Slate (writing)

Description

A writing slate is a thin piece of flat material used as a medium for writing. The slate material itself, a stony substance, is “a metamorphic rock created by the recrystallization of the minerals in shale from clay to parallel-aligned, flat, flake-like minerals such as mica”. The writing slate consisted of a piece of slate, either 4x6 inches or 7x10 inches, which was encased in a wooden frame. A precise date range for writing slates of this type remains unclear. Usually, a piece of cloth or slate sponge was used to clean it and this was sometimes attached with a string to the bottom of the writing slate. Typically, the writing slate was used by children during the days of the one-room schoolhouse to practice writing and arithmetic during classes or at home. Writing slates, however, were also used in multi-room schools until the twentieth century. The writing slate was also sometimes used by industry workers to keep track of goods and by sailors to calculate their geographical location while at sea. Sometimes multiple pieces of slate were bound together into a “book” and horizontal lines were etched onto the slate surface as a guide for neat handwriting.

Automatic writing

Automatic writing or psychography is an alleged psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without consciously writing. The words are claimed to arise from a subconscious, spiritual or supernatural source.

History

Automatic writing as a spiritual practice was reported by Hyppolyte Taine in the preface to the third edition of his "De l'intelligence", published in 1878. Besides "etherial visions" or "magnetic auras", Fernando Pessoa claimed to have experienced automatic writing. He said he felt "owned by something else", sometimes feeling a sensation in the right arm which he claimed was lifted into the air without his will. George Hyde-Lees, the wife of William Butler Yeats, also claimed that she could write automatically.

William Fletcher Barrett wrote that "Automatic messages may take place either by the writer passively holding a pencil on a sheet of paper, or by the planchette, or by a 'ouija board'." In spiritualism, spirits are claimed to take control of the hand of a medium to write messages, letters, and even entire books. Automatic writing can happen in a trance or waking state.Arthur Conan Doyle in his book The New Revelation (1918) wrote that automatic writing occurs either by the writer's subconscious or by external spirits operating through the writer. The Surrealist poet Robert Desnos claimed he was among the most gifted in automatic writing. Some psychical researchers such as Thomson Jay Hudson have claimed that no spirits are involved in automatic writing and that the subconscious mind is the explanation.