Man Without a Shadow

by Colin Wilson

  All of which brings me back to the sexual problem. There have been moments when I wonder whether all romantics—and I am essentially a romantic—are completely mistaken in their basic assumption. They all feel that they only need the ‘key’ to life, the ‘way’—and that man will be able to turn on at will these tremendous moods of exaltation and power. But consider a dray horse, or that poor old red-setter they keep chained up next door. The lives of these animals are very boring indeed; no one pretends that the animal is ‘completely fulfilled’. He isn’t supposed to be. He is supposed to be useful to his master.

  An evolutionist would argue that man’s limitations are a necessary part of his low position on the evolutionary ladder. He is not so far above the monkey and the cave-man; why should he expect visions? I see this point of view. And yet there are moments when I am convinced that man is actively impeded from climbing higher by some force that finds him most useful in his present position. It wants us to live like cars with their brakes on; it wants our consciousness to remain so narrow and absurd that we never learn to put two and two together. It is true that I have never had the least doubt of my own genius. But what is that genius in the scales of what man could attain? It merely means that I have one less spanner in my works than most people; the ‘force’ has made a slightly less efficient job of wrecking me.

  And yet I’m not a pessimist. Because there is something in me that drives me on. Whatever the force that holds us down, I don’t think it is malign—not entirely so, anyway. We are not mere sheep waiting for the butcher, being fattened and exploited.

  Of one thing I am certain. The sexual force is the nearest thing to magic—to the supernatural—that human beings ever experience. It deserves perpetual and close study. No study is so profitable to the philosopher. In the sex force, he can watch the purpose of the universe in action.

  This is my most important conclusion about sex so far: there is no such thing as sex for its own sake. The libido is a myth.

  I recall the earliest impressions ever made on me by sex—by sexual knowledge, I should say, for I was always aware of the force of sex. It was somehow a powerful and obscene force that demanded a definite ‘descent’, a loss of pride and dignity. I am sure that most of us at school thought that marriage was an ideal kind of state because it was a way of legalizing ‘something dirty’. Again, I think of a red-haired boy called Barrett who talked of nothing but sex. One day, I heard two of his friends laughing about him. They had been to the theatre the night before, and in the ‘gods’, had picked up three girls. Barrett disappeared into a back street with his girl; when his friends went to look for him, he was having sex against a dustbin. They called to him, but he was apparently unable to stop. The boys imitated his motion obscenely, jerking the hips back and forward like a dog with a mechanical motion. This stuck in my mind for a long time—sex as the force that turned men into dogs. The worst of it was that, even so, I envied Barrett.

  And yet compare this to Bill Payne’s attitude to women. I know that he actually finds the sexual act a come-down after the pleasure of seduction. There’s something delightful in his perpetual enthusiasm, the way he says: ‘Women, Gerard, women. They’re delicious.’ I honestly believe he could devote his life to the pursuit of women, like Casanova, finding in each one a new universe. He’s an example of the sexual illusion at its most intense—and in many ways, at its best.

  And yet consider my own case at the moment. I am involved with two women simultaneously. From Bill’s point of view, the fact that Caroline is Gertrude’s niece makes it only more piquant. I could sleep with either of them tonight. And yet this knowledge destroys the excitement and the desire. Somehow, the value of sex is its life-enhancing value, not in the sex itself.

  For example, Caroline has been in her flat for three months now, and I spend a lot of time there with her. Madeleine, the girl she shares with, obviously has an ambivalent attitude to me. I think she envies Caroline her sleeping partner, yet at the same time, feels she ought to be shocked. The other night, I took Bill around there for supper, and then we got rather happy on Burgundy. Finally, Madeleine, claiming that she had to be up early, went off for a bath, and then got into bed. But we all went into her room, and had a last drink. Then Bill and Caroline decided that we ought to get just one more bottle of wine before the shop closed and went off together to get it. I simply stayed on Madeleine’s bed, kissing her. She opened her mouth and let me excite her; I started to kiss her neck, then went lower, and finally pulled down the top of her nightdress and began to kiss her nipples. She simply lay there, with her eyes closed, looking as if she was listening to a heavenly choir, and would obviously have let me go on all night if Bill and Caroline hadn’t returned. And yet as soon as they came into the room, she pulled the sheets around her neck and started talking as if nothing had happened. And this is the girl who told us a few days later that she intended to keep her virginity for her husband.

  Still, I must confess that the situation appealed to me more than any of its individual elements explains. I like lying there in the morning, and watching Caroline get out of bed and get dressed. She has no sort of self-consciousness, and usually asks me which panties I think she ought to wear, then wanders in and out in her underwear until she’s made tea (I suspect this may not be as uncalculated as she’d like me to think; very few mornings have gone by when I haven’t pulled her back into bed and undressed her again). Gertrude never lets me watch her get dressed; she always vanishes into the bathroom in a dressing-gown and appears fully clothed.

  Usually I stay there when Caroline and Madeleine have gone out—Caroline to her drama school, Madeleine to her office. I stare out of the window at the warehouses opposite, and nearly always have a kind of wrestling match with my consciousness. I think: ‘Here I am, in a situation that ought to delight me, in the bed of a pretty blonde. Tonight I shall be in another woman’s bed. And yet I stare at these warehouses . . . and they are meaningless. Why? Why does this experience mean so little to me?’ I am like a man dying of thirst who has found a spring—but it flows only in tiny drops, so that he has to wait five minutes for each drop to fall. Most of us hunger for experience, for life. Our whole entertainments industry is built up on this naïve hunger: the shopgirl who wants to identify herself with Norma Talmadge being carried off into the desert by Rudolph Valentino.

  The other night, on my way to see Caroline, I remembered that she wanted some stockings, and went into a ladies’ shop in Kensington High Street to get them. As I turned around from the counter, I found myself looking into one of those cubicles where women try on dresses. The woman hadn’t bothered to draw the curtain, and was pulling a dress over her head. Since she was blinded by the dress, she wasn’t aware that I was looking at her, and I took care to look my fill before the dress came off, and she realized that she was standing in front of a man in exactly the same clothes that Caroline wears to make the tea in the morning. I pretended not to have seen her, of course, and heard the curtain hastily drawn. But I had to practically limp out of the shop. I was in an appalling state of sexual excitement—due to the unexpectedness of it, I suppose. I was burning from head to foot with lust. But the trouble with it was that simply hurling Caroline on to her bed wouldn’t necessarily have satisfied it. It was its lack of object that shattered me. The woman—as I had time to notice—was middle-aged; her figure was good, but not startling. Caroline is in every way a better candidate for lust. If I had found the woman in my bed, I doubt whether I’d have been able to summon the appetite to take her. And yet I recognized that the intensity of desire I felt could easily drive a man to murder and rape. I am, I hope, incapable of either, and yet I was trembling with excitement—an unhealthy, burning excitement that does no good. As I passed other girls in the street, women returning from offices, I felt: all these women have this same capacity to arouse this feeling hidden below this opaque outer layer of clothing. Our society is sitting o
n a sexual powder-barrel. Is there any wonder in the rise in the rate of sex crime? As men go, I think I’m capable of a fair degree of self-discipline and self-restraint. But if other men are less restrained than me, God help them. And God help civilization. We only need a war to prove how thin the ‘civilization’ is. Men go in for rape and sadism as if they were born to it. I remember how a man came to talk to us at school, and told us about how he had been in a train wreck, and had helped the rescue workers to release trapped people in spite of his own injuries. But I still recall that my main feeling was sexual excitement at the thought of unconscious women in railway carriages who could be quickly violated before being dragged to safety. I wonder how many more of the boys who heard him had the same thought? I never told anyone; I would have been too ashamed, and even schoolboy sexual frankness seldom goes to that length. And yet what stability can we expect of a civilization built on this kind of basis? Unless, of course, I can comfort myself with the thought that I am completely abnormal, and other men never entertain such daydreams.

  What conclusions do I draw from all this? I believe that, far from being ‘abnormal’, the intensity of my sexual impulse is a part of the total intensity that makes me what I am—an intelligent being, responding with unusual directness to the problems of modern civilization. I watch my sexual impulse at work with a kind of amazement. I may not know why I’m alive, but something inside me does. Sex is the only power I know that can defeat the awful pressure of the present. The world looks blank and meaningless, grey, pointless, mocking my brevity and hunger with its permanence and serenity. Only when sexual desire blazes in me can I overcome its indifference; the desire turns on it like a flame-thrower; my body suddenly carries a current at thousands of volts, surging from some main down in my subconscious; I become realler than the world; harder, intenser, more lasting.

  I know that this power exists in me for other purposes than sex. Sometimes it can be evoked by music or literature or ideas. Something like it flows in me now as I write this because I am writing with excitement, enjoying being able to pin down these ideas into words. I feel like a detective cross-examining the world, trying to trap it into admissions of purpose. I know bloody well it exists—an immense power and purpose. So why am I usually left out? This damned lying cheat of a world. I don’t know yet why I exist. I feel superfluous, like a gramophone in the middle of the Sahara Desert. And yet there are times when I almost get plugged in, when some of my plugs find their sockets, and there’s a whisper of power in my nerves. I predict there will be a day when all man’s purpose will be on the surface; he will know, he will understand, instead of living in this blackness of ignorance. Instead of having to strain his ears to catch murmurs from his own depths, he will have a clear conscious understanding of his purpose. This purpose could be excavated from our own depths with enough concentration. What chance has a man who merely ‘lives’—that is to say, who drifts and ‘takes life as it comes’ and accepts everything—the world and himself—as he finds them; what chance has such a man of escaping his own futility? Yet for more than a hundred years now, writers and philosophers have been dropping depth-charges into man, and hoping that some of his hidden meaning will be blasted to the surface. These men have focused the flame of the intellect on the world, and tried to cut through its surface as a diver cuts his way into a sunken ship with oxy-acetylene. So far, the world has repelled the assault; the works of Blake, Nietzsche, Shaw, Wells, Eliot, all stand as evidence of the failure of the assault. And yet I suspect we may be nearer success than we dream. Little by little, the great dynamo has been built. Perhaps all it needs is just one single connection, the joining of two wires—and the machine will roar into life. Or perhaps all that is needed is an overall vision of what has been done, a sudden grasp of everything that has been thought for two centuries. It is this vision that ‘life’ seems to take care we never achieve; consciousness is strictly rationed; we have to fight like mad for every inch, and usually we lose it again a few hours later.

  Am I deceiving myself when I think that a great change has come over the human mind in the past century and a half—since about the time of Blake? When I look across at my bookshelf, at the Restoration dramatists, at Shakespeare, at Chapman’s Homer, at the poems of Dryden—I feel that all these men were time-wasters. It was these other men—Nietzsche, Shaw, Wells, who attacked reality with a hatchet and sledgehammer, dealing it tremendous thumps in an effort to break through that blank surface.

  And yet I am always aware that the central problem is the problem of my body, my stupid, intractable body. My body is my despair. How can I achieve the kind of things I want when my body is so unutterably stupid? I am like a carpenter who is asked to build a house of rotten, worm-eaten wood, or like a dressmaker who is asked to design clothes for a queen out of dyed sugar-sacks. I remember the first time I ever tried to play a trumpet. I thought that I only had to blow, and the notes would come cascading out. I couldn’t understand why my breath whistled silently through it. When Dan Roberts showed me how to press my lips together, and I finally succeeded in getting a pitiful raspberry, I found it hard to believe that anyone could ever make this instrument sound like Bix. Well, I have only to concentrate my attention on my body, and I get this same feeling of hopelessness. It just will not do what it’s told. Every day I have to wrestle with it for hours. Occasionally, towards nightfall, a curious peace comes over me; the powers of my mind seem to be multiplied by ten; my memory works unerringly; every thought is like a stone dropped into a still pond. I feel as if I could stay awake for ever. But just as frequently, the only effect of trying to teach my body harmony is exhaustion. My eyelids turn to lead; my brain is like a muddy field that makes every step a tremendous muscular effort. How can man be a god with this equipment?

  And yet I sometimes wonder whether Shaw was right: that the fault lies in the will, not in the body. Could this body be drilled into a god-like obedience? Could some inner-harmony and power of spirit cancel out all these irrelevancies—illness, the slight dissatisfaction in the stomach that makes concentration difficult, the chill around the throat, the burning in the nose that is the sign of a coming cold? I think of saints in the desert, fighting the body, trying to flay it into obedience, and of the Buddha holding his breath until he lost consciousness. I have also tried to bully the body; I have tried breathing exercises and yogic postures and all the rest. And yet here is the preposterous thing. There have been so many occasions when I have felt that the time wasted in sleep is an indignity, and have tried to keep myself awake half the night. My eyelids close against my will, and I lie down with a sense of defeat, realizing that it is barely twelve hours since I got out of this same bed. And yet there are other times, when I’ve had little sleep, where a book or an idea interests me; suddenly I notice that it is four o’clock in the morning, and I am still not tired. My body responds badly to bullying, and yet allows excitement to charm it into obedience. If only I had the secret of charming at will. It happens unexpectedly, or takes twelve hours of continuous mental struggle to produce a few hours of serenity. But in these hours of serenity, the body is at last working with decent efficiency, and I understand what life would be like if I knew the secret. Is life bound to be a losing battle with the body, a struggle against its sheer insensitivity, in which our artificial allies—alcohol, drugs—only lend their aid at ruinous rates of interest?

  Can any of us fail to be interested in this fight against the body? I know of no one who is worth tuppence who hasn’t tried to beat and torture his body into obedience. Bill Payne once starved himself for a week, and told me he began to experience visions, to feel a strange lightness, as if the body had finally surrendered. Oliver Glasp slept naked on the bare wires of his bed. I have a photo of his Matthew Lovatt painting in the room now—the man who tried to crucify himself in Geneva. I think it probably his best painting; every stroke of the brush shows the intensity of his involvement with the subject. Only such men des
erve any consideration; all others are weaklings and dupes.

  Oct. 22nd.

  Caroline interrupted me last night. This was probably just as well; I felt tired, but resented my inability to keep on working. She wanted to talk to me about dropping Gertrude. I didn’t quite see her point. At the moment, I don’t give a damn—I’d drop Caroline and Gertrude without a qualm. Gertrude is an emotional blackmailer; she takes care to be undemanding and generous and attentive, then allows me to see that she’s unhappy and unsure of me. I never leave her without feeling guilt. I’m fond of her—I respond instinctively to affection. But it’s all so bloody irrelevant at the moment. Whenever I leave her place, there seems to be a mist of irony hanging over London.

  I wish I could explain this more fully. It’s worth explaining. When I first met Gertrude, I was puzzled by her apparent independence; she seemed to have come to terms with herself and with some kind of belief that made her independent of close relationships. This fascinated me; I wanted to know what it was that gave her this strength. When I got to know her better, I realized it was ordinary reticence—a refusal to confess to loneliness. At first, there was a strange charm about the affair. I didn’t particularly like being fed and plied with drink; it made me feel too dependent. But I liked the way Gertrude started to come here and turn out my dirty clothes and lug them off home to wash them (she has a machine that does it all in a quarter the time it would take me). I also liked the curious way in which she surrendered herself. I can still remember the excitement I felt about very minor things. This, for example. One evening, I started to kiss her on the settee. She doesn’t like being undressed downstairs; she feels it’s not respectable—so I often do it for fun. After a few minutes she began to get excited, and I started to get her skirt round her waist. At this moment she sat up, and told me she had to go out to the lavatory. So I had to contain myself. In the meantime, I made sure the curtains were properly drawn and the back door locked. She came back in and lay down, and I started to go through the preliminaries again. When I got my hand under her dress, I discovered to my astonishment that she had taken off her pants. As I think back on this, I can still recall my shock of surprise: it was so unlike her. She prefers everything to be in the dark, and the ritual has to be strictly observed. She prefers to get dressed and undressed in the bathroom; but if, for some reason, she gets undressed when I’m in bed, she takes care never to take off her clothes in their natural order—apparently feeling that this would somehow place her on a level with a strip-tease artist. She loosens her bra, eases her pants down under her slip, then does a curious little wiggle that brings the whole lot down around her feet; then she makes a leap for the light, and hurls herself into bed in one movement, the idea being that I should see as little of her as possible without clothes.