“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: you (to me) have been wondering whether or not to use family photographs in “Unknown” Reality. On the one hand you see how they fit into the book. Yet photographs are also connected in your mind with paintings to some degree. This is visual data, and as far as photographs are concerned personal data, out in the open, so to speak.

Your private nature makes you wonder if that involves too much disclosure, particularly where family members are concerned. The connection with paintings brings about your desire that the photographs be “as perfect as possible.” You do not want anyone else to have a hand in your own work—that is in your paintings. To reproduce paintings, or in this case photographs, seems to be tampering with them in that regard. That is, if an editor changed your copy you would be annoyed, but reproduction, you fear, can change the copy of a photograph or a painting if it is not done properly. You consider photographs originals in that regard.

The idea of disclosure however is more important, for you remember that your mother did not like to have her photograph taken. If you included any pictures of her, would she be annoyed? She did not like to have her picture taken on the one hand because she feared disclosure, and on the other hand, because her sense of perfection was affected—particularly in later years by an imperfect image.

Your stomach began to bother you when you considered whether or not to use photographs. (On Sunday, when I bought an album to keep them in.) You have the idea of how the book can appear, a model that exists in your mind. Use the model, but let it be a flexible one, in which your ideals work with the material at hand, molding it. Do not exaggerate, however, so that the ideal seems to be a perfection that cannot be attained given the conditions.

Self-disclosure and the desire for perfection are each involved, then. You know that no self-disclosure will lead to perfection, and yet self-disclosure and perfection can seem to be like opposites. Do not think in terms of perfection and nonperfection, but of bringing your ideas to life, and of using photographs to express those ideas.

You understand that private experience, imperfect but creative, underlies the points in “Unknown” Reality. Creatively you see the photographs’ value, but they still caused a conflict between your ideas of perfection and self-disclosure, particularly as they were related to your mother’s attitudes.

There is also a connection with your family’s photograph albums in general, and I have a suggestion to clearly give your father credit as photographer. Otherwise, regardless of what you say you thought, your mother would take my explanation as given.

(There was a short exchange between Seth and me, which I didn’t note down verbatim. He repeated that my mother would be against using photographs of her—something I’d never arrived at with the pendulum. When Seth asked if I had more questions, finally, I said no, that I’d have to think it over, and that perhaps we’d decide not to use photographs after all in “Unknown” Reality.

(This really surprised me, since for some months I’ve had the idea that my own reluctance to use photographs was a weakness on my part, when it was obvious that they’d add considerably to the books. But my reluctance was based, I thought, on my resentment at Prentice-Hall over their handling of art work; I really didn’t want to let the photos in question out of the house, for fear they’d be lost, etc. This in spite of Tam’s assurances some months ago that they’d be handled with care, etc. I still think my reaction here is valid. But I missed out on the connections involving my mother, disclosure, etc.