Beyond Coincidence (2 page)

The skeptic may be right, but he can't deny the power of the experience. And anyway, he's missing the point. Margaret's crossword coincidence may not have been meant, in the sense that someone or something had orchestrated it, but it was certainly meaningful. It resulted in her finding out about her friend's death for one, and it made her feel connected to him, despite the separating barriers of time and distance.

Here's another curious fact: the coincidence is meaningful to the reader as well. The reason we respond positively to accounts of coincidence, ever eager to give them the benefit of the doubt, is because they make such good stories. They have the resonance of myth and fairy tale, with their dramatic shifts of fortune, their spectacular life-and-death events and their many enchanted objects and preoccupations: crossword clues, rings, keys, addresses, numbers, and dates. There is a ritualistic quality to them because of their complex storylines: the histories, character traits, dream and thought processes that have to be established and explained in the correct sequence before the coincidence climax can be appreciated. A good coincidence story has the gravitas of Greek drama, the difference being that it is true.

We, the authors of this book, have been acutely aware of this quality while writing it. So we have not skimped on stories. There are almost two hundred in part 2 and others scattered through the book. Some are old classics that wouldn't let us leave them out (and which, like myths, thrive on the retelling); many are told here for the first time.

Carl Jung called coincidences “acts of creation in time.” The sheer potency of the stories, and the emotional catharses and transformations they wrought in some of their subjects, testify to that.

All writers have a working arrangement with coincidence. Few novelists are too proud to insert a dramatic coincidence in order to tart up a lackluster plot. Without coincidence comedy routines would be deadly serious. Allegory and metaphor work by linking together two normally unconnected ideas in order to startle the reader into seeing something they thought they knew in a different light. When the poet Stephen Spender describes electricity pylons crossing a valley as “bare like nude, giant girls that have no secrets” he is utilizing the visual energy of something entirely unrelated to pylons in order to shock the reader into a sense of blatant and gauche vulgarity. Strictly speaking metaphors aren't coincidences, as they are man-made, but they work the same trick: fusing unrelated entities to power a revelation.

An interviewer once asked the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer how he could possibly work in such an untidy study. The interviewer had never seen such a cramped and confusing place. Every ledge in the room was taken up with teetering stacks of paper and books piled up on top of each other. It was perfect, said Singer. Whenever he needed inspiration, a pile of papers would fall off a shelf and something would float to the floor that would give him an idea.

There is one kind of coincidence for which all writers have a healthy respect. It manifests itself when you are researching a subject and relevant facts appear everywhere you look. Carl Jung called it the Library Angel and grateful writers leave offerings to it by their bookshelves at night.

When Martin Plimmer was researching this book, he started looking for information about neutrinos—particles so small scientists have never seen them. He was interested in ways we might connect, not just with each other, but also with the physical world and the universe beyond. Neutrinos, which originate in stars and shower the Earth constantly, seemed to suggest a medium for universal intimacy, as they pass right through us, and then through the Earth beneath us, without stopping for the lights, flitting through the empty space in atoms as though there were nothing there. Martin had never heard of neutrinos, but pretty soon the air was thick with them.

He opened a newspaper at random and there was a story about neutrino research. A novel he was reading offered an interesting neutrino theory. When he turned on the television, there was former president Bill Clinton talking about them in a speech. When he looked down at his fingertip, a billion of them were passing through it every second. Funny how he'd never noticed them before. It was as though the whole world had gone neutrino flavor.

Again, you could say that all this stuff is always out there waiting to be noticed, part of the barrage of information that passes before our overloaded senses every day. Our attention is selective; we see only what preoccupies us at the time. That week neutrinos were big, so neutrinos were everywhere. The world appeared to be bent to Martin's current obsession, and the search engine of the gods was suggesting ideas, links, and information.

None of this theory about the barrage effect of information applied to novelist and historian Dame Rebecca West when she was searching for a single entry in the transcripts of the Nuremberg trials. She had gone to the library and was horrified to discover hundreds of volumes of material. Worse, they were not indexed in a way that enabled her to look up her item. After hours leafing through them in vain, she explained her desperation to a passing librarian.

“I can't find it,” she said. “There's no clue.” In exasperation she pulled a volume down from the shelf. “It could be in any of these.” She opened the book and there was the passage she needed.

It would be nice to think that something less fickle than chance was at work here. Did the item want to be found? Did her mind, with the right concentration of energy,
read
which volume it was in? Or did the Library Angel lend her a helping hand? Whatever helped her, it distributes its blessings impartially: for Rebecca West, a session transcript out of thousands from a trial of mass murderers; for a devout Muslim fisherman in Zanzibar eager for evidence of God's greatness, a fish with the old Arabic words “There is no God but Allah” discernible in the patterning on its tail.

If coincidences cluster around preoccupations, imagine how they fall over to please you when the subject is coincidence itself. This book's origins lie in a five-part series,
Beyond Coincidence,
made by Test-bed Productions for BBC Radio 4. No sooner had we started our research than so many coincidences happened around us that we began to feel like we were being stalked. Newspapers fell open at accounts of coincidences, potential contributors, at the moment we rang them, were interrupted in the act of writing about coincidence (or so they told us, but then they were in the coincidence business, too).

On the way back one day after interviewing a woman who was doing psychic research, we pulled off the road for lunch. Suddenly Martin began talking about the design of a car he had seen. This was unusual because, uniquely among men, Martin is not interested in cars. Normally he can't differentiate one model from another; he can barely remember the make of his own. This time he'd been so struck by the car he'd made a mental note of the make. It was an Audi.

“And if you could afford to buy one of those cars,” said Brian, “would you like to own one?”

“Well, yes,” said Martin, considering a novel idea. “I think I would.”

“Then I know just the place you should go,” said Brian, and he pointed through the window behind Martin's back. Across the road was a car showroom called Martin's Audis.

Early on in the research process Martin read Arthur Koestler's famous 1972 book,
The Roots of Coincidence.
First he poured himself a hot bath. It happened that at that time he was sorting out old vinyl records that he hadn't played for years. He'd been systematically playing these records to see if they were worth keeping or not. At the point when he settled into the bath with Mr. Koestler, Mickey Jupp, a little-known artist from England, started singing in the background.

There was Martin, out of his depth in scientific experiments into paranormal phenomena, specifically to test whether there is such a thing as telepathy. Early research was carried out in Russia by a scientist called Bechterer, who, afraid the authorities might consider his work too frivolous, disguised the telepathy part by calling it “biological radio.” No sooner had Martin read that phrase than in the other room Mickey Jupp sang the words “nature's radio.” It was a song about telepathy between lovers: “You won't have to tell me, because I'll already know / I'll have heard the news on Nature's Radio.”

Now, if Martin were an Ancient Greek he would have regarded this as a good omen. Actually he did anyway. It feels good when two pieces of like phenomena shake hands in your bathroom, particularly when they have judged your mood so well.

Later Martin and Brian were conducting random street interviews. The sixth person stopped turned out to have devoted his life to the celebration and recording of coincidence. By this time it did not seem odd at all. Coincidences? We could call them up at will! Perhaps what we should have been doing was concentrating our powers on winning the lottery.

So far so benign. We've tended to think of coincidences as having good intentions, though as neither random events nor the actions of gods (depending on your standpoint) are necessarily friendly, there's no reason why they should be so restricted. Of course, unhappy coincidences happen all the time.

If a woman were to urinate in your suitcase because it resembled her unfaithful husband's (you snigger, but it has happened), you would feel as though you were trapped in a real-life Larry David routine.

If all the passengers on a 747 jumbo jet happened to pack a small anvil in their hand luggage, the effect wouldn't be beneficial to any of them and they probably wouldn't be able to tell the story either, though the rest of us would be fascinated to read about it in a newspaper, or a novel, or watch it take place in a film. The pattern of coincidence engages us, even when it involves hardship or tragedy, and even victims of bad coincidence may experience a compensating sense of being included or chosen. Sometimes it is better to be noticed, even if we suffer by it, than to be ignored.

We have included lucky stories and unlucky stories in this book, funny stories, sad stories, violent stories, and romantic stories. We love coincidence so much that a misguided assumption prevails, that if a story contains one then it is, by definition, interesting. Many coincidence books have been written with that lazy principle in mind. It may be true, but apart from revisiting a few classic stories such as the
Titanic
prediction and the Lincoln and Kennedy similarities (shiver) we've worked hard to find stories that are interesting in their own right. We threw away a lot of stories that went: “I traveled to Thailand for my summer holiday and I met a woman who used to go to school with my brother in Philadelphia.” On the other hand if we've left the odd one in, it's because the woman wore purple lipstick or knew how to wolf whistle.

Enjoy the book. You should, as we share an interest in coincidences. Maybe we'll run into each other again one day.

But then again, realistically speaking, maybe we won't, because, despite all the shivering, we have to be realistic, otherwise we'd sit at home all day waiting for lucky gold bars to fall out of badly loaded planes onto our lawn. It's all very well being one with the great cosmic YES! but everyday life has to go on. As comedian Steven Wright says: “It's a small world, but you wouldn't want to paint it.”

2

WHY WE LOVE COINCIDENCE

Mrs. Willard Lovell locked herself out of her house in Berkeley, California. She had spent ten minutes trying to find a way back in when the postman arrived with a letter for her. In the letter was a key to her front door. It had been sent by her brother, Watson Wyman, who had stayed with her recently and taken the spare key home with him to Seattle, Washington.

Most of us have locked ourselves out of our houses at some time or other. Many of us will have received a key through the post in a letter. Very few of us will have had them happen to us with such exquisite timing. How would you have felt if that had happened to you? Pretty special probably. There you are, trying to cope with an unwelcome and vexing predicament when suddenly, like magic, the solution is handed to you on a plate, or in this case, in a letter. The denouement is so neat and perfectly resolved it makes the anguish of the beginning worthwhile. And what a story to tell your friends!

All the world loves coincidences. We are attracted to their pattern and order—their symmetry. We can even become addicted to them, seeking them out in the most unlikely places. The more unlikely a coincidence, the more we savor it.

And the more remarkable the coincidence, the more the sense that it must have some sort of meaning. Coincidences suggest some sort of controlling, godlike hand is at work—smoothing out the chaos in our complicated lives.

For many people these very personal experiences of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, can border on the religious. A major survey conducted in the United States in 1990 asked people to describe spiritual or religious-like experiences they had had. A large majority cited “extraordinary coincidences.”

Stephen Hladkyj spent several years studying coincidences experienced by fellow students at the University of Manitoba. He found that first-year students at the university who scored “high on a measure of synchronicity,” or were alert to synchronicity or meaningful coincidences in their lives, also scored higher on a self-rated measure of psychological health and had generally adapted well to their first year of college life.

He concluded that people who are alert to coincidence in their lives—particularly personal coincidence—tend to see the universe as a friendly, orderly, responsive place, and consequently develop a general sense of well-being. Coincidence, it seems, is good for us.

It gives us a delicious frisson of pleasure to know that a balloon released by ten-year-old Laura Buxton in her garden landed 140 miles away in the garden of another Laura Buxton aged ten. When coincidences like these occur it is as if people and places, times and events have been choreographed in a way that defies the law of probability.