The Coincidence Problem

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I was walk­ing down the street think­ing about a friend I hadn’t seen for some time, and when I looked up, there was my friend stand­ing at the cor­ner with his wife and he was look­ing at me in some sur­prise, for as it turned out they had been speak­ing of me in the same moment that I had been think­ing of him, and so we con­grat­u­lated our­selves on hav­ing arrived there at the cor­ner at just the right moment for these facts to be revealed to us. We talked for a while, as there were many things that we had been mean­ing to dis­cuss were we ever to run into each other pre­cisely as we had just done, and when we parted I had the happy sense that the sub­stance of my day had been revealed. Only later did I recall that none of us had referred to our for­tu­nate meet­ing as a coin­ci­dence, which is what it was, of course. But coin­ci­dence is a word that we have learned to dis­trust, a term of mild dero­ga­tion employed by par­ents, teach­ers and other grown-ups to dis­miss the mar­vel­lous: “only a coin­ci­dence” was the way they usu­ally put it, and in that word only we under­stood mean­ing and sig­nif­i­cance to lie not in the world of the coin­ci­den­tal, but else­where, in a more real world of non-  coin­ci­dence, in which events could be held account­able accord­ing to an iron law of cause and effect. What was never pointed out to us was that coin­ci­dence required per­cep­tion in order to exist: it was a func­tion of our look­ing at the world. If my friend and I had not seen each other there would have been no event: this is per­haps what trou­bled the ratio­nal minds of grown-ups, who believed an event had to be an event whether or not it was per­ceived to be one in the first place. 

On another day I had been try­ing to write a story about the British Israelites, a Protestant sect whose fol­low­ers were con­vinced that Anglo-Saxons were the lost tribes of Israel, and I had devel­oped the uneasy feel­ing that there was much about British Israelites that I would never under­stand. I left my desk and went for a walk along an unfa­mil­iar stretch of Kingsway Avenue occu­pied by Asian gro­cery stores and restau­rants and elec­tron­ics shops, and became lost in thought; when I looked up I was stand­ing out­side an aging store­front in the win­dow of which lay a map of Europe and North Africa on which curved arrows had been printed to indi­cate, as I soon saw, the move­ments of the same lost tribes of Israel that I had been read­ing about. They surged up across Europe and the English Channel and then across the Atlantic Ocean: I had stum­bled onto the British-Israelite World Federation Bookstore, the pro­pri­etor of which was a red-haired man with a beard who was pleased to fill me in on the present state of the Israelite move­ment, which he said was still alive in cer­tain cir­cles. Among other doc­u­ments, he showed me a pam­phlet con­tain­ing a speech given by a local scholar and busi­ness­man in which the Jewish ori­gins of the Japanese peo­ple and the Shinto reli­gion had been explained to the pub­lic on March 28, 1932, in the Oak Room of the Hotel Vancouver. I bought the pam­phlet for two dol­lars, and as I walked home with my sou­venir I felt as if I were return­ing from a dream. Coincidence is the glue of dreams, and that dream­like qual­ity may be what makes a coin­ci­dence so dif­fi­cult for ratio­nal minds to account for: a coin­ci­dence is always some­what ludi­crous; it makes us feel laugh­able. In a moment of coin­ci­dence the world seems, how­ever gen­tly, to be mock­ing us. 

And so we speak with cau­tion about coin­ci­dence (Wittgenstein avoided the word entirely by speak­ing of “con­comi­tance” instead). How many times have events like the ones I speak of been demoted from the real world by being dis­missed as mere coin­ci­dence? Not long ago on the radio I heard a man brush off a rather won­der­ful coin­ci­dence in his own life as being but the prod­uct of “ran­dom chance,” as he put it. What, we want to ask him, con­sti­tutes the non-random chance? Is there a world of intended occur­rence? Three of the four dic­tio­nar­ies within my reach define coin­ci­dence as events “appar­ently acci­den­tal” hap­pen­ing “with­out appar­ent causal con­nec­tion,” “appar­ently by mere chance”; the fourth is even more skit­tish: “an event that might have been arranged although it was really acci­den­tal.” None of this helps us under­stand what the non-coincidental might be, or might, as the lex­i­cog­ra­phers put it, appar­ently be. Coincidence invokes the spec­tre of cause and effect, a set of rules poorly under­stood by mod­ern, non-Newtonian physics, and it reminds us of the pho­ton that exists as a wave or a par­ti­cle depend­ing on how you look at it. Perhaps behind a fear of coin­ci­dence is a fear of magic passed down to us by the age of Newton, but magic is unnec­es­sary to under­stand a world that pro­ceeds by the rules of cause and effect: evo­lu­tion and entropy fol­low these rules, and so does coin­ci­dence, which is made mar­vel­lous pre­cisely because those same rules are the mode of its com­ing into being. Here per­haps we approach the heart of the mat­ter: the rules merely define a sys­tem; of them­selves they cause noth­ing. Coincidence is a flaw in the tan­gled blur of cause and effect that we see when we look out at the world: sud­denly the world looks back at us in a moment that has no expla­na­tion, that is defined only by our per­cep­tion of it. In such a moment every­thing is changed but noth­ing is dif­fer­ent. Perhaps this is why there are no mon­u­ments to coin­ci­dence, although coin­ci­dence informs the life of each of us. Last week I met friends from out of town in a down­town bar and told them sto­ries of an old men­tor of mine who twenty-five years ago had been an impor­tant force in my life. The music in the bar had become fune­real, and when we asked the bar­tender about it he shrugged and made a joke about a funeral par­lour. When I got home I picked up a mag­a­zine from the stack in the bath­room and it fell open at an elegy writ­ten in mem­ory of the man I had been telling sto­ries about, my old men­tor, and I under­stood at that moment that he was no longer alive. The mag­a­zine was six months old; the poem, writ­ten by his daugh­ter, would be how much older than that? 

I lit a can­dle to hon­our the man whom I had loved but had not seen since 1986. His name was Richard Simmins and he had been a cura­tor and an art critic before mov­ing to the Ottawa Valley to become an anti­quar­ian book dealer, and he was a writer of some power. (“We all laughed at the pho­to­graph of the sur­re­al­ist insult­ing a priest,” he wrote in a poem in 1974, and I copied the line into my jour­nal.) He once gave me a 1958 Pontiac in return for some small favour; I drove it for six months and sold it for a dol­lar in the Cecil beer par­lour when I didn’t need it any more. That was the sum­mer I used to go to the race­track with my brother to place bets, on the advice of an astrologer who had worked out a way of pre­dict­ing win­ners based on the posi­tions of the plan­ets and the tim­ing of the start­ing gun. It took a few weeks to adapt to the sys­tem, and when we were ready and had cho­sen our day, the astrologer cal­cu­lated that the first race, if it started on time, would bring in horses six and three, which, as I recall, were con­trolled by Mars and Mercury, and after that the fol­low­ing races would come in like clock­work. My brother and I set out in the Pontiac with our charts and my girl­friend, who became unpleas­antly neg­a­tive as we drove across the city and even­tu­ally I had to pull over and ask her to get out of the car. She had no money so I gave her cab fare. The Pontiac ran out of gas a few blocks from the track and we had to push it into a gas sta­tion and pour a few gal­lons into the tank; the park­ing lot at the track was full so we drove onto the street to park, and then ran back to the gate to pay the entrance fee. We were within a few feet of the bet­ting win­dow when the bell rang and the race went off before we could place our bets. Mars and Mercury came in just as they were sup­posed to do. We could see then that the sys­tem worked, but we couldn’t see that it didn’t work for us: we fol­lowed up the con­se­quences of the first win as our advi­sor had directed us, and broke even in the sec­ond and third races. The fourth race was a big one, we had been warned, and Mars and Mercury would play a part in it. My brother took our money to the wicket to bet on six and three both ways. I looked out at the track as the horses came up to the post; among them was a white stal­lion, a rare sight at the races, and it car­ried the num­ber four on its back: four was the num­ber of the moon, which accord­ing to our advi­sor always played a role in the fourth race. It was also an extreme long shot. I looked out to the east where the moon, nearly full, could be seen hang­ing in a blue sky. I said to myself: white horse, white moon, four in the fourth race, and then I said: it’s only coin­ci­dence, and man­fully, ratio­nally, resisted the impulse to call my brother back (I was the eldest, and per­haps the more addicted to the unbend­ing lever of logic). The white stal­lion won the race hand­ily, sep­a­rated from the pack by six and three, who seemed to be run­ning inter­fer­ence for it, and my brother and I failed to win many hun­dreds of dol­lars. Thirty years later, I read in a layman’s book on quan­tum mechan­ics that what we expe­ri­ence of the world is not exter­nal real­ity at all, but our inter­ac­tion with reality.