Further remarks on synchronicity and coincidence...

One of my research interests is in old anonymous literature and how digital archives may be used to uncover the names of those long-unknown authors.  A few years ago Fortean Times published my exposé of the 1935 book Crook Frightfulness (written by an apparently delusional man pursued by evil ventriloquists).  As mentioned in the previous blogpost, this month, the Fortean Times #341 (June 2016) contains the fruits of my latest research - unmasking the identity of the author behind a strange book called Atomic-Consciousness published in 1892 - written by John Palfrey.

I found Atomic-Consciousness a few years ago at a junk shop, and considered it unusual enough to merit further investigation.  It turned out that the book was pseudonymously authored by a man who continually experienced (and instigated) coincidences.  He tried to turn this to his advantage with his attempts to force wished-for thoughts to recur as real events.  Coincidentally, this month's Fortean Times also contains Jenny Randles regular column which happens to be about coincidences too, or rather, Jungian synchronicity.  Randles observes first-hand that talking about coincidences causes them to happen.  This rings very true, because during my research into Atomic-Consciousness I decided to keep a detailed synchronicity diary of my own, just like its author did - full of events and dream-fragments - and every few weeks a few convergences of thought were noted.  But whether this was simply selective-perception or not, I don't know.  Most were recurring frames of inner thought rather than appreciable coincidences.

I'm not a natural diary-keeper and I've stopped maintaining the diary now, but my final synchronicity entry is a worthwhile example...  In the Fortean Times' 'Atomic-Consciousness' article, I cursorily cited Noel Edmonds' 2006 book Positively Happy.  In many ways Edmonds' book is similar to Atomic-Consciousness - it's full of semi-autobiographical anecdotes supporting the idea of willpower as a force to actualise wants.  The main difference is that Edmonds focussed on upbeat positivity, but Atomic-Consciousness is laced with profound negativity.  Its down-at-heel author was prone to ranting, particularly in later abridged editions where he raged at the lack of recognition of his genius - the publication of Atomic-Consciousness was said to be "a thunderbolt falling from Jovian sky".  Palfrey writes with great grandiosity (and weirdness): "Atomic Consciousness at first aroused, on account of originality in avalanching concept of thought, revelation and teaching: and by contravening established customs and opinions, with engrafted beliefs, counterblast of cyclonic furore in all classes..."

On the day I received the Fortean Times, I observed the 'Atomic-Consciousness' article and noted my mention of Edmonds' book, briefly wondering whether the jump between 1892's Atomic-Consciousness and 2006's Positively Happy was a too-surreal juxtaposition.  Then... synchronicity struck!  Half-an-hour later, I read on a news website that Noel Edmonds "blasts the BBC in YouTube video" where he dressed as a character named "Priscilla Prim", a nominally comedic video that some commentators interpreted as a "bizarre" and "bitter" rant at the BBC with reference to his own previous TV work.  This instantly conjured to mind John Palfrey's bitter Atomic-Consciousness effusions, but also the fact that John Palfrey wrote under the pseudonym "James Bathurst", just as Edmonds adopted the guise of "Priscilla Prim".
It seemed a very strange coincidence.  Mystery can be enjoyable, but to be frank I'm glad I'm no longer keeping a synchronicity diary, as expending energy in merely noticing these things can be distracting.

Fortean Times - June 2016 - John Palfrey aka "James Bathurst" - Founder of Modernism?

June's Fortean Times (#341) contains my feature that unmasks the self-proclaimed Founder of Modernism "James Bathurst" - now identified as John Palfrey (1846-1921) - visionary author of Atomic-Consciousness (1892) (and two smaller editions: Atomic Consciousness Reviewed [1902] and Atomic Consciousness Abridgement [1909] published with the help of his brother-in-law William Hurrell Popplestone).  The odd title is listed in the 1926 Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature, and it's only now that the author can be positively identified (which was no mean feat - but I'll save the investigative ins-and-outs for another blogpost). John Palfrey was a working man plagued by coincidences (or synchronicity, as Jung would later term it) which he often initiated himself through contemplative thought.  Atomic consciousness can be seen as analogous to Jung's collective unconscious, except that it actualises thoughts as events.  Atomic-Consciousness has too many dimensions of oddness to summarise here.

Atomic-Consciousness (1892)

The details of Palfrey's life and work appear in Fortean Times #341 (out now - and jam-packed with many other interestingnesses!).  This blogpost will offer another perspective.  What I find striking about Atomic-Consciousness is the seething resentment of its downtrodden author, particularly in the two later editions.  Under the guise of "James Bathurst", Palfrey later wrote that "gradually the theses propounded [in the 1892 book] became verified in all countries, regenerating conformably thereto, the field of science, and formulating the New Psychology.  Then a host of plagiarists voraciously consumed the fruits of my wisdom and labour".   There is a grain of truth that Atomic-Consciousness was rather ahead-of-its-time in its synthesis of science and the occult, but it was an obscure self-published book, and unknown to most people.  What was happening, Palfrey claimed, was that his thoughts were being intercepted: "my ideas taking flight as they come, the lesser or greater in resuscitation or origination, to sickening repetition of continuance by thrice hated parasite pests in profusion abounding".  He believed that the moment he conceived any novel phrases, they would be immediately stolen, later to reappear in print.  The only remedy was "deeper abstraction" (whatever that means).  'Abstract' would certainly be a suitable description for Palfrey's prose in the two abridged editions.

The original 1892 Atomic-Consciousness began with a humble apology asking the reader to bear in mind that its author was an unschooled working man.  By contrast, in the 1903 and 1909 abridged editions he furiously ranted in purple prose about the brilliance of his original work.  He titled himself as "Founder of New Psychology, the New Age [...], the New Mysticism, and Modernism".  Embittered by the lack of recognition, he blustered: "My sciento-philosophical work was the last and greatest accessible within finite apprehension; subsequent chance discoveries of manipulative wireless telegraphy, and the X rays, though of practical importance, were insignificant beside the profound problems expounded in my book".

Perhaps Palfrey is, in fact, the Founder of Modernism?  The anxious coveting of originality and the abhorrence toward plagiarism is a symptom of the modernist condition.  Indeed, he seems to have experienced the upheavals of modernity first-hand, both mentally, and as a physical confessed "human wreck" hailing from the Devon village of Whimple, "compelled to labour" in industrial towns, wishing himself to be maimed or injured during his railway employments simply to be freed from work.  His 1892 masterwork starkly articulates the plight of the thoughtful Victorian worker - suicide seemed attractive to him.  However, Palfrey was too self-regarding to champion any workers' causes: describing himself, he writes that "a man of thoughtful expression incurs from the lower ranks scoff and ridicule; so great is their ignorance" (Palfrey was, after all, gifted with an ability to intuit things most people fail to notice).  Experiencing the horrors of industry first-hand, the super-cantankerous Palfrey bemoaned civilisation, and once, when observing from a hillside a squalid townscape blotting the natural landscape, he nihilistically pondered with sneaking optimism "as to whether a few thousands of particularly developed minds, with strong will, may not cause some plague or fire to devastate 'civilised' countries".  As "James Bathurst", Palfrey was able to elevate and reinvent himself as a grandiloquent philosopher-seer with anarchist tendencies, critiquing everything, obsessed by the concept of transmissible thought energies, viewing mental processes in terms of electromagnetism...

Palfrey described how the etheric agency of atomic-consciousness causes any single thought to recur - "duality" is the law.  This means that coincidences occur in pairs, but Palfrey remarked that further repetitions may follow ad infinitum "if one bestows on a second or successive occurrence that thoughtful contemplation accompanying the first".  To frustrate and complicate things, atoms have polar (+ / -) properties, and since everything is comprised of atoms (including the human mind) one must therefore be "positive" or "repellant" to bring about any desired occurrences (which is a self-confident state of mind devoid of any wishfulness), and not "negative" (anxious, timid or wishful) otherwise adverse influences may take effect, creating an opposite outcome.  Because Palfrey was very emotional and downtrodden, he had difficulty maintaining the correct state of mind so conducive to bringing about his wants.

William Burroughs cruelly illustrates in The Western Lands (1987) how, when a mysterious "Wish Machine" is introduced that operates on occult principles, there is the warning: "Feed a whiny wish through the Machine, and you will soon have ample cause to whine".  On the mean streets of Victorian west-country towns, Palfrey illustrated that same unforgiving principle at work...

For more on Atomic-Consciousness, see this month's Fortean Times #341...

Fortean Times - May 2015 - Early Electronic Soundmaking (Trolling in the 1920s)

The BBC's anti-oscillation pamphlet

It's not generally known that early valve radios were capable of producing electronic tones through the overuse of the volume dial (or 'reaction' dial).  From the 1920s onwards, valve radios could be pushed into radio-frequency feedback states, and audible sinewave tones could be produced by heterodyning against a radio station's frequency.  Problematically, these tones re-radiated through the home radio's aerial, causing 'howling' interference in every other set in the surrounding area tuned to the same radio station.

Fortean Times #327

May's issue of Fortean Times #327 contains my article Rogue Oscillators - the fullest study yet published on radio oscillation.  Anybody interested in early electronic music is advised to peruse it!  Particularly interesting is the evidence that some people oscillated deliberately, and in the light of modern noisemaking culture - exampled by tomes such as Nic Collins' Handmade Electronic Music - it may be reappraised as a rustic, unrecognised form of rogue pre-electronic music performed by anonymous rascals.

To coincide with the article, here I present a slice of oscillation: Song of the R33 (based on a runaway airship that allegedly had its radio communications interfered with by people oscillating their radios).  The only sound sources are oscillating radio valves, and it gives a rather exaggerated flavour of the kind of sounds that polluted the airwaves of the 1920s and 30s.

Leon Theremin c.1927

An oscillating radio's pitch couldn't be really controlled accurately - the tuning dial wasn't delicate enough to produce true melodies (and nearby radios wouldn't necessarily hear the same pitch as the oscillating radio), but putting one's hand near the radio could slightly affect the tone's pitch too.  This effect was seized upon by Leon Theremin, who took the oscillation principle and upscaled the capacitive body effect to produce his hands-free electronic instrument, the Theremin.

So, if you want to read about this curious pre-history of the Theremin sound, check out this month's Fortean Times #327.

To end this blogpost here's a poem about oscillation from a magazine called The Ironmonger, Universal Engineer and Metal Trades' Advertiser from December 1924:

The Knob-Twiddler

This is the story of Plantagenet,
Who fiddled about with his wireless set;
He plugged in the coils and he turned all the knobs;
He twiddled about with the thingummybobs.
The one thing Plantagenet never would do,
Was to sit down and listen to gentlemen who
Were doing their best to divert and delight
This ineffably curious twiddlesome wight.
Each time he picked up a melodious air
He knew he could tune in much better elsewhere.
Reaction was tightened; then let loose again,
His aerial howls made the neighbours complain.
Whenever the set was performing its best,
Plantagenet thought he would try out a test:
And caterwauls, mingled with groans and with squeals,
Disturbed all his family and ruined his meals.
But was he depressed? Not a bit! He would sit
Picking up funny noises that learners transmit.
For hours he would sit there in rapture sublime,
With knobs and plug-in coils agog all the time:

Perhaps you have heard the unfortunate fate
Of that knob-turning fellow, Plantagenet (late).
One night he was seized by a transmission wave,
Which transported him rapidly, on past the grave,
Into the limbo where knob-twiddlers end -
The place from which night-oscillations ascend.

So all the good people who twiddle the knobs,
Who will mess about with the thingummybobs,
Whenever they hear diabolic howls -
Should remember the army of Radio Ghouls
All ready and anxious to clap down the lid
On all men who do what Plantagenet did.

Fortean Times - Sept 2013 - Crook Frightfulness

This month's Fortean Times #305 (a sort of 'paranoia special') features my exposé of the extraordinary anonymously-penned book Crook Frightfulness, self-published in 1935 by "A Victim".  In this blog post I'll present some thoughts on the book's semi-acoustical ideas.

Crook Frightfulness was first brought to my attention by the marvel Westwyrd the Bard: drum-specialist and custodian of curiousness.  For those unacquainted with the book, it's an autobiography of a man tormented by crooks who embark on a campaign of staring, ventriloquism and covert psychological harassments against the author.  The "Victim" writes of his personal hell in which everybody else is either complicit, or simply fails to notice the ventriloquist abusers who stalk him across the British colonies.  Crooks are also able to hear the Victim's thoughts by a theorised listening apparatus used with headphones (a sort of powerful stethoscope device).  Some of the antiquated colonial sentiments add an extra dimension of bizarreness.  A colleague described Crook Frightfulness as an "acoustic mystery thriller" although it's generally seen as a schizophrenic emission.  For anybody interested in sound, its psychology and its perception/misperception, it's a particularly fascinating book, as the author manages to "attain a degree of impersonal interest" (as he puts it) and proceeds to investigate the phenomena from his own practical, acoustical viewpoint.

Crook Frightfulness is split into three parts.  The first part - some 40 odd pages - begins almost like a potboiler; autobiographical sensationalism comparable to, say, Sydney Horler's 1934 exposé, London's Underworld.  Part two is written more matter-of-factly, albeit disjointedly and with heightened paranoia.  Here, the author writes of his experiences and travels around the colonies to outmanoeuvre the 'crooks'.  The third part is the 'Vital Climax' where the crooks' terrible practices are examined (involving listening apparatuses).   In FT305, it is suggested that the Victim did experience a genuine low-level persecution that left a lasting resonance.

Charles Wheatstone's 'Telephonic Concert' at the Royal Polytechnic Institution

The listening apparatus is hypothesised in general terms.  It is assumed to be able to pick up the minutest sound, akin to an amplifier, functioning in a stethoscope-like arrangement - presumably non-electric.  This acoustic method of sound conveyance conjures to mind Charles Wheatstone's ideas on acoustic transmission through solids.  Wheatstone coined the term 'microphone', not in reference to an electric transducer as we know it now, but to refer to an apparatus where sound is carried by direct transmission through solids to the ear.  In one adaptation of this to sounding bodies, at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in the 1860s Wheatstone exhibited a 'Telephonic Concert' - completely non-electric (à la tin-cans-and-string) - where thick wires coupled to musical instruments, played on a concealed lower floor, acoustically carried the sound silently through intermediate floors to a performance stage above, where the wires reconnected with the sounding boards of harps, rediffusing the sound as if by magic.  Wheatstone also visualised the invention of an ideal acoustically conductive material to stretch vast distances, to communicate from Aberdeen to London.   In Crook Frightfulness - 'A Victim' presents a visceral horror in which crooks can acoustically subjugate you in this Wheatstonian manner:

"I frequently tried to stifle the annoyance by stopping or closing my ears with my fingers, and when doing so, I rested my elbows on my knees or put my elbows upon the wooden table.  Strange to say, I found that neither of these expedients stopped or banished the sound (...)  The sound when I stopped my ears must have travelled through the wood of the floor and of the table and then through my bones to my ears!  (...)  They no doubt send sounds (by means of some instrument) to molest any intended victim who is in the same premises, or even in adjoining premises."

Likewise, crooks are said to "hear your thoughts - the sound travelling through the floor you are standing on (...) to perhaps that next room or adjoining house, to the crook listener".   Thoughts are heard by closely listening to sub-vocal articulation: "when you think (in 95 cases out of a hundred) you actually shape your words in your throat and mouth.  When we breathe through our mouth or nose it is possible for these fiends to hear your thoughts."  The Victim's theories evolve as Crook Frightfulness progresses.  Some later editions feature paste-ins where a "sound 'outfit' like the BBC" is theorised.  In spite of the book's skew-whiff nature, some of these ideas were certainly at the 'cutting edge' - an early example of widespread covert listening is seen in the early 1940s with the hidden electric microphones around Trent Park's prisoner-of-war compound to capture prisoners' conversations.

A BBC "sound 'outfit'" of the period

Last year, the writer and long-time Crook Frightfulness aficionado Phil Baker sold me a first edition of the book.  Baker was also keen to know more about the book's author.  This spurred me on to compile all the scraps of information I'd collected over the years with a view to building a profile of "Victim".

The compilation of biographical facts (gleaned from both the first and expanded editions) revealed the author was born in the East End of London, in or around 1875.  He was involved in rent collection and property.  He left Britain for New Zealand in 1924, moved to the British West Indies around 1928, and returned to Britain to settle in Aberystwyth in March 1932.  Many hours at Kew's National Archives yielded a list of some fifty or so names, gradually whittled down as each name was followed up.  The use of digital archives plays a key role in such research.

It is revealed for the first time in this month's Fortean Times that Crook Frightfulness was written by an east London estate agent named Arthur Herbert Mills.  He left Britain using the name Herbert Mills, and returned as Arthur Mills, which slightly confused matters, but further research has confirmed the connections.  His story is very interesting, and only a bare outline could be condensed into the article.

The book presents quite a sad predicament, but it's hoped that the discovery of the author's name will enable further study of the text, which charts the onset of auditory disorientation at a point in history where technology could not quite yet provide reasonable objective explanation for the phenomena.  There are a surprising number of narratives very similar to Crook Frightfulness (some early examples are examined in the article).  Today, people with these afflictions/assailments often cite James Lin's 1978 textbook Microwave Auditory Effects and Applications that superficially appears to corroborate all sonic "unseen assailment" phenomena (although, in practice, such technology is very impractical).

Anyways... It's not my intention here to delve into the arguments surrounding these phenomena (perhaps in a future posting), it is simply to examine curios and mythologies from acoustical hinterlands.  (It is worth mentioning that a semblance of 'voices' can be perceived during exposure to fluctuating white or pink noise for extended periods. This is a psychoacoustic effect: auditory pareidolia.  In one notable example, it is employed in a sound installation by U.S. sound artist Ellen Band in her Acoustic Mirage.)

The full particulars on Crook Frightfulness can be found in Fortean Times #305.