Part 5

Concerning these drawings, there are preliminary explanations to be made. They were done hastily, by two busy people. Neither is a trained artist, and our ability to convey what we wish is limited. When I start on a giraffe, I manage to produce a pretty good neck, but when I get to the body, I am disturbed to note it turning into a sheep or a donkey. When I draw a monkey climbing a tree, and Craig says, “Buffalo or lion, tiger—wild animal”—I have to admit that may be so; likewise when my limb of a tree is called a “trumpet,” or when Craig’s “wild animal” resembles a chorus girl’s legs. I will let you see those particular drawings. Figure 24 is mine, while 24a and 24b are my wife’s.

Again, I draw a volcano in eruption, and my wife calls it a black beetle, which hardly sounds like a triumphant success; but study the drawings, and you see that my black smoke happens to be the shape of a beetle, while the two sides of the volcano serve very well for the long feelers of an insect (Figs. 25, 25a):

The tests began with four series of drawings, 38 in all, made by my secretary. Following these were 31 series drawn by myself, comprising 252 separate drawings. Each drawing would be wrapped in an extra sheet of paper, and sealed in a separate envelope, and the envelopes handed to my wife when she was ready for the tests. She would put them on the table by her couch, and lie down, putting the first envelope, unopened, over her solar plexus, covered by her hand. Her head would be lying back on a pillow, eyes closed, and head at such an angle that nothing but the ceiling could be seen if the eyes were open. A dim light to avoid sense stimulation; enough light to see everything plainly. When she had what she judged was the right image, she would take a pad and pencil and make the drawing or write the description of what she “saw.” Then she would open the envelope and compare the two drawings, and number both for identification.

This recording was, of course, an interruption of her passive state, and made the task difficult. In a few cases she repeated a number or forgot the number, and this leaves a chance for confusion. I have done my best to clear up all such uncertainties, but there is a margin of error of one or two per cent to be noted. This is too small to affect the results, but is mentioned in the interest of exactness.

Since I found the sealing of envelopes tiresome, and Craig found the opening of them more so, we decided half way through the tests to abandon the sealing, and later we abandoned the envelopes altogether. We reasoned that acceptance of the evidence rests upon our good faith anyhow, and all that any sensible reader can ask is that Craig make sure of never letting a drawing get within her range of vision. She was doing this laborious work to get knowledge for herself, and she certainly made sure that she was not wasting her own time.

At present the practice is this: I make her a set of six or eight drawings on little sheets of pad paper, and lay them face down on her table, with a clean sheet of paper over them. She lies down, and with her head lying back on the pillow and her eyes closed, she reaches for one of the drawings, and slides it over and onto her body, covered by her hand. It is always out of her range of vision, even if the drawing were turned toward her eyes, which it never is.

For the comfort of the suspicious, let me add that the relaxing of the conditions caused no change in the averages. In the first four series, drawn by my secretary, and sealed by him in envelopes, there were only five complete failures in thirty-eight tests, which is thirteen per cent; whereas in the 252 drawings made by me there have been 65 outright failures, which is nearly twice as large a percentage. Series number six, which was carefully sealed up, produced four complete successes, five partial successes, and no failures; whereas series twenty-one, which was not put in envelopes at all, produced no complete successes, three partial successes, and six failures. Perhaps I should explain that by a “series” I mean simply a group of drawings which were done at one time. It is my custom to make from six to a dozen and when Craig has finished with them, they are put into an envelope and filed away.

I will add that Craig again and again begged me to sit and watch her work, so that I might be able to add my testimony to hers; I did so, watching tests both with envelopes and without, and assure you she left no loophole for self-deception. There was plenty of light to see by, and some of the most startling successes were produced under my eyes. I will add that no one could take this matter with more seriousness than my wife. She is the most honorable person I know, and she has worked on these experiments with rigid conscientiousness.

_11_

I shall give a number of the successful drawings, and some of the partial successes, but none of the failures, for these obviously are merely waste. When I draw a cow, and my wife draws a star or a fish or a horseshoe, all you want is the word “Failure” and then you want to know the percentage of failures, so that you can figure the probabilities. Failures prove nothing that you do not already believe; if your ideas are to be changed, it is successes that will change them.

I begin with series three, because of the interesting circumstances under which it was made. Late in the afternoon I phoned my secretary to make a dozen drawings; and then, after dark, Craig and I decided to drive to Pasadena, and on the way I stopped at the office and got the twelve sealed envelopes which had been laid on my desk. I picked them up in a hurry and slipped them into a pocket, and a minute or two later I put them on the seat beside me in the car.

After we had started, I said, “Why don’t you try some of the drawings on the way?” We were passing through the Signal Hill oil-field, amid thunder of machinery and hiss of steam and flashing of headlights of cars and trucks. “It will be interesting to see if I can concentrate in such circumstances,” said Craig, and took one envelope and held it against her body in the darkness, while I went on with my job of driving. After a few minutes Craig said, “I see something long and oblong, like a stand.” She got a pad and pencil from a pocket of the car, and switched on the ceiling light, and made a drawing, and then opened the envelope. Here are the pictures; I call it a partial success (Figs. 26, 26a):

Here is the next pair, done on the same drive to Pasadena (Figs. 27, 27a):

Then came a drawing of an automobile. Considering the attendant circumstances, it was surely not surprising that Craig should report it as “a big light in the end of a tube or horn.” There were many such lights in her eyes.

Then a fourth envelope: she said, “I see a little animal or bug with legs, and the legs are sticking out in bug effect.” When she looked into the envelope, she was so excited that she tried to get me to look—at forty miles an hour on a highway at night! Here is the drawing, meant to be a skull and cross-bones, but so done that a “bug with legs” is really a fair description of it (Fig. 28):

After we arrived at our destination, my wife did some more of the drawings, and got partial successes. On this telephone the comment was: “Goblet with another one floating near or above it inverted” (Figs. 29, 29a):

And then this arrow (Figs. 30, 30a):

Concerning the above my wife wrote: “See something that suggests a garden tool—a lawn rake, or spade.” And for the next one (Fig. 31) she wrote: “A pully-bone”—which is Mississippi “darky” talk for a wish-bone of a chicken. I don’t know whether it means a bone that you pull, or whether it is Creole for “poulet.” Here is what my secretary had drawn (Fig. 31):

I had asked my secretary at the outset to make simple geometrical designs, letters and figures, thinking that these would be easier to recognize and reproduce. But they brought only partial successes; Craig would get elements of the drawing but would not know how to put them together. There were seven in the first series, and there is some element right in every one. An oblong was drawn exactly, and then two fragments of oblongs added to it. A capital M in script had the first stroke done exactly, with the curl. A capital E in script was done with the curls left out.

And the same with the second series. Here is a square—but you see that the two halves of it are wandering about (Figs. 32, 32a):

And here is a letter Y, but by telepathy it has been turned from script into print (Figs. 33, 33a):

A quite different story began when my secretary allowed his imagination a little play. He knows that my wife lives in part on milk, and he knows that she is particular about the quality, because he has to handle the bills. So he has a little fun with her, and you see that immediately she gets, not the form, but the color and feeling of it (Figs. 34, 34a):

The comment reads: “Round white foamy stuff on top like soap suds or froth.” As she drinks her milk sour and whipped, you see that its foaminess is a prominent feature.

Then comes an oil derrick. We live in the midst of these unsightly objects, and are liable to be turned out of house and home by drilling nearby; moreover, I have written a book called “Oil!” and the exclamation mark at the end has been justified by the effect of it on our lives. My wife made a figure five with long lines going out, and wrote: “I don’t know why the five should have such a thing as an appendage, but the appendage was most vivid, so there it is” (Figs. 35, 35a):

After she had opened the envelope and seen the original drawing, the problem became, not why a figure five should have an appendage, but why an oil derrick should have a figure five. Craig puzzled over this, and then lay down and told her subconscious mind to bring her the answer. What came was this: the German version of my book, called “Petroleum,” has three oil derricks on the front, and a huge dollar sign on the back of the cover, and this was what Craig had really “seen.” She had looked at this book when it arrived, a year or more back, and it had been filed away in her memory. Of course, this may not be the correct explanation, but it is the one which her mind brought to her.

_12_

These drawing tests afford a basis for psycho-analysis, and it is interesting to note some of the facts thus brought up from the childhood of my wife. For example, fires! She was raised in the “black belt,” where there are nine Negroes to one white, and the former are still close to Africa. When Craig was a girl, a nurse in the family, having been discharged, set fire to the home while the adults were away, and the children asleep. Another servant, jealous of an unfaithful husband, put her two babies into a barrel full of feathers and burned them alive. Other fires occurred; so now, in her home, Craig keeps an uneasy eye out for greasy rags, or overheated stoves, or whatever else her fears suggest. When in these drawing tests there has been anything indicating fire or smoke, she has “got” it, with only one or two failures out of more than a dozen cases. Sometimes she “got” the fire or smoke without the object; sometimes she supplied fire or smoke to an object which might properly have it—a pipe, for example. The results are so curious that I assemble them together—a series of fire-alarms, as it were.

You recall the fact that in one of the early drawing tests—those in which, instead of giving the drawings to my wife, I sat in my study and concentrated upon them—I drew a lighted cigarette, and thought of the curls of smoke. Craig filled up her drawing with curves, and wrote: “I can’t draw it, but curls of some sort.” At this time the convention that “curls stood for smoke” had not been established. But now, in the series drawn by my secretary, appeared a little house with smoking chimney, and you will see that my wife got the smoke better than the house (Figs. 36, 36a):

This apparently established in her mind the association of curls with smoke. So when, in series six, I drew a pipe with smoke-curls, my wife first drew an ellipse, and then wrote: “Now it begins to spin, round and round, and is attached to a stick.” She then drew (Figs. 37, 37a):

In series eight I drew a sky-rocket going up. My first impulse had been to draw a bursting rocket, with a shower of stars, but I realized that would be difficult, so I drew this instead (Fig. 38):

My wife apparently took my first thought, rather than my drawing. Anyhow, she made half a dozen sketches of whirligigs and light (Figs. 38a, 38b, 38c):

And here in series twenty-two is a burning lamp (Figs. 39, 39a):

And here in series thirty-four another, with comment: “flame and sparks” (Figs. 40, 40a):

I drew another pipe in series twenty-two, with the usual curls of smoke; and Craig wrote: “Smoke stack.” I drew another in series thirty-three with the result that, five drawings in advance of the correct one, Craig drew a pipe with smoke. Of course, this may have been a coincidence; but wait till you see how often such coincidences happen! (Figs. 41, 41a):

In series twenty-one I drew a chimney, and Craig drew a chimney, and added smoke. In thirty-four I drew an old-fashioned trench-mortar; and here again she supplied the smoke (Figs. 42, 42a):

Cannons are especially horrible things to her, as you may note again and again in her published war-sonnets:

The sharpened steel whips round, the black guns blaze, Waste are the harvests, mute the songs of birds.

So when, in series eleven, I drew the muzzle half of an old-style cannon, Craig’s imagination got to work one drawing ahead of time. She wrote: “Fire and smoke—smoke—flame,” and then drew as follows (Fig. 43a):

The next drawing was the cannon, and I give it, along with the drawing Craig made to go with it. The comment she wrote was: “Half circle—double lines—light inside—light is fire busy whirling or flaming” (Figs. 44, 44a):

So much for fires, and things associated with fire. Now consider another detail about life in the Yazoo delta, brought out in the course of our psycho-analysis. In the days of Craig’s childhood, poisonous snakes were an ever-present menace, and fear of them had to be taught to children, and could hardly be taught too early. There is a family story of a little tot crawling under the house and coming back to report, “I see nuffin wiv a tail to it!” In the swamps back of Craig’s summer home on the Mississippi Sound I have counted a dozen copperheads and moccasins in the course of a half hour’s walk. Also, her father has some childhood complex buried in his mind, which causes him to have a spell of nausea at the sight of a snake. All this, of course, strongly affected the child’s early days, and now it is in her mental depths. So when I drew a hissing snake, just see the uproar I caused! She made no drawing, but wrote a little essay. I give my drawing, and her essay following (Fig. 45):

“See something like kitten with tail and saucer of milk. Now it leaps into action and runs away to outdoors. Turns to fleeing animal outdoors. Great activity among outdoor creatures. Know it’s some outdoor thing, not indoor object—see trees, and a frightened bird on the wing (turned sidewise). It’s outdoor thing, but none of above seems to be _it_.”

In other words, little Mary Craig Kimbrough is back on the plantation, seeing terror among birds and poultry, and not knowing what causes it! Study the drawing, and you see that I got the action of the snake, but didn’t get the coils very well, so they might be a “saucer of milk”—and a sure-enough kitten’s tail sticking out from it. Another childhood horror here! Craig was a fat little thing, and she slipped and plumped down on her favorite pet kitten, and exploded it.

_13_

The person whom we are subjecting to this process of psycho-analysis has a strong color sense, and wanted to be a painter. So we note that she “gets” colors and names them correctly. Here is my drawing of what I meant to be a bouquet of pink roses (Figs. 46, 46a):

Or take this case of a lobster. Craig’s comment was: “Gorgeous colors, red and greenish tinges.” Apparently I had failed to decide whether I was drawing a live lobster or a boiled one! My wife wrote further: “Now it turns into a lizard, camelian, reds and greens.” When she sees this about to be made public, she is embarrassed by her bad spelling; but she says: “Please do not overlook the fact that a chameleon is a reptile—and so is a lobster.” I dutifully quote her, even though her zoology is even worse than her spelling! (Figs. 47, 47a):

While we are on the “reptiles,” I include this menacing crab, which may have got hold of little Mary Craig’s toe on the beach of the Mississippi Sound (Fig. 48):

For the crab, Craig made two drawings, on opposite sides of the paper (Figs. 48a, 48b):

The comments on the above read: “Wings, or fingers—wing effect, but no feathers, things like fingers instead of feathers. Then many little dots which all disappear, and leave two of them, O O, as eyes of something.” And then, “Streamers flying from something.”

Another color instance: I drew the head of a horse, and Craig drew a lot of apparently promiscuous lines, and at various places wrote “yellow,” “white,” “blue,” “(dark),” and then a general description, “Oriental.” Afterwards she said to me: “That looks like a complete failure; yet it was so vivid, I can’t be mistaken. Where did you get that horse?” Said I: “I copied it from a Sunday supplement.” We got the paper from the trash-basket, and the page opposite the horse contained what Craig described. We shall note several other cases of this sort of intrusion of things I did not draw, but which I had before me while drawing.

Also anything with metal or shine seems to stand a good chance of being “got.” For example, these nose-glasses (Figs. 49, 49a):

The comment reads: “Opalescent shine or gleam. Also peafowl.”

Or again, a belt-buckle; my wife writes the word “shines” (Figs. 50, 50a):

Or this very busy alarm clock—she writes the same word “shines” (Figs 51, 51a):

She has got at least part of a watch whenever one has been presented. You remember the one Bob drew (Fig. 17). There was another in series thirty-three; Craig made a crude drawing and added: “Shines, glass or metal” (Figs. 52, 52a):

Also, on the automobile ride to Pasadena, series three, there was a watch-face among the drawings, and Craig drew the angle of the hands, and added the words, “a complication of small configurations.” Having arrived in Pasadena, she took the twelve drawings and tried them over again. This time, of course, she had a one in twelve chance of guessing the watch. She wrote: “A white translucent glimmering, or shimmering which I knew was not light but rather glass. It was like heat waves radiating in little round pools from a center.... Then in the center I saw a vivid black mark.... So it was bound to be the watch, and it was.”

And here is a fountain. You see that it appears to be in a tub, and is so drawn by Craig. But you note that the “shine” has been got. “These shine!” (Figs. 53, 53a):

Another instance, even more vivid. I made a poor attempt to draw a bass tuba, as one sees them on the stage—a lot of jazz musicians dressed up in white duck, and a row of big brass and nickel horns, polished to blind your eyes. See what Craig drew, and also what she wrote (Figs. 54, 54a):

The comments, continued on the other side of the sheet, are: “Dull gold ring shimmers and stands out with shadow behind it and in center of it. Gleams and moves. Metal. There is a glow of gold light, and the ring or circle is out in the air, suspended, and moves in blur of gold.”

You see, she gets the feeling, the emotional content. I draw a child’s express-wagon, and she writes: “Children again playing but can’t get exactly how they look. Just feel there are children.” Or take this one, which she describes as “Egyptian.” I don’t know if my pillar is real Egyptian, but it seems so to me, and evidently to my wife, for you note all the artistry it inspired (Figs. 55, 55a):

Sometimes Craig will embody the feeling in some new form of her own invention; as for example, when I draw an old-fashioned cannon on wheels, and she writes: “Black Napoleon hat and red military coat.” I draw a running fox—well drawn, because I copy it from a picture; she rises to the occasion with two crossed guns, and a hunting horn with a lot of musical notes coming out of it (Figs. 56, 56a):

I draw an auto, and she replies with the hub and spokes of a wheel. Not satisfied with this, she sets it aside, and tries again a little later—without looking at the original drawing—and this time she produces a horn, with indication of a noise. I give both her drawings, which are on two sides of the same slip of paper (Figs. 57a, 57b):

_14_

An extraordinary incident occurred in connection with the fourth series of drawings. While my secretary, E. M. Hart, was making the drawings, there came into the office his brother-in-law, R. H. Craig, Jr., a teller of the Security First National Bank of Long Beach, a person entirely unknown to my wife. He heard what was going on, and said, “I’ll give her some that’ll stump her.” He took a pen and drew two pictures, which were duly wrapped in sheets of green paper and sealed in envelopes, and put with the rest of the series. I was not at the office, and nothing was said to me about Mr. Craig having taken part in the matter.

My wife did this series under my eyes; and when she came to the first of Mr. Craig’s two drawings, she wrote, “Some sort of grinning monster,” and added an elaborate description. Then she opened the envelope, and found a roller skate with a foot and leg attached. This, naturally, was called a failure; but seven drawings later in the same series came Mr. Craig’s other drawing, which was as follows (Fig. 58):

Now read the amazing description which my wife had written, seven drawings back, when the first of Mr. Craig’s drawings had come under her hand: