“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(11:12 AM.) Last night (Jane said) I felt great when Robbie kissed me, and actually I slept quite well, both in my chair and bed. I felt fairly hopeful this morning, for example, yet now I feel quite sad again (with a tremolo), and I feel as if I want to express myself—but when I try there is some strange block.

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.

I guess I thought that I’d keep up some level of communication if I talked as I am now, and Robbie took the words down. Come to think of it, I did feel fairly hopeful this morning for brief snatches. I was going to record some memories that suddenly came to me yesterday morning. Of the last few months or so I spent at my mother’s house—when she called me time after time during those spring and summer months of 1950: she wanted her pillows turned, she cried out in rage and pain—and here I was some 30 years later, calling out to Rob (voice breaking) to move my pillows or raise my head.

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.

It must have taken something for me, at 21, to leave her that summer. She attempted suicide again, this time by taking an overdose of phenobarbital. Instead of making her sleepy, however, it turned her into someone wild: she yelled and shouted and tried to get out of bed. I was afraid she’d fall on the floor. She was taken directly to the hospital when I called the doctor, and I went back home to that odd, nervous house that felt strangely vacant with her presence gone. I packed my clothes.

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.

She had some jumbled psychic abilities, I suppose. She was great for reading tea leaves now and then, and I used to think how strange it was that she could do that yet couldn’t walk. She told me that sometime she walked in the night, and that some night she’d turn on the gas jets and kill us both. I really don’t know if it’s such a good idea to go over such memories or not, but since they came to mind I decided finally to have Rob write them down for me.

(I told Jane that as I listened to it some of the material sounded contradictory. That is, the young girl must have had some feelings of guilt for leaving her prostrate mother, etc. I thought that was perfectly natural, but extending those feelings for the next 30 years would seem to be too much in nature’s scheme—as I’ve said before, it doesn’t seem to me that nature necessarily wants things to work that way, while making perfectly possible the fact that they can, if one chooses. This may be a case of things being redeemed on a “higher” level, I suppose—reminding me of material I’ve been dealing with recently in the intro for Seth/Jane’s Dreams.