NEWS & ANALYSIS

On mice, men and coincidence

Jeremy Gordin writes on toads, hamsters and Andrew Donaldson

I was thinking yesterday of Paul Kammerer, an apparently brilliant biologist of yesteryear, whose passions were kissing toads and collecting coincidences.

Remember him? Arthur Koestler - the late, great author - wrote a book about Kammerer, called The Case of the Midwife Toad, which has an appendix where Koestler deals with Kammerer's Das Gesetz der Serie, The Law of the Series. (The book has an appendix, not the toad.)

Koestler also went on to write The Roots of Coincidence, about parapsychology, extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis, all that shit my wife utilises to drive me crazy of an evening. All I want to do is leaf quietly through my Playboy and Cosmopolitan - I'm interested in the porn pictures in both - but she keeps telling me about ESP.

Kammerer's book has unfortunately never been translated into English, isiZulu or chiVenda. But, in a blinding three-pronged motion, I am simultaneously approaching the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Alan Knott-Craig, formerly of Vodacom (via his spokesperson, Peter "uh oh" Sullivan of the not-the-William-Bird Foundation), and Mondli Makhanya, an isiZulu speaker, of the Sunday Times - for funding for a translation.

It's interesting stuff. Kamerer postulated that all events are connected by waves of seriality. He was known to make notes in public parks of the number of people walking past him, how many carried umbrellas, etc. Albert Einstein apparently called the idea of seriality "interesting and by no means absurd".

Consider, for example, just the second and third paragraphs above. I, as it happens, was molested by a toad last Sunday - Andrew "hip replacement" Donaldson of the Sunday Times. This witty columnist, who is a hung like a hamster and obsessed with zombies and the brassieres of Zulu maidens, accused me of being a mouse with a minute chiluga. Now out of this coincidence, other coincidences flow - you could go crazy if you focused on the seriality of things.

For example, as I started reading Donaldson's column in the Sunday quietude of my modest kitchen, Hymie, the Gordin hamster, started swinging from the top bars of his cage and whispering "Andrew, Andrew". And my mother, may her memory be blessed, though she would never have said anything about my chiluga, did once accuse me of being a mouse - when I was having trouble giving up smoking.

What's more (I'm still on paragraphs two and three), Koestler, notwithstanding his other talents, was an appalling and incorrigible womaniser. He actually raped the wife of a famous British politician - and we (I, Hamster Donaldson, and everyone else) have been thinking lately about a certain, local, er, womanising politician, haven't we?

Thoughts of this politician - who shall be nameless because I do not want to be accosted by thugs and hauled off to Parkview police station to make a confession - have in turn led to other "serial formations". My learned brother Bullfinch aka Bullard (make a note: "bullfinch" - connection with Sullivan's Bird Foundation) has remarked, for example, that the great composer of majestic music, Johann Sebastian Bach, an even grumpier sod than Donaldson or Bullfinch, had five wives and 20 children.

And I learned just the other day - from The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (I was researching the woman who lived in a shoe) - that Edward Lear's mother had 20 children. And some kind reader wrote in (or do I mean "blogged"?), in angry response to "Uh oh" Sullivan, alleging that Knott-Craig was interested in more than one sort of bird. Geez, these Money/Politics web readers, they don't take prisoners, do they? They make Ben-Donald seem like a girl scout, which he certainly looks like in his mug shot.

And talking of Koestler, Kammerer, Bullfinch and Bach, did you know that the Police chief - not Bheki Cele, I mean Sting - was a keen reader of Koestler? Consequently, we had the albums Synchronicity (CG Jung plagiarised Kammerer) and Ghosts in the Machine.

Quiz - for those who want to be the brains of Politicsweb: Who was responsible for making one of the most gorgeously moronic musical statements of all time? Jacob Zuma? Andrew Donaldson? The Bullfinch?

Nope. It was Major Muff "no muff too tough" Andersen of the ANC. She - who, in a much earlier incarnation, was a music critic - once told my friend Roy and me that The Police were a very important group because "they are very sincere". As one of my creative writing teachers at the old Hebrew University of J used to say: "I don't want you little shits to tell me your work is sincere. My infant daughter [now, coincidentally, the writer Naomi Wolf] is sincere when she takes a crap. That doesn't make her faeces a poem."

And, question two, who is even meaner than Donaldson? The Politicsweb readers? Trevor Manuel, when in parliament? Maurag Ben-Yitzhak of The Sunday Independent?

Nope. The answer is Helen Zille. She wanted to send her colleague Dianne Kohler-Barnard MP, DA Shadow Minister of Police (that's like appending B.Com to your name), to - and I quote - "two police stations", to check on this hot-headed young fellow with a long finger, Chumani Maxwele. Zille is just being mean. Kohler-Barnard will tell the oinkers to fuck off - and then she'll be locked up and molested. What is Zille thinking?

In addition - I'm still talking about seriality and coincidences - I noticed this week that some letters from former president of the US, JF Kennedy, are to be auctioned Apparently JFK had some Swedish nookie on whom he was pretty keen. Hah, a womaniser. A similarity - you see - with Tiger Wolf (who has a penchant for Scandinavians), Jacob Zuma, JS Bach, Koestler, Edward Lear's mother, and so on. By the way, I see that Ernie Els has got his knickers in a knot (Craig?) about Tiger Woods planning to make a statement about his so-called sex addiction today.

What does one say, by the way? "I'm sorry, your worship, but she had great mammalian protuberances and called me her little hamster." Or: "I'm sorry, m'lud. But she was indefatigable. The par for the hole was 37." Or: "Culturally, m'lud, it is very insincere to leave a woman unsatisfied. I would have been arrested by my own bodyguards."

Or maybe (and I think this is what I would say): "Sorry, your worship. I was feeling so very transported at the thought of a group of some sincere and good people holding a meeting next to a bust of John Maynard Keynes in Cambridge - a bust of Keynes, m'lud, think about it! - and after a reading a certain Moneyweb columnist's ode to the new deity, Pravin Gordhan - in other words, m'lud, the spirituality and good vibes came in such tsunami-like waves - that, well, I saw a vision of the great toad Arthur Koestler hovering above the soccer field at Old Ed's and I could not control my hamster-like urges."

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