Posted September 2005

Hello everybody,

Well I came back from visiting my son for two and a half weeks, and lo what had appeared on my doorstep in my absence but a box full of What a Coincidence!

It's always a thrill to see those first author copies---and my feeling every time is, "Who wrote this?" Somehow, it never quite seems to have been me. Then I get to hand out some of those first copies to family and friends, and wait for their reactions.

And those reactions have been very interesting this time, to say the least. So far, everybody's had a coincidence tale to tell me, and almost all of them involved the timing of my book's arrival. One friend noticed a parked semi with the single word WATKINS on it from his commuter train window, and guess what was in the mailbox when he got home? (We hadn't communicated in quite some time, and he didn't know WAC! was out already.) Another friend told me she'd stopped off at a B&N bookstore near Elmira to see if my book was in yet, and when she got home . . . there it was in *her* mailbox. Again, we hadn't communicated in a while, and she had no idea I was even going to send her a copy; moreover, she's in a WAC! anecdote that occurs in that same B&N bookstore. Neat!

However, the most striking post-WAC! story so far came from the owner of the local antiquarian bookstore that's just down the street from my apartment. Eileen appears in Chapter 7 ("Of Marbles, Money, and Mulch"), in which I relate (and explore) the amazing---sometimes immediate---synchronicity of imagination, imagery, and coincidence. Specifically, I give the example of imagining that I'd meet some new people of "like mind," as I put it, and later that same afternoon, some peculiar little twists of impulse and coincidence led me to Eileen's shop and we struck up an instant friendship. So I gave her an autographed copy of WAC! and we had a fun chat about it a few days later. She was especially taken with my description in Chapter 9 ("Didn't Do X, Which Leads to Y"), of how I'd avoided a possible car crash by paying attention to a sudden mental sound-image of my father's voice delivering a warning.

Eileen said, "That scene [in the book] reminded me of something I hadn't thought about in years. I always said, if I never have any more good luck in my life, the luck I had then would be enough.”

Then she told me this story: When Eileen was a kid growing up in Rochester, she made friends with a neighbor's dog, a fat old beagle named Nippy, who was more or less ignored by the family who owned him, so Eileen became his daily playpal and companion, which brought much joy to both of them. Then one day Nippy burrowed down into a leaf pile that had been raked into the street for municipal pickup (commonly done in that city at the time), and went to sleep in it, and somebody drove a car through the leaves, intending to park by the curb, and ran over the dog and killed him, much to Eileen's sorrow.

So flash forward (Eileen said) about ten years, and there's 20-year old Eileen driving her first car, a huge ugly Buick, and one day she and her sister are coming back from someplace, Eileen driving; it's a beautiful fall day, leaves are piled up along the curbs as usual for pick-up, and Eileen is about to pull into the parking space in front of her parents' house, which means that to do so she'll have to drive through the leaf piles as everybody, Eileen included, did all the time, when suddenly she slammed on the brakes and said to her sister, "I can't drive through those leaves because that's where Nippy was killed!" Which was the first time in years and years that she'd thought about it. And the minute she screeches the car to a halt, the leaves rustle, and two little kids pop up out of the pile in which they'd been totally hidden from sight, and there's Eileen at the wheel of this big huge car which if she'd kept going would have run right over those kids and probably killed them.

Eileen said to me, "Can you imagine if I'd done that, run over and killed those children? My life would have been over also, I just can't imagine." She'd remembered all this while reading the bit in WAC! about my hearing my father's voice just as I was about to pull out in front of a car with its signal on, but didn't, and it saved me from harm. Eileen said it wasn't a voice for her but a sudden intuitive "jolt" that yanked her mind back to Nippy's death, and even though she hadn't seen it happen, she'd "seen" it in her mind, and it made her stop the car on a screeching dime just in front of the leaf pile.

I said to her, maybe in some way Nippy was repaying you for your companionship by choosing to die the way he did, so you'd remember it when the time came, and it would save your own life, as well as literally the lives of the little kids. That if consciousness indeed has the ability to roam out into all possible futures and probabilities, it wouldn't just be its "human expression" that does so, and maybe Nippy had picked up on that probable future of yours, and chosen a death that you'd remember at just the right time, like a gift from the past and the future, combined, just in case you went in that probable direction . . . And later, thinking about it, it seemed to me almost as if this represented something like some sort of consciousness time capsule, set up to "open" if the right trigger came along (if we choose to go a certain direction and thus meet that moment of probability, say). And that we might implant these constantly without realizing it. Of course, just the cues of the season and the location of the first accident (involving Nippy) could have set off an association strong enough to startle Eileen into slamming on the brakes. But she'd pulled her car up through those leaf piles plenty of times before this without making that connection.

All very fascinating, as for one thing I hadn't had that specific kind of conversation with her, and I had the feeling she hadn't talked about the Nippy thing before at all, but my book opened up that whole line of speculation for her, just fantastic.

So if anyone out there reads WAC! and has a story to relate--please do! I can't wait to hear from each and every one of you . . . smwbooks@yahoo.com.

Posted November 1, 2004

Hello Friends and Readers:

After more than a year of being completely immersed in selling my house and moving, I'm once again working on a new book titled What a Coincidence! Those months of packing up and moving out were very difficult, and a dead zone in my creative life; and from it I've excerpted here a neat little coincidence that illustrates how the conscious mind seeks out its own refuge in dream-like fashion, even (or especially) while awake.

Thursday morning, November 11, 2003, there’s an especially amusing “Close to Home” cartoon in the comics section of the Elmira paper. In it, artist John McPherson has a cat configured in a yoga pose that I’ve never seen before, and I’ve been taking lessons twice a week for nearly three years by then from yoga instructor Barbara, in her Watkins Glen studio. Even funnier, one of the people in the ’toon who’s observing this example of feline flexibility is saying, “The cat was completely stressed out from the move, so Barb has been teaching him yoga.”

I think this is so cute that I go to the closetohome.com web site and download a full-color copy to give to Barbara before that evening’s class. Later when I hand it to her, she’s so nonplussed she can only stare at me open mouthed before managing to sputter, “Did you put my name in the caption?” Evidently she hadn’t seen today’s Elmira newspaper, and I explain that no, the ’toon was written with “Barb” already in it; I’d just printed out a copy of the website version for her to hang up in the studio (where there are many other cartoon panels providing comment on the quirks of exercise and diet).

But the thing is, Barbara says—“It’s so weird!” Just that morning she’d gotten around to reading the latest issue of Yoga Journal magazine, and had been studying a picture of the Extended Bridge pose—the same pose, she tells me, that the cartoon cat is doing (and so well)! “Here, I’ll show you,” she says, and goes to her desk and paws through the magazine (which I don’t subscribe to at home and hadn’t read) until she finds the photo in question, a woman holding the Extended Bridge asana, and yup, that’s the pose, all right, and an admirably challenging-looking one, too. And I thought the cartoonist had made it up! Not only is it real, but Barbara tells me she had already decided to have us try it out in tonight’s class—this before seeing the cartoon. “I’ve never done it before, either!” she says, astonishment filling her voice.

So class begins, and eventually we get to Bridge, and then Extended Bridge, and—oof! I manage to do it, but whoo-doggies (or whoo-kitties, as it were)! Tough, but very satisfying to accomplish, as yoga poses usually are.

Later when I think about this, a couple of other connections occur to me that I hadn’t initially noticed, even though both are fairly obvious (which often happens with coincidental events; they seep in through the cracks of one’s consciousness and come to slow realization fruit). For one thing, there’s the cartoon’s reference to the cat being “completely stressed out from the move.” By November of 2003 I’d finally sold my house after more than two years of almost daily obsession about it: getting it ready for the market, dealing with the real estate procedure, effecting the closing with all of its demands and requirements, and most of all, sorting out and selling or packing ten rooms full of stuff and finding another place to live. All of this, as anyone who’s been through it can testify, had taken over my life and thoughts to the point of keeping me awake night after night, worrying about everything from worst-case scenarios to the possibility of forgetting to take my favorite rock-garden stones with me! During that time, one of the few respites I had from this stress monster was yoga class. I literally do not know what I would have done without it.

So in its own way the cartoon had touched upon that, even though, ironically, I didn’t think about it at first—just the funny little tie-in with Barbara’s name and the yoga pose. But there was something else, and later I wondered if Barb had also recognized it. Just months before, her favorite cat had died after seeming to recover from a sudden, rapid decline. A few weeks after that, I had to put my thirteen-year old Welsh terrier Zippy to sleep after he went into unexpected and rapid decline. As it turned out, both animals had unrecognized, untreatable liver disease. By November Barbara and I were still mourning our lost companions, though oddly, neither one of us made any conscious connection at all between this and the fact that it was me (and not, say, another member of yoga class, or some other friend of hers) who latched onto the cat cartoon; who was in the throes of moving hell; to whom (among others) Barb had been giving the gift of yoga class; and who, like Barbara, was still bereft by the recent loss of a pet. So in some fashion I think my modest effort with the cartoon and Barbara’s teacherly good will comprised a small Namaste coincidence, and a heartfelt one, indeed.

Posted November 1, 2001

In the month and a half since September 11, each of us has had to find a way to reconnect with the world in something like the old routines and philosophies that comprised our individual perspectives before those profoundly shocking events took place. I think it’s fair to say that believing that we create our reality privately and collectively has not provided what you might call an especially comfortable cushion these days-–-not that this is the point, particularly. In fact, these ideas are often unsettling and not infrequently maddening. One of the questions that I’ve been asking myself is why I chose to experience this probability with this specific set of events, and when exactly did I choose to do so? What beliefs led each of us---every one of us in this reality, wherever we might live and however immediately or not we were involved---to this literal explosion of tragedy and social upheaval that seemed to come upon us all without warning?

I have my own thoughts about all of that, and about the inner meaning of these outer events, but for a lot of reasons I’m just not going to speculate about it right now. What I will say is that however horrific and appalling all this has been, the one thing it was not was "unknown."

Just on the apparent outward level of happenstance, there have been dozens of stories about people who made last-minute changes of plans, either consciously (in deciding to take an earlier or later flight, or not to go to work that day, and so on) or "un"consciously (as with the fellow who fell asleep on the subway for the first time ever and thus missed his stop under the WTC). Disasters like this (and indeed all events) are always surrounded by these tales, and they are fascinating and worthy of record and study in themselves. Inner knowing and response to that knowing is the gel that comprises experience, after all.

What interests me as much as these incidents, though, is the aspect of precognition in the form of dreams and dream-like correlations. And as I discovered some years ago when I did the research for a book about dreams in a small town, such prescience, when it happens, rarely gives you a complete picture. Instead, it tends to provide pieces of the thing to come, according to your own inclinations and affiliations, and can continue providing bits of information after the fact, in something like an awareness/response cool-down mode.

I have some examples of pre- and post-cognitive dreams about September 11 (and if anyone reading this has any such dreams to report, I’d like to hear from you at watkins@momentpoint.com). My own occurred September 8 or 9, the Friday or Saturday night before. Uncharacteristically, I didn’t write it down (since writing makes things more real for me, maybe this was a subliminal defense mechanism). It was in vivid color and perfectly clear, though confused. I was trying to make my way down through piles of fiery rubble to get to the depths of hell to rescue a friend---someone who in fact died some years ago. Why this friend should be in hell, specifically the last circle of hell as in Dante’s Inferno, I did not know, but I knew that it was up to me to find him and lead him out of there. Along the way, though dark-fire mazes of rocks and twisted building girders, I kept meeting other people clambering through the ruins, but nobody would give me any directions or help me in any way. I crawled and stumbled on and on, lower and lower, and the noise and confusion got worse and worse---until I woke up, unsure if I’d found my friend. Had I glimpsed him down there, at the bottom of hell, or not? Had I failed, and left him behind? For several moments, I was disoriented and heartsick.

But as I came awake I also thought of The 13th Warrior, the Antonio Banderas movie I’d seen for the first time the previous evening---had watched it twice, in fact. It’s a retelling of the Beowulf story, and in it, Banderas and his Northmen companions go deep into a cave to root out the leaders of the mysterious invaders that have been terrorizing nearby villages. The underground scenes are vivid, and lit by fire, so as I came to, I figured this must be the source of my dream’s storyline.

Not until after the World Trade attacks and subsequent events did I connect my dream with the scenes of rescue workers and digging through the fiery ruins, and for that matter with the associative element of the Northmen searching out the enemy in his cave, the exact words and imagery used by US officials in military response. Also it’s interesting that in The 13th Warrior, Banderas’s character is an Arab, a heroic figure who helps defeat the adversary and later records the tale. But why, I wondered, was this particular friend of mine the object of my dream-search? Other friends had passed away in recent years; why him?

It wasn’t until later that week, when I was on the phone with Moment Point editor Susan Ray, comparing dream-notes, that the connection came to me. Thunderstruck, I realized that my dead friend’s birthday had been September 11! Which seemed to me like a whopper of a hint of events to come---certainly it’s a whopper piece of hindsight---but nothing compared with the dream that Susan related to me:

"Mathew [my husband] and I are sitting at an outdoor cafe in a wharf-like area. It has a military look about it, and it's in a city---lots of concrete. Mathew leaves to do an errand at a government- or insurance-type office and soon the sky over my head is filled with huge, black planes. They're flying very low, very slowly, and I'm filled with dread. But nobody else seems to be paying attention.

"I look to a nearby table and see an older gentleman sitting alone. I know telepathically that he's been through WWII, so I watch to see his reaction to the planes. He whispers, "Oh, Shit," with a tone that matches the dread I'm feeling. So I immediately get up to look for Mathew. And in the near distance, in the direction the planes are flying, I can see and hear explosions. Still, no one seems to be paying attention.

"I spend the rest of the dream frantically searching for Mathew, while all around me people are ignoring what's happening. Everyone has this maddening don't-bother-me-I've-got-work-to-do attitude as I ask them for help. As the dream ends I spot Mathew, back at the table where we started, looking for me.

"That morning I recounted the dream, in detail, to Mathew. We came to the conclusion that it was a stress dream. But that didn't ring true to me. I wasn't particularly stressed and the dream had had an epic feel to it. Two days later, September 11, Mathew called from work (a corporate office building outside of Boston) and said, "Turn on the TV, you won't believe what's happening."

Note the coincidental elements in her dream and mine of trying to find someone in the midst of a specific kind of chaos, the ultimate nightmare scenario to come out of those scenes of wreckage and horror.

And aftermath dreams will go on and on, of course. Friends have been emailing me dreams filled with panic and guilt, though hopeful resolution has begun to show through, too. One friend saw a portion of herself split off to become a second and separate entity that had supposedly been murdered, yet this self wasn’t quite dead and wasn’t quite human, either. Another friend, who is ardently opposed to this country’s military reaction, dreamed of being put to death in an electric chair that was a mini-nuclear device; the condemned, who were dissidents, had to set off the devices themselves. Yet the moment of death was only a sudden, painless sensation of rapidly floating up to the ceiling, "like we’re on our way somewhere," he said. Reassurance from the psyche? Still another friend dreamed of challenging Jesus and Muhammed to show up and fight it out between them. But the challenge was a no-show; thus, no confrontation came about.

Which is, one would most sincerely hope, the most accurate precognition of all.

Posted June 1, 2001

A Coincidence of Letters

Recently an email routed to me through this bulletin board set off an amazing chain of coincidental episodes that interconnected not only with SPEAKING OF JANE ROBERTS but with world history and epic mythology, as well as everyday life and personal revelations from the past! You have to admit, for sheer mind-boggling serendipity overload, this is pretty hard to beat.

In SOJR, I mention the fact that in early November of 1999, while I was writing my memoir, I had a strong impulse to write a letter to Jane’s first husband, Walter Zeh, whom I’d never met. Rob Butts had sent me a complete copy of the correspondence he and Walt carried out in the months after Jane’s death in 1984, and I had decided to excerpt from Walt’s unique memories of her [see chapter 2 of SOJR]. Though for my purposes I didn’t need to secure Walt’s permission to do this, I still felt an urge to communicate with him about my project. Fifteen years had passed since he’d written to Rob; I even wondered if Walt were still alive. So I wrote him a letter but decided for some reason not to mail it. As it turned out, that decision had its own logic. Walt had died on November 11, 1999, at the same time I’d been thinking of him so strongly--the only connection with him I ever had, aside from Jane’s own memories relayed to me during the years of our friendship.

I reported all this in SOJR, and dwelled on it from time to time. Clearly, I’d picked up on Walt’s death for various reasons--the connection with my book the obvious one. Had Walt stopped by on his way out, maybe in some smooth framework-2 response to my feeling that I owed him a communication about his inclusion therein?

Then in April, I received an email from one of Walter’s sons, who had picked up a reference of SOJR in an Internet search. He asked if Jane had ever spoken of his father, and if I’d mentioned Walt in my book (which obviously he hadn’t read as yet); the Zeh family knew very little about his life with Jane. I replied that Jane had indeed spoken occasionally (and well) of Walt, and mentioned the coincidence of my thoughts about him around the time of his death. Walt’s son then pointed out the interesting significance of Walt’s death date (Veteran’s day), as he’d been a member of the Army Air Corps during WWII, a fact that made me think of my own late father, who’d been a Marine Corps Sergeant in the same war.

All of this was fascinating to both of us, and so I arranged to send Walt’s son a copy of his father’s correspondence with Rob--letters which contained details that Walt’s family had never known before, and thus delivered, as you might expect, a profoundly moving experience "beyond words," as Walt’s son later reported. Which again reminded me of my father, and of how little I knew, really, of his early life, and--I specifically thought of this--especially his stint in the Marines and the time of my parents’ marriage, in 1943, in a JP’s Santa Barbara, California, living room. I envied Walt’s son, thinking how wonderful it would be to find a bunch of letters written by my father or about my father that would open up the past for me in that way.

Well, about a month after all this, I went to see the movie "O Brother Where Art Thou," a fable loosely based on Homer’s ODYSSEY, the immortal ninth-century epic in which the hero Odysseus has many adventures trying to get home from the Trojan wars before his wife gives up on him and marries someone else. I knew the essential story, but after seeing this movie, I realized I’d missed many sly references to the original. So I went into my home library to look it up. Many of my books were passed down to me from parents and grandparents, and the collection includes texts from my mother’s college courses in Roman and Greek history. After scanning titles for a minute, I picked THE STORIES OF THE GREEKS by Rex Warner off the top shelf. I literally had not so much as dusted this book, let alone opened it, since I’d put my library together when I moved to my present home in 1986. In fact as it turned out, this moment in May of 2001 was probably the first time I’d ever read it in my life, because when I flipped its pages to the index, four small envelopes fell out on the carpet by my feet.

They were all addressed to my father, copied and approved by a military censor, in August of 1943, the month my parents were married. The shock and surprise I felt left me almost unable to open the envelopes. I had never seen these letters before, had no idea they’d been tucked away all these years in a book about Greek mythology. The correspondents were friends of my father’s also in the service, and three of the letters were from his best childhood pal who was later killed in the South Pacific--not long after these letters were sent, actually. They were writing to congratulate my parents on their August 7 marriage, and to reminisce about home and all the great times they’d had, and would have again, after the war. The details were homey, even mundane. Yet as I read them something opened in the air, in my heart. For a moment my father seemed to come alive, in the time and place evoked by those letters--twenty-three, just married, so young it makes you cry to imagine it, in the midst of a war that for him included horrors like Guadalcanal-–and all of them only wanting one thing: to get home (from overseas, yet, like Odysseus), to get back to wives and girl friends and old familiar hangouts, though nothing of course would ever be the same.

The feelings I experienced in reading those letters was indeed, as Walt’s son had put it, beyond words, as much for the event of finding them as anything else. Not six months before the email from the Zeh family, not six months or a year later-–but now, almost in response to an epic journey through some more invisible realm. And not just out of the blue, either, but while I had been specifically fantasizing about finding old letters by or about my father’s life, much as Walt’s son had yearned to know more about his own father’s life. And for both of us, each set of previously unknown letters and their accompanying revelations had appeared in our lives spontaneously, while searching out a book.

Posted April 1, 2001

Hello, friends and fans! This month I’ve chosen excerpts from an informal get-together with Jane that took place one Friday night in her home in 1977. I wasn’t there that evening; the tape was set up and left running while Jane and Rob and several people from ESP class talked about art and writing--and in particular, Jane’s younger years as a published writer of fantasy and science fiction. Though I drew on some of this material in SPEAKING OF JANE ROBERTS, I thought her readers might enjoy this transcript (which I edited for clarity) of Jane’s memories delivered in her own uninhibited words.

[The tape begins as Jane is talking about how it was in the fifties as a writer of SF and fantasy, fields dominated in those days by male writers; she’s describing a story of hers that apparently didn’t sell-–and it’s interesting to note that in recent years, its central idea has appeared in numerous films and works of fiction . . .]

Jane says: [So there’s a] flash of light . . . [and the guy], he's about 36; he's in his aunt's sixty-three year old body. She is now a young man, 36 years old. So the aunt, the old woman, is in the guy's body now and the young guy is in the old body, right? So now the nephew, you know, the real nephew who's in the woman's body, wants . . . he wants out. But the other one doesn't [want to switch back]! The atoms and molecules are all changed around and they're in [quite a pickle]

I couldn't sell it because the male magazines didn't like it because the male ends up in the woman's old body, absolutely trapped, see--and the women's magazines wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole no matter what the hell I did with it. And one time I wrote this thing--they had this thing on what it means to be a mother for, I don't know, if it was for REDBOOK [magazine], or whoever the hell it was, but anyway I did this long article about why I've decided not to be a mother and who needs it? And [this was] back in 1958--I mean, well--oh, god.

I mean, I believed in each of [my] stories. I did one on freezing bodies that I sold to TOPPER--I'd start with the highest-priced male magazine that would take science fiction and just keep on going down the list. If PLAYBOY didn't take it, and they never did, I'd end up with TOPPER and the like-–though some of them took damn good stories. It was the only way you could get that stuff published.

Fantasy and science fiction, see, if you hit a science fiction magazine, they didn't care [what gender you were], but for the mass market they were pretty well divided between male and female.

I was really tempted to just use initials instead of my name, see. Then I thought, fuck it, I'm not gonna do that. But the thing I remember [about writing as a woman] in those days--I mean, it's according to how you're doing it. Say if you're born poor, well, you got a whole bunch of problems, and you worry about being poor whether you're a man or woman or what the hell ya' are. But I can remember that men, if you were at all good-looking, would think--or I thought they thought--that you were just a cute little thing, and your ideas wouldn't be taken seriously.

I don't [think that] any more. There's one great big joyful luxurious thing that happens at someplace after 35--you don't care about that kind of thing anymore. It's when you're very young that it worries you. I mean, you know, nobody can think you're too flighty after 35. I mean--well, it's hard to be really frivolous, although [lightly] I try.

I think when you're very young the woman bit is stronger and you're more frightened. Just as a person, you're more frightened. After, you can at least say, well, I'm me and I may be dumb here or brave here or an ass here, but I'm me and to hell with it, take it or lose it or whatever you want.

When I was a girl, you know, in college, I identified with Thomas Wolfe--the old Thomas Wolfe, who wrote YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN. And I'd go in bars, and I'd be sitting there by myself writing down dialogue, and I'd be THE WRITER--period! And some guy'd come up, and think I was on the make, and I'd be utterly furious! Later I realized that women would really get in trouble doing [that sort of thing], but it was like a minor annoyance that I shoved aside. But I suppose if you weren't that strong about your own beliefs or you weren't so determined to do what you wanted to do, it could have hassled you more, I don't know.

But if you were a man, a whole lot of other things could’ve hassled you.

[Some of the introductions to Jane’s stories in F&SF magazine referred to her as "The Siren of Sayre" and "a stunning little brunette."] It didn't take too much to be the Siren of Sayre! And I don't see why [the "stunning little brunette" remark] is so god-damned unbelievable either!

But you know what? You know what I hate to admit? You know why that hits me? When I first wrote to [SF writer] Cyril [Kornbluth], I had sent exactly one story to FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION magazine. And it was something like two or three months, and I hadn't heard a god-damned thing. I found out because of an article in the paper that Cyril lived maybe ten miles away [from us]. So I wrote him a letter. I had no idea he was going to write me, there was--I never wrote, you know, to people like that. He wrote back, and said, come on up.

I went, I brought him a copy of the story, I said, look, you publish in this magazine, I haven't heard a goddamned thing, I need the money--if they don't want it, send it back, I can send it out [elsewhere]. Cyril said, I tell you what [laughing] we're going to do! It was in the summer and I had shorts on, and a halter, and he took my photo--in fact we still have it--sitting in one of the [lawn] chairs--

And he sent the goddamned picture out to [S&SF editor] Ed Boucher with a note saying, hey! This girl sent you a story and you never even replied! About a week later I got a--[raucous laugh]--they took the story. But from then on, I sent my stories in and I got decent replies. I guess actually Cyril said [to them] was, This kid's been sending stories and you haven't even answered; at least you could send them back, and so after that I got decent replies--either they took 'em or they didn't, but the fact that, Cyril . . . intervened, picture or not, was important. I mean, that made a difference. It was a sweet goddamned gesture.

[I remember that Cyril] went from living as almost a holy savage in the middle of the mountains in Pennsylvania, from [a place that] looked like somebody that’d been on welfare for five generations--he had an outside john, no water in the house--and from there he went to a ranch-style house in Levittown, and he was dead in no time. I think, though I could be wrong--I've got mail that I've saved, correspondence from Cyril and Boucher and so forth--that he died mowing the lawn, of a heart attack. And it wasn't a hell of a long time after that that Tony [Boucher] died

And they were so bitter! I was just startin' out, and these guys had been in the field for at least ten years, Cyril and all of 'em, and they were so bitter against the editors and the public and the publicity [for] their works.
And you know [Donald] Wohlheim [editor at Ace Books]--Wohlheim came for a Seth session. And it was a riot! See, originally, I sent [HOW TO DEVELOP YOUR ESP POWER] to Wohlheim, who published REBELLERS. He’d wanted me to do more science fiction, and I sat down dutifully and in a period of eight months I must have done ten outlines and 200-page resumes of novels for him. And I did one called VOICE OF THE DOLPHIN, which really would have been damn good if I'd finished it--I did 200 pages of it--and he didn't take it because he said it's not a straight novel and it's not science-fiction; it was about telepathic communication with dolphins

It was when [Rob and I] both had part-time jobs. And I wanted to sell something else! At the same time, I had straight novels that I was trying to sell, and they weren't selling either. And then all of a sudden I got IDEA CONSTRUCTION, and the out-of-body, and the whole [Seth] bit began! So when I got the idea for ESP POWER, I sent that outline to Wohlheim. And [Ace] was gonna take it. Then they turned it down because of Seth! [Wohlheim] said, well, this shows you've been a medium or something all along, Jane, for chrissake-–and then he asked to come to a session. And I'll never forget it. He came with his wife and his daughter, and I'd had a great relationship with him by mail, but . . . I had dinner fixed and the whole bit, and they were like four or five hours late! And as soon as I saw him I knew I wasn't gonna have a Seth session. I just knew it. And he had come for a Seth session, to see what I was doing . . .

[So instead], I read [my poetry manuscript], HIGH, LOW, AND PSYCHO for about two hours [raucous laughter] and the whole thing was just absolutely awful, just absolutely terrible, though I liked Wohlheim, he was nice enough.

But then REBELLERS came out. I was working at the [Elmira] art gallery, and by then the Seth sessions had just about started, but this was my first book. I came home and it was a summer day and I was out in the yard taking a sunbath, late, and Rob got the mail and brought it around. And I took one look at [the book]--at the cheap cover, at the fact that it had another book with it, which I didn't even know--and I just started crying. I wrote most of that book while we were camping in a State Park, in a tent, on vacation. I had a favorite character in there and he died, and I was really upset. All my work, everything I was supposed to be doing and trying hard to write, and here's this goddamned fuckin' trashy book, and I took it down to the newspaper office and showed it to people that I liked, and into the gallery, and everybody thought it was so great, and I kept listening to everybody saying how great it was that I had a book published, and I kept tryin' to think, it's great, 'cause I got a book published, and I just went home and I cried some more! Because no matter what they said, it was a crappy package! A really crappy package! And my straight novels that I believed in hadn't published at all. I was so mad, I never read the other novel [that ran with REBELLERS]. And I haven’t read it to this day!

(And as far as I know, she never did. -–SMW)

© March 2001 by Robert F. Butts

Posted March 1, 2001

Hello, fans and friends!

The editors at Moment Point came up with these new author bulletin boards and then diabolically left it to the actual authors to post all sorts of interesting and enticing materials, upcoming works, commentary, even (with permission) selections from fan letters. So, here goes my first posting--in the form of an excerpt from my latest book, SPEAKING OF JANE ROBERTS: REMEMBERING THE AUTHOR OF THE SETH MATERIAL.

In the various radio interviews I’ve done since this book was released, questions invariably arise about how the emergence of the Seth material changed the lives of Jane and her husband, Rob Butts. To answer that (as best I can, in the time allotted!), I first make sure to describe the industrious creative life that Jane and Rob had established long before Seth came on the scene--a life resolutely focused on the hours and days they devoted to pursuing their art. She wrote (and published) poetry and fiction; he painted. Everything else--including lifestyle decisions, part-time jobs taken to pay the bills, even the timing of social gatherings and excursions--was arranged to support that devotion.

It’s been interesting to note how often I hear surprise expressed at this fact of Jane and Rob’s early years--as if the Seth phenomenon must have invented their circumstances, rather than the other way around--as if "speaking for" so-and-so is all that’s required. Yet no less than the structure of the Seth material itself, as well as Jane’s relentless, brilliant exploration of the nature of consciousness, rested on that framework. Without this essential element, within which Jane and Rob incorporated the Seth sessions and all of the subsequent record-keeping, manuscript preparations, notes, journals, and so on, the material would almost certainly not have flourished and developed so prodigiously.

Thus in chapter 7 of SPEAKING OF JANE ROBERTS, I describe my impressions of Jane and Rob’s unique work habits, and I think a portion of that chapter is worth excerpting here--not only for first-time visitors interested in who Jane Roberts was, but also for anyone (including me) who might enjoy a reminder of how creativity can take care of us in the world, if only we insist upon believing that it can.

From SPEAKING OF JANE ROBERTS:
Really Great for Any Age at All

. . . [So] here [Jane] was, putting herself out on a psychological limb that nobody else seemed to know even existed, and doing it with impeccable integrity and balance, not to mention continuous self-assessment and creative genius, something in rare store anywhere. And letting a bunch of friends, fans, and strangers into her house once or twice a week for the sole purpose of conversation and philosophical exploration--not as strange back then as it is now, perhaps, with email and chat rooms and multi-channel TV appropriating the quiet hours, but still pretty wild, all of us there just to toss ideas and opinions and argument back and forth, for the sheer hell (and in the case of ESP class, $2.50 a head) of it.

And here the two of them were, Jane the writer, Rob the painter, unapologetic about structuring their lives around their art: Every day no matter what, Jane wrote, Rob painted, they explored consciousness and the meaning of reality, following their aspirations with the same dedication they'd felt from childhood. Their lives, in other words, did not come into focus with the emergence of the Seth material--rather, that body of work rose out of the focus their lives had already achieved.

I'd grown up around artistically gifted women who spent their energy kowtowing to the careers of husbands and mourning what they accepted as their gender's limitations. "A woman has to wear blinders," my mother told me often enough. "A woman can't look to the right or the left--she just has to look straight ahead and pretend nothing else is there." My mother's favorite author was Dorothy Parker, whose story "Big Blonde" was in my mother's eyes the voice of Everywoman, of the humiliation and unfulfilled yearning that was a woman's lot. The first true despair I ever felt was upon reading that story, at my mother's insistence, when I was twelve or thirteen. The message was clear: you can't have what you want, men are dangerous, life is awful, you might as well drink. And yet, inexplicably, my mother looked upon fiction with great derision. "Fiction is a dodge," she said many times. "Only cowards write fiction." Though her invective was aimed mostly at novels, I hid my stories in desk drawers, and kept them to myself.

Later I grew to understand that in her assumption of inevitable disappointment, my mother was only trying to protect me from expecting too much. By contrast, Jane expected everything, creatively speaking, and her writing background sprang from poetry and fantasy, much like my own. So what if she couldn't run around the block? (A rueful question Jane grapples with herself, in her journals.) My mother could run around the block plenty, and break the men's swimming and diving records in college, and play a million rounds of golf, and still she ate herself up alive, repressing her own abilities with ferocious strength.

So as a couple, Jane and Rob seemed to me like something out of a science-fiction story themselves. They lived modestly, in steadfast make-do fashion, keeping their wants and needs in check so as not to jeopardize the central vow they'd made to devote their lives to their art.

In that way, they were quite radical to me--I knew other artists who lived spare lives, but this seemed a pretense or a grievous burden, rather than a methodical plan joyfully taken on to achieve life-goals. In effect, Jane and Rob were radical and conservative in equal measure. They didn't spend money on frills, or what I considered frills (or even essentials)--no bookstore bingeing, for example, or shopping extravaganzas of any kind, including food. In 1968 their car was an ancient Valiant with an unreliable battery; and here they were, roughly my parents' age, still renting an apartment furnished with home-made amenities and hand-me-downs, still schlepping their dirty clothes to the laundromat or (something that used to give me a mild thrill of horror) washing it all out in the bathroom sink and hanging it out on doorknobs or the backyard lines to dry.

"The checks I'd get from Fantasy & Science Fiction would cover our laundry for a couple months sometimes," Jane told me once. "We always managed to squeak by." She said she considered it a matter of pride, and love, that she'd never demand a "fancy house with all the trimmings" with the attendant mortgage payments, and thus "trap Rob," her words--trap both of them-with debts. Their tenaciousness bore its own fruit. When in 1975 they finally did buy their own house, they paid cash.

And they paid their work dues every day, no matter what. If they had a late-night party on a Friday or Saturday, or New Year's Eve, and slept late the next day, they put in extra work hours to make up for it. And they kept track, no sluffing off, no matter what their other obligations. For years in her early journals, Jane logged in her work hours on charts, right down to the minute ("6-7:30, 1 1/2 hrs. - 8:20 PM-9:10, 1 hr."), along with the hours she put in selling kitchen knives or Avon products door to door, or whatever other part-time jobs she had, and compared these "outside" efforts with her writing schedule. ("Possibility of making out and to hell with depending on others in ordinary job," she writes for May 13, 1956, under notes for a full day put in, "My initiative only thing that will count . . . By God, we're not beaten yet by a long shot!").

And then there was her insistence on not having children, in the face of tremendous pressure on women to do so, far more so then than now. All of this, all of this carefully hoarded energy and mighty determination, poured into the creation of stories and paintings . . . What did my mother mean, "only cowards write fiction?" This all seemed fantastically brave to me. It was only when Jane demanded I do the same that I felt its potential as a prison. And so at times when I felt that Jane was ragging me about not having the proper dedication to my writing, I would think--yeah, well, Jane, at least I can run around the block if I want to. At least I can goddamned well get up and run around the goddamned block.

But of course I never said that. At the core of Jane and Rob's life was a secretiveness, more reticent than mere discretion, that held people at a distance, which I sometimes misinterpreted as a judgment. It was like a black hole, into which, depending on factors I could not decode, questions and comments would fall soundlessly, never to be heard from again. For example, I once asked them why they didn't publish the ESP class transcripts as is, in book form. "You don't understand the implications," Rob told me, and that was the end of it. No further explanation was offered.

At the time, I thought this meant that there was some awful discrepancy in the class transcript material that they didn't want to reveal--I couldn't figure what the hell else Rob could mean by "the implications." Now I think this had more to do with their sense of privacy, and of not wanting to turn the spotlight on the process, or performance, of Jane speaking for Seth in class, any more than it already was--they kept a careful accounting of balance there, too. Their focus was on the context of the material, which had to pass the muster of their artistic standards (Jane comments in her unfinished "Aspects" manuscript that the psychic field "has no understanding of what art standards are," for example); they also understood that too much public exposure might interfere with the essentially private process of producing it.

Later, after I began to write with serious intent, I also came to understand that their secretiveness was a natural component of creative solitude, of keeping one's energy centered and the work whole.