Skinny Dipping

§69 [9.i.24.a : mardi] Last night and this morning I’ve been distracted. Travel nerves. What can I do but accept the sensations and push ahead. V.W.’s clouded brain is due to her return to London and signing a ten year lease on 52 Tavistock Sqe. and the books she’s fetching are the translation of Montaigne.

Since last night I’ve been casting about for what books I’ll fetch for the flight and for the week-long stay in Oregon with my mother. One book is decided already : The Patchwork Girl of Oz which is the seventh book in the Oz series. My mother and I have read the first six and I’ll read to her while she knits. L. Frank Baum seemed to want to put an end to the series with The Emerald City of Oz by having the Good Witch Glinda cast an invisibility spell over Oz so folks wouldn’t be able to see it anymore and wouldn’t know Oz was there. The flaw in the plan seems obvious to me. What if, not knowing Oz is there, someone decides to move in a build a city or a lake? Someone could built a freeway right through Princess Ozma’s castle and they’d never know it. Being invisible doesn’t make you safe.

But three or four years later, Baum is back with a new Oz book : at his enthusiastic readers’ insistence. The prologue to Patchwork Girl suggests that Baum is receiving news from Oz via wireless (an idea sent in by one of his readers) : if Oz can’t be seen, then maybe it can be heard? The mention of “wireless telegraph” (aka radio) set off a little bell. Writing yesterday about a story I never wrote called Wireless and then seeing the word wireless in an Oz book, does invite one to believe in synchronicity. And I’ll add another coincidence since we’re on the subject : yesterday morning I read the story of Jacob stealing Esau’s blessing from their father Isaac, then in the afternoon when I was cleaning out a filing cabinet in the basement, I plucked at random the precise file folder containing a printed copy of my father’s sermon on Jacob and Esau, the selling of Esau’s birthright and the fraudulent theft of the blessing. As I read my father’s remarks, I thought he was rather hard on Esau. I agree that he let go of the birthright too easily and at too low a price (a bowl of porridge), but it was Rachel’s scheming that Esau fell victim to in the case of the stolen blessing. None of the characters come off too well in that story. Isaac might be old and blind, but is Esau really so hairy that Jacob’s putting on lamb’s wool would fool Isaac? Even after Isaac calls Jacob out about his voice not sounding right. I wanted to discuss the biblical passage and the traditional exegesis with my father, but I waited too late. Or maybe if I listened closely, I would hear my father’s voice.

V.W. writes that she’s heard “the voices of the dead.” In a postscript to her 9 January 1924 diary entry, she records some strange experiences in Richmond at Hogarth House: “I’ve had some very curious visions in this room too, lying in bed, mad, & seeing the sunlight quivering like gold water, on the wall. I’ve heard the voices of the dead here. And felt, through it all, exquisitely happy.” Make of that what you will, but the first thing that comes to my mind is William James and his Varieties of Religious Experience : you can deny certain interpretations of an experience, but you can’t deny the experience itself, whatever is within the field of experience always remains real. Assigning causality is a litmus test for revealing certain presuppositions in an interpreter’s worldview. No matter how comfortable you are with your presuppositions, you can’t prove them. Madness might lead to visions or visa versa.