The Pen Friend (7 page)

At any rate, the whole eBay system is based on mutual trust. You bid, you buy, you sell, and every one of these transactions receives Feedback, so that a cumulative profile of your honesty is built up which can be consulted by any other eBay member at any time. In this manner I have bought pens from people all over the world, from Kansas, Minnesota, Taiwan, Paris, Augsburg, York, Swanage, Brighton, Hamburg, Greece, New Zealand, Hong Kong, the Balearic Islands. You could say that eBay is a kind of Esperanto, or free-market communism, except its members are invisible.

My own eBay
ID
is goligher. In the course of my Esperanto researches I had been following a tenuous link between Esperanto and spiritualism, and I’d taken the name from a spiritualist group known as the Goligher Circle, of Belfast, who between 1915 and 1920 were the subject of investigation by W.J. Crawford, a lecturer in Engineering at Queen’s University. The Circle was essentially a family affair. Mr Morrison, in the attic of whose home the Circle met, was a hard-working committee member of the Spiritualist Society. Mrs Morrison was a sister of the principal medium, Kathleen Goligher. The other participants were Mr Goligher, Kathleen’s father; Kathleen’s older sisters, Lily and Anna; and her younger brother Samuel, who was thought to have some mediumistic gifts. There is no mention of a Mrs Goligher. I first came across the case when I picked up Crawford’s book,
The Reality of Psychic Phenomena
(1916), in the Excelsior Book Store in Skipper Street. Over the next few months I managed to get my hands on the rest of Crawford’s oeuvre:
Hints and Observations for Those Investigating the Phenomena of Spiritualism
(1918),
Experiments in Psychical Science
(1919) and
The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle
, published posthumously in 1920. Crawford, after many painstaking experiments, concluded that Kathleen in particular was a medium of extraordinary power, and that the phenomena were genuine.

As described by him, the séances which produced the phenomena differed little from those conducted all over Europe and America at the time, when spiritualism was re-energised by the grief of those who lost their loved ones in the Great War. The participants would enter an attic room, and form a circle around the séance table. The room would be illuminated by a dim red light, in this instance a gas jet ensconced in a lantern having a red glass sliding front, for normal light was thought to be injurious to the phenomena. The sitters, said Crawford, clasp each other’s hands in chain order, and the séance begins. One of the members of the circle begins the proceedings with a prayer, and then a hymn is sung. Within a few minutes, sounds –
tap, tap, tap
– are heard on the floor close to the medium. They soon become louder and stronger, and occur right out in the circle space, on the table, and on the chairs of the sitters. Their magnitude varies in intensity from barely audible ticks to blows which might well be produced by a sledgehammer, the latter being really awe-inspiring and easily heard two storeys below, and even outside the house. The loud blows perceptibly shake the floor and chairs. Sometimes the raps keep time to hymns sung by the members of the circle; sometimes they tap out of themselves complicated tunes and popular dances on the top of the table or on the floor.

Other extraordinary effects include imitations of a bouncing ball – one would really think there was a ball in the room – the sawing of the table leg, the striking of a match, the walking of a man, and the trotting of a horse. Sometimes the raps sound perfect fusillades, for all the world like gunshots. After a quarter of an hour or so the rapping stops, and another type of phenomenon takes place. Remember, said Crawford, that the members of the Circle are simply sitting in their chairs holding each other’s hands in chain order. The little table is standing on the floor within the circle, and is not in contact with any of them, or any portion of their clothing. Suddenly the table gives a lurch, or it moves along the floor. It lifts two of its legs into the air. Then all four. The table rises completely into the air of itself, where it remains suspended for several minutes without support, said Crawford.

According to Crawford, the phenomena were produced by ‘psychic rods’, which emerged from the orifices of Kathleen Goligher’s body, and, anxious to verify their physical existence, he made several attempts to photograph them. On 23rd October 1915, as described by him in
The Reality of Psychic Phenomena
, he succeeded in obtaining an image which seemed to corroborate his theory. On the developed plate, plainly visible within the Goligher Circle, was a vertical column of whitish translucent material, about four inches in diameter and rising to a height of about five feet. The pattern of the wallpaper was quite easily seen through it, said Crawford. At its summit, however, it appeared quite opaque, as if the psychic stuff, issuing from its source, had exhausted its velocity at the top, and had doubled over on itself. The column, moreover, had several arms or branches, one of which appeared to terminate in or emanate from the chest of the medium. Others were joined to Miss Anna Goligher and Master S. Goligher. The whole photograph suggested to Crawford that the medium was in reality a psychic pump, with a complete pressure system. Perhaps, during levitation, the vertical column was under the table, in which case the pressure range would appear much greater. As it was, the psychic fluid appeared to be losing its energy much in the same way as a vertical jet of water, projected upwards against its own weight only, inevitably loses impetus and falls back.

Interestingly, Crawford failed to reproduce the photograph to support his verbal account, though it appeared in his posthumous book,
The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle
. In like manner, wanting to show that the sounds produced by the Circle were not the result of a collective hallucination, he hired a phonograph – an Edison Standard model – from a local dealer and, on 14th April 1916, ten days before the Easter Rising in Dublin, he successfully recorded the phenomena, which according to Crawford were produced by spiritual ‘operators’ who manipulated the psychic rods that emanated from Kathleen Goligher’s body.

I was struck not so much by this alleged proof as by the fact that the recording session took place on the same day that my father was born, and I was struck by a powerful nostalgia for a time I had never known. The Golighers were textile workers, and I imagined Belfast as it would have been then, its air trembling with noise from the linen mills which were then producing fabric for British aeroplanes in the Great War, and I indulged myself in a fancy that, since everything affects everything else, so Crawford’s phonograph had recorded not only the sound of the psychic raps but a trace, however subliminal, of the whole aural hinterland of Belfast, including the voices of its people, and that the wax cylinder contained in one of its grooves a series of infinitesimal pits and tics, a wavering scratch a fraction of a micron deep, caused by the first cry of my father as he came into the world.

I told you, Nina, how Billie Holiday’s singing affected me when I first heard it on your hi-fi system, little altered from the original recordings; and I think the hiss and crackle of old wax cylinders or shellac discs is even more atmospheric, for the dust which surrounds the music, as it drifts into the grooves, provides a more faithful molecular record of the sound in the air than is possible in a modern, hermetically sealed studio. So, when I hear Caruso’s singing – his ‘Ave Maria’ of 1914, for example, a favourite recording of my father’s – it is like dust-motes drifting through a shaft of sunlight in an empty room. The door has closed. The person has gone but the voice remains. I dreamed about my father that night, singing ‘Ave Maria’, as he used to do on Sunday evenings, sitting in the gloom of the parlour at Ophir Gardens.

A few pages later I came across a detail that once again fleetingly reminded me of my father, who happened to be born precisely one year after the death of Ludwig Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto. In October 1916 Crawford asked the ‘operators’ if any languages besides English were spoken in the other world they inhabited. By now it had been established that the operators were indeed entities who had once lived on this planet, but had passed on to a higher plane, this information being relayed by a system of coded raps, somewhat like Morse. After some hesitation the operators rapped out,
E
…
S
…
P
. Crawford could make no sense of this, beyond the speculation that the letters might stand for English, Spanish and Portuguese; the term
ESP
, meaning extrasensory perception, had not yet been coined. I was disappointed that Crawford had not entertained the possibility that it might be the beginning of the word
Espagnol
, or
Esperanto
; but I thought no more about it, until, several months later, I came across an article, in the journal
Esperanto Studies
, that made an explicit connection between Esperanto and the Brazilian version of spiritualism known as Spiritism, or Kardecism. Allan Kardec is the pseudonym of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (1804–1869), who was born a Catholic in Lyon, but was educated in Protestant Switzerland under the famous pedagogue Pestalozzi. After completing training as a teacher, Rivail returned to France, where he taught French, mathematics and sciences at various schools. Around the years 1854–55 the ‘talking-table’ fad had swept through the salons of Europe, and Kardec, initially sceptical, began to examine the extraordinary claims made by its practitioners. He found to his satisfaction that many of the phenomena were genuine, and summarised his findings in
Le Livre des Esprits
(1857). He concluded that the spirit world was made of souls in various stages of enlightenment, as the living on earth are in various stages of ignorance.

Kardec’s philosophy was enthusiastically embraced in Brazil, where it was assimilated by the less educated classes into the various ‘umbanda’ sects, which recognise not only the saints of the Catholic Church, but the old Amerindian spirits, and the trickster Yoruba spirits. ‘Pure’ Kardecism seems to be mostly a middle-class phenomenon, and its followers, aware of the marginalised status of Portuguese among European languages, actively promote Esperanto as an excellent vehicle for promoting their beliefs. A key text for the Spiritists is John 10:16: ‘And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also must I bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd’, meaning, to the Spiritists, that there will be not only religious but linguistic unity when the word of God is fulfilled. For, as we read in the first verse of John, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God’; and Esperanto is a means of salvation from the curse of Babel.

In 1958 the Brazilian medium Yvonne Pereira published a novel,
Memórias de um Suicida
(Memoirs of a Suicide), which she claimed was dictated to her by the spirit of Camilo Castelo Branco, one of the greatest Portuguese prose writers of the nineteenth century. It is not a literary work, said Branco, but rather fulfils a sacred duty of warning against suicide by revealing the truth about the abyss that the suicide will find himself in after death; and Branco did indeed commit suicide in 1890. However, this abyss, unlike the conventional Christian hell, is not forever: one can escape it through enlightenment in the other world, and eventual reincarnation; and one of the chief instruments of enlightenment is Esperanto, which Branco learns by graduating through successive levels before enrolling in the celestial Embaixada Esperantista, the Esperanto Embassy.

Castelo Branco was only one of many spirits who made themselves known to Yvonne Pereira. In her work
Devassando o Invisível
(Penetrating the Invisible) she recalls that one of the ‘better dressed’ and most beautiful spirits she observed as a medium was that of Zamenhof, who appeared to her clad in his characteristic wool suit. He bore a halo of concentric waves, highlighted by a jet of brilliant green light. As I write to you, Nina, I recall the green star of my father’s Esperanto lapel badge, and I cast my eyes towards the portrait of Zamenhof which still hangs in my study where my father hung it when I was a child, opposite the crucifix.
In Hoc Signo Vinces
.

And you, Nina, will see the pattern in all of this. You are a Gemini. Your dual nature enables you to be a skilful gatherer and disseminator of information. You are a good communicator. You were in New York at the behest – the invitation – of the Irish Embassy, which was entertaining a group of American-Irish businessmen, some of whom were known to be financially implicated with the
IRA
. It was July, the marching season in Northern Ireland, when sectarian tensions rise to a predictable annual pitch, and when you suggested that I join you in New York, I was glad to get out of Belfast. By then I had as good an idea as I ever had as to what it was you did for a living. I’m a communicator, you said that first night in Eglantine Avenue, don’t you know that’s what Geminis are good at? You might call me a diplomatic aide, but I’m not. But what’s your job title? I asked. Oh, technically I’m called a Field Officer, but there are quite a few of us, and we all have different areas of expertise, you said. When I first got the job I duly reported in at nine o’clock sharp in the morning. The only person in the building was the receptionist, who was doing her nails and reading a Mills & Boon novel. The title stuck in my mind:
Ask Me No Questions
, it was called. Eventually some of the other staff straggled in, and by maybe eleven o’clock there were seven of us there, all of us in separate rooms. I was given a room with a desk, a chair, and a filing cabinet in it, you said, and when I was asked what I was supposed to do they looked at me with some surprise, and they said, Well, how on earth should we know? You’re the expert. That’s what we hired you for.