Michael Prescott's Blog

Shameless self-promotion

Well, I guess I can cross "appearing on a nationally syndicated radio show" off my bucket list. I did that earlier this week with my appearance on Coast to Coast AM, hosted by George Noory. It was sort of a trial by fire for somebody who'd never done a radio appearance before, if you don't count an Internet radio show that probably had an audience of fifty people, which I did several years ago.

I did the show because I felt a certain obligation to my publisher, White Crow Books, to promote my new book The Far Horizon, and because I didn't quite know what I was getting myself into. When I was told that Coast to Coast wanted me as a guest, I assumed I would be on for maybe five minutes. Only once I called the show-runner did I discover that I was expected to be on for two hours. (!) This gave me pause, but she kindly assured me that it was broken up into segments, with a lot of commercial breaks and so forth.

Anyway, in a triumph of bravado over common sense, I agreed to do it. Fortunately, I had already scheduled a podcast interview a couple of days before the radio show. (It hasn't aired yet; I'll post the details when it does.) The podcast, besides being very worthwhile in itself, gave me a chance to get accustomed to talking about my book and answering some standard questions.

Still, it's one thing to talk to a podcast host on a recorded show and another thing to talk to a radio host on a live show that goes out to much of the country.

Because Coast to Coast airs in the middle of the night, my segment wasn't going to start until 3 AM Eastern time. This left me all kinds of options for how to spend my time leading up to the broadcast. I ended up doing some animation (puppet animation is a hobby of mine; you can look at some of my stuff on this Vimeo channel), then watching a movie on Turner Classic Movies – The Blue Dahlia, a pretty good film noir with an unfortunately compromised ending – and then reviewing my notes for the interview. 

I had an idea of the general trend of questions I would be asked, and I had notes on the kind of answers I would give. The last couple of hours before the broadcast were spent pacing my living room, notes in hand, crossing things out and jotting down stuff in the margins. As it turned out, I never referred to the notes at all once the show began. But they did help me to focus my thoughts.

Was I nervous? Yes. But I had done theater in college — in my triumphant tour de force, I essayed the role of Orestes in a three-act abridgment of the Greek trilogy The Oresteia — and I knew that nerves typically pass as soon as the show gets started. There's a lot of truth to the recurring motif in the wonderful movie Shakespeare in Love about how, in the theater, everything just somehow works out. I figured it would work out in radio, too.

Orestes 

Plus, having had some serious anxiety issues in the past, I knew I could dampen my anxiety if I were to pop half a clonazepam tablet and then sip some Coors Lite as needed. This mellowed me enough to avoid spacing out when the broadcast began. I make no apologies. You try talking off-the-cuff on a show that broadcasts live to 600 stations.

George Noory was very pleasant and guided me smoothly from one topic to the next. I found, much as in my college theater days, that as soon as the program began, my anxiety went away and I started talking very naturally. I was actually surprised at how relaxed I was as I chatted on the phone, almost oblivious to the fact that a large audience was listening in. To be honest, I hardly thought about the audience at all. I just looked at it as a conversation between myself and George. That kept me from panicking, probably. I had trained myself to think of it as a one-on-one dialogue.

One tip I would offer is that if you must think of the audience, imagine them as friendly. Do not imagine critics who are ready to snipe at you. That will only make you self-conscious and hesitant. It's best not to think of the audience at all, but if you must, think of them as on your side.

In the past, I've always shied away from promotion, much to the consternation of my earlier publishers (primarily Penguin). I'm still not a big fan of it, because of the pre-show jitters and the significant amount of preparation involved. But it worked out okay in this case, and at least it gives me a good story. Not everybody has been interviewed on the radio, so it's the kind of thing that's good for an anecdote. And maybe it will sell a few books.

The one serious point I would make is that, twenty years ago, and probably even more recently, I never would have imagined I could do this. There was a time when social phobia (the writer's curse) had me hamstrung to the point where I was limited in going out at all, even to the grocery store. Facing the cashier at the checkout counter was an ordeal. Finally I got the help of a psychiatrist who prescribed the proper medication (Effexor, for me) and trained me in the appropriate cognitive-behavioral techniques. As a result, I largely got over my phobias, to the point where, with the proper preparation and rehearsal, I can now talk comfortably with a radio host before a national audience. 

If I can do it, anyone can do it.

If you're suffering from such insecurities, which are not uncommon in our high-stress age, please find a psychologist or psychiatrist who specializes in anxiety issues. Not everybody is equally qualified to treat this complicated problem. And don't listen to well-meaning amateurs who say that all you need is to relax or take a nice walk in the woods. Anxiety issues involve a chemical imbalance in the brain and require professional treatment. Over-the-counter supplements rarely are sufficient, and positive thinking, on its own, will probably not do the job. Disregard any outmoded stigma about seeking psychiatric help and make the phone call. You will not regret it.

If you're interested in seeing how I did on the radio, you can stream or download the show here. But you've got to pay for it. The cheapest way is to sign up for a month-to-month membership ($6.95 per month) and then cancel the membership after you've heard my show or any other show that interests you. Of course, you may find you want to maintain the membership and listen to more shows. There's a lot of good stuff on Coast to Coast. Leslie Kean, for instance has been interviewed about her important book and Netflix series Surviving Death. Speaking of which, I haven't watched it yet, but I intend to get to it next month.

The Far Horizon

My book on the afterlife, The Far Horizon, published by White Crow, is now out as a Kindle ebook and in paperback. An Apple Books digital edition will follow. 

Here are some links: 

White Crow Books page, which includes links to Amazon sites in the UK, Canada, France, Germany, and Japan, as well as to Book Depository, which ships worldwide. 

Amazon US sales page for the Kindle edition.

Amazon US sales page for the paperback edition. 

My author website's page on the book. 

Also, I will be a guest on George Noory's radio show, Coast to Coast AM, on Wednesday, January 27, in the second two hours of the four-hour program (i.e., hours 3 and 4). This show airs late at night — 1 AM to 5 AM Eastern, 10 PM to 2 AM Pacific — but all episodes are archived and can be accessed for unlimited streaming or downloads with a $6.95 monthly fee (cancelable at any time). 

I've never done a radio show, and now I'm diving in headfirst with a two-hour live appearance on a nationally syndicated program. Yikes. Probably I won't be that great (as I warned them). Experience counts for a lot in things like this. But I'm sure the host can carry me if I falter. 

A paranormal mystery

Recently I've become somewhat addicted to mystery fiction from the early part of the 20th century. I started with locked-room mysteries, which were very popular at that time. The first locked-room mystery ever written is the famous Edgar Allen Poe short story "Murders in the Rue Morgue."

One of the most famous of all locked-room mysteries is a unique short story called "The Problem of Cell 13, written by Jacques Futrelle. I say it's unique because it involves no actual crime. Futrelle's protagonist is a wizened scientist whose international reputation as a savant has earned him the popular nickname The Thinking Machine; his actual name is Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen, Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S., M.D., M.D.S. , etc. In this story, The Thinking Machine simply accepts a bet that he can escape from a locked prison cell within a week using only his wits, or as he would say, using the power of logic.

The story has been anthologized many times and is well worth a read. Futrelle, knowing a good thing when he had it, wrote many more stories featuring Dr. Van Dusen and and his sidekick, intrepid reporter Hutchinson Hatch. They do not quite measure up to Holmes and Watson, but they do make a good team, and many of the stories are quite ingenious. I've been working my way through a more-or-less complete compendium of them. Though remembered only by mystery buffs today, Futrelle still has a following and even an official website.

 

Jacques Futrelle

 

When I got to one of the last stories in the collection, "The Tragedy of the Life Raft," I found something that surprised me and suggested a possible paranormal element – specifically, precognition. The story concerns a miserly usurer haunted by a vision of a life raft at sea. The vision appears three times in the story.

For many minutes Peter Ordway sat with dull, lusterless eyes, gazing through the window into the void of a leaden sky. Slowly, as he looked, the sky became a lashing, mist-covered sea, a titanic chaos of water; and upon its troubled bosom rode a life raft to which three persons were clinging. Now the frail craft was lifted up, up to the dizzy height of a giant wave; now it shot down sickeningly into the hissing trough beyond; again, for minutes it seemed altogether lost in the far-plunging spume. Peter Ordway shuddered and closed his eyes.

... a lashing, mist-covered sea; a titanic chaos of water, and upon its troubled bosom rode a life raft to which three persons were clinging ... [This description is repeated verbatim a little later.]

What struck me about these passages will become immediately obvious when I explain the denouement of Futrelle's life. He and his wife Lily had been traveling abroad and decided to return to America on the maiden voyage of a luxury liner. This was in April, 1912, and the liner was the RMS Titanic. As the ship was going down, Futrelle frantically implored his wife to board a lifeboat and eventually succeeded in making her do so. He himself refused to board one of the boats and gallantly went down with the ship.

You can see why “The Tragedy of the Life Raft” got my attention. As we learn in the unraveling of the mystery:

The tale began with the foundering of the steamship Neptune, Liverpool to Boston, ninety-one passengers and crew, some thirty-two years ago. In mid-ocean she was smashed to bits by a gale, and went down. Of those aboard only nine persons reached shore alive.

So we have an ocean liner that sinks, a life raft (close enough to a lifeboat) carrying a handful of survivors, and to top it all off, the repeated use of the adjective “titanic.” Moreover, a character in the story is obsessed with this memory and keeps returning to it as an almost mystical vision. I wondered if Futrell had actually anticipated his own death, at least on a subconscious level.

It would be interesting to think so. But when I looked into the matter a little further, a more prosaic explanation presented itself. The story was first published in August, 1912, in a publication that called itself, rather immodestly, The Popular Magazine. Note that the Titanic went down in April, 1912, so this publication was posthumous. In fact, the magazine cover announces “the last stories of Jacques Futrelle,” a slight exaggeration, since, as far as I can tell, there is only Futrelle story in the issue.

 

August 1912 issue of The Popular Magazine. Cover art by N.C. Wyeth

 

Bearing all this in mind, we can see what may have happened. It’s entirely possible that an enterprising editor, seeking to remind readers of Futrelle’s tragic and highly newsworthy death, inserted the adjective “titanic” into the narrative, using it three times to call attention to it. “A titanic chaos of water” is not an obvious choice of words, and the adjective may well have been added to the manuscript by another hand.

This would still leave the other elements of the story that presage Futrelle’s death: the sinking of an ocean liner, survivors on a life raft, etc. But without the word “titanic,” the connection is much less obvious. Futrelle wrote a lot of stories – he cranked them out month after month from 1905 to 1912 – and the idea of a ship lost at sea is hardly original.

Overall, then, I’m inclined to think that, like Dr. Van Dusen, I’ve been able to apply logic to solve the problem of Futrelle’s last story. As The Thinking Machine likes to say, "Two and two make four — not sometimes, but all the time."

But I could be wrong. Maybe an editor didn’t add the word “titanic.” Maybe it was in the manuscript from the start. I suppose we’ll never know.

We are all loved

Roger Knights directed me to this story in the Washington Post. It's heartwarming and reassuring, and may provide some comfort in these increasingly crazy (and crazy-making) times.

The story is written by a hospice social worker, Scott Janssen, who, like many people in that field, has encountered patients with compelling stories of deathbed visits and similar phenomena. In this case, an elderly patient remembered a deeply meaningful event from his time in World War II. After a particularly traumatic day of dealing with casualties from a combat operation, the patient was unable to shake the memory of one patient in particular. He said:

“Later that night I was on my cot crying. Couldn’t stop crying about that poor guy, and all the others I’d seen die. My cot was creaking, I was shaking so hard. I even started getting scared that I was going insane with the pain.”

I nod, waiting for him to continue.

Then I looked up,” he says. “Saw a guy sitting on the end of my cot. He was wearing a World War I uniform, with one of those funny helmets. He was covered in light, like he was glowing in the dark.”

“What was he doing?” I ask.

Evan starts crying and laughing at the same time. “He was looking at me with love. I could feel it. I’d never felt that kind of love before.”

“What was it like to feel that kind of love?”

“I can’t put it in words.” He pauses. “I guess I just felt like I was worth something, like all the pain and cruelty wasn’t what was real.”

“What was real?”

“Knowing that no matter how screwed-up and cruel the world looks, on some level, somehow, we are all loved. We are all connected.”

This turned out to be the first of several paranormal visits. Each time the specter arrived, he’d wordlessly express love and leave Evan with a sense of peace and calm.

“After the war, the visits stopped,” he says. “Years later, I was cleaning out Mom’s stuff after she died, and I found an old photograph. It was the same guy. I looked on the back, and Mom had written the words ‘Uncle Calvin, killed during World War I, 1918.’

Janssen asked him why he'd brought up this subject, and Evan replied:

“He’s back,” he whispers, staring out the window. “Saw him last night on the foot of my bed. He spoke this time.”

“What’d he say?”

“He told me he was here with me. He’s going to help me over the hill when it’s time to go.”

Janssen goes on to describe some paranormal experiences of his own, which opened his mind to the conviction that his patients were not merely hallucinating. He writes that while he tried to dismiss one such experience as coincidence ...

Inside, though, a part of me knew it was real.

After nearly 30 years as a hospice social worker, I’m certain of it. And I have patients like Evan to thank: dying patients who have convinced me that the world we inhabit is lovingly mysterious and eager to support us, especially during times of disorientation and crisis. It even sends messages of love and reassurance now and then when we’re in pain.

I would add to this only two things.

First, I think there are times when we all feel we are "going insane with pain." This particular moment in American history may be one of them – and this is true for people on both sides of the increasingly wide political divide. It is comforting to think that others who've endured their own share of earthly misery, perhaps in much larger measure, are watching over us and are ready to take our hand and lead us to a better place when it's our time to go.

As an aside, I sometimes think that only my exposure to spiritualist concepts and the evidence for them has kept me from losing my mind entirely. Admittedly, sometimes I come pretty close to losing it, anyway ... But as G.K. Chesterton reportedly said when told he was a pretty rotten person for all his Christian faith, "Imagine how much worse I would be without Christianity." (Quoted from memory, because I can't track down the actual quote.) In my case, just imagine how much worse I would be without my knowledge of the afterlife and the higher self! I shudder to think of it.

Second, I would note that my own rather limited experience with hospice workers, during the brief time when my father was on in-home hospice care, made me realize that these people – people who deal with death on a daily basis – are often profoundly spiritual in their outlook. In fact, I would even describe them as "Spiritualist." Some of them use the language and concepts familiar to me from my own readings of Spiritualist literature of a hundred years ago.

It is, of course, entirely possible that some people influenced by Spiritualism went into the hospice field precisely so they could attend the dying. But I think it is also the case that hospice workers have witnessed so many examples of anomalous phenomena – deathbed visions, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, apparitions, and so forth – that they have no choice but to adopt the language and mindset of spiritualism in order to make sense of it.

I might add that years ago, I was in a used bookstore when two hospice nurses asked the clerk if she had any of John Edward's books. This was a time when John Edward was the most famous medium in America. I somewhat regret not talking to those nurses, as I imagine they had some interesting stories to tell.

To repeat what hospice patient Evan said, his comfort came from "knowing that no matter how screwed-up and cruel the world looks, on some level, somehow, we are all loved. We are all connected.” This is so easy to forget and so hard to remember. Yet it is true – profoundly true.

Why do we forget? My forthcoming book The Far Horizon has some thoughts on this, essentially suggesting that we are temporarily players in a fully immersive virtual-reality environment. "Fully immersive" means we cannot easily emerge from the illusion of earthly life. We must endure all the Sturm und Drang of our environment even if it is only an illusion. Apparently, this is how we learn and grow. And those who refuse to engage with the world and endure its highs and lows, those who prefer to sequester themselves in ignorance and apathy, are missing out and will probably have to return again and again until they learn their lesson.

The late Bruce Siegel, who often commented on this blog, liked to emphasize the primary role of love in any understanding of life and spirituality. I was frequently inclined to downplay his input, preferring to focus on more "scientific" concepts like information theory. But I'm starting to suspect he was right all along. Without love, what is there? What's the point?

Ultimately, one way or the other, all the pain and drama of this world will fade like a bad dream. That's worth remembering at times when the bad dream becomes especially nightmarish.

Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.

MacBeth Act 3, Scene 2