him in a long time. For whatever reason he was compelled to ask my dad about him.

We found out two days later that my father’s friend died that morning in which my uncle asked about him. I could give you a few other reasons—here’s one more, which is fun.

Melissa and I were on vacation and really stoked on Aldous Huxley. We were in a calm, meditative headspace, and got talking about synchronicity and the energy all around us. We decided to manifest the energy of Huxley. After begging and pleading with the universe, a painting fell off the wall. That makes me 2/2 in terms of meeting deceased writers.

On a serious note though, as people we are all connected. That holds especially true for writers, or artists in general I should say. Artists like Philip K. Dick, Steven Pressfield, and William Patrick Corgan make indelible marks on thousands of people. They touch the very center of our souls through the words they put to paper. The examples I used stress the connectedness of everything. They tap into the well of knowledge, the logos, the muses to draw their genius and see it as a gift from above.

They use these gifts to spread their creations, working as channels through a divine source and sending the messages out to the masses. These writers and artists believe in this channeling, and reap the benefits financially and spiritually.

When you do what you’re supposed to do, good things happen. Ask anyone you know about that; it’s the truth. Stray away from the person you really are and see how quickly you can lose yourself.

Cormac McCarthy spent the latter part of his life writing and as a trustee at the Santa Fe Institute. While at the institute McCarthy theorized about the unconscious mind. Did McCarthy himself believe what I’m saying? Perhaps, perhaps not. Research has led me to believe he might’ve called himself agnostic. What I can tell you is that whatever he believed, he truly did tap into that knowledge, into the logos.

For those that may not be familiar with what that wealth of knowledge, or what the logos is, I’ll try to explain. I first discovered the term in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Throughout the book, he makes references to “the Logos that extends through the whole of matter, and governs the universe for all eternity according to certain fixed periods.”^⁠³ According to him, the logos always was and always will be. It’s a divine knowledge bank that humans came from and will go back to after death. Where any and all that was created and thought up by humans was always existent.

This logos is where we were before birth and where we will go after death, best said by Marcus in this quote from Book 4 of Meditations:

“You have functioned as part of something; you will vanish into what produced you. Or be restored, rather. To the logos from which all things spring. By being changed.”

The genius writer Philip K. Dick wrote an entire book about this, Valis. I won’t break that down as it deserves an essay on its own. VALIS was an acronym meaning ‘vast living information system’—Dick’s own version of the ‘logos.’ The writer had an experience once, in which a sudden spark of intuition gave him the knowledge that his son had an undiagnosed medical condition. Although he was previously unaware of his son’s illness, he suddenly knew the exact condition that he suffered from. He rushed his son to the doctor, who told him that if he had not been treated, he probably would have died. Dick attributed this strange realization to VALIS.

Great books have been written on this divine well of knowledge. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron calls it the ‘Great Creator,’ and Steven Pressfield refers to it in The War of Art as the ‘Muse.’ My favorite artist, William Patrick Corgan, read The Artist’s Way while he was preparing to work on his album Siamese Dream. Heck, The War of Art is what gave me the strength and understanding to go to the Muse in order to write my own first novel. And second. And third.

These artists all have something in common. They believe in a creator, a muse, a logos, a God. They give the credit for their success to them because they know that it’s through them that we can create. It’s what humans have been doing since time immemorial. As Steven Pressfield put it in Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be:

“I’m not getting religio-nutty on you, I promise. I’m merely suggesting that the idea that the Higher and Lower Dimensions interact and communicate has been stated and believed by greater minds than yours and mine.”

Every day, when I struggle through work and contemplate my own path in the universe, it always reassures me to see a sign. Some little spec of synchronicity to brighten my day and send me on the right path. It happened yesterday, when Cormac McCarthy died. Though I didn’t know the man, he changed me, that moment changed me. Perhaps it’s a turning point in my life. I know that McCarthy and I will be connected for the rest of my life, to me at least. I just hope he’s okay with it.

Rest in peace, Cormac. Thanks for reading.

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1. Quotes taken from Jung’s 1952 book Synchronicity.

2. Quoted by Jung in Synchronicity, from Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena.

3. From the Gregory Hays translation of Meditations (my personal recommendation out of all the translations out there).