The Fourth Principle—Elfin Coincidence

New readers of this blog should begin with the first post—"Introducing Miller's Five Principles of Pastiche"—at the bottom here and work their way up.

I started my third post about the role of Fate in my fiction by saying that it would be difficult to pin down. This next principle may be harder still: 

“It’s my intent to convey a sense of my conviction that there is in reality an attentive, deliberate consciousness 'behind the veil' and that the key to knowing, or relating to, that consciousness is G.K. Chesterton’s remark: 'There is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss.'”

Here is a scattershot approach:

When I was in high school, I was a misfit. I liked to read, particularly science-fiction. I was not athletic and teased for that reason. I didn’t wear the same clothes as the other guys. But neither was I an especially good student, mainly C’s with the occasional B.  I was shy, and by definition avoided girls, though I was terribly fond of a couple, and girls, of course, ignored me. I had three salvations: Two were the library and astronomy.

When I was 16, I was a profound atheist. I’d ponder the enormity of the universe, the countless beings on our infinitesimal earth, and so forth and there was only one solution. There was no God, and the universe was infinite and eternal. I found this viewpoint rather poetic and serene and many a night found me standing in the front yard staring up into the sky and taking in the countless stars, while my rational mind reminded me that I saw only a few thousand at most while there were hundreds of billions in our galaxy and billions of galaxies besides. There was no room for anything except a logical universe. And the distances!  The closest star was 4.2 light-years away, that’s 24 million million miles, or 24,000,000,000,000—the closest!

Proxima Centauri
(NASA)

A moment ago, I said I had three salvations; besides the library and astronomy, I could write, and two of my English teachers in my senior year were most impressed by the quality and originality of my essays and poems. For Mr. Siringer, I’d write longish perfectly structured essays on why there was no alternative to an infinite, Godless universe, and for Mr. Thornton, I’d write the poetic equivalents, for example:

To Proxima Centauri

I can’t see you, but I know you’re there,

twenty-four million million miles from me

and Mom and Jack, our helping hand—

Four-point-two light-years from me

and those piglets cuddled by the sow

in the pen over there by the barn.

I know you’re there; the astronomers say so.

I can’t see you because you’re too faint.

But I can see your cousins Betelgeuse and

Rigel and Sirius and thousands of others.

And you know what…?

They twinkle.

And sometimes, when nobody’s looking, I wink back.

I know you’re there. The big book on the shelf

in my bedroom says so. But you’re not alone.

There’s another star you dance with named Alpha.

Around and around you dance, forever and ever.

In the field, of corn-stalks grow tall towards the sun,

almost touching the sky. Maybe they know you’re there, too.

Maybe they’re trying to shake your hand or say hello.

Mom doesn’t know you’re there.

She’s afraid of the stars.

She stays in the house at night.

I’m not afraid, though.

Often-times, Jack and I sit on the fender

of the old truck and look up.

That’s all;

We don’t talk.

You do all the talking for us.

Copyright  © 1963, 2017 Thomas Kent Miller

Following high school, my life circumstances did not allow me to continue on to college, and so for a decade I worked at mailroom jobs, messenger jobs and the like. One day I was driving and reached the top of a hill in San Francisco. I happened to be thinking just then that I really needed to get my act together and go back to school. The very instant that those words crossed my mind, as I was looking down at the intersection a block away, two delivery trucks crossed paths for an instant, one with the big word THOMAS (Thomas English muffins) and the other MILLER (High Life beer). In other words, the instant that I was telling myself I should go back to school, my name appeared emblazoned on the sides of two big trucks just where I was sure to see them, for only a couple of seconds to be sure. But that impressed me.

Seeing my name on the trucks was fun, but that in itself hardly bears scrutiny even as a coincidence. But the fact that the names happened to appear juxtaposed at the instant I was thinking about doing something that could ultimately affect my life impressed me mightily. In short order I was applying to junior college, which was the beginning of my higher education and the launching of my career as an editor and writer.

When thinking about that moment, and its affect on my life, I wondered about all that had to happen in order to bring those two trucks together at that instant. Any number of factors would have had to come together: the daily lives and moods of the drivers of the two trucks and their families, their delivery schedules, the traffic patterns, the consumption of beer and English muffins in the area, my own schedule and life events that put me at the top of that hill at that precise moment, ad infinitum. The number of things that had to happen in advance of that moment were countless and beyond calculating…yet they did happen and I did see my name writ large in the intersection below, and because of that moment my life changed for the better, I returned to school, got my degrees and began my career.

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung studied this sort of phenomenon and gave it a name: synchronicity. During the last several years, there have been countless self-help books on the subject, several attaining best-seller status, so there is really nothing new about this topic.

Nevertheless, it, and similar coincidences, proved so vital in my life that it was not possible for me to leave the subject out of my pastiches. Here is another specific example. Fast forward. The year was 1978. I was living alone in a small apartment near San Francisco. On a lark, I picked up a dictionary, closed my eyes, opened the book to a random page, and pointed. When I opened my eyes, my finger was pointing to the word “forgiven”. “Hmmm,” I said to myself, “Let’s say it’s me that’s being forgiven. Who’s forgiving me?” I shut my eyes again, flipped, pointed, and opened my eyes and saw that my finger was pointing to “Mary”. I have been mulling over that one for 40 years!

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life

To the degree that, among other things, Mary became the central figure of Book 2 of my “Holmes Behind the Veil” trilogy.

But the main upshot of all this is the simple incontestable awareness that while the fabric of the enormous universe with all its stars and galaxies and enormous spaces seems, most likely rightly, to be devoid of consciousness, which is how I began this essay, nonetheless there is something, somehow, somewhere that is able to take the time out of its busy schedule to arrange an unending panoply of matters to help me—one mere tiny person on this tiny speck of a planet—to decide to go back to school. 

It so happened that I noticed and took seriously this juxtaposition of three things—two trucks and my thoughts; I am of the opinion that, per Chesterton (author of the Father Brown mystery series), it may well be that these sorts of thoughtful "comings together" are strewn about, yet "people reckoning on the prosaic may be perpetually missing them.”

Whether readers of my books notice this or agree with this or contest this, I felt it was my duty—my service, if you will—to share this observation.

The first book in the series is already released and is available from all good bookstores including Amazon USA,  Barnes and Noble, and Amazon UK.


Next:   Post # 5 will discuss my decision to make Holmes mainly anonymous in my books.

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