Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (18 page)

Myers immediately explains that there is no “emotion subliminal” that ranges so widely and shows itself in so many guises as love.
¹²¹
Employing his spectrum method again, he explains that at one end of the scale, love is “as primitive as the need of nutrition,” that is, it manifests as sex. At the other end, eros morphs into hermeneutics. Literally. Here is Myers: “at the other end it becomes, as Plato has it, the
hermeneueon kai diaporthmeuon
, ‘the Interpreter and Mediator between God and Man'
” (HP 1:112). We are back to the threshold and the art of interpretation across the gap of two states of consciousness or being.

Myers immediately glosses this rather mysterious line with another: “The controversy as to the planetary or cosmical scope of the passion of Love is in fact central to our whole subject” (HP 1:112). In other words, it all comes down to whether we understand the erotic as something simply
sexual
and biological, or as something also potentially mystical and hermeneutical, that is, as the “the Interpreter and Mediator between God and Man.” It is worth repeating, in my own terms now: by his own stark confession late in life and in his own final statement, a metaphysical understanding of the erotic lay at the very heart and center of Myers's lifework. And by the erotic, I do mean the erotic. I mean
eros
.

So did Myers. The classicist invokes two iconic figures to represent the two poles of this perennial debate about the metaphysical status of “that primary passion”: the famous French psychiatrist Pierre Janet, who is made to represent “the physiological or materialistic conception of the passion of love,” and Plato himself, whose record of the prophetess Diotima's speech on eros in the
Symposium
Myers unequivocally describes as “unsurpassed among the utterances of antiquity” (HP 1:112, 113). Thus, whereas Janet's “planetary view” sees “sexual instinct as the nucleus of reality around which baseless fancies gather,” the “Platonic view” regards such “earthly passion as the initiation and introduction into cosmic sanctity and joy” (HP 1:xxxi). Basically, what we have here is a very clear polarization of the erotic as the sexual and/or the mystical.

Although he plays at a certain balance between Janet and Plato, it is very clear where Myers himself stands on the debate. He stands with Plato and his conviction that it is eros that generates genital desire
and
the creative energies of philosophy, law, poetry, art, culture, and society itself. As if to drive this point home, Myers quotes directly from the
Symposium
for almost two full pages.

There is something about this section on Plato's
Symposium
in
Human Personality
that sets it apart, that
marks it
for me. It is my own intuitive sense, which I cannot prove or establish beyond a reasonable doubt, that it is here that Myers gives himself away; that it is here that we learn about what drove him to research, classify, and write for those two remarkable decades. It is not simply Myers's stated conviction that the primary passion of Love is central to his entire subject. It is not simply the textual fact that his quotes from the
Symposium
in this section are among the longest of the entire two volumes. It is the biographical facts that in the summer of 1873 Myers fell madly in love with his cousin's wife, Annie Hill Marshall, and—more importantly still—that it was her tragic death, on September 1, 1876, that helped catalyze and drive his own anxious questions about the postmortem survival of the human personality. Annie committed suicide, probably in despair over her mentally ill husband, by ineffectively cutting her throat with a pair of scissors and then walking into a cold lake. Myers was devastated.

But
he never really let Annie go. As historians Alan Gauld and Deborah Blum have explained in some detail, Myers would love this ghost for the rest of his life. There were early alleged signals from Annie in Myers's extensive sittings with mediums, but it was not until 1899 that Myers received his first clear communication from his beloved, this time through a medium named Rosina Thompson. Myers was convinced now. As a sign of just how convinced, it is worth pointing out that he sat with Mrs. Thompson
150 times
between September of 1898 and December of 1900. And this, of course, was at the very same time he was completing
Human Personality
and, presumably, polishing those passages on Plato's
Symposium
. In any case, it was these late sittings with Rosina Thompson that Myers considered his very best evidence for the soul's survival of bodily death. Annie's continued existence was the final proof that he would soon publish for the world.

Until, of course, his wife found out. The best evidence and final proof was systematically suppressed by Myers's widow, Eveleen Myers, who actively censored her late husband's
Human Personality
by excising all the key passages about Annie Hill Marshall. Blum explains:

What he could not have foreseen when he composed
Human Personality
was that the evidence that Myers considered strongest—the séances in which Annie Marshall appeared, his many sittings with Rosina Thompson—would not give support to his published argument. His wife had many pertinent records destroyed; more than that, she had refused to allow [Richard] Hodgson to mention them in his edited version of the book.
¹²²

And that was not all. “Evie Myers wanted every trace destroyed, every scrap of evidence, that her husband had been infatuated with a spirit,” Blum explains. She particularly hated her husband's autobiography, “Fragments of Inner Life,” in which he “had actually counted the days with and without his beloved Annie.”

“I find,” Myers writes in these same pages, “that love in its highest—in its most spiritual—form is a passion so grossly out of proportion to the dimensions of life that it can only be defined, as Plato says, as ‘a desire for the eternal possession' of the beloved object.”
¹²³
He was almost certainly writing about Annie. He had hinted at the same in what I have called the “Platonic speech” of
Human Personality
: “And through the mouth of Diotima,” he wrote there, “Plato insists that it is an unfailing sign of true love that its desires are
for ever
; nay, that love may be even defined as the desire of the
everlasting
possession of the good” (HP 1:113). Evie was not the everlasting possession whom Myers desired. And this, quite understandably, infuriated her.

Blum
goes on to explain how Myers had given privately printed copies of “Fragments” to his closest colleagues in 1893. Evie demanded that they all turn their copies over to her. She even asked William James to oversee the censorship campaign. Sir Oliver Lodge, head of the physics department at the University of Birmingham, flatly refused, although he agreed not to publish the whole thing.
¹²⁴
Evie would end up editing the final published version of “Fragments of Inner Life” in 1904. They were indeed now “Fragments” in more ways than one. In her preface, she makes no mention of Annie, only that she has collected other letters of her husband, and that “some day they may be possibly printed, but they are of too personal a nature for present publication.”
¹²⁵
That is all.

As both Blum and Gauld have stressed, then, on some deep level it was Myers's “primary passion” for Annie that provided the spiritual fuel for those two decades of incredible focus, dedication, travel, and writing. Recall that before the S.P.R. was even founded in 1882, Myers had participated in 367 séances. He would sit at many hundreds more, including those 150 times with Rosina Thompson as he approached and entered the writing of
Human Personality
. There are more than a few reasons to approach
Human Personality
as a kind of textualized séance, then. There are all those séances.

On a deeper level, however, we might also speculate that the ritual of the séance structured the text itself, that, through these pages at the end of his life, Frederic Myers was striving to establish contact with his departed beloved, Annie Hill Marshall, as he himself moved toward the threshold to meet her again. We might speculate, that is, that his philosophical quest was driven, exactly as in Diotima's speech, by the altered states of eros, by the love of a deceased Beloved and the forces unknown to science that he appears to have known in her presence, both while she was still living and after she had died. The “passion of love” was indeed “central to our whole subject,” as he put it so well, so clearly, so honestly. It was in this way that the erotic subsumed the traumatic in Myers's
Human Personality
. This was how Love finally conquered Death.

Given all of this—some of it easily established, some of it admittedly speculative—I cannot help asking a final question. Was Frederic Myers's conversion to psychical research in the fall of 1873 really connected to shaking John King's hairy hand from the ceiling? Could it have rather been connected to Annie, with whom he had just fallen deeply in love that previous summer? I find it significant that Myers is forever relating his central concept of telepathy to eros, not to hairy hands. It must be admitted that this connection between the telepathic and the erotic is not immediately obvious, unless of course one has experienced exactly such a connection in
one's
own life. Then it is not only patently obvious; it is crucially important. This, I suspect, is what happened to Frederic Myers.

Recall here that our only source for what Myers describes as his “personal experience of forces unknown to science,” which he tells us he will not tell us about, is the very text that his widow later censored and controlled, that is, his “Fragments of Inner Life.” Obviously, when Frederic Myers refuses to tell us a secret in a text that was not made public until after his death and that we know his widow subsequently censored, we must be more than a little wary.

Alan Gauld makes a similar point, although he does not ask quite the same question about Myers's initial conversion experience to psychical research. He points out that Myers fell madly in love with Annie Marshall at the exact time he began investigating Spiritualism. He is also very clear that Annie became a veritable mystical presence for him. She was Beatrice to Myers's Dante. “She became at once a symbol and a manifestation of a hidden world of timeless realities, a world once apprehended by Plato, and now obscurely revealed by the strange phenomena of Spiritualism.” This, Gauld speculates, is partly explained by the fact that Annie herself showed mediumistic talents and attended séances with Myers.

Certainly Myers was clear enough about his own “endless passion” and its relationship to his psychical researches:

so soon as I began to have hope of a future life I began to conceive earth's culminant passion
sub specie aeternitatis
[under the perspective of eternity]. I felt that if anything still recognizable in me had preceded earth-life, it was this one profound affinity; if anything was destined to survive, it must be into the maintenance of this one affinity that my central effort must be thrown. . . . For me was there a sense that this was but the first moment of an endless passion.
¹²⁶

I am not sure what else needs to be said here, other than the textual fact that some of the most passionate and powerful passages in
Human Personality
have been erased. Many others, though, have survived. What we finally have left are thousands upon thousands of fragments, chains of memory and personality inscribed within twelve hundred pages of words and sentences. Happily, eerily, we can now reactivate and bring to life this human personality in our own intimate readings of what he wrote for us. Frederic Myers's book has become his own séance.

two

SCATTERING THE SEEDS OF A SUPER-STORY

Charles Fort and the Fantastic Narrative of Western Occulture

If we could stop to sing, instead of everlastingly noting vol. this and p. that, we could have the material of sagas—of the bathers in the sun . . . and of the hermit who floats across the moon; of heroes and the hairy monsters of the sky.

Char me the trunk of a redwood tree. Give me pages of white chalk cliffs to write upon. Magnify me thousands of times, and replace my trifling immodesties with a titanic megalomania—then might I write largely enough for our subjects.

—CHARLES FORT
,
New Lands

Once upon a time, a man named Charles Fort (1874–1932) sat at a table in the New York Public Library or the British Museum in London, spending much of every working day for a quarter century reading the entire runs of every scientific journal and newspaper in English or French he could
find.
“A search for the unexplained,” he explained, “became an obsession” (WT 918).
¹
That is something of an understatement. Here is how he joked about a typical day at the office: “I was doing one of my relatively minor jobs, which was going through the London
Daily Mail
, for a period of about twenty-five years, when I came upon this” (LO 630). As he read from the present back into the past, he chose an arbitrary but admittedly even date of 1800 as the place to end his reading odyssey. He had to stop somewhere.