Pink Floyd provides the key to "The Wizard of Oz"? Patterns in Biblical letters foretell the future? Randomness sure looks better when it has the imprimatur of technology. BY LEONCE GAITER at some point in the recent past, some major dude sat around, doubtless doobie-in-hand, playing various CDs while watching unrelated films. He could have played "Frampton Comes Alive" to "The Three Stooges on Mars" or "Parallel Lines" to "Beach Blanket Bingo." But he played "Dark Side of the Moon" to "The Wizard of Oz." Lo and behold, when he synced up the beginning of the CD to the MGM lion's last roar, all sorts of "synchronicities" appeared. The CD functioned as a sort of alternate soundtrack to the movie. For instance, the credit for producer Mervyn LeRoy appeared during the transition from "Speak" to "Breathe." During the song "Time," Dorothy started running to the line "no one told you when to run." During that same song, the words "past present and future" could be read on the fortune teller's sign. Well, the rest is history. Newspapers all over the country ran with the story about the "astonishing" "synchronicities" that occurred when "Dark Side of the Moon" and "The Wizard of Oz" were played simultaneously. When a New York DJ mentioned the matter on the air, he received 2,000 letters (that 2,000 people who cared could write is impressive), the largest response the radio station had ever had -- to anything. Wire services picked it up and the whole nation seemed caught up in the throes of this stoner mysticism, with its own dedicated Web sites containing quotes like "perhaps it was just fate" (not "coincidence," mind you, but the infinitely more weighty "fate") and references to "the magic of experiencing these two performances combined." It was like a comic book version of the Hale Bopp suicides. Instead of downing a lethal dose of 'ludes and Cold Duck, Pink Floyd freaks sat with furrowed brows, biting their tongues, hands full of remote controls, trying to time their "Dark Side" to the MGM roar. All in search of ... what? Some sort of coincidental transcendence? Naaah. In this age of "The X-Files," there are no coincidences anymore. It's always the spirits talking. Alien interventions. The specter of an unseen, Godlike hand either producing this string of "fate" or plotting such an elaborate "synchronicity" (a word that's bandied about a lot in this case, folks liking its twin auras of the spiritual and the technological). Soon after the Pink Floyd phenomenon, publishing giant Simon & Schuster heralded the release of a book called "The Bible Code" with full-page ads in major newspapers. According to Newsweek, the book's author, journalist Michael Drosnin, "argues that a highly complex code in the Hebrew Bible which depends on the precise positions of all 304,805 letters in the text, 'reveals events that took place thousands of years after the Bible was written ... In a few dramatic cases it has foretold events that then happened exactly as predicted.'" It all began with a statistics-journal study in which three Israeli mathematicians, led by Eliyahu Ripps of Hebrew University, wrote of something called the "Torah Code." They programmed a computer to run a "skip code" on the Torah in order to find the names of ancient sages. A skip code extracts every 14th or 3,034th or any other sequence of letters to build an alternate document. The program found the names of most of the sages, the odds against which were 62,500-to-1. Drosnin took this research several steps further, manipulating the Hebrew texts even more arduously, and found coded in the Bible such foretellings as the name "Yitzhak Rabin" and the words "assassin will assassinate" -- one year before Rabin's murder. It has since been pointed out that similarly manipulating the Hebrew translation of "War and Peace" can get you 59 words related to Chanukah; and the chances against that are more than a quadrillion to one -- but never mind. Marketed as spiritually revelatory (and hey, it just happens to have elements of summer sci-fi no-brainer, with the film rights already snapped up for a hefty sum), this book statistically re-creates the old "monkeys at a typewriter" adage, which stated that if you sat enough monkeys at enough typewriters long enough, they would reproduce the collected works of Shakespeare. No one bothered attempting that experiment. That would have been stupid. Now we have the technology to create the monkeys-at-the-typewriter scenario, but without the absurd vision of innumerable chimps at innumerable keyboards; and far from considering it idiotic, we dedicate scholarly journals to it. Just as killing becomes more "acceptable" when you simply have to push a button instead of physically bashing brains in, chaos becomes meaningful when technology paints it with a high-tech sheen. Using technology, we create a randomness heretofore considered meaningless, and then we seek gods there. What is the difference between creating randomness in the real world and in real time, and creating it with a computer? Why is it that we would never consider the former, yet we exalt the latter? Is it the intervention of the machine? Do we so fetishize the intensely mysterious binary configurations of digital technology that we elevate them to the level of divine messengers? Within a space of two months, we've had our attentions grabbed by randomness created with CDs and VCRs and then with a statistical computer program; and in both cases, we have leapt upon the results as revelatory in some way. Perhaps now that we can create chaos, we are desperate to finally eradicate it. Instead of forcing us to acknowledge "simple" chaos, as would the sight of countless chimps at countless keyboards, the middle man of technology -- the VCR, CD and the computer -- allows us to prettify the scene, clinicalize it, erase its inherent absurdities and then impose some sort of order on it, regardless of how tenuous or far-fetched. We are Westerners. Cause and effect is the basis of our civilization. Imposing order has been ... what we do. Yet the modern world challenges that mind-set. Chaos thrives all around us. Discoveries about the nature of the universe, of the very planets in our solar system, the workings of our minds and bodies, the weather, all defy categorical cause-and-effect explanations. The world around us is often, and will always be, beyond our control. And we don't like it -- we who were sure we would have mastered cancer and hunger by now. Fetishizing patterns, regardless of how "random," may just be our small revenge. July 3, 1997 Leonce Gaiter, a refugee from Los Angeles, is the Arts Editor of the Chico News and Review in Chico, Calif. His essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Times, the L.A. Weekly and elsewhere. His novel "Just Titty-Boom" will be published by the Noble Press in the spring of 1998.

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