Mobius Dick

Hi everybody. Great to be back. May I firstly thank Karl for keeping the blog as vibrant as ever during my "Sicilian Vespers". I have yet had the chance to catch up with the Sunday Itladic Digests but they seem really fantastic. The amount of work Karl puts into these posts staggers me. I would also like to thank him for placing the LBC interview on the blog. This was the second interview/phone-in I had been involved in with LBC and in my opinion it is probably the best I have done. I guess it is because of the time factor. Such a complex subject as itlad/CTF needs time to be explained. Secondly I would like to thank the regular bloggers for making such fantastic contributions. This blog really is becoming a phenomenon!

The reason for this posting is that Karl loaned me a copy of a book entitled Mobius Dick by Andrew Crumey three or four months ago. I decided that I would wait until I was on holiday to do the book justice.

I read this book in one sitting (well loafing really as I was lounging around a swimming pool at the time!). I found it a fantastic read. To say that it is itladic is an understatement. No wonder Karl was keen to have me read it.

The book deals with many of the subjects dear to the hearts of all involved in this blog - 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 on Wirral. 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!!!!