Reviews
The Crash of Flight 105: A Psychic
Journey To The Truth by Melanie Martin, published by Hidden Brook Press.
Review by Robert G. Granger
The Crash of Flight 105: A Psychic Journey To The Truth, is a fusion of
a very personal biographical story with a common sense investigative
reportage of a tragic time in aviation. Melanie Martin draws on her own
personal inner strength and is bolstered with clues and encouragement
from her treasured psychic readers. With perseverance she slowly pieces
together the puzzling questions that surround the death of her husband,
Danny Martin.
Melanie Martin is exploring a new style of writing in her book – The
Crash of Flight 105. This book is a cathartic biography of a tragic and
soul-shaking event that haunts many people even to this day. She has
woven her own personal grief and her intuitive spirit into a dynamic
story of perseverance. She digs until she finds the truth about the
cause of her husband, Captain Danny Watkin Martin's death in the crash
of Midwest Express Flight 105. This book is as much a vindication as it
is a tribute to the indomitable human sprit. This book will
embrace all the elements that speak to the hearts and encourage the
souls.
Her story reads as if it were a stream of consciousness. It is
simplistically stylized to bring every thought and emotion to the
surface, as she unfolds the raw emotion that has been her journey. The
community that we are introduced to by Melanie are ghosts, sketches and
fully drawn characters that contribute their fragments of the story and
remind the reader that there are more stories that are still untold.
The psychic readings that Melanie tells us about are as intrinsic to
her solace as they are to her determination to find the hidden and
misplaced pieces that the initial NTSB investigation did not find.
The reader is rewarded with Melanie Martin's lyric poetry as a coda to
the book. The poetry reflects an arch of emotion that is both personal
and universal, as well as, inspiring and timeless.
Melanie Martin has written a book that will leave the reader fulfilled.
One will read and reread as they delve deeper and deeper into her
psychic readings to find more than just a mesmerizing story. Melanie
Martin's The Crash of Flight 105 will capture your imagination and make
even the staunchest sceptic think more than twice about her psychic
journey to the truth.
---------------------------------
A Review by Terry Barker:
Psychic Psychology: A Review of Melanie Martin, The Crash of
Flight 105: A Psychic Journey to the Truth, (Brighton, Ontario,
Canada): Hidden Brook Press, 2006 $29.95
After the death of my aunt, an anti-aircraft gunner, in 1943, and my
father, an RAF Bomber Command navigator in 1944, my grandmother took an
interest in what was called then “Spiritualism”, attending
séances in order to try to get in touch with her departed
daughter and son-in-law, “on the other side”. As for many others at the
time, the tremendous shock for a spiritually sensitive person (as I
know she was) of the loss, in quick succession, of two young much-loved
family members, led to a certain crisis in her conventional Christian
faith (from which she recovered later), and a receptivity to the
“alternative gospel” of Spiritualism being promoted by British Air
Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, for example, in his best-selling Many
Mansions (1945).
I naturally thought of these aspects of my own family history when
reading Melanie Martin’s sensitive and apparently utterly frank account
of her spiritual and emotional turmoil on the unexpected death, shortly
after her marriage, of her commercial pilot husband’s name with regard
to his culpability in the crash, through attention to “psychic
readings” she had received over the years. The result of this analysis,
which she admits involved taking “a chance” and trusting “my inner
self” with its “feelings and vibrations within”, (p. 151), is, of
course, the book, a journal-like account of her feelings, psychic
experiences, and associations of events, names, dates, places etc., to
which a selection of Ms. Martin’s poems on similar themes is appended.
The “truth” of the title is thus not simply what she considers the
confirmation of her husband’s innocence, and her suspicion of a
“cover-up” involving shoddy aircraft maintenance and parts supply, but
also the affirmation of herself provided by the writing and publication
of the story: “Yet one thing for sure (sic) I have experienced
the unexplained and pieced a story ever so cleverly together and I have
created a masterpiece within my mind.” (p. 118)
Ms. Martin’s clarity and candour about the subjectivity and circularity
of the mental processes and states she has experienced in the course of
her spiritual saga, causing her to reflect, perhaps, to herself “I am
either psycho or psychic” (p. 85), throws considerable light upon the
structure of consciousness of the psychic that is usually obscured in
more sophisticated presentations, dressed up as they often are with the
furniture of “the etheric (astral) plane”, “controls”, “cosmic
consciousness” etc. Quite different from the classic mystic
“participation in” or “union with” the divine of religious or
philosophical transcendence, which produces order in the soul, and its
opening to the order of the universe, the Gnostic experience Ms. Martin
describes encloses the self further within itself, constructing a
“higher self” or “overall” (to use the traditional language) which
inhabits an imaginary universe; as Ms. Martin puts it towards the end
of her meditation “I believe the choices (in life) are somehow
prearranged beforehand within our soul … I also believe in trusting the
thought of spirits within our own universe…Though my loss of Danny (her
husband) shook my foundation, his loss gave me great strength and
courage to go forth and follow my inner self … I trust my inner self
more than anyone else in the world.” (pp. 114-117)
The casual reader of The Crash of Flight 105 may, at first, be puzzled
as to the “point” of the book, particularly because of its “stream of
consciousness” method of composition in which the author constantly
restates her essentially solipsistic perspective, but a more careful
linear reading reveals a sort of “argument”, drawn perhaps from the
predestinarian Calvinist theology in which she was presumably raised
(she was brought up in the Presbyterian Church). This seems to be that
there is a dues absconditus (a God that is far away), but that His will
can be known in the interactions of the soul of Self with the spirits
of the intermediary world (angels, the spirits of the departed etc.), a
Providence that is evident in the details of one’s life, which, of
course, thus become the will of the absent and unknowable divinity.
This is more or less just Puritanism, the British and American version
of the “Rhineland theology” of the late Middle Ages, that, as a battery
of authors in this “Golden Age of scholarship” on the subject has
shown, provided the basis for both Lutheran and Reformed philosophical
anthropology and the political ideologies of modernity, and that is
linked to the Hermetic Gnostic theosophy of such Renaissance figures as
Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, the author of the famous “Oration on the
Dignity of Man”, a large place in the though-world of whom was taken up
with question of “angel-conjuring” (what we might call “psychic
politics”) during the era of the decay of New England Puritan theology
into its Theosophical “church” (founded by Madame Blavatsky and others
in New York in 1875), a “psychic philosophy” (perhaps articulated best
by Stanley de Brath in his book of that name), and more recently a
plethora of “channelled” manifestoes of “psychic politics”, such as
Jane Roberts’ “thoughts of Chairman Seth.” Ms. Martin’s Crash of Flight
105, in effect, adds a “psychic psychology” to the growing literature
by and about the Spiritualist Movement, giving us a clear insight into
the structure of consciousness that is attracted to contemporary
manifestations of what the Renaissance called “angel magic”.
Bio.: Terry Barker studied political gnosticism at McMaster and
Oxford Universities. He currently teaches Political Science, Ethics and
Philosophy at Humber College, Toronto, and is the author of After Acorn
(1999) and Beyond Bethune (2006).
More reviews to
come! Stay tuned.
