Geosynchronicity
ROB BRAY joins the dots from his past and finds some surprising alignments.
ROB BRAY
For many years I’ve enjoyed strolling around the environments of my past – most notably my childhood neighbourhood, the woods and open spaces I roamed and explored as a teenager, and my old university campus. I’d say that I’ve been practising a personalised form of psychogeography without naming it.
Psychogeography’s origins lie in the urban explorations of the 1950s Letterists, the aim of whose free-flowing rambles was to map the energetic forces at play within the built environment, exploring their effects on the emotional lives of the human inhabitants of towns and cities. Nowadays, the term is used with rather more freedom, and covers a range of approaches to pedestrian urban wandering. Nick Papadimitriou names his practice of conscious walking “deep topography”. His approach is a synthesis of factual observation of mundane topographical details and the subjective, experiential relationship between himself and the changing urban environment.
Without being aware of my psychogeographic forerunners, I’ve always seen my own nostalgic perambulations as a means of connecting with my former self via topographic features and built structures that unite my present with my past. By standing where I stood 25 years ago, leaning against the same wall, gazing at the same building, resting my foot on the same little ledge, I can reliably achieve a strongly felt inner sense of reunion with the me of that earlier time. There’s no particular purpose to this; it just excites and pleases me, and it feels like the right thing to do when I visit a place from my past. Sometimes the sense of reconnection is mild and lingers for long enough for me to savour and inspect it; at other times it’s almost shockingly powerful but can’t be held on to, disappearing if I attempt to examine it.
This practice extends to the contemplation of key characters in my personal history and how our courses through life have intersected, aligned, and diverged. I’ve always had a fondness for maps too, and a few years ago I decided to pull these various strands of thought and exploration together by looking into the possibility that there might be synchronistic alignments between locations of personal significance in my life.
I bought a large map of Britain and stuck it to my office wall. I quickly noticed that a line drawn from the first town I lived in to the town I live in now passes through Keele – known to many as the location of a service station on the M6, but significant to me as the university whose beautiful campus was my stomping ground
“We know there is a lot of debris that others claim to have retrieved”
from 1992 to 1995. There are extensive woodlands on the campus, and I spent a lot of time in them during my three years as an undergraduate student. One tree in particular was a favourite spot of mine. I’d often climb a short way up it to where a thick branch leant out at just the right angle for me to recline on it and enjoy a quiet think.
Spotting this alignment, and craving greater detail than my 1:550,000 map could hope to afford, I turned to Google Maps, where I made the happy discovery that it’s possible to drop pins into a map and plot straight lines between them. By zooming in to a scale at which I could drop a pin right into the roof of each house, I found that a straight line from my first house (near Liverpool) to my current house (near Milton Keynes) not only passes through the campus of my old university, but actually runs through the woods and close to the tree in which I used to sit. (Furthermore, this same line passes precisely through another significant rooftop: that of my sister-in-law’s flat in Milton Keynes.)
Excited by this surprising coincidence, which I had by now termed “Geosynchronicity”, I contacted my former girlfriend from those Keele days (who I’ll call Sophie) and we agreed I should plot points for her addresses too.
We were quite astonished to find that a line matching the same criteria as mine, namely joining her first home (near Manchester) to her current home (in Devon) with rooftop accuracy, passes right through those same woods where we used to spend so much time at Keele.
As you can imagine, I was keen to look at other significant locations to see if there were more alignments to be found. A favourite haunt of mine and Sophie’s was the town of Glastonbury. We’d often go together to a campsite (closed since the late 1990s, sadly) at the foot of Glastonbury Tor, and would always consider an ascent of the Tor to be a vital part of each trip. It turns out that a line from my current home to Sophie’s current home passes through Glastonbury and runs right between the campsite and the Tor. But not only are our respective homes (some 270km/186 miles apart) joined by a straight line through Glastonbury, they both also have solstitial alignments with the town. From my house, the Winter Solstice Sun sets over Glastonbury, while from Sophie’s house, the Summer Solstice Sun rises over Glastonbury (both within one degree of the Tor). For me, the fact that we’ve unknowingly located ourselves on opposite sides of that special place at such an angle that our homes are also aligned with the Solstices is amazing enough, even without the crossing of our other lines at the university where we met.
I have many other alignments on file, and I continue to be surprised by the coincidences I discover.
After university, I moved to a house chosen with minimal consideration in another town. It turns out that house is within 100m (328ft) of a 240km- (150 mile) long line between Sophie’s house at that time and the address where my wife (whom I hadn’t yet met) was then living. Given the personal circumstances surrounding that move, and the changes to my life that followed it, I cannot help but be impressed by the magnitude of that coincidence. Looking at my wife’s other former addresses, we’ve also found a line that connects her first house with two of her other homes. That’s a line from Milton Keynes via London to Switzerland, covering over 800km (500 miles), and aligning three of her dwellings with rooftop precision.
But should any of this really be surprising? Readers with an interest in leys may have seen the impressive geometric shape that comedian and mathematician Matt Parker produced by plotting the locations of 12 former branches of Woolworths as a counter to the supposed significance of apparent alignments between ancient religious and spiritual sites. But Parker’s shape, while visually striking, does not boast any great precision or symmetry. For example, the three locations in the Midlands that appear to be on the line between Conwy and Luton are actually all 2-3km (1.2-1.9 miles) from it. While these distances may be close to the tolerances permitted for some celebrated leys, such as the St Michael Line, there’s not a single three-point alignment in the Woolworths shape that comes close to the precision I’ve found, and that’s in spite of there being over 800 Woolworths stores to choose from. Perhaps some more precise alignments might be revealed if all those locations were plotted and studied, but to do so would be a task far more onerous than was necessary for Parker to make his point; a full list of addresses is available online if anyone wishes to give it a go. I accept the Woolworths shape as a compelling example of how convincing patterns can be found within any sufficiently large set of data if you’ve the desire to see them, but it’s not powerful enough to diminish my wonder at the far more accurate alignments I’ve so far found from around a dozen significant addresses of a handful of people close to me.
And that’s all I’m claiming here: my own wonder. I’m not asserting that my alignments mean anything – at least, not in any objective sense. This investigation enriches my reflections, it stimulates contemplation of the reciprocal relationship between places and people, it suggests the influence of the unconscious on our movements and choices, and it hints at a ‘vertical’ interpretation of time, where past and future are facets of a single, unified event extruding into time-bound awareness. More simply, I like maps, I enjoy reflecting on past places and experiences, and coincidences give me a buzz. That makes this pursuit rewarding enough. But I do think that what I’ve found so far is rather unlikely. I encourage you to give
it a try with your own addresses and places of significance. Maybe scores of FT readers will find alignments as personally resonant and geographically accurate as mine, and that will surely be interesting. Or maybe only very few will find anything noteworthy, which would make my results all the more surprising.
NOTES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Psychogeography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Nick_Papadimitriou. John Rogers’s 2009 film The London Perambulator
is an excellent introduction to Nick Papadimitriou’s practice of deep topography.
You need to expand the menu at the top of a Google maps page, select ‘Your places’, go to the ‘MAPS’ tab, and hit ‘CREATE MAP’. Thereafter, when viewing your maps, always click ‘Open in My Maps’ to get access to the line drawing and measurement tools. I recommend you use a mouse with a scroll wheel.
www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/ latlong.html is useful for converting map coordinates to angles. I also use the mobile app Sun Surveyor for quickly identifying Sun and Moon positions for any location and date.
https://bigthink.com/strangemaps/527-the-st-michael-line-a-straightstory
www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk/ WoolworthStores-FullList.html
2 ROB BRAY is a musician based in Northamptonshire, where he blends folk and jazz influences into the mythical, mystical, nature-themed songs of The Straw Horses. You can read more about Geosynchronicity and Astrosynchronicity on Rob’s blog at: https://everydayanomalist.wordpress. com/