Coincidence Be My Guide

Wrinkly Brautigan, ca. 1971

(hey, nobody told me you needed to stretch the paper...)

When it comes to cultural matters, I'm very susceptible to being led by coincidence. This is not as irrational as it sounds: there's a huge difference between, say, coming across two or more references in a matter of days to the same painting or painter, previously unknown to you, and the sort of uncanny coincidences that prickle the antennae of deluded seekers after signs and portents. For one thing, the former are the result of real human activity: they're straws in the wind, a buzz, a signal that something of possible interest to you is stirring in the contemporary world. The latter are, well, just coincidences.

Obviously, when you are young, pretty much everything is new and unknown to you, and the busy criss-crossing of tracks means the world is thick with meaningful coincidences. I remember how, aged 17 in 1971, the placename "Big Sur" meant absolutely nothing whatsoever to me, but then I read Richard Brautigan's story A Confederate General From Big Sur (does anyone read him any more?), and I immediately started coming across references to Big Sur everywhere: as a novel by Jack Kerouac (does anyone read him any more?), as the home of numerous bohemian notables of the 40s and 50s, as the haunt of photographers like Edward Weston, as the location of the Esalen community, and so on.

Such positively-charged noticings are not so much coincidences, strictly speaking, as a curious mind flagging up a new bit of data as possibly related to a previous bit of data: they are experienced as coincidence because you lack any context that would explain the relationship. It is not accidental, after all, that Big Sur turns up in the contexts it does, but I had no way of knowing this. And, until I had read the Brautigan book, I was not primed to notice it. Cultural and social moments and movements always have certain people, places, and things that act as common denominators, many of which are no more than the arbitrary specks of dust around which the crystal can form. But if a moment or movement achieves even a temporary degree of media saturation – perhaps through reviews of a recent book, or an exhibition, or even an obituary – quite often it's precisely these random elements that you notice first, vividly experienced as apparently unconnected coincidences. How many mentions, for example, did it take before you first realised the multifaceted significance of New York's Chelsea Hotel, LA's Laurel Canyon, or the place of St. Ives in British art history?

Now that I'm older, after a further 50 years of education and experience, it takes rather more to get my attention, but it still happens: after all, ignorance is a lifelong condition. For example, looking on Amazon Prime recently for something low-key but entertaining to watch, I settled on Tobago 1677, a documentary about undersea archaeology, and the 17th-century struggle between the French and the Dutch for control of this tiny foothold of empire in the Caribbean. It wasn't a great programme, thin on actual archaeological results and overlong, but was quite informative about the events and personalities leading up to one of those historical events that (I presume, in my ignorance) no-one but specialists will have heard of, the Battle of Tobago. In the well-established style of such documentaries, a lot of the footage is made up of what used to be called "rostrum camera" work, but is now generally known as the "Ken Burns effect": the use of camera movement, voice-over, and music to enliven and add narrative force to static contemporary visual documents like engravings, portraits, and photographs.

One of the key players on the Dutch side in Tobago was someone apparently called commodore Jacob Benckez, or perhaps Bénquez – it sounded like an odd name for a Dutchman – who was a bit of an action man in that swaggering age of seafaring action men. So, naturally, his portrait played a leading role in the Ken Burns manner, the camera slowly zooming in on a pair of slightly worried-looking eyes (voiceover: "Benckez was a unusual man..."). As so often, the portrait was unattributed: just another sombre Dutch oil painting from the stock library. But then a few days later I was reading the latest copy of the TLS, in which there is a review by Ferdinand Mount of a current exhibition in the National Gallery (temporarily closed, sadly, like everything else), "Nicolaes Maes: Dutch Master of the Golden Age". In it I read, "... the naval trophies carved and gilded in the frame of the portrait of Jacob Binckes, a naval officer who was killed with half his garrison when a cannonball blew up the powder magazine during a French attack on the Dutch colony of Tobago". Whoa, hang on... That there Binks must be "Benkez" from Tobago 1677... Coincidence! Not to mention connection, correction, and redirection.

Then I went on to read a piece by Simon Schama in the same issue: a reprinted review of a 1992 exhibition, "Rembrandt: the master and his Workshop", in which he comments disparagingly on a portrait by Maes (pronounced "Mars" apparently – Dutch pronunciation is a minefield) of arms magnate Jacob Trip (Tripe? Dreeb?) which was once attributed to Rembrandt; at which point the nudging started to feel more like a solid push. But to where, exactly? Maes? Binckes? Rembrandt? Golden Age portraiture? Tobago? Exploding powder magazines? I'm happy to wait for the next coincidental shove to find out.

It goes without saying that I'm no scholar, and, much as I love art, I'm no art historian, either. All these names, dates, places, events, and the links between them may well be commonplaces to the Schamas and Mounts of this world, but not to me. I'm perpetually at the stage where new discoveries are best made not by diligent study, but by following the buzz of "coincidence". Which is why I like to let such coincidences be my native guide through the vast territories of my ignorance; if it's not exactly the aleatory method of The Dice Man, it's also very far indeed from the painstaking methods of scholarship, and a lot more fun. And, simply by chance – by coincidence, by serendipitous connection – I can now point out to Mr. Mount that the fateful powder magazine on Tobago was in fact not exploded by a cannonball but by a mortar shell that ignited a gunpowder trail dropped by a panicky powder monkey which led, inevitably, back to the magazine. I know it's true, I saw it on TV.

"As above, so below": passing portent at St. Audrie's Bay, Somerset

(Fuji GS645S on Jem Southam workshop, 1995)