Surtsey Press seeks to erase the line between science and mysticism.
Synchronicity is a term coined by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung to describe two or more events that occur at the same time in a seemingly meaningful way, even though the events are not related by any kind of cause and effect. Jung’s explanation for synchronicity was something he called “the collective unconscious,” meaning that all people share certain genetic memories, which cause them to act in certain ways at certain times, without any direct contact with one another.
Left: Carl Jung, bottom right: Alchemist
A song called Synchronicity II, by the rock band The Police, tells of a modern day working man who is driven to quiet desperation by the pressures of family discord at home and humiliation and work. While rage rises up inside the man, according to the lyrics, “Many miles away something crawls from the slime at the bottom of a dark Scottish lake.”
Surtsey is an island formed by a volcanic eruption off the southern coast of Iceland. It was named after Surtr, a mythological Norse giant. Lava from the volcano first broke through the ocean’s surface on November 14, 1963, so the volcanic activity had already begun, possibly on November 11, 1963 while Brian Epstein was in negotiations with Ed Sullivan for The Beatles to appear on CBS television for the first time, signalling the “eruption” of Beatlemania in the United States (The Daily Mirror coined the term “Beatlemania” in a November 2, 1963 review).
Surtsey has been studied intensively by botanists and biologists as life forms gradually colonized the originally barren island.
By 1965, the first vascular plants surfaced on Surtsey.
Also at this age, for some reason, nightmares increase. At nine years old, I struggled to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, sitting on the couch in my parent’s living room. I know it was November because my parents were watching news coverage of the recent Kennedy assassination on the television in the same room. Years later, I learned that Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis also died the same day Kennedy was killed: November 22, 1963. Like Carl Jung, Huxley had also written much about psychology and the collective unconscious. Huxley suggested mind-altering drugs might be one way to tap into the collective unconcious. C. S. Lewis, of course, wrote about children entering the land of Narnia though a wardrobe in an old house. It was also around this time that I first saw a movie based on Mary Roberts Rhinehart’s The Bat, which thrilled me with people sneaking around through secret panels in an old, dark house.
Forrest J Ackerman, Editor of Famous Monsters
Greenland and Iceland have fascinated me for years. We tend to think of North America as Mexico, the United States, and Canada, although Greenland is considered part of North America, too. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein begins and ends in the frigid North Sea, where the unnatural “monster” seeks solitude from the world of natural human beings, symbolizing a heart grown cold from lonliness.
For all the above reasons, I am glad to have chosen “Surtsey Press” as the name of my publishing house, but I have to confess, I knew nothing of the island of Surtsey when I first came up with the name. I found it by searching words like “sertsy, sertsee, surtsi” until I found one that was meaningful. In the beginning, all I was looking for was an easier-to-read phonetic spelling of my last name spelled backwards: Cirtce.
Bill Ectric, June 2009
