by Colin Wilson
This picture of the musician, with his unwashed hands and dirty handkerchief, seems to me to capture the essence of the Outsider tragedy. Inside him he carries around the magnificent world of Beethoven, even a touch of Beethoven’s genius. How must he have felt as he sat on a crowded bus, jammed between workmen and housewives, wondering whether he had enough money for another packet of cigarettes? It must have seemed to him that he was a kind of changeling, condemned to a life of servitude by some malicious enchanter. And this, I felt, was one of the major problems of our world: that there are thousands of people who are intelligent enough to make some real contribution to modern life, yet who are condemned to remain permanently unknown.
It was because I was fascinated by this problem of the ‘Outsider’, the intelligent misfit, that I wrote my first book. What seemed so paradoxical was that these people were not dying because they hated life. On the contrary, they wanted more life. You could say that they were on strike for a more interesting way of life. The problem was summarised by the great romantic writer Hoffmann in his novel Murr the Tomcat, in which the mad musician Kreisler tells the Princess: ‘You seem, your highness, not to be very interested in dreams, and yet it is really in dreams that we grow butterfly wings so that we can esape this narrow, tight prison, and fly, like glittering moths, up to the sky, to the highest heaven.’ And he adds, with typical humour: ‘Every man really has an innate inclination to fly, and I have known serious, respectable people who in the late evening fill themselves up with champagne, as a gas useful for ascending to the heights, as balloon and passenger at the same time.’
‘As balloon and passenger at the same time.’ That was the great romantic dream. But he adds elsewhere in the book: ‘Is it not eternally true that our flight is impeded by leaden weights that we cannot identify—nor do we know where they come from, or who attached them to us.’ Hoffmann himself made heroic attempts to fly, both by writing his famous Tales, and by drinking vast quantities of German wine, which ended by ruining his health so he died in the greatest misery.
All this explains why I came to believe that man is on the point of an evolutionary breakthrough to a higher stage. He obviously wants to fly—not in the physical sense, but on the wings of the mind. And, as Bernard Shaw once remarked: ‘The brain will not fail when the will is in earnest.’
So long before I wrote The Occult, I was convinced that we all possess unknown powers of which we are only dimly aware. But how do we become aware of them? How do we learn to make use of them? One thing was obvious to me: that the first step is to learn to sink inside ourselves. Imagine that someone has offered you a rare wine to taste, a wine that was made while Napoleon was still alive. The first thing you do is to raise it to your lips, and then sink inside yourself, until you are aware of nothing but the smell and taste of the wine. Most of us can remember doing something of the sort as a child, listening to the rain pattering on the windows, and perhaps rolling up into a ball in the warm bed, totally happy and relaxed. (I knew a girl who told me that whenever she did this as a child, she used to murmur to herself: ‘Isn’t it nice to be me?’)
It is significant that John Cowper Powys, whom we have already encountered, attached great importance to this ‘trick’ of sinking inside himself. He described it for the first time in a novel called Wolf Solent, which was published in 1929—that is, at the same time as the incident when he ‘appeared’ to Theodore Dreiser. And this coincidence is enough in itself to make us wonder whether there might not be some connection between the two. Let us look a little more closely at Wolf Solent.
The novel opens with a long chapter that is typical of Powys—a description of a train journey. The opening paragraph sets the tone:
‘From Waterloo Station to the small country town of Ramsgard in Dorset is a journey of not more than three or four hours, but having by good luck found a compartment to himself, Wolf Solent was able to indulge in such an orgy of concentrated thought, that these three or four hours lengthened themselves out into something beyond all human measurement . . .’
The first thing you feel is that Powys is in no hurry. You can almost sense him chortling to himself as he settles down—imaginatively—into that railway compartment and prepares to indulge in his ‘orgy’ of thinking. So let us try to follow his example—that is, relax deeply, and forget all impatience. Unless you can place yourself in that mood of peaceful abandonment, of not caring how long this takes, you will miss the point of what Powys is saying.
‘A bluebottle fly buzzed up and down above his head, every now and then settling on one of the coloured advertisement of seaside resorts—Weymouth, Swanage, Lulworth and Poole—cleaning its front legs upon the masts of painted ships or upon the sands of impossibly cerulean waters.
‘Through the open window near which he sat, facing the engine, the sweet airs of an unusually relaxed March morning visited his nostrils, carrying fragrances of young green shoots, of wet muddy ditches, of hazel copses full of damp moss, and of primroses on warm grassy hedge-banks.’
All this is intended to hypnotise the reader: the buzzing bluebottle, the ‘sweet airs of an unusally relaxed March morning’, the fragrance of green shoots.
After introducing us to his hero, and explaining that he is on his way to Dorset to take a job as a squire’s literary adviser, Powys tells us how much Wolf hates London, with its unending rush, and how much he detests all the barbarous mechanicalness of modern civilisation. In an image that would have far more appeal now than it had in 1929, he tells us that Wolf sees the whole earth as looking like a helpless, vivisected frog, ‘scooped and gouged and harrowed’.
‘And then’, says Powys, ‘stretching out his legs still further and leaning back against the dusty cushions, he set himself to measure the resources of his spirit against these accursed mechanisms. He did this quite gravely, with no comic uneasiness at the arrogance of such a proceeding. Why should he not pit his individual magnetic strength against the tyrannous machinery invented by other men?
‘In fact, the thrill of malicious exultation that passed through his nerves as he thought of these things had a curious resemblance to the strange ecstasy he used to derive from certain godlike mythological legends. He would never have confessed to any living person the godlike intoxication of personality that used to come to him from imagining himself a sort of demiurgic force, drawing its power from the heart of Nature herself.’
And as he sits there, watching the telegraph poles flashing past, Wolf imagines himself to be a prehistoric giant ‘who, with an effortless ease, ran along by the side of the train, leaping over hedges, ditches, lanes and ponds, and easily rivalled, in natural born silent speed, the noisy mechanism of all those pistons and cog-wheels.’
Two pages later—Powys is nothing if not leisurely—he tries to analyse this ‘mental device’ that gives him so much peculiar strength.
‘This was a certain trick he had of doing what he called “sinking into his soul”. This trick had been a furtive custom with him from very early days. In his childhood his mother had often rallied him about it in her light-hearted way, and had applied to these trances, or these fits of absent-mindedness, an amusing but rather indecent nursery name. His father, on the other hand, had encouraged hm in these moods, taking them very gravely, and treating him, when under their spell, as if he were some sort of infant magician.’
Wolf calls this peculiar habit ‘mythology’ or ‘mythologising’, an oddly disappointing name for a concept of such momentous importance. And he admits that it makes him feel ‘as if he had been a changeling from a different planet, a planet where the issues of life—the great dualistic struggle between life and death—never emerged from the charmed circle of the individual’s private consciousness.’
In other words, the trouble with our planet is that it keeps us entangled in triviality, so we never get a chance to confront these great issues.
What is so interesting about this whole passage is that strange sense of power that it expresses. Wolf knows tha
t, when he sinks deep inside himself, he has the strength and the ability to ‘measure the resources of his spirit against these accursed mechanisms’. He becomes a kind of magician. We can, of course, dismiss this as pure wishful thinking—until we remember how he was able to ‘project’ himself back to Dreiser’s apartment in New York.
In a later novel Porius, Powys invents an even more unwieldy name for this habit of withdrawing deep inside himself; his young hero has christened it ‘cavoseniargizing’—which suggests withdrawing into a cave. What he means is that there are certain moments in which the gulf between his body and his soul is somehow bridged, ‘so that his soul found itself able to follow every curve and ripple of his bodily sensations, and yet remain suspended above them.’ We normally have the sense that the body is a rather unwilling servant that obeys us only reluctantly; yet in moods such as Porius describes, the sense of unwillingness vanishes, and it seems that the body is simply the visible part of the soul. Racing drivers speeding at 200 miles an hour have occasionally described the same odd sensation of being suspended above themselves while nevertheless wholly in control. It is the sensation that convinced the Romantics that man is really a god.
At this point, let us return for a moment to those remarks made by Hoffmann’s mad musician Kreisler: that ‘it is in dreams that we grow butterfly wings by which we can escape our prison and ascend to the highest heavens’, and that ‘every man has an innate inclination to fly’. The first remark takes on new significance when we think of Dickens’ lady in red, Miss Napier, and the second when we recall Church’s description of the morning he suddenly realised he could fly. ‘I felt both power and exultation flooding my veins. The blood glowed warm within me, rising to my brain and pulsing there . . . I had found out the cheat of time and space . . .’ In short, Church was unconsciously doing what Wolf Solent does on the train: he was ‘cavoseniargizing’. And a few moments later, he was literally flying. Cavoseniargizing seems to be the key to ‘magical’ powers—the key, for example, to those preposterous coincidences that Jung called ‘synchronicities’, and which he believed were somehow caused by the unconscious mind.
In other words, Powys is really suggesting that we control this curious power over space and time, and if we knew the trick, could exercise it when we like. Think again of the experience of tasting a very rare wine: the way that you try to induce what Shaw called ‘the seventh degree of concentration’, and descend inside yourself.
I recognise that words like ‘cavoseniargizing’, or even ‘mythologising’, are unlikely to achieve wide popularity: both are too clumsy. But I am not sure my own substitute is any better. I have always called this deliberate ‘self-absorption’ subjectivising, bearing in mind Kierkegaard’s remark: ‘Truth is subjectivity.’ He obviously meant this descent into ourselves, as if we were stepping into a lift and pressing the button labelled ‘Basement—7th level’.
The romantics saw the answer, but they went about it in the wrong way. Their problem, quite simply, was immaturity. If you asked a 5-year-old child to imagine what would make him happiest, he would probably describe some endless Christmas party with slabs of iced cake and sherry trifles. If you asked a teenage youth what would make him happiest, he would probably describe some charming girl who would look at him with adoring eyes. The romantics were still thinking in terms of iced cake and pretty girls.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the most famous romantic novelist was a German called Richter, known as Jean Paul, whose novels are full of his own equivalent of Christmas cakes and pretty girls. A glance at his most famous novel Titan will give us the essence of romanticism in a nutshell. In the opening chapter, its young hero, Count Albano, is returning to Isola Bella (Beautiful Island), the island where he was born, and which he left as a baby. His mother is dead, and he has never seen his own father; now he is returning to meet his father—an Austrian knight—for the first time. Two friends transport him in a boat to the island during the night, then lead him, blindfolded, up to the top of the ten garden terraces. As the first rays of the sun gleam on the horizon, his friend Dian—a Greek painter—pulls off the blindfold:
‘“Oh god!” cried Albano with a shriek of ecstasy, as all the gates of the new heaven flew open, and the Olympus of nature, with its thousand reposing gods, stood around him.
‘What a world! There stood the Alps, like brother giants of the Old World, linked together, far away in the past, holding high up over against the sun the shining shields of the glaciers. The giants wore blue girdles of forest, and at their feet lay hills and vineyards, and through the aisles and arches of grape-clusters, the morning winds played with cascades as with watered silk ribbons, and the liquid brimming mirror of the lake hung down as if suspended by the ribbons from the mountains, and they fluttered down into the mirror, and a carved work of chestnut woods formed its frame.
‘Albano turned slowly round and round, looked into the heights, into the depths, into the sun, into the blossoms; and on all summits burned the alarm fires of mighty Nature, and in all depths lay their reflections. A creative earthquake beat like a heart under the earth and sent forth mountains and seas. Oh then, when he saw on the bosom of the infinite mother the little swarming children, as they darted by under every wave and every cloud—and when the morning breeze drove distant ships in between the Alps—and when the Isola Madre towered up opposite him, with her seven gardens, and tempted him to lean upon the air and be wafted on a level sweep from his summit to her own—and when he saw the pheasants darting down from the Madre into the waves—then did he seem to stand like a storm bird with ruffled plumage on his blooming nest, his arms were lifted like wings by the morning wind, and he longed to throw himself off the terrace after the pheasants, and to cool his heart in the tide of Nature.’
Here we have a kind of verbal equivalent of Van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night, with its flame-like trees and its sky that seethes like a whirlpool with sheer vitality.
In fact, Jean Paul does not always write on this ecstatic level; many of his works are about humble schoolmasters who live quietly in some small country village, and marry a local girl, and spend their lives peacefully teaching children the three Rs, and writing poetry which they never try to publish. But whether he is writing of magnificent landscapes or idyllic little villages, we can see why thousands of young people read Jean Paul with tears in their eyes, and regarded him as the greatest writer since Shakespeare. It seems absurdly ironic that he is now totally forgotten.
But what is so interesting here is how much things have changed in the sixty years since Pamela. Richardson was a realist; people read him because he wrote about the sort of people they knew. But if you are going to be carried away by a writer, rather like Sinbad the Sailor being carried up into the air by the roc, you may as well go for stories about young counts with mysterious fathers, which take place in the midst of magnificent scenery. If, like most of Jean Paul’s readers, you had never been outside your native town or village, then why not also have the benefits of a technicolour travelogue?
But as you read Jean Paul’s splendid description of Isola Bella, you will notice that the mood it attempts to induce is one of abandonment. Like Albano, you are supposed to cry ‘Oh God!’, and feel as if you want to fling yourself off the terrace and swoop like a bird over the sea. Jean Paul is trying to persuade you to give yourself to this wonderful landscape, like a girl giving herself to a lover. And here we encounter the greatest problem of the romantics. They may have intuitions of hidden powers, of the ability to fly or to float into the air like a balloon. But it is all basically Christmas cake and pretty girls. You sit back passively and wait for it to be handed to you on a plate. Church, on the other hand, is excited by his insight to make a sudden effort:
‘I exerted that will, visualising my hands and pressing downwards upon the centre of the earth. It was no surprise to me that I left the ground . . .’
And the student Beard, we may recall, had been reading a book about the power of the
will when he decided to try to ‘appear’ to his fiancée Miss Verity.
These ‘hidden powers’ we are speaking about demand a certain effort, a non-passive attitude—something like Powys’s ‘thrill of malicious exultation’, the feeling that he is a ‘demiurgic force’, not a passive creature waiting to be swept off his feet.
In the following chapter I want to look more closely at some of these ‘hidden powers’, and the methods by which we can contact them. But it is important, above all, to remember that the method for contacting these powers consists in ‘subjectivising’, withdrawing inside yourself. This is the basic secret of ‘magic’.
