Index of Articles

Probably the most difficult part of writing Speaking of Jane Roberts:  Remembering the Author of the Seth Material was in deciding what to leave out. I collected a massive amount of materials for the memoir, not the least of which were the journals and records that Jane left behind, with every single page full of gems. Jane's journals quickly became more than background material—from the first page, I was completely immersed. Vividly if briefly, they brought Jane back to life, at least in my mind's eye and ear. With every sentence, the genius of her unique intellect displays itself, especially when she's dissecting her own ideas, or more poignantly, the physical difficulties that eventually led to her death, and the beliefs that engendered them.

As to that, the journals were very difficult to read, and searingly intimate, even more so than the reams of material Seth devoted to her symptoms over the years. In the time that I knew Jane, I was largely unaware of all that she was going through on this score, however obvious (or not) her condition was at any given time. She held those cards close to her vest, basically determined to work it out (or not) on her own.

Thus I was especially taken by Jane's unfinished Bali manuscript, the "secret diary," as she called it, that was meant as an autobiographical novel of her physical problems, written between 1971 and 1977 in what novelists call the third-person subjective point of view. "Bali," the narrator, is, of course, Jane—Jane the "writer," as opposed to Jane the "psychic," a division she herself created and distrusted, and which she tried most of her life, more or less unsuccessfully, to resolve.

"The psychic, the one people wrote to—she wasn't supposed to have any weaknesses," Bali observes.
The Bali who wrote novels, the woman writer, could freely work with all her experience. To the psychic this freedom had been denied and by whom? By the herself that was both, primarily....

But the symptoms—perhaps were a symptom precisely of this separation. Bali the woman—the writer—could be sorrowful or joyful, healthy or sick, aggressive or loving, and work these things through. Bali the psychic was supposed to be perfect—joyful, healthy, loving, and kind. Period. Super. The psychic and the person somehow got separated.

What fascinated me most about this manuscript, looking at its events through the vista of time, is the brilliance and applicability of the technique. The third-person subjective point of view creates an interpretative perspective without the inside-your-head "I think" or "it seems to me" hedge that the usual first-person stance of diaries and dream journals almost automatically employs. It gives Jane, as Bali, a way to step back a pace and reinvent the details of her life as a storyteller. That is, Jane isn't making up fictional tales in the way that process is usually presumed; instead, she uses Bali to voice the story of daily life as it occurs—exactly as you experience a dream through a dream-self, the point of view through which you, awake, remember that dream, and record it.

Though in actual fiction writing the third-person subjective has its limits—the late novelist John Gardner faulted it as "thriving on intimacy and something like gossip"—it is precisely those qualities, and limits, that make it such a stupendously ingenious way to discover one's own beliefs. Using it, you are basically interpreting your physical experience as if it were a dream. This frees up all sorts of intuitive elements that generally aren't used in journals or objective belief-digging, if only because we tend to separate the waking mind's methods from the dreaming mind's free-associative world. Things suddenly connect in ways you hadn't noticed as an "I." Try it—I've started my own third person point of view papers, and it works, though in a strangely off-center fashion; pragmatic yet elusive, like the other side of dream recall, or its counterpart.

"She stood up, slowly as usual," Jane, as Bali, writes in May of 1973, "straightened up the coffee table, and headed for the hall.

Surprised, she discovered that it was somewhat easier to go down stairs; one step didn't feel as far away as the other; a stack of mail but nothing important; still, mail.

She started back up. Wouldn't it be wild if by night in some fantastic way she was standing straight and free? What wild shit—how her students would boogie; or if she could even do yoga exercises nonchalantly as if she'd been able to all the while? Grinning, she came back up and it was easier; her right leg went faster on its own, it seemed.

Still, that had happened before and even more noticeably and nothing overall had come of it. Or had it? Had these improvements begun just in this way? And if they started again . . . could they really last?

Later Jane would continue, "Writing, she suddenly knew why she was writing Bali. Because sometimes when she did—she improved physically."

A revised one-volume edition of Watkins's Conversations With Seth, including a new ten-page photo insert, was published by Moment Point in 1999 and is available through Brass Ring, see page 12.