Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Is anybody there?
A Victorian seance is comparable to writing a blog. Is anybody there? Perhaps one has more chance of contacting the dead than a readership!
No matter. Here I am to report on an excellent exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology Of Magic. Despite the word 'magic' in the title, it also covers psychic phenomena, seances, spiritualists etc. There are lots of fascinating documents, photographs and objects such as this...
...there's Conan Doyle, a famous believer in spiritualism. He also features on the Sub Rosa compilation that's just been released, Spectra Ex Machina / A Sound Anthology Of Occult Phenomena , which I received around the same time as attending the Welcome Collection.
It comes with an extensive booklet telling the stories behind the recordings. On 'the voice produced by Janet Hodgson under a trance' we're definitely in The Exorcist territory, minus abusive language and vomit but still unsettling. Believe it or not, it's an interesting documentation of occult phenomena.
Another psychic connection: reading Michael Stevens’ The Road to Interzone: Reading William S. Burroughs Reading the other day I saw that Eileen Garret, medium and psychic, supposedly 'channelled' the captain of the ill-fated R101 airship days after he died in the crash. The part that interested me was that Brion Gysin knew her and the title of his book Here To Go: Planet R101 was inspired by the incident and Garret. News to me. The book's highly recommended, by the way.
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