“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Often, I could hear a powerful Seth through two closed doors. And so, we learned more than once in warm weather, could neighbors and passersby on West Water Street when our windows were open. But those occasions were relatively minor: consider the situation inside the house! Long ago, the three floors of the old house, a typical turn-of-the-last-century “mansion” on the main street three blocks west of Elmira’s business district, had been converted into eight apartments. All were continuously occupied during the 15 years Jane and I (and Seth for the last 11 of those years) lived there. Turnover was low, and we knew most of the other tenants, although no more than one or two of them at any time had an inkling of what we were up to with first the sessions and then the addition of the ESP classes. Even now I still correspond with two of those “ex-tenants”—loyal friends indeed!

Ed wanted to find number 92, the old double house that Jane had described to him as being her childhood home. We had crawled halfway along the avenue, between its dim corner streetlights, when my car’s headlights brushed over a shadowy feminine figure walking in our direction. Indeed, I was driving past the lady when Ed, looking back, exclaimed: “Hey, wait, Bob—that’s her! That’s Jane right there now. Pull over—” He was lowering his side window even as he spoke. Yes, it was Jane Zeh, expressing surprise in a clear musical voice at such a “chance” meeting as she came even with the car. I could see only part of her silhouette as Ed introduced us and told her I’d be working for him. Jane didn’t have a license to drive. She said that if she happened to be in Schuylerville during the day she’d stop in at Ed’s studio in town and say hello. (She did, but several weeks later.) Right then, she told us she was on her way to see her bedridden mother, Marie, as she often did at that time of night. She pointed out number 92, a few doors ahead of us. I said something innocuous to the effect that I looked forward to meeting her and her husband next Saturday night.

I had kept my very strong feelings for Jane to myself, or so I’d thought, and despaired at the idea of never seeing her again. I was the complete amateur at dealing with the personal interactions of others. I visited Walt and Jane at their apartment in Saratoga Springs and told them I’d be leaving the area. Jane discussed the decision she and Walt had made. Then, directly to me: “I’m leaving town, with or without you. So which is it going to be?” I was quite unprepared, yet knew at once what my answer would be. Even though I’d had no thought of interfering with, or taking advantage of, any complications between them. I can see Walt now, sitting by the window of their second-story apartment’s small living room, nodding at Jane’s words, his eyes wet. There was never a harsh word between us. Jane’s dog, Mischa, slept at her feet. It was only after Jane had begun the Seth material a number of years later that we realized that she and Walt, both coming from dysfunctional families, had chosen to come together at just the right time for their own mutually creative learning purposes—and that with those purposes fulfilled, each of them was ready to move on by the time I met them. At the time, however, I wasn’t ready to consciously understand such interlocking emotional relationships even though I was playing a part in one of them.

For whatever reasons, she had resolved along the way to do her own thing in her own way—with two exceptions. She went to Andy Colucci, a dentist (and friend) who had his office around the corner from where we lived on West Water Street for routine cleaning (she had perfect teeth); and on rare occasions one or both of us visited Sam Levine, a doctor who had his office on the ground floor of his building next-door to 458. We’d see him for an inoculation, say, or treatment for a cold. Did Doctor Sam ever hear Seth’s booming voice in the summertime, when windows were open, or the uproarious racket made by the members of Jane’s ESP class on Tuesday nights? Yes he did, he told Jane, but he didn’t understand what was going on—only that there were many extra cars parked in the neighborhood on Tuesday nights. And Jane wasn’t about to explain: “Hi, Sam. Hey, I’m speaking in a trance state for this nonphysical entity called Seth—a guy I knew in Denmark three hundred years ago. I wonder if you can help me deal with some of my symptoms, as I call them. They might be connected with my psychic work…” Not a chance! Doctor Sam was a very kind but reserved Jewish doctor who helped many people on a daily basis. Yet I do think that even if he hadn’t accepted Jane’s mediumship per se, still he would have recognized it as being a portion of her psyche.

At the end of the first day of the group’s most interesting visit. Richie and Yvette left to return to Connecticut. Jim and Debbie and Winter and Theresa left for the Holiday Inn in Elmira, New York, 15 miles across the Pennsylvania border. At the Inn in 1997 and 1999 Laurel and I had been guests at well-attended Seth conferences organized by Lynda Dahl and Stan Ulkowski. Our rich memories of those gatherings are nourished each time we drive past the Inn on our way to the hill house. We met our guests at the Inn the next morning, and the six of us drove in our three cars to a nearby country restaurant for breakfast. Then, with Laurel driving and our friends’ cars following, we traveled up a steep and winding hill just outside the city to not only a fine view but to Quarry Farm, an old-fashioned but large and elegant wooden homestead where Mark Twain had done some of his finest writing. No admittance, private property, a sign proclaimed, so we stood in the driveway just off the road to study the farm and its open and peaceful setting. Then back down into the city and to the campus of Elmira College. Jane had lectured to a class in creative writing at the college after the publication of Seth Speaks in 1972.There on the school’s green sward stood the small many-windowed gazebo that Mark Twain had worked in during his summers at the farm; it had been relocated to the college long ago. Not surprisingly it was locked, but still easy to inspect—and also to just accept as the people of Elmira and those in the college went about their daily activities. Mark Twain had been one of Jane’s favorite writers.

I pushed open the back fire door and the six of us clumped down the open stairs that Jane and I had used so many times. I worried about being an intruder into the domain of the people who lived in those dingy apartments now. Indeed, as we left the stairs two dogs in a back apartment set up a furious barking as they scratched at what I knew were kitchen windows. A friend of ours had lived in that apartment (and I still correspond with him). I was embarrassed: the dogs’ racket must have bothered everyone in the house. We saw no one, however, and the barking magically ceased as we moved around to the east side of 458 and surveyed it from a small paved parking lot. Once in that spot there had been flagstones and benches beneath an extended roof supported by four sets of wooden pillars. The tin-covered roof had born layers of old vines that had climbed up the pillars from our living-room windows on the second floor. Jane had liked to throw seed and bread crusts into the vines for the squirrels and birds to root out. The pigeons, cardinals, sparrows, blue jays and others had flown over from the Chemung River a quarter of a block away.

Early in this introduction I wrote that late in November 1963 Jane had had an out-of-body experience while writing her essay, The Physical Universe as Idea Construction—that she had looked in at herself from the porch roof outside our windows. That had been the porch she referred to. Long gone.

From the parking lot I pointed out to our guests the windows of Apartment 5 as they marched along the side of 458 on the second floor. Our landlord, Jimmy Spaziani, had told us that the entire apartment had been the master-bedroom complex of the wealthy merchant who had built the house for his family more than a century ago. The kitchen with its three tiny windows near the front of the house had been a closet; the three bay windows of the living room where Jane had held the sessions and her ESP class had been the main bedroom. Next comes the oversized bathroom with its stained glass window, tiled floor, and marble shower with eight nozzles. Jane and I had really enjoyed that shower! Then comes a smaller room that we had used as a bedroom, with one window in the back wall of the house. Finally, there’s the last room with its windows on three sides as it juts out on iron posts from the back of the house. Originally it had been a sun parlor. The room is open underneath. It had been my studio, and I’d had to insulate the floor.

I also described to our guests the great Seckel pear tree that had grown so beautifully in the back yard, with some of its branches—and fruit— within my reach from the windows of the studio. It must have died years ago, as did its companion, the apple tree I had drawn to illustrate Jane’s poem, “The You-ness of the Universe,” in her book of poems, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time (1975). At the Sayre house I have the large oil painting I did of the sunlight streaming through the windows of the studio on a certain day early in August: the only day in the year that the ever-moving sun casts that particular intriguing pattern of light and shadow across the bare wooden floor.

Once our three cars were parked in or near 1730’s driveway, Debbie Serra helped me unload the overstuffed roadside mailbox and carry the pile to my SUV. As we milled about the side porch and garage area and began talking about 1730, Jim politely asked if he and the other three guests could see the inside of it. Laurel just as politely declined. The cozy house that Jane and I had loved so much looked dark and forlorn. The door and window shades were drawn. The house needed painting. The porch’s screen door was wired shut in a crude way that wouldn’t keep anyone out.