Sicilian Synchronicities
I have recently returned from a holiday on the beautiful island of Sicily. After a week of travelling round the island I spent the second week relaxing in a place called Taormina.
I had been loaned a copy of a book entitled Mobius Dick by Andrew Crumey three or four months ago by a very active member of my blogsite. He insisted that I read it because it had many elements of my "Cheating The Ferryman" theory. I decided that I would wait until I was on holiday to do the book justice.
I read this amazing book in one sitting (well loafing really as I was lounging around a swimming pool at the time!). I found it a fantastic read.
The book deals with many of the subjects involved in "Cheating The Ferryman" - Everett's Many-Worlds (Many-Minds), Synchronicity, The Eternal Reccurence etc etc. Clearly Crumey is influenced by (although he does not state this in the book) Philip K Dick and Jorge Borges. Indeed the story has echoes of Dick's Man In The High Castle and Borges' Garden of the Forking Paths. (I wonder if the 'Dick' in Mobius Dick was as much a play on PKD's name as Moby Dick).
However whilst reading the book there was a series of synchronicities that were simply startling - absolutely significant to my circumstances at the time and in the past.
On arrival in Taormina I noticed a CD in the window of a record store. I was so taken by this that I took a photograph of the window front. At the time I was interested because in the window was a CD by the Welsh singer-songwriter Duffy. This album is entitled Rockferry. Now Rock Ferry is a place about three miles from where I now live in the UK. At the time I was just simply interested in the geographical link.
On my return to the hotel I started reading the book. It was then that a coincidence became a series of synchronicities. I found the book so readable that I was swiftly getting through the pages. On page 241 Andrew writes about a letter sent to Nathanial Hawthorne by Herman Melville in 1856. Melville writes in the letter that "Liverpool, your home, was as welcome to me, as colourful, as strange, as an Arab bazaar." Now Nathaniel Hawthorne had worked in Liverpool at that time. However his house, where Melville would have stayed (Hawthorne's 'home') was, in fact across the river in a place called .... Rock Ferry! This made me sit up and take notice, particularly because the whole theme of Andrew's book is they way in which the world around us is created by our own mind and that every coincidence is significant. I read on, literally waiting for the next synchronicity - and it was not long in coming, and it was a cracker!!!
On page 243 Andrew has Melville write the following:
"The churchyard is romantic and overgrown, though the church is of but recent make, subscribing to a local Presbyterian sect more unfathomable than the Messina Straits."
I burst out laughing at the joke specifically made for me, created within my own phaneron and Bohmian Imax. Why? Because I raised up my eyes across the swimming pool and stared at the dark blue waters of ..... the Straits of Messina!!!!
