The voice in the dream

The voice in the dream?

Probabilities interest me. Who, or what, for instance, is the voice in the dream?


Is it realization? That something previously unkonsidered, becomes abruptly manifest.


Or


The deeper voice we contain within us that reaches down… down and taps into that universal consciousness that fills the infinite emptiness of all things.


Yet we are here
Or seem to be here
And are, presumably, somewhere
Albeit that could be nowhere.


What is the message in unrelated matters that collide: creating what we call coincidence.


This morning while sifting through some of my late mother’s effects I came across an envelope addressed to a late uncle. Presumably it should have gone from mother to her adoptive ‘brother’ who died presumably before she could post it, [old days remember: posting things?] and so she filed it.


It contained a signed copy of the Manuscript edition of my first novel: The Buffalo Hunters that I published in 1996. Ironically I re-published the story in a digital edition form on Amazon seven days after she died. When I opened the book the phrase with which I began this blog leapt at me. “Probabilities interest me,” I wrote at the start of the preface to the edition. I had forgotten that I had done that.


The sorts of things we experience, as coincidences, are matters that test our understanding of what we konsider to be reality… or do our realities differ?
Mostly these coincidences are random and fleeting. They strike us for the moment and are soon forgotten.


Sometimes however they stretch our credulity. Further on I shall test yours with a tale of mine that stretches all credulity.


For instance: “on an occasion,” I wrote in the Preface, “I meet and am introduced to an attractive woman in a bar. It is an icy winter’s night and she ‘borrows’ my scarf as we leave the pub. Then she takes it and goes away. Months later, in another crowded bar, in a street full of bars, in another country, SHE walks in and as she passes me, I reach over and remove the scarf… “Thank you for bringing it.” I said, she moved on. We never spoke again.


This is a simple coincidence and has its own range of dramatic possibilities. But ultimately it is the sort of coincidence we forget.


Sometimes however random events can synchronize and create coincidences, which have the illusion of plot… and routinely lie at the heart of a host of conspiracy theories.


For instance: In a blog on the topic a few years ago [The ultimate Murphy] http://nicholasjakari.com/tag/sudden-death-syndrome/ I speculated on an alternate reason for a terrible airliner crash, than the one being toted at the time in the media… a simple concatenation of random events coinciding in horror.


But what if coincidences occur that move us beyond credulity. For instance, I am involved in my first car accident, as a youth, which leaves me, as an adult, with an inaccessible aggressively arthritic node next to the lumbar area of the spine. The prognosis is not good for long term walking.


Years later a man attempts to murder me. He rams a large caliber pistol into my back and blows a hole right through me, causing immense damage and along the way completely obliterates the arthritic node.


A while later a man drives into the back of my car at an intersection yield sign. We swap details for the insurers. He was born on the day of the first car accident.
For want of a better description I call this a Zen Konspiracy… and if I knew what that meant then chances are I am wrong


So for instance here’s an example of a coincidental set that could seriously stretch credulity if it weren’t real.


On an other occasion during my earlier years, I was leaning on some safety railings outside the entrance to a facility at which I was doing some post graduate work. I was studying a text for a play in which I had a part, while waiting for the crowds to disperse from the entrance.


The entrance, common to the era in which it was built, was an Heptagonal Apse form of neo Gothic archway, created on a colonial government budget. It was also a façade to a passageway that ran about ten metres back to a t-junction intersection with another wide passageway. My view was down the passage through the archway towards the T.


As I looked up from the text to practice the lines I had memorized, I saw a girl figure walk across the T Junction section. She was wearing a flowing gown styled [home konstrukted in fact] overcoat; and as she strode she revealed knee high boots and, lit from above from overhead lighting, the light flashed off the rim of her hexagonal shaped, steel framed spektakles. A flash of what seemed like lightning linked us.


I was electrified and a voice said to me. That is ‘the one’. I pursued. We met… fell into whatever spell it is, called Love: and we have now been together for forty-seven years.


So where is the coincidence, apart from the fact that, had I not looked up at that moment, I would not have had the experience of seeing her through a Gothic archway? And why should that be important… We routinely see people through doorways and entrances.


So here is the credulity testing back-story.


Many years after we were married, her father died and in going through his effects a copy of a family tree, commissioned by my, now wife’s, grandfather, in the 1930’s: comes to light. It reveals in amazing detail one leg of my children’s ancestry. We are agog and intrigued at a document that purports to trek back some 1700 years.


During an investigation of its intricacies, many interesting names come up: especially in the Pre-Conquest era, of the now pre-Brexit land of new Pomerania. One in particular was significant.


The coincidence for me?


It was that One of her ancestors, was a woman to whom a statue exists in the city [in Pomerania] in which I was born. She is a woman who is regarded as the patron saint of that city. She was one of the few Saxon landowners to retain some of her properties after the 1066 A.D. event, and spent most of her declining years in a gothic style monastery on her retained land. That in itself was an amazing coincidence.


Then: Curiously, [according to a random history of the town that I found amongst my own grandfather’s effects, many years after that moment when I saw my wife through the archway,] much of what was ‘redistributed’ of her land, as the former Countess of Mercia, who retired in apparent long term reclusion
puctuated by periods of rage at the turn of events, was given to a man known only to history as: Nicholas.


When I discovered that I felt distinctly weird.[There are times when i think she is still as mad as hell itself… but that may simply be the normal make up of relationships over time.]


As if that was not enough for set of coincidences… the truly weird part was to come. Like most people who battle to remember people’s names when introduced for the first time i have routinely experienced people calling me Mick, Rick and such like instead of Nick… One error during one period of tiime, that started to crop up more frequently was the name Chris… This was puzzling because i couldn’t quite see how i could be introduced as NiK and have the answer come back as Chris. I mentioned this on an occasion to my mother. She told me an odd story.


Apparently through my entire gestation she intended to call me Christopher… in honour of ‘lost love’ for a Canadian paratrooper, preceding my father, who had fallen at the disasterous Arnhem intervention [WW2], for whom she forever still carried a torch.


While in the nursing home expecting me, in a building, situated as the last remaining building within the Spon end [?] gates [she said] in that ancient city called Coventry… ripped apart by the great blitz in WW2… the woman in the next bed heard what my mother intended and [according to Mother who was still enraged half a century later] announced that she couldn’t think of a name; and liked my mother’s choice: and would give that name to her son, born 24 hours earlier than me.


She was in a quandary she said, about what to do… Her “Name” had been stolen she said: and while dozing during labour a voice in her head said “Call him Nicholas” [Presumably assuming it was a boy child.]. In her heart she said she still pined for Christopher… and had no idea why Nicholas had arrived.


Weird piled on weird piled on weird. And that is a truly Zen Konspiracy.


So: in the full knowledge of what The Bard had his character: Hamlet say that “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dream’t of in our philosophy” i decided… What if I took a random kolektion of news reports extracted from various Zone One media sources over the past few years and allocated them as randomly, to various groups of characters who have a form of glancing contact with each other over a Saturday night and a Sunday morning.


What if I fictionalized these events and then radically dekonstrukted them to protekt the innocent participants in many original events. Then perhaps I kould konstukt my own “Zen Konspiracy”.


And having konstrukted it; I chose to call it The Buffalo Hunters a story that I describe as a brutal allegoric crime story… the tale behind our journey to Civility in the place of Revolution where i have lived for more than seventy years: a story of random muder and explicit lust.


The Buffalo Hunters: A tale available on Amazon.com @ https://www.amazon.com/Nicholas-Jakari/e/B077V146ND


May the voice that was in my dream then, leave you stunned in disbelief, as it has many others.


Bon appétit

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