Ciaran Carson - The Pen Friend

Developed by the marine painter Lieutenant Commander Norman Wilkinson in 1917, dazzle painting, rather than trying to blend in with the sea and sky, which are visually inconstant, used a system of stripes, blocks, zigzags and disruptive lines to confuse enemy observers. The intention was not to hide the object, but to make it unfamiliar. For much of our ability to identify what we see is based on our experience of seeing similar things in the past. Vision depends on memory. In our memory is stored a vast thesaurus of images, to which we constantly refer when looking at the world, so that we can identify a thing quickly without spending time working out what it is. And the art of illusion depends on this visual process: Roland Penrose, for instance, had collaborated with the stage magician Jasper Maskelyne, who was practised in making his audience see things that were not there, and not to see things that were there. W.J. Crawford, examining the phenomena produced by the Goligher Circle, jumped to the wrong conclusions because he already knew what he wanted to see; he was led astray by his expectations, and possibly his desire, for his attraction to Kathleen Goligher is evident in his writings. He was beguiled by love and memory, just as we retain the image of the loved one long after she has gone from our sight. And Nina, I never lost sight of you through all these years of your absence from me, much as I tried to. Oh, after three or four years I thought I had forgotten you, but then you would appear to me in dreams, unbidden, and I would consent to the reality of your presence, even when I knew I was dreaming.

We can easily suspend our disbelief in dreams because they are so wonderful. When I was younger I would fly in my dreams, soaring and swooping like an angel above the city, seeing it spread below me like a map, and when sometimes it occurred to me that it was impossible, that I must be dreaming, I used that lucidity to revel in the experience, and I would fly with even more spectacular agility.

So it was when I dreamed of you. Most of the dreams took place in cities that resembled Belfast, or cities I had visited with you, like New York, Paris, Dublin and Berlin, or cities I had visited alone, like Lisbon, Rome, and Prague, or cities I had never visited, like Tokyo and Madrid. I would be walking along a crushed cinder path by a dark canal in the shadow of a semi-derelict factory when I would catch a glimpse of the heel of your red shoe vanishing under the arch of a bridge, and I would hurry to catch up with you, half-walking, half-running, till I came to a flight of stone steps, I could hear the click of your heels as you ascended and the steps became an alleyway between high blank walls that led to a street of closed shops, which led in turn to a row of mean houses with incurious pale children loitering by the doorways, who barely took you under their notice as you passed by, for I can see you clearer now as the gap between us closes, you are wearing an apple green 1920s jacket with a pink floral print pleated dress that sways a little against the sway of your hips as you turn off into an entry that takes you into a close, and I follow you through a doorway into a gloomy room, it looks like a workshop, for it smells of oil and metal and a massive lathe gleams in the corner, and now you pause at the foot of the stairs, and turn towards me, and I see your face for the first time, and you smile wordlessly, beckoning with your eyes as you lead me up the stairs to a bare attic with a mattress on the floor, where you take off the jacket and the dress and the 1920s flesh-tinted bra and pants and garter-belt and stockings, we both lie down, and we are about to embrace each other when I wake.

It now occurs to me that the attic resembles the attic where the Golighers held their séances. Here, W.J. Crawford had conducted experiments that proved to his satisfaction that Kathleen Goligher could extrude psychic matter, or ‘plasm’ from her body — from the join of the legs, as Crawford delicately put it — to form semi-flexible rods and cantilevers which could lift a small table, manipulate hand-bells and trumpets, and create various sound effects which gave coded answers to questions asked of the unseen ‘operators’ of the structures. The operators, according to Crawford, were independent spirits who, having passed through the portal of physical death, wished to communicate to us that death was not the end of being, but the beginning of a new life. The world in which they lived was contiguous to ours, and very like it in many respects, for it had mountains, lakes and rivers, as real to them as ours were to us, so much so that many of the operators referred to our world as the shadow world, and theirs as the real one. The psychic structures were a link between the two worlds. Crawford, after numerous experiments, succeeded in obtaining impressions caused by these structures in a dish of clay. He discovered that when Kathleen Goligher wore stockings, the impressions were lined with stocking marks.

The common-sense explanation for this phenomenon, that the marks had indeed been made by a stockinged foot under cover of the darkness of the séance room, was contemptuously dismissed by Crawford. He had taken every conceivable precaution against any such imposture. The medium’s hands were held firmly by other members of the Circle, while Crawford tied her legs to her chair with a variety of ligatures, including whipcord and black silk bands. He theorised that the psychic structures were covered by a film of matter which oozed round about the interstices of the stocking fabric. Being of a glutinous, fibrous nature, it assumed almost the exact form of the stocking fabric. It was then pulled off the stocking by the operators, built around the end of the psychic structure, which, when placed in the dish of clay, naturally left an imprint similar to a stocking. But the thing that left the mark was not a foot in a stocking, said Crawford.

Convinced that he was on the brink of something extraordinary, nothing less than a scientific proof of immortality, Crawford went over his findings again and again. He began to experiment with different types of stockings, and more elaborate restraints. He purchased brown stockings, blue stockings, white stockings, and grey stockings for the medium, made out of different fabrics — wool, cotton, silk. Sometimes he had her wear stockings of a different design on each leg. He encased her legs in high boots. He made a special box with a bar which was locked over her feet; a piece of wood was then tightly fitted around the tops of her ankle and screwed into the top of the box. Nevertheless the plasm was able to force its way up the foot and leg of the medium, between her stocking and the tightly laced long-legged boot.

When he asked the operators to levitate the table they did so with ease. He filled a tin dish with a very watery white clay, and asked them to dip the end of a structure in the clay and leave marks on the floor. Soon afterwards, he heard them do just that. The dipping sounded exactly like a cat lapping up milk. Crawford had a fine ear for acoustic textures. Sometimes ‘peculiar fussling noises’ were heard in the region of the feet just prior to phenomena. He noticed that when the medium wore thin silk stockings the noises were accentuated. They occurred in spasms, and were caused, thought Crawford, by the friction of the psychic particles on the stocking fabric. Many people interested in psychic matters, said Crawford, assumed the evolution of the plasma to be a quiet and tranquil affair; but of course nothing could be wider of the mark. Considerable labour attended the production of the phenomena, and the medium was sometimes heard to groan as if undergoing birth-pangs. Crawling under the table in the dark, he had felt her feet at such moments, and had noted a whirlpool of internal muscular movement round foot and ankle and the lower part of the calf. He also felt a flow of material particles from the medium’s ankles and legs, cold and disagreeable to the touch. Further, when he placed his hands on the outside of her haunches, he could feel little round packets of psychic stuff filling in on the backs of the thighs; and when he felt her breasts during the occurrence of psychic action, they became very hard and full.