Before John C. Lilly went cuckoo and started hacking the language of dolphins, he invented the sensory-deprivation tank and found out that the mind is a self-recursive black box returning images all by itself when its default interpretive mode is not called for. Automatic writing, as one application of automatism, predates Lilly as a longstanding technique of running the mind in self-unpacking freefall. Andre Breton (1896-1966) explained automatism as "the true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by reason, excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation".

Automatic writing became the power-drill in the arsenal of games and automatist strategies developed by Surrealism, enabling them to poke holes in the fabric of consensus reality. In our times automatic writing has been tucked away as a curiosity, as exotica of the mind belonging on the scrap yard of creativity, far removed from high-art, tainted by associations with discredited Vienna psychologists. Outlining the history of automatic writing, however, means outlining the history of the excavation of the origins of creativity.

It would be mistaken to think of automatic writing as confined to certain types of literary hacks. It was amidst 19th century spiritualists, séance-mongrels and ghostbusters, in the hodgepodge of bourgeois explorers of superstitious reality, that automatic writing gained ground as a reliable interface for mediums to channel messages from spirit  inhabited realities, into the reality of our conscious perception. There is plenty of little history available, each anecdote as unconvincing as the rest; famous dead persons retelling history, composers piping unwritten masterworks from ether Shangri-la to planet Earth, Hindi-magi sharing divine wisdom in a language nobody speaks, not even in Tibet. One notorious medium, Hèléne Smith (1861-1929), went beyond that, inventing a language to report on one mediumistic cosmic adventure to Mars. Breton wrote of her: "Hèléne Smith, presents successively automatic phenomena of verbal-auditive nature (she notes as best she can fragments of fictive conversation that reach her), of vocal nature (when in trance, she says words in an unknown language), of verbal-visual nature (she copies exotic symbols that appear to her) and of artistic nature (when in trance, she writes taking the place of one of her Martians)".  

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), ferocious student of his own psyche as witnessed by his obsessively kept notebooks, wrote the absolute masterpiece in the strata of automatic writing. In between waking up from an opium-dream, and being disturbed by some travelling salesman from Porlock, Coleridge committed to paper his Kubla Khan, or at least the bit he could save from dreamtime. This was in 1797. Coleridge predated Freud in many ways: speculating on the possibility of interpreting dreams, suspecting the brain, while dreaming, to process reality in a symbolic language native to the unconscious mind. The reason poets welcomed Freud, it has been said, was because Freud made scientific what had been common stock in poetic theory for at least a century.

Andre Breton, poet, student of medicine, devoted to Hèléne Smith, early adopter of psychotherapy applying it on shell-shocked soldiers returning from the trenches of WWI. Andre Breton: the 'pope' of Surrealism, the poetic-revolutionary movement freeing man from a society, from a state of mind, that made possible the Great War. Against the (so-called) rationality of trench-warfare, Surrealism erected a movement dedicated to the chemistry of unbounded creativity and beauty. Everything can be poetry as long as it is confuses, Tristan Tzara said. Automatic writing was to be a liberator, one foundation on which the revolution of the irrational was to rest.

Alastair Brotchie (in his book Surrealist Games) presents a way to do automatic writing: "Sit at a table with pen and paper; put yourself in a 'receptive' frame of mind, and start writing. Continue writing without thinking of what is appearing beneath your pen. Write as fast as you can. If, for some reason, the flow stops, leave a space and immediately begin again by writing down the first letter of the next sentence. Choose this letter at random before you begin, for instance, a 't', and always begin this new sentence with a 't'." What this description lacks is the acknowledgement of the fact that only real nutters practise automatic writing on their own. Surrealist practise can't be understood without taking in account its desire for accompanying Dadaesque uproar.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Nobel-prize winning Irish poet and life-long member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, once gaining the upper hand in an occult-society power struggle with Aleister Crowley, merged the poetic with the occult to rationalise his use of automatic writing. When already a famous poet, Yeats married a much younger girl who turned out to be a talented receptive: "What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after day to the unknown writer, and after half dozen such hours offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piercing together those scattered sentences." After collecting these scribbles for over a decade, Yeats compiled from it 'A Vision'. A prophecy of the Oedipus-Christ, destined to be, Yeats thought, his one work read till the end of times. On publication not a veil trembled and the book was a failure on all accounts, provoking Yeats, in later editions, to add the shanty comment that it at least brought him many metaphors he could use to enrich his poetry.

Yeats failure to produce decent work using automatic writing seems to confirm WH Auden suspicion: "If poems could be created in a trance without the conscious participation of the poet, the writing of poetry would be so boring or even unpleasant an operation that only a substantial reward in money or social prestige could induce a man to be a poet". Automatic writing as self-inflicted torture? Auden obviously misses the point. Yeats, despite final disappointment, had a great time doing it, working in close harmony with the woman he loved. Coleridge aside and his case was accidental (poetry as the collateral damage of dreaming), automatic writing is about the act as much at it is about the profoundness of the results. Automatic writing, for spiritualists and surrealists alike, is a social activity to be executed in carefully engineered circumstances, surrounded by friends, when the moon is full and Orion aligned with a lost river. Its purpose not to produce poetry but new insights in the knowledge management capabilities of the human brain.

Raymond Queneau (in Odile) asserts that surrealists séances were a true spectacle, a circus almost. They were fully prepared to accommodate the room for Pentecostal speaking in tongues and temporary manufactured madness to enfold. With approval they quoted Novalis: "There exist great resemblances between madness and enchantment. The enchanter is an artist of madness". That says it all; automatic writing is a means to purge, at the speed of thought, socially defined cultural sanity from the process of creativity.