Fuller,
John G., The Ghost of 29 Megacycles, Souvenir Press Ltd., London, 1985.
Octavo;
hardcover, with silver-gilt spine-titling; 257pp. Near fine in like
dustwrapper, now protected by archival–quality non-adhesive plastic film.
I’m
only halfway through this at the moment but I’ve already got up such a head of
steam that I need to de-pressurise a bit before I go on. This is a book about
technology being used to determine if there are ghosts out there; about science
going head-to-head with “things beyond the veil”, and I had high hopes of a
satisfying conclusion.
It’s
not that I have a superstitious mind, or that I believe prima facie in the
supernatural: when I was a kid, like a lot of kids, I wanted magic and spooks
and monsters to be real. Too often I found that exploring the world for the
supernatural led to pat answers about how “magical” the world is, if you look
at it in just the right way; that is, if you use your imagination and play nicely.
Not satisfying. I was reading about actual
monsters - werewolves being hunted through the villages of 16th
Century France; the Amityville Horror; UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle: I didn’t
want someone at the end of the show saying “how much fun was that? See what we
can do if we all play the same imaginary games?” Going through all of the
cut-and-thrust, only to be told what a great, fictional story it all is, was
the ultimate cop-out to my 8-year-old way of thinking.
This
attitude remains with me today. I don’t mind following through on an
investigation only to find out that some phenomenon is the result of creaky
floorboards, glowing marsh gas and a few over-active imaginations; I don’t mind
the Scooby-Doo ending if it’s reached intelligently and logically; however, I
REALLY dislike being dragged through a narrative, hooked along by someone
else’s poor assumptions.
This
I think is one of the reasons I like Charles Fort (what he stood for anyway; not his writing style). His basic
premise is that too often, in any field of human endeavour, people become
blinkered by their assumptions about what ought
to be happening and refuse to look at what’s actually going on. His main target was the scientific community
which, having structured itself in such a way as to discount anything which
doesn’t fall within its consensus-backed, peer-reviewed parameters, refuses to
even look at anything anomalous. To this end he wrote (turgid,
poorly-expressed, incendiary, convoluted) lists of anything that was out of the
ordinary, so that it stood on record until such a time that science advanced
far enough to be able to understand what had been going on. Fort didn’t have
any answers; what he did have was a
bee in his bonnet about people who refused to lift their heads up and look
around.
The
thing that really griped Fort’s cookies was that the scientific community
claimed to have all of the answers. It annoyed him that Science, when
confronted with the Unknown, often declared in a patronising manner “there has
to be a rational explanation”, without then going on to provide one. Discount
and move on: this seemed to him to be Science’s standard operating procedure.
There are echoes of Fort’s annoyance in every episode of the X-Files, where Government deniability
swoops in to conceal, appropriate and cover-up anything that seems strange and
unusual. Fox Mulder: the modern-day Charles Fort.
So,
I thought this book would be something a little refreshing: the scientific
community setting out seriously to discover the nature of Life After Death.
The
story is as follows: a well-known industrial engineer named Meeks, a staunch
member of the scientific community, approaches our author to ask him to write
an unbiased, impartial record of his discoveries in finding a method to
communicate with the Dead. This scientist claims to have found a way to get
ghosts to communicate with the living through an extension of principles
outlined as EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena), working with the spirits of dead
scientists to refine the process. It sounded pretty whacky to me (as it would
to anyone really) but I decided to take the ride and see where it took me.
The
book started off with many authorial assertions from Fuller that he was
unwilling to take on the task, that he found the whole thing too preposterous.
This was followed by claims to have researched all of the people involved, to
see if they were members of the lunatic fringe (and thus to be avoided). Then
we had the face-to-face meeting where we were told that everyone present was
“normal” and earnest, in no way fruity or demonstrably unhinged. Meeks and his
wife meet Fuller and his wife and
they discuss the project over tea: Meeks is calm of aspect, steadfast in his
beliefs, engaging in manner. The wives are supportive and engaged on both sides
of the equation, and we get some homey exchanges of dialogue between Fuller and
his missus about what the project entails and where it’s going.
It
took less than this much to make my “baloney senses” start tingling.
Arguably,
it’s my Gen-X attitudes showing, but when anyone tries this hard to convince me
that everything’s OK, I automatically start picking at the cracks. The book to
this point followed a well-trod path of deflecting suspicion and reservation: I
was being asked not to harbour a feeling that anything other than what I was
being told was going on. Strike one: I don’t like being told what to think, and
I can see a soft-soap job coming a mile off.
We
next had chapters of background, both of Meeks and Fuller, specifically, his
past books which rang like self-promotion and advertising. To be frank, it was
boring and I kept wanting him get to the punchline. Eventually, we started to
hear about Meeks’s initial experiments wherein a cabal of technicians gathered
regularly in a rented room with some hard-core audio and other electronic
equipment to download information from the Afterlife, in the company of a
medium.
What?
A medium?
Here’s
where the fantasy unravels: we’re told that our scientific researchers are wary
of accepting the evidence of spirits from The Other Side, but that the main
tentpole of their investigation is a crystal-ball-gazing, tarot-card-shuffling
medium. Sorry: given that the presence of the one automatically assumes the
fact of the other, as far as scientific method goes this is shooting itself in
the foot from the get-go.
Further
assertions of serious attitude follow: we’re told that the experiments begin
with an earnest prayer; that the medium is not some gypsy-descended fruitcake,
but is a reluctant acknowledger of the “gifts” they have been imbued with.
Really? Seriously, they could be prayers to Satan at the start of a Black Mass
for all I care, it just says that there’s all kinds of bias going on here, not
just the taking for granted that dead people live on after “moving on”.
But
wait: there’s more. Meeks tells us that, after many sessions tweaking an
oscilloscope and twitching a metaphorical cat’s whisker, he has discovered that
people “over there” live a life of pure thought and spiritual development; some
people arrive less-than-perfectly adapted and must be schooled in ascending to
higher grades of spiritual excellence. “Life” is spent enjoying the prospect of
mental and spiritual attunement, passing on to higher states of
phantasmagorical excellence. And there are scientists over there working night
and day to find ways of communicating with their loved ones.
Come
On! Seriously? Despite the fact that it all sounds mind-bogglingly tedious, has
anyone else noticed that all of this material is being made available by one
single individual whose “abilities” are assumed, cannot be measured or
quantified, and are probably pure hogwash? Well, Meeks and his cabal of
serious-minded researchers certainly have no problems with this, and Fuller is
keen to make sure that we readers don’t either.
(Insert
here the sound of a book flying across the room to bounce off a wall.)
This
is no journalistic effort: it’s crap. Fuller’s assumptions – which he may have been sold on by Meeks – are
creaky and don’t hold up to any reasonable examination. The premise that
mediums exist, that psychic energies swirl around us and can be manipulated by
schooled, talented individuals, is not a given, so any “research” which takes
off from this premise is necessarily flawed and untenable. Let’s not even
mention that a lead chapter outlining the author’s other literary efforts reeks
of self-promotion and warns that this entire effort is likely to be an exercise
in unit-shifting rather than revelation. Oh, did I just mention that? My bad.
I
feel, like Fort, that I shouldn’t be judgemental and that I should keep an open
mind about the assertions here. However, I’m not an idiot: the world has rules
and it has a lot of snake-oil salesmen. I’m prepared to be astonished by new
discoveries, not to be made to swallow a line.
Forty
years on, there are still no
monsters, ghosts or UFOs; sadly, there are still a lot of bullshit shovelers.
From your review, it seems that you object to the fact that a known professional writer actually acts like a professional writer, writing in a popular and well-recognized mode of the time to get his subject matter across. Also, you find the experimental use of a medium personally repugnant and therefore suspect. There are also suggestions of a minor snit that the universe continues to not make sense. You contend that Fuller's assumptions are creaky without enumerating them for evaluation. As for mediums not existing, evidence would seem to be against you, there. I'll grant the existence of charlatans and credulous fools galore, but I refer you to John G. Neihardt and the SORRAT experiments as an example of bloody-minded dedication to rooting out the possibility of hoax during experimentation. As for the persistent lack of monsters, ghosts or UFOs, perhaps you're looking in the wrong places?
ReplyDelete...Also the entire premise of this book is ripped off from a 1939 novel by William Sloane called "The Edge of the Water", so there's that. :)
ReplyDelete