“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This afternoon I made up the usual double test envelope, including a pair of Bristol stiffeners. The envelopes contained a black and white photo of York Beach, ME, taken there last summer, that is the summer of 1964. It is of a view I scouted from our motel window. I took it for reference for a future painting, and consists mainly of a mass of tangled marsh grass in the foreground; in the background rise a couple of average-looking houses, a telephone pole and some wires. I obtained excellent detail in the rhythmic pattern of the waist-high grasses, which was what I wanted.

(“Something to do with a circle” is interesting, in that our motel at York Beach, where this photo was taken, is situated on a circular driveway in back of the beach hotel that fronts on the ocean. In the photo the marsh grass comes out as “dark leaves against white,” and the photo was taken in the afternoon of a bright day. I recall this easily enough because I had to wait until the sun was in the correct position to give a good contrasting result in the black and white photo that I wanted to use for reference.

(Jane tells me that “a mistake of sorts connected here somewhere” could refer to a mix-up concerning the room we had rented at the motel, but I do not recall this personally. It was nothing serious, Jane said, but a bookkeeping error on the part of the motel room clerk, to the effect that our room had been reserved for someone else, in advance; we were to be moved to another room, she said, but the transfer never took place. There was no unpleasantness involved.

(“And a look out” is interesting to us, because I spent some time for a couple of days looking out our back motel room window, studying this particular view before finally taking a picture of it. This involved checking the appearance of the marsh grass at various times of the day to see when the light would be best, then waiting for a sunny day to increase contrast, etc.