What a KUUincidence!

By Howard Male
September 2022

The idea that remarkable coincidences might be the work of the Knowing Unknowable Universe – hereafter, the ‘KUU’ – first came to me around the turn of the millennium, when I started to playfully formulate what I considered to be a credible and practical alternative religion.

The challenge I set myself was to come up with something that would be the complete antithesis of what already existed. Christianity, Islam, Judaism and the rest had caused incalculable suffering, guilt and death over the centuries: so how could I go wrong if I just made KUUism their absolute opposite?

Non-commandment number one had to be ‘You can doubt’ (belief and faith, in the face of zero knowledge, being patently absurd). Number two was ‘You can laugh’ – either at the KUU or with it (and try that with any of the other po-faced and pernicious gods throughout the ages).

There would be no specific moral guidance (all that reciprocal-altruism stuff is already in our Big-Bang-given nature – even if we don’t always act on that instinctual knowledge). And, most important of all, one would merely entertain the possibility (rather than just blindly and dumbly believe in the existence) of this mischievous higher intelligence that – according to my whimsical notion – delights in surprising, amusing and mystifying us with remarkable chance events and probability-challenging synchronistic occurrences.

But what would my non-belief system be for? A spiritual self-help book (God help us)? A conceptual art piece (one never really does grow out of art school)? Or just for my own personal use? I had no idea. I only knew I had the itch to do this thing. From my twenties onwards, I’d read a lot of Russell and Hitchens on the subject of religion – then later Harris, Dennett and Dawkins – and now I thought there was room for a more amusing and less didactic response to all the anachronisms, cruelties, prejudices and absurdities of the Him Upstairs of History.

Needless to say, the moment I began to work on my coincidence-based non-religion, improbable ‘KUUincidences’ in my own daily life started materialising thick and fast.

A typical KUUincidence – if such a concept can exist – would be when you bump into an old friend for the first time in ten years, in a foreign country neither of you has visited before. What is the mathematical probability of such a meeting? No one can say. There are too many variables and too many potential spanners in the works in regard to exact time, precise place and the whims of both you and your friend, to even begin to calculate the chances of you both finding yourselves on, e.g., the same train platform at 11:45am on August 12th 2015. If one of you had just stopped for a coffee en route, the other would have caught his train by the time you had arrived. Then there’s the infinitely long line of dominos all the way back to the inception of each man’s respective holiday. Maybe you almost booked July instead of August, or planned to see Madrid rather than Paris.

Alternatively, let’s look at a hypothetical chance event with extremely limited causal parameters. Take just six standard Lego bricks, and put them together in any way that pleases you. Now, the odds of me recreating your little Lego sculpture, unseen, are apparently 102,981,500:1. So we can only wonder what the odds might be against a far more complex chance occurrence, with thousands or even millions of variables, only a single one of which has to be out of whack to foul the whole thing up.

To return to the increase-of-this-kind-of-phenomena-while-I-was-writing-about-this-kind-of-phenomena: you’re probably thinking that my interest in the subject made me more alert to supposed manifestations of it. And yes – that would be a perfectly reasonable, if ultimately rather pedestrian, explanation.

But if you consider, instead, that this dull little rationalist’s corner constitutes something of a failure of the imagination, well, then you can have much more fun envisioning some sort of omniscient practical joker who derives pleasure from amusing and amazing us with occasional credibility-spurning events, in order to coax us out of our complacency with regard to our – your – altogether chance-defying life on this exceedingly unusual, if not unique, little planet.

It’s a real trip once you get there, trust me.

“A typical KUUincidence – if such a concept can exist – would be when you bump into an old friend for the first time in ten years, in a foreign country neither of you has visited before.”

Anyway: after about a year, I ended up with this uncategorisable non-fiction manuscript that nobody was interested in publishing – not least because most publishers with any kind of spiritual bent already have the god they’re championing. And then, around 2006, a friend in Tokyo emailed to say his editor at the Asahi Weekly needed a fiction serial. Would I be interested in writing it? Was this for money, I asked. Yes, I was told: a bit. OK, I said: I’m in.

I’d not written a word of fiction since I left school; but I had a feeling that this would be fun. And so it was.

My big ‘eureka!’ moment, though, came maybe twelve months later, when I made my half-formed non-religion the domain of one Zachary B, the murdered rockstar star of my glam noir far-Eastern whodunnit.

Imagine if John Lennon or Bob Marley had left behind the blueprint for an alternative religion which both captured the world’s imagination and pointed out the anachronisms and dangers of the existing faiths. How long would it take for this religion to establish itself and even become a perceived threat to Christianity, Judaism and Islam? In the age of the Internet, certainly less than 2000 years.

This was enough material for an entire book… if not four books!

I was off. And by 2010 that 16,000-word short story had mutated into a 112,000-word novel (Etc Etc Amen) which, as of this year, is now merely the first in the completed KUU Quartet.

The novel, to me, had always seemed the most challenging of all the art forms, and I could never, in my wildest dreams, have imagined even writing one of them. Yet now I can not only boast that – among many others – legendary music producer Tony Visconti is a fan of my books (plural), but that he passed a copy on to my personal musical hero David Bowie, who had it in his TBR pile when he died.

The quartet, it turns out, is no uncritical advertisement for KUUism. Far from it. In fact things start to go horribly wrong pretty quickly for my global community of KUUists. Doubt, it transpires, isn’t quite as appealing as belief: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him think. And of course, you also can’t teach an old god new tricks. Yes: paradox is also central to KUUism!

“Imagine if John Lennon or Bob Marley had left behind the blueprint for an alternative religion which both captured the world’s imagination and pointed out the anachronisms and dangers of the existing faiths.”

So even if you’re tempted to pooh-pooh my notion of a hypothetical, non-dogmatic deity who’d spend his/her/its days setting up elaborate confluences of time, space and objects solely to momentarily awaken us from the somnolence of our humdrum lives, I hope you’ll at least be somewhat impressed (or amused, anyway) by the idea that this Knowing Unknowable Universe I don’t even believe in myself was nonetheless gracious enough to inspire me to write nearly half a million words of fiction.

Meanwhile, thanks to The Emigre, a non-fiction KUU avenue presents itself, an outlet for real-life KUUincidences.

Criteria for a good, legitimate KUUincidence start with the requirement that the key element be highly unusual: that’s to say, not something you come across every day. Stand by for tall-but-true tales concerning Jesus’s foreskin, three legged greyhounds, Neptune and Poseidon, Zimbabwean mbira player Stella Cheweshe, dead pigeons, Thunderclap Newman, Earl Grey tea, Adam Mars-Jones, a 103-year-old nun, a Tokyo beer mat, three pairs of twins, Thomas Mapfumo, a mug of cocoa, and the Clash.