Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (12 page)

It was not all burning Theosophical houses, forewarned astrologers, and pissed-off Spiritualists, though. There were other moments that approached near luminosity. None were more impressive than the case of Leonora E. Piper, the Bostonian medium whom Gauld describes as “an undoubted lady” and whom James once described, for her lack of intellect and conversation skills, as “that insipid prophetess.”
⁶⁷
But insipid or not, prophetess she was. Gauld, Blum, and many others have told her story in great detail. Indeed, Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick published a 657-page study of Piper in the 1915
Proceedings
. Obviously, we are not going to repeat such a performance here. It is enough simply to point out the barest impossible facts.

Once William James discovered her, the psychical researchers went to great lengths to test Mrs. Piper. Hodgson went so far as to have her and her family followed by professional detectives, sometimes for weeks at a time. In an attempt to remove her from her usual surroundings, the S.P.R. also took her to England for four months, from November of 1898 to February of 1890, in order to test her further there. The society then offered her two hundred pounds per year if she would let Richard Hodgson control her sittings for the next few years. She agreed.

Like many mediums, Piper's “controls,” that is, the spirit-personalities who allegedly spoke through her, changed over the years. Not all were terribly promising, and even here one encounters that strange fantastic mix of the factual and the fraudulent. Mrs. Piper's early controls, for example, included a certain Indian girl named “Chlorine” and Sir Walter Scott, who
informed
his listeners that there are monkeys on the sun.
⁶⁸
But Chlorine and Walter quickly disappeared as other controls took over, including a certain “Phinuit” and a young man named “George Pellew.”

Pellew was known by many (including Hodgson) as a local historical figure who had been killed in an accident a few weeks before he began speaking through Mrs. Piper. In this life, he was an outspoken critic of psychical phenomena who, as Deborah Blum has it, “had made a half-joking promise” a few months before he was killed. “If Hodgson was right, Pellew was willing to prove it. If he died first, he would return and ‘make things lively.'
”
⁶⁹
He certainly lived up to his promise. G. P., as he was called in these sittings, recognized every single person whom he knew while alive who now came to Mrs. Piper: “Out of 150 sitters who were introduced to him,” Gauld explains, “G. P. recognized the thirty and only the thirty with whom the living Pellew had been acquainted. He appropriately adjusted the topics and the style of his conversation to each of these friends and often showed a close knowledge of their concerns.”
⁷⁰
Even here, of course, there were mistakes, but there were no more solar primates.

Gauld points out that nearly every serious psychical researcher who came into contact with Mrs. Piper eventually became convinced that her powers were real, and many came to the impossible conclusion that spirits were indeed communicating to the living through her trances and automatic writing. James published well over a hundred pages on her phenomena.
⁷¹
And even Richard Hodgson and Frank Podmore, widely known as the harshest of critics and the most difficult to convince, were finally convinced. No one had to burn another house down.

Always the poet, classicist, and philologist, that is, always the lover of words, Frederic Myers dwelt on all of these extraordinary events and colorful personalities through long personal meditations on various Latinized and Hellenized coinages, brave new words that he fashioned out of his own experiences and intuitions. Basically, he took the altered states of consciousness that he encountered in the field and transformed them into the altered words that he expressed in his writing practice. He took all those hundreds of séances and transformed them into the Book as Séance.

In the pages that follow, I would like to trace, both reasonably and speculatively, some of the pathways—psychological, biological, traumatic, fantastic, and erotic—through which Myers accomplished this unique linguistic alchemy. I will dwell on just four of the altered word-states he
develops
in
Human Personality
: (1) the subliminal; (2) the supernormal; (3) the telepathic; and (4) the imaginal. I will then conclude with a rereading of Myers's initiatory encounter with those “forces unknown to science,” which involves a fifth and final altered word-state that I have been honing for two decades of my own life but that also works beautifully with the secret of this Book as Séance—the erotic.

The
Subliminal Gothic: The Human as Two

A young André Breton, much inspired by both the early psychical researchers and Freud's later psychoanalysis, pursued a kind of double vision he came to call
the surreal
, that is, the super-real. “I believe,” he wrote, “in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.” Not surprisingly, Breton loved Myers. Indeed, he affectionately referred to the elaborate architectonics of Myers's psychological system as a “gothic psychiatry.”
⁷²
William James would have agreed. As we have already noted, in a kind of eulogy for Myers he published in the
Proceedings
, James aligned his recently deceased friend with the “romantic” imagination against what he called the “classic-academic” mind, which wants only straight logical lines and neat categorical boxes. James also insisted that in our own immediate experience, “nature is everywhere Gothic, not classic. She forms a real jungle, where all things are provisional, half-fitted to each other and untidy.”
⁷³
This was putting it mildly with respect to his old friend. The details of Myers's major text, after all, consist largely of the eerie data of death and apparitions.

This Gothic castle of a book was built with a very particular method, which we might capture, in our own terms and for our own purposes now, as a type of trauma or dissociation theory. Virtually all of the book's data, after all, depended in some way on that most universal of all human traumas and that most permanent of all dissociations—death. But death was not the only trauma Myers treated. He also took the data of early psychiatry and psychopathology very seriously as well. In Emily Williams Kelly's framing, “Myers believed that psychologists needed to begin to single out for special attention situations in which the ordinary relationship between mental and physical functioning seems to be altered or thrown out of gear.” Only in this way could they see more clearly “that the correlation of mind and brain might not be as straightforward as it appears under normal circumstances.”
⁷⁴

In
other words, for the psychical phenomena to manifest, it is usually necessary for the normal state of awareness, the social ego, to be temporarily suppressed (as in sleep, trance, or ecstasy) or traumatized (as in an accident or near-death experience). The stars, after all, only come out at night, when the sun goes down. In a stunning comment that foreshadows certain strands within contemporary neuroscience, Myers even suggested that subliminal material and various unusual automatisms might manifest in an especially clear way when the left, language-processing hemisphere of the brain is damaged or suppressed. This is also how Myers thought automatic writing worked: essentially, the right brain and its specific energies become dominant over the left brain and its waking self.
⁷⁵
I will return to this idea in my conclusion, as, neuroanatomically speaking, I think this is precisely how a writer becomes an “author of the impossible.”

Aldous Huxley, who had read his Myers and positioned him in his own psychological galaxy well above both Freud and Jung, put the same traumatic insight this way:

Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason for supposing that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen; and yet when we subject water to certain rather drastic treatments, the nature of its constituent elements becomes manifest. Similarly, nothing in our everyday experience gives us much reason for supposing that the mind of the average sensual man has, as one of its constituents, something resembling, or identical with, the Reality substantial to the manifold world; and yet, when that mind is subjected to drastic treatments, the divine element, of which it is in part at least composed, becomes manifest.
⁷⁶

The situation, however, was more radical than Huxley's chemical metaphor suggests, for in the light of the new physics and his own psychical research, Myers had already realized that fundamental terms like “material” and “immaterial” were beginning to waver. He observed that “it is no longer safe to assume any sharply-defined distinction of mind and matter,” and he predicted that “our notions of mind and matter must pass through many a phrase as yet unimagined.”
⁷⁷

Indeed. We can now make the point even more contemporary. Nothing in our everyday experience, for example, gives us any reason to suppose that matter is not material, that it is made up of bizarre forms of energy that violate, very much like spirit, all of our normal notions of space, time, and causality. Yet when we subject matter to certain drastic treatments, like CERN's Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, then we can see
quite
clearly that matter is not material at all, that there is no such thing as materialism, and that the world is way, way weirder than we thought.

Myers, of course, was writing well before quantum theory, which, had he known of it, I am certain he would have mined for new ways of thinking about his psychical data. But he was writing well after men like Sir William Crookes, the pioneering British chemist who was president of both the British Association for the Advancement of Science
and
the Society for Psychical Research and who had performed experiments with mediums and psychics toward the discovery of what he called “a New Force.” Most of all, though, Myers was writing after the discovery of the electromagnetic spectrum, hence the language of the latter science became one of the central organizing principles of his theorizing and poetics. Enter the metaphor of
the spectrum
(which, in turn, we might surmise, alludes to the earlier register of
the specter
).

The discovery of electromagnetic radiation taught Myers that our senses pick up only a tiny fraction of what surrounds us at all times. The vast majority of reality is quite literally “occult” or hidden to us. He thus wrote of “the Interpenetration of Worlds,” which Kelly glosses as “the interaction between the physical world that our senses have evolved to perceive and what he called the ‘metetherial' world, the larger universe that is beyond our direct sensory perception.”
⁷⁸
He even intuited, before Einstein, that space may not be absolute: we must, he reasoned from his psychical data, “be ready to conceive other invisible environments or coexistences, and in a sense to sit loose to the conception of Space, regarded as an obstacle to communication or cognition” (HP 2:262). To employ a less abstract analogy, Myers thought our condition might be like that of a tadpole, “who had learned theoretically that what he was breathing in his pond was not the water but the oxygen dissolved therein,—and who then should. . .raise his head above water . . . [and] perceive frogs and other animals respiring the translucid air” (HP 2:526). We'll see this one again, when we get to Charles Fort and his fishes.

Along similar spectral lines, Myers was convinced that there are no true “breaks” or “miracles” in the universe, that even the most extraordinary events are located along a spectrum that stretches back to the most ordinary ones. Accordingly, he did not argue from the special or completely anomalous case. He argued from the common cases through the less common cases to the relatively rare cases and, finally, toward the horizon of the seemingly impossible ones, which now, precisely because of this gradation or spectrum method, began to look more than a little possible. This is how Frederic Myers became an author of the impossible—through the data of
trauma
and dissociation, a poetics of the electromagnetic spectrum, a tadpole here and there, and a method of gradation.

So, for example, in the first volume of
Human Personality
, Myers did not just plop down an extreme example of automatic writing and expect his readers to accept it. He carefully introduced his methods (chapter 1) and began with the subject of the disintegration of personality in mental illness in order to show just how malleable and multiple the self really is (chapter 2). If we could track how the self devolves or falls apart, he reasoned, we might also be able to figure out how it evolves into something higher up the spectrum of consciousness. From there he moved slowly to the extraordinary but still accepted “subliminal uprushes” of genius and inspiration in artists, thinkers, and writers (chapter 3), and then to sleep and dreams, those common nocturnal visions in which many strange voices speak through us at night (chapter 4). Who could deny such things? From there it was on to hypnotism, which in its earlier, more robust form as “magnetic sleep” had been widely rejected as preposterous but now as “hypnotism” was being widely studied in the major research hospitals of the time (chapter 5). Immediately after that, Myers took on the related subject of sensory automatisms, such as spontaneous visions or auditions (chapter 6).

This in turn laid the foundation for the second volume, where Myers now ventured into the most extraordinary material on the far end of the spectrum of consciousness. Here we catch sight of phantasms of the dead (chapter 7) and then enter a chapter on motor automatisms (chapter 8). By motor automatisms, Myers referred to phenomena like automatic writing, that is, the paranormal
as writing
. Myers completes his mapping of the spectrum of consciousness with the truly extraordinary subjects of trance, possession, and ecstasy, that is, those phenomena in which the human personality is radically transformed by an altered state, another presence, or even an invading personality (chapter 9). He then concludes with a final philosophical epilogue (chapter 10) and a long series of appendices, which really form the “meat” or base data of the book for the careful and patient reader. The form or structure of
Human Personality
thus reproduces its theory and content: the book begins with an analysis of the normal and evolves gradually into a discussion of the supernormal, ending finally with a discussion of the empirical evidence for postmortem survival.