Inca Roads (Introduction)

Everybody experiences coincidences. When we experience one, most of us think about it for a moment or two, maybe talk about it for a moment or two, and then move on.

But people interested in the Goblin Universe—or its variants—often have trouble letting go of coincidences. These people often make coincidences the center of theories about existence itself.

For instance, Paul Kammerer and Carl Jung researched coincidences extensively and created the notion of synchronicity. Synchronicity is the belief in an acausal connective principle. Reality is governed not just by cause-and-effect, but also by ephemeral and invisible linkages which generate effects without causes in the traditionally understood, three dimensional model of reality.

More recently a computer scientist turned UFO researcher named Jacques Vallee put forward the notion that we live in an associative universe. A computer recalls data by putting a pattern of ones and zeroes on a sequence of wires called the address bus and that pattern causes an associated pattern of ones and zeros to appear on a different sequence of wires called the data bus. Vallee and others suggest that perhaps reality is typically ‘ordered’ along temporal lines, but consciousness can sometimes, somehow put forward a pattern of some kind which acts as an index into reality itself and calls up, again somehow, an associated pattern. We become aware of these moments as ‘coincidences.’

I suspect that something like this will eventually come to be understood as the ‘real’ meaning behind the Nazca Lines. I believe they were an ancient culture’s understanding and expression of the associative nature of reality. So you have roads which start and end nowhere. Figures in the middle of nothing. Patterns with no context. And I believe that is the point. I believe the builders were expressing the belief—held either explicitly or implicitly—that real and meaningful ‘locations’ and ‘connections’ occur in the mind, in consciousness, and not in the three dimensional world around us.


Tomorrow I’m going to tell a story about a bassoon player and a marimba player and a walk I took along one of those Nazca Lines in my mind to a very weird coincidence.


The theme song for today’s post and tomorrow’s is Frank Zappa’s “Inca Roads:”

Did a vehicle
Come from somewhere out there
Just to land in the Andes
Was it round
And did it have
A motor
Or was it
Something different

Did a vehicle
Fly along the mountains
And find a place to park itself
Park it
Self

Or did someone
Build a place
To leave a space
For such a thing to land

Did a vehicle
Come from somewhere out there

Did a vehicle
Come from somewhere out there

Did the Indians
First on the bill
Carve up the hill

Did a booger-bear
Come from somewhere out there
Just to land in the Andes
Was she round
And did she have
A motor
Or was she
Something different

Guacamole Queen
At the Armadillo in Austin Texas
Her aura
Or did someone build a place
To leave a space
For Chester's Thing to land

Did a booger-bear
Come from somewhere out there

Did a booger-bear
Come from somewhere out there

Did the Indians
First on the bill
Carve up her hill

On Ruth
On Ruth
That’s Ruth!

Frank Zappa
“Inca Roads”
from “One Size Fits All”