What passes as uncanny in waking life?

Yesterday morning, around 8 or 9 a.m., I returned to my 11th floor bedroom of my giant apartment complex (over 20 buildings) in Manhattan. The window that houses the air conditioner was cracked open and upon entering my room, I saw a figure perched on the a.c. It was a red-tailed hawk, staring directly at me. When I acknowledged him and froze, he squawked and then flew away. I watched from my other window as the majestic bird, with a wingspan as wide as I am tall, glided between buildings and cast a great shadow as it rounded the corner of my building.

As a native Northwesterner, I have encountered much wildlife usually while hiking about in areas where one would hope to encounter such creatures. One is lucky to catch a glimpse of an eagle and may even enjoy a visit from a raven once in a while as long as it is not dropping by to raid your rations. However, I find it rattling not only to meet with such a symbolic creature in Manhattan, but at my window out of thousands nonetheless.

I was wondering if Freud would agree that such an encounter would qualify as uncanny. When a recognizable, yet unfamiliar creature enters a familiar space, such as my bedroom, I would say yes. What struck me further in making this connection was that it made the familiar unfamiliar at once. I immediately began to think that this was so strange an occurrence that it must mean something. I began researching red-tailed hawks in New York City and made this other connection to our material with regards to Freud's contemporary, Carl Jung and Greek myth. Much like Freud's concept of the uncanny, Jung had an idea about synchronicity, which is either an expansion of the idea, or perhaps a digression. At any rate, this information lends insight when thinking of the Odyssey or hawk visitations.

In The Body of Myth, J. Nigro Sansonese writes:
"The ancients believed strongly in what Jung has called synchronicity: coincident events have coincident meanings. They were sensitive to omens, often morbidly so, and in particular to animal omens. If a Doric hunter on setting out in the morning chanced to see a wolf, a skilled predator, he anticipated good hunting. Moreover, to the hunter, the wolf was sacred to Apollo, indeed was Apollo in the guise of an animal. Thus the hunt and the god were knitted together meaningfully in the mind of the hunter. From our more skeptical point of view, the “truth” of the matter lies in whether the hunter did in fact have a good day, and in general we tend to suppose that the sighting of a wolf or a hawk is irrelevant. Yet that is perhaps to dismiss too casually beliefs and practices having 10,000 years’ experience behind them. The skilled omen reader would not look solely to the appearance of a predator for heavenly sanction but to everything in the environment that caught his attention at that moment. Was there a cloud passing over the sun? If so, the shadow on his path was not a good omen, for Apollo was also associated with the sun, and thus the god’s affections were ambiguous. Did a raven croak? That would be a warning from Cronus. Because, apparently, the trance of omens is potentially large, vaticination (omen reading) could be dismissed as unfalsifiable, hence unscientific; but also, because the number of omens is not arbitrarily large—as a practical manner, the hunter cannot notice everything in his environment at that moment—the truth or falsity of synchronicity ultimately rests with the skill of the vaticinator, which cannot be prejudged. His skill depends crucially on a high degree of concentration, amounting to trance. Vaticination then is a form of samyama, momentarily frozen awareness, as it were, of the immediate environment of the vaticinator” (63).

We could also look at vaticination in terms of selective narration. What does Edgar Alan Poe choose to tell us in the story of the Black Cat that allows the meaning of the black cat to accrue throughout? Who becomes more strange or estranged? What does Poe or the narrator leave out that would otherwise detract from the overall mood and metamorphosis in the story. I think this "frozen awareness," can be quite a useful way to see writing. Many critics and writers talk about what moves the reader, but I think we should not forget about what arrests you.


(exhale)
Lia