Not fitting in the dominant culture's deceitful view of surrealism as an art movement, the importance of chance gets considerably condensed in so-called critical works on surrealism. Luckily, surrealists have always reversed this falsified emphasis, viewing art as a lamentable expedient, and the pursuit of chance as one of the pinnacle surrealist experiences. These shocking disruptions in common sense we call chance events arise as the internal synchronizes with the external reality, proof that we are always unconsciously searching and seeking. When not dominated by religious idiocy, these encounters can act as flights from the territory of the mundane into the intuitive world of the Marvelous.

Perhaps my most sublime chance experience occurred while attending Portland State University in the late 1990s. After reading Freud's essay on the uncanny a brief class discussion ensued concerning the epileptic fit and its automaton-like effects. Less than thirty minutes later, while riding the bus home, the rider sitting next to me jolted into an epileptic fit. As the rest of the riders panicked, I was strangely overjoyed by the coincidence. What caused me to sit next to this unfortunate man? Did my unconscious perceive something my conscious could not?

It was also around this period that I developed a mysterious bond with the year 1888. This chain of repetitive encounters started after being introduced to Paul Serusier's small painting Le Talisman, created in 1888. Following this the date 1888 began appearing in other scholastic readings, and then some of my extra-curricular activities, curiously following me into the present. A recent example of this happened on November 19, 2003 when I impulsively attended a reading by an author I knew nothing about. Just after seating myself to hear Mark Essig discuss his book Edison and the Electric Chair I was astounded to hear him reveal -- as if on cue -- that electricity was first discussed as a means of capital punishment in 1888.

Another memorable event occurred in late 2001. When fumbling through a roommate's collection of books on Jack the Ripper I encountered an illustration of three men uncovering a women's limbless and headless torso in the Whitehall district of London. Some time later, on November 18 to be exact, I discovered a plaster female torso by the garbage compactor at my place of work. Limbless and headless, it strongly resembled the torso in the illustration. Oddly, this tangible torso had been glued to a large piece of cardboard, with both it and the cardboard painted white. Above the torso, written on the cardboard in blue letters were the words: "I must be a witch." The shoulders contained blue swirls, and between the breasts a blue square was placed, across which white letters were splattered. The words were written in English, yet unintelligible. While my boss would later confess that this found object was an old art project of his daughter's intended for demolition, this harmonized rendezvous will forever remain a poetic and vibrant memory. Even more fascinating, adding a complementary layer of the Marvelous to the situation, is that I recently discovered the event depicted in the Whitehall illustration occurred on October 3, 1888.





Note: The feeling of the uncanny Freud writes about is simply the horror of the Marvelous, akin to the hate of the Marvelous mentioned by Breton in the first surrealist manifesto. The uncanny is nothing more than a reactionary and fearful response of the return of the repressed.

On September 18, 2003 a discussion was held between the Portland Surrealist Group and several local allies about the phenomena of the double. Morgan Miller explained that over a long period of time he had regularly been mistaken for someone else, and that at one point he had arranged to meet this double at their place of work. When Morgan arrived he found that the double had called in sick. Not long after he learned that his double had died.

The discussion developed into a talk about mistaken identities. Shibek and myself have both had brief situations where we’ve seen one person faultlessly in the features of another. Shibek claims to usually have these experiences when deprived of sleep, a state of mind where the unconscious is more active and able to manifest remarkable illusions. My experiences don’t typically depend on sleep deprivation, but seem to revolve around a single individual. Too embarrassing to discuss publicly, these experiences have left me feeling like Scottie Ferguson in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, hypnotically roving the streets after Madeline’s death, and finding her everywhere, most notably in other people. Over the past few years these false impressions have also occurred with photographed individuals who resemble the said individual, such as in a photograph of Nora Mitrani with Hans Bellmer.

Not long after our discussion, on September 26, one of these experiences occurred while watching Gone with the Wind when I noticed a striking visual similarity, perhaps it was the eyes, between the said individual and the actress Olivia de Havilland, a similarity that today seems only trivial but at the time sent me into a state of shock. Even more striking was the correlation between the scenario of the film and my own life, being that on October 10 I was informed that only two weeks prior this individual had, to my displeasure, gotten engaged to be married.