First old guy on the sidewalk: "They took your world away from under you."
Second old guy, on walker: "Yeah, they took my world away."
"What you gotta do is tell everyone, like everyone."
"Or get a gun and shoot somebody. That's what I feel like doing."
"Forget the gun. Tell your story. That's more powerful."
The first old guy got that right.
I logged this exchange, overheard as I walked to a neighborhood store this morning, as my first kledon of the day.
Monitoring kledons is one of my favorite daily synchronicity games. A kledon is words or sounds coming out of silence or out of the cacophony of urban noise bands. In ancient Greece, kledons were highly valued as portents.
It was believed that the gods, who love disguises, might communicate in this way. This
was thought to be especially likely when a hush falls in the midst of a social event, like a dinner party. The first words to break that social silence were inspected as a possible hermeion, which is to say an act of Hermes, the messenger god who personifies the play of synchronicity.
I am content to receive daily kledons as part of life's patterns. I notice that sometimes a theme that is raised rhymes with something that comes up later in the day, in the kind of riff of coincidence for which I have coined the word reincidence.
Oh yes. There is often great material for creative writing in bits of conversation harvested in this spontaneous way.
