Friday, August 2

The cleaning lady has arrived and I've escaped to my desk to avoid getting in the way.  I have a couple of ideas for stories so will take this chance to start getting them down.  Before that, though, I have to start going through some paperwork Jamie dropped off last night. When you get to our age, you need to start planning for the future. There are things like Advanced Care Directives, Living Wills, and so on which have to be filled in and discussed with the doctor.  It's all  a bit of a bore.  

Today's story is Automatic Writing, from 2021, and is a bit more didactic than other stuff I''ve written.  Is didactic the word I'm looking for?  Explanatory? Expository? 

Sometimes when I’m writing a story I experience something like a ghostly presence guiding my hand so, when I re-read what I have written, I see that my narrative has gone in an unexpected direction.  There are names I hardly remember and occurences whose origins are a mystery.  I’ve embraced the phenomenon and, in many ways, come to depend on it, to the point that I am now in the habit of setting out on a story project like an unprepared sailor putting his life in the hands of the vagaries of the weather and trusting that good fortune will see me through.

 

Recently, I started to write a story about Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Australia in 1954 and was surprised that it became a polemic on the machinations of a Prime Minister intent on cementing a win in a forthcoming election.  That’s just one example.

 

Having done some research, I suspected that it might be a phenomenon called psychography or automatic writing.  The Chinese called it Fuji writing or Spirit Writing and it was used by Zen monks who were said to communicate with an ancient Taoist sage credited with the creation of the kung fu system.

 

In the west, early examples of automatic writing date back to the 16^th century. A famous spiritualist called John Dee convinced followers that he communicated with angels and introduced a new language which became known as Enochian because it was believed the prophet Enoch was the last person to know the language.

 

Through the centuries, different methods of communication with the spirits have evolved.  Practitioners typically employed techniques like the writer passively holding a pencil on a sheet of paper or by using the planchette, a small heart-shaped device on casters and fitted with a vertical pencil.  A variation of the planchette is the Ouija board which has letters and various symbols around the edge; the planchette moves, seemingly of its own volition, pausing briefly on individual symbols to spell out a message.

 

Automatic writing was a favourite ploy of spiritualists operating in Britain after World War 1.  So many people had died in the conflict and grieving relatives were desperate to make contact with their spirits.  The spiritualist, often a woman, would say that a loved one who had passed over wanted to send a message.  The spiritualist would act as a conduit or medium through whom the message would pass and would go into a trance, holding the pen or planchete and enabling writing to appear. Gullible clients, desperate for news of their departed loved ones were happy to give the medium a generous donation.

 

The author, Arthur Conan Doyle suggested automatic writing occurs either by the writer’s subconscious or by external spirits and, with his wife, led an automatic writing séance with Harry Houdini.  Of course, Conan Doyle famously believed in fairies so his opinion might be discounted.

 

I’ve read what noted psychologists have said and I’ve become convinced that my automatic writing is the result of the ideo-motor effect, when I enter a mild dissociative state.  I then become a victim of auto-suggestion produced by auto-hypnotism leading to the emergence of a secondary self.  That secondary self takes over the story leaving my normal self in the dark.  I wonder if that’s what they used to call ‘split personality’.

 

On the other hand, it might just be a result of my undisciplined mind.  Because I’m too disorganised or lazy to properly plan my writing, I tend to start with one or two characters and a general premise and see how it develops.  It’s not surprising that some of my stories are wayward and take an occasional unexpected turn.

 

I hope that’s what makes them interesting.