Automatic writing

“ A parallel case to Automatic Writing is the action of the speech centres, resulting in the production of all kinds of utterances from trance speeches in the ordinary language of the speaker to mere unintelligible babblings. ”

“ A highly interesting case of pathological writing is that known as automatic writing, writing of which the writer is either not conscious at all or else conscious only of the movement and its result without feeling in any way responsible for the act. In connection with such automatic writing one would like to have not only an analysis of the mental state, but also detailed information of the variation from the normal in terms of speed, amplitude, alignment and pressure of writing. ”

“ It would doubtless amaze the scientifically orthodox to know how many people habitually and successfully practice the dubious art of automatic writing—not mediums, so-called, but people of refinement and intelligence. Although the messages received in this way may emanate from the subconscious mind of the performer, there is evidence to indicate that they come sometimes from an intelligence discarnate, or from a person remote from the recipient in space. ”

“ We now come to the mental phenomena, of which the following are the chief:
1. Automatic Writing.—The medium writes involuntarily; often matter which he is not thinking about, does not expect, and does not like. Occasionally definite and correct information is given of facts of which the medium has not, nor ever had, any knowledge. Sometimes future events are accurately predicted. The writing takes place either by the hand or 48through a planchette. Often the handwriting changes. Sometimes it is written backwards; sometimes in languages the medium does not understand. ”

“ The thorough examination I made of one particular case of automatic writing—a rather rudimentary [239] case, it is true—clearly revealed to me the play of the unconscious souvenirs of the medium.
The methods for obtaining automatic writing are numerous. We can even make a table write by fixing a pencil to one of its feet; the same with a hat or basket, etc. More perfect methods exist, of which the following are the best:—
First of all the planchette ”

“ The "messages" of a number of automatists, taken at random, will be sure to resemble each other much more closely than do the supraliminal writings of the same persons. Quite apart from their general correspondence in ideas—which belongs to another branch of our subject—there is among the automatic writings of quite independent automatists a remarkable correspondence of literary style. There is a certain quality which reminds one of a translation, or of the compositions of a person writing in a language which he is not accustomed to talk. ”

“ He cannot exude form: he must set himself to create a particular form. Automatic writing will never be poetry, nor automatic scrabbling design. The artist must submit his creative impulse to the conditions of a problem. ”

“ As is so often the case in automatic writing a dramatic formx is taken, and messages purport to come from different deceased people. The subconscious or subliminal self of the automatist, doubtless, is the source of much contained in the scripts, and may possibly be responsible for all the insight shown. ”

“ Sensitive persons have acquired that most wonderful gift of mediumship, namely, automatic writing as the result of an invisible attraction which uses the non-intelligent instrument of a human arm to express its ideas. ”

“ Automatic writing—that is, the control of the hand of a living person to record the thoughts of another who has lost the physical body—is perhaps one of the least objectionable ways in which communications have come from the astral world, and to it we are indebted for some useful books with interesting accounts of the life in the unseen regions. ”

“ I will leave it for my readers to draw their own conclusions as to whether automatic writing is the work of extraneous spirits, through the brain and intelligence of the medium, or the result of auto-suggestive influence upon the subjective personality. ”

“ The lowest phase of mediumship is automatic writing, and the lowest grade of that is where the Subject knows what words are coming, but feels impelled to write them as if from without. Then comes writing unconsciously, even whilst engaged in reading or talk. ”

“ Of late years, whilst the theory of external inspiration as the cause of the phenomenon has been generally discredited, automatic writing has been largely employed as a method of experimentally investigating subconscious mental processes. ”

“ There are several Latin versions of Autolycus, a French translation by Forcadel (1572) , and an admirable edition of the Greek text with Latin translation by F. Hultsch (Leipzig, 1885) .
AUTOMATIC WRITING, the name given by students of psychical research to writing performed without the volition of the agent. The writing may also take place without any consciousness of the words written; but some automatists are aware of the word which they are actually writing, and perhaps of two or three words on either side, though there is rarely any clear perception of the meaning of the whole. ”

“ Among the commonest and most striking of such manifestations is the automatic writing which a considerable proportion of normal persons are capable of producing. A person who has this power may sit absorbed in reading or, in conversation, while his hand produces written words or sentences, of which he knows nothing until he afterwards reads them. ”

“ But we must not be discouraged; on the contrary, we must continue experimenting for a certain time, before concluding to the impossibility of success. Whether we be trying to obtain collective or ordinary automatic writing, it is a good plan to consecrate ten or fifteen minutes every day, [240] always at the same hour, to these trials. The phenomenon takes a long time to evolve, and people, who have obtained most curious results with automatic writing, have passed months in developing their faculty. ”

“ Many persons can, while in an apparently normal or but very slightly abnormal condition, produce automatic writing, i.e. intelligibly written sentences, in some cases long connected passages, of whose import they have no knowledge, their self-conscious intelligence being continuously directed to some other task. ”

“ Under motor automatism, some of the most striking phenomena tending toward proof are cases where automatic writing has announced a death unknown to the persons present; knowledge communicated in a séance, not known to any person present, but afterwards proved to have been possessed by the deceased ”

“ I venture to think that the phenomena of automatic writing will before long claim the best attention of the physiological psychologist. They have been long neglected, and I can only conjecture that this neglect is due to the eagerness with which certain spiritualists have claimed such writings as the work of Shakespeare, Byron, and other improbable persons. ”

“ And not graphic automatism only, but other263 forms of muscular and vocal automatism must be examined and compared before we can form even an empirical conception of that hidden agency, which is ourselves, though we know it not. In the meantime I shall, I think, be held to have shown that, in the vast majority of cases where spiritualists are prone to refer automatic writing to some unseen intelligence, there is really no valid ground for such an ascription. ”

“ In accordance with analogy, there258fore, we may expect to find that automatic writing—this new glimpse into our deep-sea world—will afford us some fresh proof of currents which set obscurely towards us from the depths of minds other than our own. ”

“ When I perform the slate trick described above, after writing the "automatic" message, apparently erasing it, and replacing the slates, I do not scatter the slates around on the table as this medium did. Instead, I proceed as I will now describe.
We place our palms on the stack, and after a time examine the large slate for a message, but find none. I may incidentally remark that this last examination unconsciously verifies in the sitter's mind the fact that I actually erased what I wrote "automatically." ”

“ From time to time the visual image of a normal letter rises in the mind, an image which does not correspond to that which the hand is endeavouring to express, whence doubt, reflection, arrest, and, usually, error. If, however, the subject allows his left hand to write, without preoccupying himself with the shape of the letters it is making, or with his eyes shut, automatism reasserts its sway and mirror writing results. ”

“ Perhaps the best-studied case of invention is that of the learner in typewriting, who, after laboriously perfecting his "letter habits" or responses to single letters by appropriate finger movements on the keyboard, may suddenly find himself writing in a new way, the word no longer being spelled out, but being written as a unit by a coördinated series of finger movements. The amazing thing is that, without trying for anything of the kind, he has been able to break away from his habit of spelling out the word, and shift suddenly to a new manner of writing. ”

“ It is one thing to write a letter, manuscript, or business plan with a pencil, quite another to do the same on a typewriter, and even more different to use a word processor for these purposes, or to rely on the Internet. The cognitive implications of the experience-what kinds of processes take place in the mind-cause the output to be different in each case. No medium is passive. In each medium, previous experiences and patterns of interaction are accumulated. The more interaction there is to a process, and sometimes to a collaborative effort, the more the condition of writing itself changes. ”

“ Technology takes care of spelling and even syntax; more recently it even prompts semantic choices. This use of technology in creative writing is far from being neutral. Different rhythms and patterns of association, as embodied in our practice with interface language-the language mediating between us and the machine-are projected volens-nolens into the realm of literature. Moreover, different kinds of reading, corresponding to the new kinds of human interaction, become possible. One can already have a novel delivered on tape, to be listened to while driving to work. ”

“ In these our days every young lady holds the pen of a ready writer, and words flow from it as fast as it can indent its zigzag lines, according to the reformed system of writing,—which said system improves handwritings by making them all alike and all illegible. ”

“ To take a commonplace example—can it be held that the difference between using a typewriter and "writing by hand" is purely and simply a matter of degree—that the machine serves the same purpose and accomplishes the same kind of result as the pen, but simply does the work more easily, rapidly, and neatly? ”

“ When a man sits down to write he mechanically reproduces on paper what is in his mind, and this may be said to be his natural handwriting. Should he stop to think even for a moment, not of what he is transferring to the paper but of the writing itself, he instantly ceases to write his natural hand, the transcription becoming only a copy or drawing from memory.
In the opinion of the expert, emphatically expressed, a person never writes twice exactly alike. ”

“ The pupil is then taught to make lines in a certain direction, and to copy characters so large that they have no resemblance to writing at all; and to care particularly about up-strokes and down-strokes, and all manner of minutia?, which, if they are of any value at all, will soon come of themselves. So strong, in spite of centuries of experience, is the belief in this method, that machines for controlling the fingers while writing have repeatedly been invented; and the author of a book before us, a professional, is inclined to tie them up in some fashion with ribbon. ”

“ This is of the greatest importance, for the manner of making a letter, or even a single stroke, affects its form and character with a definite tendency (see p. 416 & fig. 172) . And this becomes more marked the faster the writing. An apparently right form may yet be wrongly—if slowly—made; but in rapid writing, a wrong manner of handling the pen will inevitably produce wrong forms. As the real virtue of penmanship is attained only when we can write quickly, it is well worth training the hand from the beginning in the proper manner. ”

“ And though calligraphy is a means to many ends, a fine MS. has a beauty of its own that—if two arts may be compared—surpasses that of the finest printing. This in itself would justify the transcribing and preservation of much good literature in this beautiful form (besides the preparation of “Illuminated Addresses,” Service Books, Heraldic and other MSS.) and make the practice of formal writing desirable. And furthermore as the old-fashioned notion that a legible hand is a mark of bad breeding dies out, it may be that our current handwriting will take legibility and beauty from such practice. ”

“ Typewriting is carried on by habits. The habit of writing most naturally formed is that known as the sight system. Recently, attempts have been successfully made to enable the operators to form the habit of writing by touch rather than by sight. ”