Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

A NOTE TO THE READER
I found entries for “Automatic Writing,” descriptions of archived
“messages from the unseen world.” They were written in various
languages and orthographies, including Chinese, Japanese, and Ara­
bic, reportedly transmitted to people who had no knowledge of the
received language. The messages from royalty and famous person­
ages were noteworthy for having signatures “verified by the experts.”
I was especially impressed with the transmissions received from
1913 to 1937 by an “ordinary homemaker” in St. Louis, Pearl Cur­
ran, who had no formal education past the age of fourteen, and was
the recipient of stories from a garrulous ghost named Patience
Worth. Patience purportedly lived in the 1600s and wrote of medi­
eval times. The results were volumes of antiquated prose, with in­
timate knowledge of colloquialisms and social manners of olden
days, a language that was not quite Middle English and yet con­
tained no anachronisms past the seventeenth century. One of her
page-turners began in this breezy way: “Dew-drop soggeth grasses
laid low aneath the blade at yester’s harvest . . .” Aside from the
stolid prose style, there was good reason to either admire or loathe
Patience Worth and Pearl Curran. One of the novels was dictated in
a span of thirty-five hours.
There was another case in the archives that fascinated me even
more. The writings were recorded by a medium named Karen Lunde­
gaard, who lived in Berkeley, California. She had received in fifty-
four sessions a rambling story that was part rant, part memoir,
delivered by a spirit named Bibi Chen.
The name startled me. There was a well-known woman by that
name in my hometown, San Francisco. She had been a socialite and
the owner of a landmark shop on Union Square, The Immortals,
which sold decorative Asian antiques. She died under bizarre cir­
cumstances that were never fully explained. Karen Lundegaard de­
scribed Bibi Chen accurately: “A petite, feisty Chinese woman,
opinionated, and hilarious when she didn’t intend to be.”
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