“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Neither of us knew how such a tremor and slowdown might influence the sessions, for example: Jane hadn’t spoken for Seth in several weeks, so we had yet to find out! I took comfort in remembering her excellent vocal power when delivering the private session for December 3.¹² Her voice is a powerful and dramatic connective among realities for her, charged with energy and emotion whether she’s speaking for herself, for Seth, or speaking or singing in her trance language, Sumari.¹³ That vocal steadiness and power, coming out of someone whose weight hovers around 100 pounds, has always been most reassuring to us. We tried what Seth had suggested many times: After discussing her voice effects we gave Jane gentle suggestions that they could be greatly minimized, then turned our attention away from them. Actually, I hoped that our almost childlike trust—which I felt was closely related to at least some of the psychological elements involved in her acceptance of the voice challenges to begin with—would make possible their complete disappearance.

I think most people would agree that Jane’s singing in Sumari is extraordinarily original, and that she’s an excellent natural dramatist. It’s easy to miss, or skip over, the drama in her lifework because it’s so pervasive in all of her creative endeavors. She was fully aware that that quality became much more obvious in her class singing and sessions, but she didn’t have to consciously evoke it—the drama was just there. In its own form each time, it still underlies our sessions, and her poetry, writing, and painting.

13. In Jane’s Adventures in Consciousness, see Chapter 7 for her thorough discussion of how she began to speak and sing in her trance language, Sumari, in November 1971.

Jane initiated Sumari in ESP class, and largely let it go when we ended class and moved to the hill house four years later. As with her speaking for Seth, her greatest power and drama in singing was engendered in class. For the most part in our regular, private, and book sessions, Seth speaks to me with a quieter, businesslike energy; I always feel his vigor and humor, but he isn’t nearly as loud or quick or boisterous as he was in class. Jane was obviously sensitive to the infusion of energy from 30 or more people during those gatherings, and through her Seth responded masterfully. The same was true of her singing, when she ranged from the most delicate soprano trills and nuances to powerful, much deeper emanations.

I have come to feel that I should have encouraged Jane to speak and sing much more often in Sumari, either when we were alone here at the house, or on a Friday night, say, when we had company. I gave up doing so partly because I hesitated to add to her pressure to perform, whether or not the material might be recorded, and partly because, except on rare occasions, she didn’t offer to sing—or to have a session—as she used to spontaneously do in our downtown apartments.

Once in a while, Jane will sing to herself as she sits at her table in her writing room and looks east through the sliding glass doors at the side street rising into the woods to the north. Across the street is the white clapboard house of our neighbors, whom we love and who love us. Our friends have a large yard beside their house. It’s filled with trees and flowering shrubs—a view Jane cherishes, and one she has painted and written about a number of times. Indeed, she was looking out at that view at four o’clock on a foggy morning in June 1979 (over two and a half years ago) when she was inspired to name that certain part of her “that is as clear-eyed as a child” the “God of Jane.” Out of that insight she titled the book she had started a few weeks earlier The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto. In Chapter 9 of Mass Events, see the opening notes and Note 1 for Session 860.

Occasionally Jane will record a Sumari song when I’m out of the house; I may hear her play it later, but I don’t “bug” her about sharing it with me. With the increase in her symptoms her songs have become more subdued, more poignant. Although she seldom translates them into English, I know their subject matter. As Seth does, they represent one portion of her psyche offering reassurances to another more conscious portion, in our terms; they deal with her questioning of the reality she’s creating in the finest personal detail—her wanting to know why she’s made her choices, her determination to press ahead, her embracing of our beloved earth and our universe. Sometimes her singing carries from her writing room at the back of the house, through the kitchen, around the corner and down the hall into my studio. And sometimes I hear her voice break in mid-song. She is overwhelmed with her yearning. She stops singing.