Читать книгу Edgar Cayce A Seer Out of Season - Harmon Hartzell Bro - Страница 28

Whatever it was, it kept close track of us.

Gladys was seated several feet from him, making her notes on a steno pad at a little table. Cayce could not even see her notebook without lifting himself from the couch, much less read her rapid, cryptic inscriptions upside down. Besides, he knew nothing of shorthand. But he did not hesitate, though the occasions were unusual, to correct her spelling, her punctuation, her paragraphing, or her medical terms. Her eyes would flash with surprise and humor when part of his consciousness monitored her careful work, after more than twenty years of serving him. Perfection did not seem to be his goal so much as care on important details. There were a few words which the unconscious man habitually mispronounced and she corrected for him, such as “angrandizement” for “aggrandizement,” and “obogdulla mengata” for “medulla oblongata,” or “morstle and petar” for the pharmacist’s “mortar and pestle.” He did not bother with these. But he did interrupt her when the use of an i for an e, for example, might change the meaning of a medical term, or a comma change the intent of a sentence.

How he kept us in view also showed when he answered my own unspoken questions. After studying an individual’s correspondence, I often wanted to understand how a back injury had affected the person’s vision, or why certain foods precipitated a young man’s fits, or why a mother and daughter were such strong rivals for the husband/father’s attentions. Sitting all the way across the room from him, with my notebook open and my pen scurrying along, I would be trying to abbreviate technical terms and to underline key factors in a disease, a personality, or the structure of a reading. Now and then my thoughts would shoot up with a spontaneous “Why?” when Cayce linked a cold spot on a child’s abdomen to epileptic seizures, or traced a woman’s mental illness to a fall on the coccyx at the end of her spine, or described a man’s deafness as karmic consequences from having “turned a deaf ear” to the pleas of others in a previous lifetime. There were similar questions when a reading suddenly became eloquent, after proceeding as detached discourse. But I said nothing and did not stop writing, only thinking my questions. Yet on occasion, when the entranced man appeared to be in an expansive mood, he would pause, saying, “As to the question being asked . . .” or noting my query in some other way. He might even instruct his secretary to keep aside what briefly followed, as he had done with unspoken questions of his elder son and others before me. Then he would give a little essay on the theory, or explain a chain of medical reactions, or suggest how we should investigate further the laws he had just implied. My breath stopped a moment each time.

There was little to suggest the limits of his peripheral awareness in trance. For example, how had he known that a small boy cherished by Gladys, T.J., was out on a fishing dock behind Cayce’s house and in danger of falling into the little freshwater Lake Holly? What prompted him to interrupt his speaking with a terse “Better go get the boy from the dock” and then wait in silence until Gladys returned?

More sobering were comments that might be made about the attitudes and priorities of those of us in the room. The voice we listened to was not unkind, but it could be blunt. In the files were warnings to “Do something for yourself!” when people in his immediate circle had grown too fond of getting guidance on everything that came up. “Next thing,” he added pungently in another transcript, “you’ll be asking whether to blow your nose with your right hand or your left!” And Cayce showed me ruefully that the shortest reading in the files was one given for him: a medical checkup which elicited only the sharp comment that he hadn’t done what was given to him last time and promptly terminated. None of us wanted a brush with the shining blade of this counsel.