Vermeer and meerkats

Vermeer came up in the sync stream yesterday, in "Girls with pearls, six-legged spider, Star of Chaos," so this morning I looked up the etymology of the name. In an 8:30 comment on that post, I published what I'd found: "Vermeer means 'from the marsh,' because of course it does." People whose names mean "marsh" or "swamp" have been a long-running sync theme around here; see "Thomas B. Bucket, the bucket of story -- oh, you know, the thing!" (February 2024) for starters.

I unexpectedly had some free time this afternoon, so I decided to visit a certain used bookstore in Taichung that I hadn't been to in a while.

While on the road, I was thinking about the name Vermeer and how the meer element meant "marsh" or "lake," and it occurred to me that, since Afrikaans is basically a dialect of Dutch, the painter's name probably shares its etymological history with the first element in meerkat.

Some minutes after I'd thought of that, I stopped at a red light and noticed that the motorcyclist in front of me had a little stuffed meerkat dangling from her purse. I snapped a quick photo, which unfortunately isn't really in focus, but I saw it clearly, and it was definitely a meerkat.

I thought, Okay, that's meer. Now I'm sure I'll run across something that says ver. The sync fairies did not disappoint. The meerkat photo above is timestamped 12:59. At 1:06, I had to pull over to take a photo of a restaurant I had just passed on the other side of the road.

The restaurant is called Verdure, but it is so stylized as to make ver appear to be a stand-alone word.

As I continued down the road, my thoughts returned to meerkats, and I thought of Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi, which I read back in 2006 and which prominently features that animal. I documented a sync related to that novel in "Coincidences in connection with Beyond Coincidence" (September 2012). Thinking about the meerkats today, I remembered that at the end of the novel, someone proposes that Pi's reported adventures with animals are a roman a clef, with each animal representing a particular person -- the orangutan is his mother, and so on. Someone else says, "Yeah, but what about the meerkats?" and the reply is something like, "How should I know? I'm not inside this boy's head." So the meerkat represents a symbol whose meaning is opaque.

When I arrived at the bookstore, the first book to catch my synchromystic eye had nothing to do with Vermeer or meerkats. It was a memoir called The Days of Golden Leaves:

Leaves of gold are a long-running theme, but this title -- with the golden leaves representing a particular period of time in the author's life -- was especially interesting. In yesterday's post "Riding the great white bird into heaven," I linked back to my June 2024 post "Feuilles-oh, sauvez la vie moi." That post includes my verse translation of part of Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell:

Once I -- but only once -- was able

To make of life a living fable.

Heroic days of not-so-old!

A youth to write on leaves of gold!

Was none of it, then, mine to keep?

How did I fall? How fall asleep?

Then I found this:

It's a book called Great Australian Shearing Stories by Bill 'Swampy' Marsh. So not only is the guy's name Marsh, but he has a nickname drawing attention to the meaning of that name. How do you write a great story about something as simple as shearing sheep? No idea, but apparently it's an established genre. In "Picaresque narrative" (April 11), I mention a reading comprehension test in which one of the questions related to that phrase. Here, from the same test, is a story summary which the student is supposed to identify as a good example of picaresque narrative:

The adventures of Nutty Thompson, an all Australian sheep shearer and drunk, and the troubles he gets into as he moves from town to town, wool shed to wool shed, and bar to bar. No matter how bad the situation looks, Nutty always manages to escape alive and intact, complete with cheeky grin.

Bill is of course a form of my own name, and it was at one point proposed that I have some connection to Thomas B. Marsh. One of my childhood nicknames was Woolly, and in "Shaved by Tessa while contemplating a rose or lotus" (June 2025) I report a dream in which "I was being shorn like a sheep," and this represented absolution, with "sin falling away like wool under the buzzing shears."

No points for guessing which book I ran across next:

Life of Pi by Yann Martel. I opened it up and quickly found the part I had been thinking about earlier. I'd remembered it tolerably well considering I'd only read the book once, 20 years ago. (I don't remember the weird fonts, though.)

"I'm not inside this boy's head" also syncs with a recent comment exchange with Debbie. She attributed the Vermeer syncs to telepathy between the two of us, and I said telepathy wasn't really an adequate explanation in this case. Debbie also stated that she wasn't trying to "take over" my mind.

As I've written several times William I believe that you and I have a telepathic connection.

And no, I'm not trying to 'take over your mind' with evil witchcraft, or some silly crap like that ;-((.... but as you know I absolutely believe in telepathy.

When I got home, I saw that I had an email from Debbie, sent at 2:11 p.m. Taiwan time. The photo of the Bill 'Swampy' Marsh book above is also timestamped 2:11 p.m. The email referred me to her most recent comment on "Girls with pearls, six-legged spider, Star of Chaos," so I read that first. The Marshall referred to is Debbie's husband.

LO AND BEHOLD!!!, guess who just showed up with the sync fairies.??

The Marsh himself.

Backstory: Just an hour ago this morning 5/19, Marshall came into the computer room. I called him over to the computer to read your latest post and my comments about the girl with a pearl.

I have tried in the past to read to Marshall my comments on your posts but, and he has admitted, he just don't understand a lot of it, so I don't read or talk about it very much anymore.

For some odd reason though, this morning, I asked him to take a couple of minutes and let me read the latest comments and how absolutely beezaar all of this stuff is.

Right away after I opened your post, Marshall said; "I just saw that photo of that painting in a newspaper article that I'm reading."

I was like: WHAT???!!! Are you sure?!!!

He then went to get it in all of his clutter stuff and stacks of papers. The section with the article was in the Life &Tradition section, which is the section of the paper that Marshall seldom reads.

I absolutely couldn't believe it.

Marshall has a subscription to the actual paper The Epoch Times.

Every now and then I'll read a couple of the articles that he suggests for me to read, but I rarely read the paper and I had no idea that he had that particular article. The paper is dated May 13--19 2026 so he must have just gotten it May 13th or so. He showed it to me today May 19th. The paper comes in the mail every week.

The article is titled : Vermeer's Girl with the Earring.

I read to Marshall your response to me about the name Vermeer meaning 'in the marsh'.

How frickin crazy is this William?? The sync fairies will NOT let me rest. Not even one day :-(((

I took pictures of the paper. I'll send them to your email.

Here are the photos:

Truly the sync fairies never let us rest, not even for one day.