by Laura Roman
Catholicism defines grace as “the help God gives us to respond to our vocation.” Grace in my interpretation can be sensed as “chance” – the sometimes synchronous events that indicate we are engaged with purposeful work and travelling on the right path. Chance can be seen as a kind of divine alignment with a promise and potential; at times there seems to be a concentration of these synchronous coincidences
Several years ago I experienced this synchronicity when I was a doctoral student. As I engaged with my research, the right resources appeared at the right time, as if designed by an overseeing architect. I went to Oxford to research the Victorian writer Thomas De Quincey and his great unfinished Suspiria de Profundis. In Suspiria, De Quincey delves into the shadowy workings of the subconscious to draw together dream, experience and autobiography. For several years I traveled far and wide to piece together this fragmented masterpiece. In Suspiria is the motif of dreaming; De Quincey believed dreams were indications of a divine grace and a channel into what is mystical in human nature; dreams are “the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy.” Chance plays significantly in Suspiria as De Quincey grappled with the symbolic role of tragedy, loss and sudden death in earthly experience. Chance also played into my research.
Partly through my doctorate, I met a filmmaker (alumnus of Oxford who is partnered with a screenwriter, editor and author of Jam Today). On talking of my research, my filmmaker friend asked if I had seen Suspiria, the horror film directed by Dario Argento in the 1980s, written by Argento’s then partner, Daria Nicolodi. My friend found a copy of the film in a divey video shop in Soho. On viewing it I was convinced that Nicolodi had been inspired by the published parts of De Quincey’s Suspiria and abstracted on the motifs, but I had no proof.
Three years later I was in Rome for a literary conference. I was staying in a hotel on the outskirts of the city, not far from the Villa Borghese. Descending the stairs to the bar one evening, I had with me a number of books, including a copy of De Quincey. As I approached the bar and placed my books on the counter, I noticed a very striking woman with whom I shared an instantaneous look of recognition. I knew we had never met, yet mysteriously she seemed familiar. She talked with the bartender in Italian, holding, of all things, a bag of ice against her face. Upon spotting one of my books, she stopped and spoke to me. “You’re reading Thomas De Quincey.” “Yes,” I said. Her response: “Yes, I know De Quincey well, I wrote the Suspiria with Dario Argento.” The woman was Daria Nicolodi, who happened to be in Rome for a visit to the dentist (hence the ice bag) and to see her daughter, actress Asia Argento, who lived not far from the hotel. It was a chance meeting, and it turns out that Nicolodi had been deeply engaged with the writings of De Quincey and indeed drew on the published Suspiria in writing her film. In the dimensions of coincidence and dreams, it turns out that Nicolodi herself was drawn to De Quincey’s writing for her own philosophical reasons . . . . again with chance playing into the picture.
What were the chances of meeting Nicolodi in these circumstances, after all my travels and time engaged with De Quincey’s text, as I pieced together the rest of his fragmented Suspiria? If I had descended to the hotel bar five minutes later, she would have been gone and the meeting never would have occurred.