Ancestors and Synchronicity

Perhaps, it is explained by
the many dimensions of the universe,
the membranes of parallel and mirror universes,
that make up our current mask of
cosmological knowing and imagination.

If the fitness landscape
is of innumerable dimensions,
and all the possibilities exist,
simultaneously, in present and future,
then the quantum argument holds.
Synchronicity is possible and explainable.

But, same-named forbearers, of faint
genetic relation, in the Abruzzi hills, on
the premonitory of Torricella Peligna,
must have shared a local landscape,
whose meme and gene soup of imitation,
tumultuously swirled with viscous adherence.

How else the non-local convergence?
Forlorn and foreboding mountains, a
bespoken land, a poor peasantry of
unabated ignorance and illiteracy;
spirituality yes, but surely infected
by straw-narrow tunnels of bigotry,
feudal behaviors and superstitions.

Struggling for subsistence and existence,
a culture of hunters and poor-soil farmers;
opportunities and the crop land
mostly spent generations earlier,
before the family name evolved to its present,
and dreams beyond horizons could be entertained.

Then the primal flash---the spark of ignition.
Was it courage or the common thread
of mere copy and replication;
the contagion of thought
that makes the migration gush,
from a indolent spring and despondent trickle?

Hurtling ideas into action, unleashing the hibernation
that devours the ancient community,
expelling its youth, its families, its clans;
the climax ends another
timeless aboriginal dreamtime,
destroying the old to unleash the new.

Is this the memeplex blasted
into its quantum molecular cloud;
or merely the faded hum of all familial
diasporas, as in the granddaughters of Eve?
Is it the promise of abundant life---or the deeper search,
which shadows the risk and makes the quest irresistible?

Of those many generation-later
sons and daughters of these migrants,
globally dispersed, of same name and place,
yet of diverse experiences and genealogy,
how do we explain the common thread
of their interests and their chosen lives?

The skills, the aptitudes, the adopted fields of expression?
Science, mathematics, engineering, the analytical bent:
coursing so deep; as well the golden threads
of teaching and professing these
arts of technical acquisition and discovery.
Can this be mere coincidence?

From this ancient plot of rural landscape,
the torch of objective knowledge becomes
the beam that lights and illuminates their being.
The deep specifics of this consilience,
casting suspicion on all the usual explanations
for such statistical anomalies.

Its manifest presence in the hearts and minds,
and in the very being of these
non-locally entangled strangers,
so descended from a bleak,
and desolate intellectual heritage,
begs for insight and explanation.

Torricella Peligna was not blessed
to be bathed in the cultural and intellectual stew,
as that of the Central European Christian,
the European Eastern Jew; or the universal
metropolitan.
It imitates more the hollow and ravine country
of Kentucky and coal-mining West Virginia.

Its migrants were rural peasants who largely
manned the steel mills along the Great Lakes,
and unloaded the wharves from Philadelphia to Boston.
A survey of forebears reveals an appreciation
for education as a ascendant step in assimilation and status,
but not as a focal point of profession.

And though the ticket for the next generations of Americans
has always has been the great educational staircase,
the expectation is of great diversity in dispersion.
The plethora of Torricella Peligna’s American grandchildren,
"de Porreca", of the plain, prominent in the analytics
and sciences is implausible and mathematically unexplainable.

So, you men and women of science what say you?
Is it the absence that drives the choices in the fitness
landscape, and the mere seeking of niches to be filled? Or is something else at work?
Is the gene and meme metaphor, its dance a viral analog
that is enfolded and linked in some implausible way?

Dare we invoke the metaphysical,
the spiritual or the mystical?
Quantum physics meets the genetic-memetic entanglement
at some synchronous Sheldrakian metamorphic level, within the foam of parallel worlds inexorably at work in
the folds of evolutionary time-space?
 

Some wizened old physicists, controversially say,
the undivided universe of entangled particles,
that non-locally survive attempts to pry apart their affinity,
and their unitary communion, may engage in some
stringy dance, much like the multiverse membranes that mask our observation of ourselves, and hide us from
our own image in the looking glass.
 

Is it our image that is hidden from us in the matrix?
Or is it our connectedness,
all curled and folded in the many invisible
dimensions of the infinite multiverse,
disallowing us the glorious view into
the smiling hand of our own creation?