“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“And your hearing is better than it’s been for what—years?” I continued. Jane agreed. “Yes—I can hear the birds now. Last year I started wondering where all the birds had gone.” “And you’ve had the whole hospital experience to use in the years ahead in your work,” I said. “Creatively. You’ve learned a lot about another way of life, met a lot of people: you’ve got a much wider base now from which to work....”

(Jane agreed again. “And I wish I’d written down all I’ve just told you,” I said. I began these notes, only to be interrupted as Jane began dictation. I finished them later.

I guess I really want to cry. (Long pause.) Maybe its actually when I feel most ambitious that I begin to feel most helpless, since I began to realize how little I’m actually doing. Just to look through a notebook is quite uncomfortable for me. I wonder if I could work with small ink sketches at all now. I could at least give that a try.

She called me all kinds of names. (Long pause.) I tried to understand but felt half-doped—indeed. Maybe even half-duped, because I could never figure out when her crying outrage, her screaming anguish, were real expressions of nearly unbearable moments, or when she was acting. She could do that too.

I took off with Walt on the motorcycle, and all the way across the country in my mind I heard her yell, “bitch, bitch, bitch.” Yet I’m certain I didn’t feel guilty. I was scared to death of her. For that matter, I was somewhat frightened of Walt, who threatened to leave me when he got angry in a new town we happened to be in, but we made it to the west coast.

So I wonder how much of this started then. I honestly thought I’d put most of that behind me—yet my early novels all dealt with the relationship between my mother and others, in various guises, and I know I was afraid that somehow she’d end up turning me into her.