CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
The reader is here invited with asterisks to fill in a portrait of a water-nymph according to fancy. From Some Welsh Legends and Other Poems by John Humphreys Davies, 1893.
"[W]henever I closed my eyes, the letters of the alphabet shifted around like Scrabble pieces and formed words. Those words lined up and soon I imagined entire pages of writing so clearly that I could actually read them, sentence after sentence, as if I were reading straight from a book. A book I had written, with my name on the cover ..." —Jack Gantos
The Mafulu people of the South Seas believe that when one's ghost leaves the body upon death, it becomes and remains a malevolent being. From The Ways of the South Sea Savage by Robert Wood Williamson, 1914.
If you consciously mind your own business, fortune telling machines may disregard you as a ghost, even when you try to give them money. Here's our take on the uncanny phenomenon.
"Down in my inner self, there passes before me, in slow and sinister review, the memories of days done with, of things for ever over, of the faces of the dead." From A Phantom from the East by Pierre Loti, 1892.
Exactly when, down to the day, will the mystery be brought to light? Here are two answers:
"Possibly, in some yet undiscovered ruin or tomb, the key may be found to the problem which now puzzles the world: but then it is only a possibility. There is little doubt that the mystery will remain a mystery until the great day when the sea shall give up its dead and the past be stretched before us like a scroll." —The True Latter-Day-Saints' Herald, 1873
"That, I suppose, will remain a mystery till the day when a[ll] secrets will be cleared up, an[d] a[ll] the deeds o[f] darkness brought to light." —The Brownie of Bodsbeck by James Hogg, 1833
Here's 59 seconds on how to make a physical reality of your imagination:
Mindful attention was the meditative practice of Portuguese philosopher Fernando Pessoa. His technique empowered him to make a physical reality of his imagination, through what he called a great act of intellectual magic. His Book of Disquietdemonstrates exactly how to do that, entertainingly. Pessoa kept notes on what happened around him, from a sudden thunderclap to what the office boy just said, and he allowed every occurrence to inform and illustrate his personal philosophy, that we can sift out what parts of reality are illusions and which illusions have reality, and that we can prevent any act from being in vain so as to conserve energy. Depending upon how you look at it, Pessoa said, anything can be either astonishing or an obstacle. His secret was to look at each thing that happened differently every time, as a way of renewing and multiplying it. He said a contemplative soul who never left his village could in this way have the entire universe at his disposal. Pessoa's meditation was a magical act of transformation. I'm Prof. Oddfellow.
Here's an anecdote about how a restless spirit was charmed into the shape of a fly and read into a bottle by 12 parsons standing in a circle. Note how the parsons made a mistake when they threw the bottled ghost down a well: they committed it to lie for a hundred years, forgetting to specify "a hundred years and odd," thereby allowing the ghost the escape in due time. From Chambers's Journal, 1866.
