Spooky, Mulder

Visiting The Rocks in Sydney last month I chose Café Danieli in Harrington Street for brunch based on online reviews like ‘high quality food and friendly service’ and ‘inexpensive in comparison to places located in the main street’. Described as being in the ‘Clock Tower Centre’, I imagined the café had a heritage location. In fact it is in a 1989 office/retail complex with no particular architectural merit. In 2023 Singapore-based developer Far East Orchard proposed demolishing it for a hotel but it has survived so far. The café has outdoor seating but the main part is in an arcade. When I arrived at the counter the proprietor was talking to a young couple about landlines and black and white television.  From their incredulous reaction, he could have been discussing dinosaurs and hot air ballooning. He appealed to me to verify that these things had in fact existed in living memory. Possibly still unconvinced they left soon afterwards. Coincidence rather than causation I think. 

I took a seat at the one of the outdoor tables and soon a couple nearer my and the proprietor’s age arrived with their wheelie suitcases. We exchanged pleasantries, then, a few moments into the conversation, the man asked me how things were in Wagga Wagga. Knowing I’d been quite chatty I asked him if I’d mentioned that was here I lived. He said ‘no, I saw you at the Civic Centre a couple of years ago when we were visiting’. There was no time to establish the context as the couple took an inside table and our conversation ended. I wish I’d enquired further. What the occasion was. What his connection with Wagga was. Doing so seemed obsessive and a bit of an intrusion and as my friend had arrived by then my focus changed. Our meals were nice – the online reviews I read were correct.

The Clocktower Centre, Harrington Street, The Rocks, Sydney, New South Wales. Cafe Danieli is on the ground floor, seating visible (Source: The Daily Telegraph).

The phenomenon of coincidences and unexpected connections has been playing on my mind. Many years ago a friend lent me Colin Wilson’s The Outsider; all I remember of it is his remarks on coincidence. He saw no hidden significance in them but found following their trail rewarding. I suppose it’s the same impulse that sends us down ‘rabbit holes’ online. It has been my habit to pursue coincidence, to make links, to uncover stories (the research strand) or to craft connections (the creative strand). Three examples that relate to connections with Wagga:

No. 1 – I met a woman in Sydney with the same first name as me who was born in Wagga Wagga but moved away in her teens. One of the jobs I held after moving here was located in Harvey House, the same building her mother had lived in as a nurse in the 1940s!

No. 2 –  Researching my husband’s family I discovered that his great great grandfather, John Semple  who emigrated from England to Australia in 1849 and  lived in Melbourne with his wife and had 6 children,  after his timber importation business went bankrupt in 1859, came to Wagga. He worked as a gang leader for a team of timber cutters for the telegraph line. He had a horrible accident in Tarcutta on or around November 23, 1860 when a tree fell unexpectedly and crushed his spine.  He was taken by cart to the Hope Inn (now the Riverina Hotel) in Fitzmaurice Street where he languished for ten days before dying and becoming the a very early Anglican burial in the local monumental cemetery. When in 2017 we had our reconnoiter visit to Wagga to decide whether we wanted to move here,  we had dinner at the Riverina Hotel, in the dining area in the older portion of the building where John Semple stayed/died.

The Bridge Hotel formerly Thomas Turvey's Hope Inn now the Riverina Hotel,
Fitzmaurice Street, Wagga Wagga

No. 3 Researching my first cousin twice removed Armandine Garnay I found out that she and her husband and daughter moved from Rockdale to Wagga Wagga in 1924. Her husband Laurie was head accountant at the Union Bank here. She was Treasurer of the Shakespeare Club, the oldest continually operating Shakespeare club in the world. They moved to nearby Henty in 1927.  I have toured the Union Bank building, one of Wagga’s most elegant structures, visited their Henty residence and am now a member of the Shakespeare Club. If that wasn’t all enough coincidence, our son lived in the same Rockdale street as Armie and her family for a brief period.

Perhaps the six degrees of separation thing means that these are not so extraordinary. However there is a sort of spooky thrill you get when they occur. Related, or perhaps obverse, are the unexplained and weird things you see. I am sure I have experienced multiple instances but just now all I can recount is the time the train I was travelling in stopped and I saw a young couple exercising a kitten on an untended garden bed on Sydenham railway station platform. I mentioned it to a friend who dubbed it a ‘raelian moment’ but I just googled ‘raelian’ and it relates to encounters that suggest contact with an extra-terrestrial highly feminized race called the Elohim. Unless Bohemian inner westies and the Elohim are interchangeable that seems unlikely.

Three sharp looking Elvis impersonators ready to board the Blue Suede Express to Parkes, New South Wales (Photo: Belinda Pittard)

The most recent coincidences I had planned to pursue relate to a writing workshop I missed at the weekend where the exercise was to describe the qualities one would seek in a lion tamer and an Elvis impersonator. My sister was related by marriage to a Czech Elvis impersonator (not that surprising given their proliferation) and I thought I wrote a poem about a lion tamer in 2025 but it turns out it was about  a performing bear attacking its keeper, or maybe an Elohim circus act. 

Anyway, by way of non sequitir, here it is:

Poem after Andrew Sibley’s Stage Fright (1984) 

The book you bought me to cut up for my art

falls open at the page with the ‘dancing’ bears

muzzled and tethered

held upright by two staff-wielding

Turkish street entertainers

abducted as cubs

they were taught to ‘dance’ on hot metal or coals while music played

learning to associate music with pain,

lifting their paws in rhythm

as their keepers drummed and piped

 

In China, Myanmar and Korea

they still cage bears and drain their bile for specious medicine

Ursodeoxycholic acid has some anti-inflammatory qualities

says Wikipedia

How did anyone discover that?

 

In Andrew Sibley’s circus ring

the bear act departs from form

Clara, in her shiny emerald leotard proffers a single rose

red as her lipsticked mouth to Bruin

He rests his paw upon her hand as if to accept the token

but then rejects this human courtship

and casually sinks two razor rows of teeth

into Clara’s face

dislodging an eyeball

her peers will

doubtless rush in

shots will pierce Bruin’s shaggy hide

his gore will pool with hers on drenched sawdust

but he has made his point

it is over between them!

Andrew Sibley's Stage Fright, 1984, oil & enamel on linen

Things that look like other things

[Note: please forgive the varying font sizes and formatting issues - have run out of time to try to fix them - will have another go later]

There is a phenomenon known as pareidolia which means perceiving vague or random stimuli (usually images or sounds) as significant. It often takes the form of ‘seeing’ a familiar or meaningful image, such as a human or animal face, in a random pattern or object, Jesus on a slice of toast and animals in cloud formations are examples. Since our brains are programmed to discern faces it isn’t surprising that they feature so prominently in examples of pareidolia.

The drive to see patterns in a field of random  data is apparently  biologically useful as it enables us to pick out food, friend or foe against a background where they would otherwise be camouflaged. It also helps us to learn recognition from our previous encounters with things by creating our own mental stock images files. Unfortunately it also makes us credulous enough to see apparitions in blurry photographs and images of the Madonna in Coogee fence palings, to say nothing of spotting life on Mars!

 'Vision' of the Virgin Mary appearing at Coogee, NSW in 2003

 The so-called Mermaid of Mars

Pareidolia can be a shared experience, like group sightings of ‘ghosts’, or individual like our personal interpretations of Rorschach ink blots. Cultural and individual frames of reference always come into play i.e. your own preoccupations will influence how you ‘read’ the pattern. As one blogger drolly put it, “one person’s Virgin Mary …, is another’s Darth Vader eating a giant sno-cone” (http://skepchick.org/2014/01/bad-chart-thursday-the-pareidolia-plot/)

In the religious pareidolia pantheon Renaissance costume is much preferred -  robes and loincloths abound. Those privileged to see visions of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ cannot enlighten us about the actual appearance of the revered ones but can often cite the exact painting the image resembles.  Funny that!

Uncanny likeness - in this instance the Virgin Mary based her rocky manifestation on a romanticised, very anglo 19th century painting. 

Our interpretations of cloud shapes tend to be limited to a stock range of creatures, generally horses, sheep, bears and bunnies, I could not find any pictures of cloud formations resembling Nissan hatchbacks or Nespresso machines but perhaps, unlike the photographers, I wasn’t looking hard enough. Of course picking out shapes in clouds is a great deal easier if said clouds are helped along by the artist’s hand as is the case in the 62nd episode of Disney’s New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh where Christopher Robin and Pooh see a cloud-formed whale, a honey pot, a bee, a pirate ship, and a dragon. I guess it isn’t pareidolia if the image is deliberately drawn that way.

 "Spooky, Tigger, the fluff is out there".

Back in the early 17th century Shakespeare arranged for Hamlet to tease Polonius about the ephemeral and subjective nature of pareidolia in this exchange:

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in the shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it's like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale.
Polonius: Very like a whale.

Polonius doesn’t want to contradict the wayward prince so makes a complete fool of himself.

Millions were prepared to make a collective fool of themselves in 1968 - 71  when lights appeared in the sky near the Coptic Orthodox Church of Saint Mary in the Egyptian town of Zeitoun  and were perceived as manifestations of the Virgin Mary.  The fuzzy splodges that they attached this significance to are about as like a female form as this McNugget is like George Washington! But hey, no room for Ockham’s Razor when you’re confirming centuries of  superstition. (Good post about it here: http://skepdic.com/zeitoun.html).

 

 Alarming likeness, it's as if this McNugget was totally channeling old Georgie.

So Jesus himself, his mum and various mammals are traditional pareidoliac sightings but other cultural icons get their share of attention from our pattern insistent brains; Lenin on a shower curtain, Mickey Mouse on the surface of Mercury (what, not Pluto?),  Kate Middleton on a jellybean and, most recently, Barack Obama on that good old standby a slice of toast. 

 

 

 

Some instances of pareidolia are quite personal and specific. As a child I lived in my grandmother’s terrace house and at the spot where the top of the stair banister met the floor of the landing I  clearly saw  a grimacing face  in the cornice. As I was carried up in an adult’s arms I would come very close to this image, which I dubbed ‘the ceiling eye’,  and get frightened.  My father  plastered over the offending vision but like believers in demons everywhere I was convinced it still lurked unseen.

Not 'the Ceiling Eye' but with pareidolia near enough is good enough - always!

Pareidolia has its lighter side. My favourites are functional objects that have cute little faces a la Wall-e. They abound on the net. Here are a couple I really like:

Sometimes, as with Pooh’s clouds, a little artistic licence helps. Here are some I prepared earlier.

So, happy solo or collective hallucinations! Try to expand the popular repertoire. Elvis seems to be the only pop star to have manifested himself - in  a tree and a rock (google him). Where are the Britneys and Bonos? Mother Theresa  appears in a cinamon scroll (definitely google her), but there is no Mary McKillop lamington vision yet recorded. And why should Disney get all the publicity? How about Homer Simpson in your bathroom tiles or  the surface of the moon? Post your discoveries, you may start a cult!