But it is far too late for that. The automatic writing has been mushrooming, fragmenting, overwhelming, and recombining for a very long time now. I remember John Ballou Newbrough, who in 1880 saw a strange light envelop his hands as he held them over a manual typewriter. The next thing he knew, a manuscript began to write itself. It was Oahspe: a New Bible in the Words of Jehovah and his Angel Embassadors [sic]. (A Sacred History of the Dominions of the Higher and Lower Heavens of the Earth for the Past Twenty-Four Thousand Years, together with a Synopsis of the Cosmogony of the Universe; the Creation of Planets; the Creation of Man; the Unseen Worlds; the Labor and Glory of Gods and Goddesses in the Etherean Heavens; with the New Commandments of Jehovah to Man of the present Day. With Revelations from the Second Resurrection, Formed in Words in the Thirty Third Year of the Kosmon Era.) I remember Andrew Jackson Davis, who in 1845 lapsed into mesmeric trance at the hands of his operator S.S. Lyons. Two years later, the paradigmatic made-in-America metaphysical text appeared in print, “by and through” Davis. It was entitled The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind (In Three Parts. Part First. Any theory, hypothesis, philosophy, sect, creed, or institution, that fears investigation, openly manifests its own error. Part Second. Reason is a flower of the spirit, and its fragrance is liberty and knowledge. Part Third. When distributive justice pervades the social world, virtue and morality will bloom with an immortal beauty: while the Sun of Righteousness will arise in the horizon of universal industry, and shed its genial rays over all the fields of peace, plenty, and HUMAN HAPPINESS!) I remember the Admiral of the Ocean Sea and the pre-1492 oikoumene cosmic-world-map before it exploded, supernova-like, into a multitude of worlds. I remember Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg and the Word before it erupted, Vesuvius-like, into a googolplex of words.
I write, “I.” Scribo ergo sum: the only way to be, coherently, worldwide, amid this raging molten meltdown.
You vapors, I think I have risen with you, moved away to distant
continents, and fallen down there, for reasons,
I think I have blown with you you winds;
You waters I have finger’d every shore with you,
I have run through what any river or strait of the globe has run through,
I have taken my stand on the bases of peninsulas and on the high
embedded rocks…
Neat and tidy on the screen, some semblance of form still remains, which is to say this glowing white rectangle, this body of yours slouched in a chair, my body nowhere to be found in this doppelganger-ether-ghost, automatic-Martian-author-voice, simultaneously-manifesting, which is to say, now is as good as any time to break from the stream, the other doppelgangers notwithstanding, and may automatic writing be praised forevermore.
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