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University, who has studied the case and believes it can be explained without citing supernatural forces.
The Patience Worth case remains one of the most tantalizing literary mysteries of the last century, a window onto a
vanished era when magic seemed to exist because so many people believed in it. In the decades since Pearl
Currans death, in 1937, no one has explained how she produced Patiences writing. Combing through the voluminous
archives, however, a modern sensibility starts to see clues and patterns that may not have been apparent at a time
when science was just starting to explore the far reaches of the human mind.
One by one, visitors would be called to sit with Pearl, who would let them question Patience or request a poem on a
specific topic. Sometimes, when Patience used a particularly odd word, John Curran would interrupt his note-taking to
look it up in an encyclopedia. Invariably an impulse to write would seize Patience, and she would announce that it was
time to work on one of her novels or plays. Then the pointer would fly around the board and Pearl would call out
words at the rate of 1,500 or so an hour, with never a seconds hesitation [and] never an alteration, noted a social
worker who attended a Patience Worth evening in 1918.
At first Pearl spelled out every letter with the Ouija board, but as time passed, the mere touch of her hand on the
pointer loosed a flood of spoken words. Eventually, she abandoned the board entirely; a feeling of slight pressure in
her head would announce Patiences arrival, and Pearl would begin reciting.
While Pearl recited, she behaved normally, with her eyes open and her senses alert to the faces and noises around
her. Sometimes, she looks over to a guest while writing and asks some question entirely foreign to what she is
spelling out; again answers the telephone or inquires what the message was; exchanges a few words of greeting to
late visitors as they enter and goes on with the work without a moments hesitation, recalled a visitor. Occasionally,
shed even smoke a cigarette.
Pearls archaic language and knowledge of history might have been partly the result of extraordinary memorythat
is, a replaying in her mind of information imprinted there by books she had read or listened to as a girl. It seems
similar to photographic memory surrounded by a context of spiritualism, says Howard Eichenbaum, director of the
Center for Memory and Brain at Boston University. But such a medical abnormality would not explain her stunning
narrative skills or the moments of true art in her writing.
We dont really have an explanation for cases like Pearl Currans, says McGaugh. Its a frontier of neuroscience
thats never really been explored. We just havent had the conceptual tools to think about it.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/.../patience-worth.../...
From Public Domain Review:
"The critics who extolled the quality of Worth/Curran had their reasons for doing so, some of which still hold up. It
should be emphasized again, that these are not just short lyric poems that one could see a Ouija-using author writing
in a few minutes. The sheer length of some of her books is astounding in itself, to say nothing of their literary quality.
One need only flip through The Pot upon the Wheel, a verse play whose dialogue sometimes reminds one of the
spiritual urgency of a classical religious text like the Bhagavad-Gita. Or take A Sorry Tale, a more than six hundred
page esoteric account of the life of Christ that at points reaches a prophetic pitch calling to mind the theology of
William Blake."
http://publicdomainreview.org/.../ghostwriter-and-ghost.../