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208 Chapter 9 The Neural Pearl: Automaticity for All The function of consciousness must be in part to dummy up and shape a coherence from all the competing conflicting subsystems that processed experience . By nature it lied. Any rendition we might make of consciousness would arise from it, and was thus about as reliable as the accused serving as sole witness for the prosecution. —Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 Mediums Quiz the Mirror Although Pearl Curran told readers of “A Nut for Psychologists” that she would aid men of science “with all my power” by delivering the “facts” of her mediumship, her fatigue with familiar diagnoses was evident.When the“beautiful French story” (which was never finished and never titled) began to be dictated, she estimated that a mind-scientist would quickly conclude that not only the names of Villon and Basselin but the character of her story about them “must have slipped into my subconsciousness whole while I was not looking! Sly dog!” (CPW, 400). Suddenly become the reader of a “wonder book,” the first person must assert itself, intending no disrespect for wonders, to claim The Neural Pearl 209 some version of ownership.“If Patience Worth is a part of me, I auto-educated myself,” Curran said (SS, 215–16). Well before the brain could be imaged in its magnetic resonances, the language of the introspective writer-medium found itself at a borderland of agency, between experience too glorious or threatening to be claimed as one’s own and too familiar to be denied. For James Merrill as poet-medium, double-mindedness became not simply a curiosity but a mandate: “to remain of two minds about everything that was happening.”1 After casually looking out and up to “that realm of, oh, cosmic forces,” Merrill pointed to the “absurd, flimsy contraption” of the Ouija as “a hedge against inflation” (CPJM, 110), unembarrassed by “the degree of credulity ” its dictations required (CPJM, 143, 168). Curran, too, greeting a rush of language from nothing more than the“dead wood”under her hands, was ready to settle for diagnostic formula when she told readers of Patience Worth’s Magazine that the“average”Ouija-board sitting is“an insult to the intelligence,”the board only an instrument for moving thought “from the subconscious to the conscious mind” (PWM, Oct. 1917, 9). Probably everyone “wants to get beyond the self,” Merrill granted, to some kind of “god” within, where the self is “stranger and freer and more far-seeing” (CPJM, 107–8).Yet even while playing the lesser self, the medium must eventually emerge to acknowledge that the natural he or she is the inexplicable event. Merrill is the performer being interviewed, not his first speaker, Ephraim. At times, Curran could not resist the temptation to demote Patience Worth to pen name. The mediums’ polarity—a minimizing of originary circumstances and a sense of boundaryless inflation in the result—is as evident in Merrill’s comments on the production of The Changing Light at Sandover as in Curran’s attempts to crack the nut of her own experience. On any basis other than their dramas of doubleness and the paradoxical stakes of mediumship, there would be no point in speaking of Curran and Merrill in the same space. The experience of mediumship must be spoken of as double both from within and from without. The board game, trivial in itself, points through its practitioner to possibilities almost but never quite beyond wording. The medium , performing as no more than an interested questioner, is aware of respondents numbering from one to dozens who speak as if from elsewhere but raise suspicions in their host that they come from within. Outside the game, from experimental and neurological perspectives adopted by psychology, the subjects are doubled again by being addressed in a different discourse. Or perhaps one should say that for psychological research the subjects are multiplied, because its questions—about dissociation, memory, automaticity , and subliminal self-representation—are open-ended. Stepping back from the Ouija experience, the medium takes introspection to its limits. Stepping 210 The Patience of Pearl into questions raised by the immediacy of Pearl Curran’s and James Merrill’s scorn or celebration, puzzlement and discovery, the voices of psychology will make their own contribution. In practice, Merrill struck the note of ordinariness, with an overturned Blue Willow teacup as pointer, then by arranging the alphabet and Yes/No of the board on a cloth, or cardboard, or, for portability, he suggests...

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