Page 155, Fleetwood Mac and small coincidences

I found this little gem in an old 1977 music mag:

"With a bit of luck, a few influential radio stations will pick up on them and, maybe then (no thanks to Polydor), people will discover exactly who Buckingham Nicks are. After that, who knows? There might even be a second album.

You never can tell."

Well, they never did get that second album deal but I doubt 'Rumours' would have sold 20 million copies if they had :) (MG says BN is one of the treasures of his vinyl collection. "I was one of the 'few', I got there first", he brags!) Actually he didn't, you don't have that 'Fritz' single, do you, clever clogs?

These cosmic coincidences always strike me as interesting. Musically, where would popular music be now if John had never met Paul and there never had been a lonely hearts' club band? Would it have still developed the same way? Or would all the tedious mediocrities just have disappeared up their own collective, talentless arsehole that much sooner? If Jimi had never met Chas Chandler would we ever have been able to witness (then or now) the apocalyptic 'star spangled banner' and would we now be forced to conclude that 'Going Home' was the highspot of Woodstock? (Actually it wasn't, Hendrix aside, Joe Cocker was, not bad for a Sheffield steel worker in a tie dye. Oh alright, it was Santana really but let's not get into an argument about it. It's definitely NOT Country Joe and the Fish! OK?)

Would Elizabeth and Robert's development as poets have proceeded the same way, would either have been so great, if each were not feeding the other's muse? Would we have 'The Divine Comedy' if it had been de rigeur in 14th century Florence for Beatrice to walk up to Dante Alighieri, standing forlorn on the corner, musing on his unrequited love, dreaming of 'Paradiso' and to politely ask: "You look like a nice boy, fancy a quick one?"

Would the whole course of modern European history have been changed had Adolf, Josef and dicke Hermann not got absolutely rat-arsed that night in 1921 in the bierkeller or the table had not been so thick in the Wolfsschanze in 1944? How would English history have panned out if Henry had not happened to have a fetish about six fingered hands and had not bumped into one? Would they still be Catholic? Is the Pope?

If Wilde had never met Lord Alfred Thompson would we have the 'Ballad of Reading Gaol?'

As Stephen Jay Gould points out in 'This wonderful life', were it possible to roll the tape back to the beginning and re-run it, things wouldn't turn out the same, it wouldn't be the same world, the same lives, would it? It couldn't be, could it? Too many other possibilities that could have happened, just didn't happen to the first time around but easily could on a re-run.

One of supreme attractions of quantum mechanics is that it enshrines that in one of the fundamental concepts of the theory - the uncertainty principle. You can only ever make a statistical statement about the probablities of an event, never have a certainty about the outcome. And that is one of the great joys of life. How dull it would all be if, like the God Emperor Leto, you had perfect prescience. You knew exactly what was around the next corner. You knew exactly what was coming. Everything was essentially fixed for all eternity.

This, I think, is why I can't get my head round omniscience. However you try to fudge it, omniscience is just that, all knowing. There can be no surprises however much free will you give the universe. And how boring would that be? If you were God, you'd have to change that bit of the contract, wouldn't you? Leto certainly did, tho' it cost him his life as a singular, thinking entity. Although the actual outcome envisaged for Leto, small sparks of individual consciousness, was, I thought, a neat solution to provide a 'happy' ending.

No, sometimes you may not like them, sometimes they may hurt you, but life's little surprises are what create and enrich this life! Enjoy them! And if you cannot enjoy the surprise, like being hit on the head with a mallet, learn from it! Find a picture dictionary, learn what a mallet looks like, duck when it appears to be on an impact trajectory with your skull. MG says that was the most valuable lesson he ever learned. He could never understand the headaches after hand chiselling wood. :)

Moby goes on, but, it seems, oh so slowly :( Ah well, it's not as bad as reading Proust, in French!

Something has happened. I cannot write about it now. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not. We'll have to see.