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.