Time and Propinquity

In February, 1967, Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, wrote a five-page memo called “Time and Propinquity: Factors in Phase I,” which revealed some of the spurious connections he was making in his attempt to outline what he believed was the true nature of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 

Garrison believed that the best way to uncover well-hidden conspiracies was by noticing seeming coincidences — when two people happened to live a few blocks from each other or when someone ran a bar around the corner from where a cache of heroin was seized — and assembling a pattern from the resulting swamp of names, addresses, and dates. 

A few years ago, the British Filmmaker Adam Curtis came across Garrison’s memo in “The Prankster and the Conspiracy,” a book by the zine writer and self- described crackpot historian Adam Gorightly. 

At the time, Curtis was trying to make sense of the political fracturing and rampant disinformation that accompanied the election of Donald Trump and, in his own country, the Brexit vote. 

“Normally, I hate conspiracy theories. I find them boring,” Curtis told me recently. 

“Then I stumbled on ‘Time and Propinquity’ and I just thought, Yes. . . . Fragments. That’s how people think now. They make associations, and there’s no Meaning. That’s The World we live in.” 

 "This theory was going to have a very powerful effect in the future because it would lead to a profound shift in how many people understood The World,” he says. 

“Because what it said was that, in a dark world of hidden power, you couldn’t expect everything to make sense, that it was pointless to try and understand the Meaning of why something happened, because that would always be concealed. 

What you looked for were the patterns.”