The Day I Didn't Get Dressed

[poliphilo]

I spent all of yesterday in my dressing gown- not because I was sick or anything but simply because I could. It felt mildly transgressive.  I don't think I'll do it again.

I've been reading Peter Lamont's The First Psychic- a life of Daniel Dunglas Home, the Victorian spirit medium. Home was amazing; he got heavy furniture to dance around, he materialised spirit hands, he levitated; He did all these things in front of eminent scientists and the crowned heads of Europe; and he was never caught cheating. Thackeray, Elizabeth Browning and Mark Twain admired him, Dickens, Robert Browning and Leo Tolstoy detested him, and Alexandre Dumas pere was best man at his wedding to a Russian aristocrat. Was he the greatest medium the world has ever known or the most successful charlatan? Either way it's a fascinating story. And one that raises all sorts of disturbing and unanswerable questions such as  "How far can we trust the historical record?",  "How far can we trust scientists?"  and "How much do we really know about anything?"

In the evening I watched 2001, A Space Odyssey. It holds up very well.  The special effects are as good- no, better- than those in any modern film. Everything is handmade- so you're seeing real objects not computer simulations. And I don't care what anyone says, CGI always looks fake. 

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I can do it in dreams- and then it seems like the most natural thing ever.

Also it makes me happy.

I'm willing to believe the laws of nature get suspended for certain remarkable individuals.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I've told you, I think, about the one time I had a truly psychic moment--a boy asked me to look for his dog, and gave me a phone number on a piece of paper. I went inside, and, in a bemused, sleepy, and somehow expectant optimistic state of mind, opened our big city phone book, wondering (idly) how long it would take to find the phone number.

I looked down, and there it was. No kidding.

There was no name on the boy's piece of paper, and I had nothing to guide me.

I think that dreamlike fugue-state, coupled with optimism, helps us let go of our earth-bound-ness.

Fakirs don't fly around after breakfast--they have to be in a state of some sort. And mystics have to be "in ecstacy."

I think maybe we can suspend the laws of nature (the rigidity of expectation)--all of us--if we are not fully awake in this world.

It helps me believe in something other than this world, just barely.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've had things like that happen to me, only I can't remember what they were. They have a dreamlike quality- and unless you make the effort to hang onto them they escape into the aether.

When I was a witch they were happening all the time. I think you're right, attitude has a lot to do with it.

Daniel Dunglas Home seems to have been a very naive, unworldly sort of person. (Or a very cunning charlatan.)