Ghosts in The Machine: Spooky looks at the Met.

Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Perfect Medium

National Review Online, October 31, 2005

I'm not altogether sure that New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is taking its new, entertaining, and utterly charming exhibition dedicated to photography and the occult, entirely seriously. At the launch party for "The Perfect Medium" last month, giggling guests sipped smoke-shrouded potions to woo-woo-woo Theremin tunes, as vast projected images of the séances of a century ago shimmered silver-and-gray against the walls of a great hall that could just, just for a moment, have been in Transylvania. Up beyond the sweep of the Met's Norma Desmond staircase, a cheery crowd thronged past antique photographs of spirits, charlatans, and strange, vaguely unsettling, effluvia. As I peered closely, and myopically, at a mess of tweed and ectoplasm, there was a sudden, startling "boo" in my ear, and a pretty girl who had crept up behind me ran off laughing. As I said, unsettling. As I said, charming.

Unfortunately, the exhibition's catalog is, as such volumes have to be, straight-faced, straight-laced, and saturated in the oddball orthodoxies of the contemporary intelligentsia. With truth, these days, relative, and all opinions valid, it would be too much to expect an establishment such as the Met to say boo to a ghost and it doesn't. In the catalog's foreword the museum's director admits that "controversies over the existence of occult forces cannot be discounted," but he is quick to stress how "the approach of this exhibition is resolutely historical. The curators present the photographs on their own terms, without authoritative comment on their veracity."

Fair, if cowardly, enough, but a chapter entitled "Photography and The Occult" sinks into po-mo ooze: "The traditional question of whether or not to believe in the occult will be set aside...the authors' [Pierre Apraxine and Sophie Schmit] position is precisely that of having no position, or, at least not in so Manichean a form...To transpose such Manicheanism to photography would inevitably mean falling into the rhetoric of proof, or truth or lies, which has been largely discredited in the arena of photography discourse today," something, quite frankly, which does not reflect well on the arena of photography discourse today. Still, if you want a nice snapshot of how postmodernism can be the handmaiden of superstition, there it is. Standing up for evidence, logic and reason is somehow "Manichean", no more valid than the witless embrace of conjuring tricks, disembodied voices and things that go bump in the night. It's a world, um "arena," where proof and truth are reduced to "rhetoric," and, thus, are no more than a debating device stripped of any real meaning.

Thankfully the exhibition, principally dedicated to photographs of the spooky from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is itself free of such idiocies. The images are indeed allowed to stand "on their own terms" and, on their own terms, they fall straight down. They are, quite obviously bogus, balderdash, and baloney, slices of sepia stupidity that are magnificent proof of our species' wonderful curiosity and embarrassing evidence of its hopeless credulity. They were also very much the creations of their own time. After over a century of manipulated images, vanishing commissars and Hollywood magic, we are better at understanding that photography's depiction of reality can often be no more reliable than a half-heard rumor or a whispered campfire tale. One hundred forty years or so ago, we were more trusting in technology, more prepared to believe that the camera could not lie.

And we were wrong to do so. On even a moment's inspection the Met's ghosts, sprites, emanations, and fairies are as ramshackle as they are ridiculous, but all too often they did the trick. The work of the depressingly influential William Mumler, an American photographer operating in the 1860s and 1870s, may include a spectral Abraham Lincoln with his hands resting on the shoulders of Mumler's most famous client, the bereft and crazy Mary Todd Lincoln, but, like the rest of his eerie oeuvre, this insult to John Wilkes Booth was based on crude double exposure (or a variant thereof). Nevertheless, the career of the phantoms' paparazzo flourished for a decade or so, even surviving a trial for fraud (he was acquitted).

Or take a look at the once famous photographs of the Cottingley fairies (1917-20), absurd pictures of wee fey folk frolicking with some schoolgirls in England's Yorkshire countryside. Once you have stopped laughing, ask yourself just why, exactly, the fairies resemble illustrations from magazines. Well, it's elementary, my dear Watson, that's what they were (one of the girls finally confessed in 1981), but to the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a man who dedicated an entire book (The Coming of The Fairies) to the topic, and to many other believers, these fraudulent fairies were the real, fluttering, deal. Fairies were, explained Conan Doyle, a butterfly/human mix, a technically awkward combination that even the great Holmes might have found to be a three-pipe problem.

To be fair, by the 1920s, the possibilities of photographic fakery were no secret to the informed, but this made no difference to Sir Arthur, a convinced spiritualist who was to receive his reward by returning, like Holmes, from the dead (within six hours of his death, the author had popped up in England, moving on later to Vancouver, Paris, New York, Milan and, as ectoplasm, in Winnipeg). Conan Doyle believed what he wanted to believe, and so did his fellow-believers. Photographs could confirm them in their faith, but never overthrow it.

That's a recurrent theme of this exhibition. Yes, back then people were more inclined to give photographs the benefit of the doubt, but again and again we are shown pictures that were demonstrated at the time to be fake, something that did remarkably little to shake the conviction of many spiritualists that the dear departed were just a snapshot away. Even the obvious crudities and photographic inconsistencies could be, and were, explained as a deliberate device of the spirits—apparently they wanted to appear as cut-outs, illustrations, and blurs.

And it wasn't only photographers who egged the susceptible on. The idea that some gifted individual can act as an intermediary between the living and the dead is an idea as old as imbecility, but, after the dramatic appearance of New York State's rapping and tapping Fox sisters in the 1840s, the Victorian era saw a flowering of mediums, only too ready to impress the credulous with mumbo jumbo, materializations, mutterings, Native-American spirit guides (some things never change), transfigurations, grimaces, and tidings from beyond. Some were in it for the money, others for the attention, and a few, poor souls, may have actually believed in what they were doing.

The Met's show includes a fine selection dedicated to those mediums at work. Tables soar, chairs take flight, men in old-fashioned suits levitate, apparitions appear, and ghostly light flashes between outstretched hands. Most striking of all are the visions of ectoplasm snaking out of mouths, nostrils, and other orifices quite unmentionable on a respectable website. These grubby pieces of cotton, giblets, and who knows what were a messy but logical development, manufactured miracles for what was, in essence, a manufactured religion. Like the photographs, like dead Walter's mysterious thumbprint (don't ask), they were evidence. The immaterial had been made material, and in a supposedly more skeptical age, that's what counted. In great part, the enormous popularity of spiritualism in the later 19th century was a response to the threat that science increasingly represented to the certainties of traditional belief. Science had made Doubting Thomases of many, but spiritualism, by purportedly offering definitive proof of an afterlife, enabled its followers to reconcile ancestral faith and eternal superstitions with, they thought, fashionable modernity and the rigors of scientific analysis.

That the science was junk, and the evidence bunk, did not, in the end, matter very much. What counted was that old superstitions had been given a new veneer, and, if that veneer soon warped into a bizarre creed all its own, that's something that ought not to surprise anyone familiar with the nonsense in which mankind has long been prepared to believe—and still is. Any visitor to "The Perfect Medium" tempted to feel superior to the credulous old fogies now making fools of themselves on the walls of the Met should take another look at the metaphysical shambles that surrounds him in our modern America of snake churches, suburban shamans, mainstreet psychics, psychic detectives, pet psychics, psychic hotlines, spirit guides, movie-star scientology, alien abductions, celebrity Kabbalah, Crossing Over, Ghost Hunters, Shirley Maclaine, resentful Wiccans, preachy pagans, and (though I know this won’t be entirely welcome) don't even get me started on Intelligent Design.

Oh yes, "Happy Halloween," one and all...

Dead Zone

National Review Online, December 8, 2004

Lily Dale, September, 2004 © Andrew Stuttaford

If the painter Thomas Kinkade has redesigned Heaven—and who’s to say that he hasn’t?—it might look a little like Lily Dale, a tiny community about an hour south of Buffalo. On a gentle-breeze, blue-sky, no-cares, endless-summer sort of day, gingerbread Victorian cottages doze alongside tranquil, flag-festooned streets. The houses’ colors—white, yellow, gray—are, like their inhabitants, mainly muted, gentle by design or faded by the years. Only occasional flashes of eccentricity—an unexpected plague of stone angels here, a rash of concrete cherubs there—signal to visitors that there’s something not quite right, not Shyamalan wrong, but odd nonetheless, about this idyllic village nestled so prettily against a quiet lake.

Even Lily Dale’s visitors (those that are visible anyway—I’ll explain that remark later) seem more subdued than the typical vacationing hordes, more Trappist than tourist, chatting among themselves in low tones as they stroll towards their destinations. Once—over a century ago—there was a Ferris wheel here, a bowling alley, dances, even (oh, the thrill!) speeches by Susan B. Anthony, but those excitements have passed, vanished into history and stiff sepia images. But guests can still wander under the shade of trees more than a hundred years old now, and, if they choose, across a series of small, perfectly kept parks—immaculately green as they sweep down in the direction of the lake, itself smooth, untroubled, and inviting, gently lapping up against the eastern edge of town.

And the sense that there’s something celestial about this place is only reinforced by a small white-pillared “Forest Temple” half-hidden amid some trees and by the “Healing Temple” that can be found nearby (yes, yes, I was “healed,” blue light discovered burning within me, long story). Bells toll at certain times of day summoning the faithful to meditation, ritual, and to quavering old tunes played on a quavering old organ, the singing of quavering old hymns of spirit messages and eternal light.

These people are, quite clearly, not Baptists.

To find out more, enter the cool, dark Leolyn Woods. Like so much in Lily Dale, they are unexpected survivors, a rare scrap of old-growth forest. Walk straight ahead. Don’t be tempted by the questionable attractions of the pet cemetery. Look instead for an ancient tree stump—Inspiration Stump, they call it here—and the people gathered there to hear from the hereafter. They have turned up for the daily “message service,” a séance, stand-up style, at the stump, starring the quick (a rapid succession of mediums) and the dead (a host of the dear departed—dads, moms, a brother or two).

If you’re ex, Lily Dale is in.

People have been bothering the dead in Lily Dale since 1879. That was the year in which a handful of pioneers, enthusiastic participants in the great wave of spookery and table tapping that gripped those supposedly sensible Victorians, first bought property here. It was to be a permanent site (only Spiritualists can own property in “the Dale,” even today) for enlightenment, and communication with corpses—a “White Acre,” wrote Mrs. Abby Louise Pettengill (its 1903 president), “where all may receive the benediction of the unseen world.”

She would have been pleased to see (and perhaps she did, who knows?) the small but expectant crowd waiting one Friday evening in Lily Dale’s Assembly Hall for a benediction from another world, in their case a chinwag with ET. Like Spiritualism before it, much UFO mythology is an attempt to reconcile mystical and superstitious impulses with the unwelcome realities of an age of science. And like Spiritualism it soon descends into mush-mutterings of otherworldly visitors, enlightened beings, and contact with the mysterious, thrilling unknown, talk which the late (or not) Mrs. Pettengill would surely have relished.

And when it comes to enlightened beings, there’s no better guide than the human speaker that night, writer and soulapath (don’t ask) Lisette Larkins. She’s the author of Listening to Extraterrestrials: Telepathic Coaching by Enlightened Beings; Talking to Extraterrestrials: Communicating with Enlightened Beings; and, alarmingly for those of us familiar with the work of Fox Mulder, Calling on Extraterrestrials: 11 Steps to Inviting Your Own UFO Encounters. After an hour or so of New Age banality and musical interludes that would have insulted Yanni, an alien turns up, but, dismayingly, via Ms. Larkins rather than in person. Repeatedly shaking her head from side to side, alien Lisette starts speaking in a slow, faintly mechanical voice slightly reminiscent of Hillary Rodham Clinton. She is purportedly channeling messages from our extraterrestrial visitor, but the vague beatitudes and something about “connecting” reveal only that this particular alien is from Planet Hallmark. That’s not worth the price of admission. For 30 bucks I expect Klaatu barada nikto or, at least, sexy Sil from Species.

Where flying saucers hover, other nonsense is never far behind. Sure enough, the Crystal Cove, Lily Dale’s gift shop, is a supermarket of superstitions, a casbah for the credulous, its pick-’n’-mix spirituality a perfect symbol of the intellectual confusions of our age. It’s all there: the supernatural bric-a-brac (Celtic crosses, misting bowls, chalices, spell books, fortune-telling kits, candles, Ouija boards, strange hanging things); the tarot (tarot of love, fairy-tale tarot, universal Waite tarot, basic tarot, spiral tarot, Lord of the Rings tarot, unicorn tarot, dragon tarot, tarot of the Sephirot, herbal tarot, renaissance tarot, quest tarot, tarot of a moon garden, Morgan-Greer tarot); cosmic kitsch (fairies, angels, fairies, unicorns, fairies, various goddesses, fairies, the goddess, yet more fairies, wizards); and the inevitable Native Americana, complete, naturally, with Native American tarot.

Despite that very contemporary willingness to accept any reassuring mumbo-jumbo, however ludicrous, so long as it can be wrapped in vaguely mystical garb, in its core Lily Dale clings to the traditions of its slightly off, determined founders, those earnest Victorians convinced that table-tapping, séances, and other conjuring tricks could give them what generations had dreamed of: proof, scientific proof, that we all enjoy an encore in a place some called Summerland. According to Spiritualism, nobody dies. We “pass,” we don’t die. There is no death, only a “transition.” Nevertheless, for a faith that revolves around eternal life, Spiritualism has always had a rather morbid fixation with that dicey moment that, as a pessimist, I still call, well, death. In all its prettiness, there’s a touch of the funeral parlor about Lily Dale, something a little oppressive, something too hushed, too over-scented, too much.

In a way this is inevitable. It’s death that brings the living to Lily Dale. Offer the grief-stricken and the lonely the chance, any chance, to talk to those that they have lost, and some will try their luck. And where there are the desperate, there will be those who take advantage of them. You can see their traces in Lily Dale’s museum, most strikingly in a collection of relics from the Gilded Age, a golden age, quite clearly, of bunkum. There are the slates on which the spirits allegedly scrawled their enigmatic messages, the spirit trumpets that floated through the air, even the peculiar, strangely compelling paintings that supposedly materialized onto canvas untouched by (living) human hand, paintings of the passed, paintings of spirit guides, even, helpfully, a painting of the spirit world to come. It looks, yes, a little like something Thomas Kinkade might have done, but since its artist was dead at the time, it’s churlish to carp.

In our scientific age, our time of reason and progress, our era of Kabbalah, crystals, alien abductions, Wicca, homeopathy, goddess worship, Al Gore, past-life regression, astral travel, psychic hotlines, recovered memories, Feng Shui, and creation “science,” all that old sideshow spiritualism seems somehow something of a relic, too crass, too embarrassing, too crude for an epoch so spiritually sophisticated that Madonna is a major religious figure. The trumpets have been stilled: “physical mediumship” is rarely practiced in Lily Dale these days, but the hunger that nourished it still remains.

You can see it—neurotic, compulsive, relentless, and not a little sad—in the capacity crowd packed into the Dale’s auditorium to listen to the medium James van Praagh “Making The Psychic Connection” between, ambitiously, “Heaven and Earth.” We’ve each paid $80 to hear him.

That’s more than twice the price of an extraterrestrial, but, in the dim galaxy of contemporary superstition, James Van Praagh is a star. Like Amy Fisher and Adolf Hitler, he too has been the subject of a TV miniseries (played by Ted Danson!), a cultural accolade matched only by his multiple appearances on Larry King Live. He’s a best-selling author and recording artist and a man who, judging by his website, survived a childhood that combined the worst of Jeffrey Dahmer (“an average child, he remembers having a tremendous fascination with death”) with the best of Joan of Arc (“an open hand appeared through the ceiling…emitting radiant beams of light”). Despite a weakness for the saccharine (“When a bright smile overcomes tears, it becomes a smile that can light up the world”), Van Praagh is also highly entertaining. He’s John Edward with good jokes, a Frank Cannon moustache, and a way with the ladies who make up the bulk of his beguiled and besotted audience.

Some are there just to gawp at the dead men talking (many spirits, yikes, are “here with us today”), while others have come to be soothed by Van Praagh’s soft-soap sermons. “Death” is painless, everybody’s immortal, and we all end up in Heaven. “Step into that world,” he purrs, “there’s no judgment.” It’s a perfect gospel for a society in full flight from the notion that we should ever have to account for our actions. Some spectators, sadder, unhinged, pleading, are there for the answers, and the comfort, that reality cannot provide. Sharon has survived “a couple of terminal illnesses” but is not satisfied with the advice of her doctors (she’s led away to speak to a “medical intuitive”), while others, weeping, choking up, voices cracking, tell of sick friends, of children killed in motorcycle accidents, of relatives lost to cancer, and the rest of the carnage we call daily life.

These are people who want to believe. When Van Praagh starts tossing out ambiguous communiqués from beyond, it doesn’t take long before someone can be found who thinks that these messages might be for her. Another quick succession of references, names, and clues follow, all seemingly precise, but in reality vague enough to allow the respondent to find something in it for herself and, in replying, give Van Praagh further, invaluable guidance for his next step, and, ultimately, “validation”: the supposedly specific factoid needed to prove that long-dead dad is indeed with us that day. It looks to me a lot like an old technique known as “cold reading.” All it takes is a quick mind, intuition, and (no problem here) an audience that has lost connection with reality.

Still, Van Praagh manages, there’s no denying, some remarkable hits: coincidence, or, perhaps, well…

Whatever the explanation, none of my dead relatives shows up. Much as I would like it to, this proves nothing. They were a reserved lot and none of them would have been seen dead in a place like the auditorium. With the thought that somewhere more discreet might be more inviting, I decide on an individual consultation with one of the many mediums that have set up shop in Lily Dale. She’s a kindly soul, a late middle-aged woman with twinkling eyes, a jolly smile, and 40 of my dollars. Within a few minutes, and, shall we say, some gentle prompting on my part, she has proof that both (a twofer!) my grandmothers are with us in the room. As they’ve been dead for nearly 30 years, that’s quite a family get-together, like a childhood Christmas back in England, even if I can’t actually see the guests.

And if I believe that, I’m the Christmas turkey.