by Colin Wilson
This long parenthesis has been necessary to explain why I thought I understood Karel Weissman’s last request to me. I am an archaeologist, not a psychologist. But I was his oldest friend, and I had once shared his interest in the problems of the outer limits of human consciousness. In his last moments, surely his thoughts had returned to our long nights of talk at Uppsala, to the endless lagers we had consumed in the little restaurant overlooking the river, to the bottles of schnapps drunk in my room at two in the morning? Something about it all bothered me, some faint, indefinable anxiety, of the kind that had made me ring Karel’s Hampstead house at midnight. But now there was nothing I could do about it; so I preferred to forget it. I was in the Hebrides at the time of my friend’s funeral—I had been called to examine the neolithic remains so remarkably preserved on Harris—and upon my return I found several filing cabinets of material on the landing outside my flat. My head was full of thoughts of neolithic man; I glanced into the first drawer, looked into a folder entitled: ‘The Perception of Colour in Emotionally Starved Animals’, and hastily slammed the drawer. Then I went into my flat and opened the Archaeological Journal, and came upon Reich’s article on the electronic dating of the basalt figurines of the Boghazköy temple. My excitement was intense; I rang Spence at the British Museum, and rushed over to see him. For the next forty-eight hours I thought and ate and breathed nothing but Boghazköy figurines and the distinguishing features of Hittite sculpture.
This, of course, saved my life. There can be no possible doubt that the Tsathogguans were awaiting my return, waiting to see what I did. And luckily, my head was full of archaeology. My mind was floating gently in the immense seas of the past, lulled in the currents of history. Psychology was repellent to it. If I had eagerly studied my friend’s material, searching for a clue to his suicide, my own mind would have been possessed and then destroyed within hours.
When I think of it now, I shudder. I was surrounded by evil, alien minds. I was like some diver at the bottom of the sea, so absorbed in contemplating the treasure of a sunken ship that I failed to notice the cold eyes of the octopus that lay in wait behind me. In other moods, I might have noticed them, as I did later at Karatepe. But Reich’s discoveries occupied all my attention. It pushed out of my head all sense of duty to the memory of my dead friend.
I conclude that I was under fairly constant observation from the Tsathogguans for several weeks. It was during this time that I realized I must return to Asia Minor if I was to clear up the problems raised by Reich’s criticisms of my own dating. Again, I can only feel that this decision was providential. It must have confirmed the Tsathogguans in the feeling that they had absolutely nothing to fear from me. Obviously, Karel had made a mistake; he could hardly have chosen a less suitable executor. In fact, I felt twinges of conscience about those filing cabinets during my remaining weeks in England, and once or twice forced myself to glance into them. On each occasion, I felt the same distaste for these matters of psychology, and closed them again. On the last occasion on which I did so, I remember wondering whether it would not be simpler to ask the caretaker to burn all this stuff in the basement furnace. The idea instantly struck me as utterly immoral, and I rejected it—a little surprised, to be honest, to find myself entertaining it. I had no idea that it was not ‘I’ who thought the thought.
I have often wondered since then how far the choice of myself as executor was a part of my friend’s design, and how far it was a last minute decision made in despair. Obviously, he can have given little thought to it, or they would have known. Was it, then, a sudden inspired decision, the last lightning flash of one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century? Or was I chosen faute de mieux? We may know the answer one day if we can obtain access to the Tsathogguans’ archives. I like to think that the choice was intentional, a masterstroke of cunning. For if providence was on his side in making the choice, it was certainly on mine during the next six months, when I thought of anything but Karel Weissman’s papers.
When I left for Turkey, I instructed my landlord that Baumgart was to be allowed into my flat during my absence. He had agreed to attempt a preliminary sorting of the papers. I had also opened negotiations with two American publishers of textbooks of psychology, who showed themselves interested in Karel Weissman’s papers. Then, for some months, I thought no more about psychology, for the problems involved in the dating of the basalt figurines absorbed my full attention. Reich had established himself in the laboratories of the Turkish Uranium Company at Diyarbakir. His main concern so far, of course, had been the dating of human and animal remains by the argon method, and in this technique he had become the foremost world authority. In turning his attention from the ages of prehistory to the reign of the Hittites, he was exploring a relatively new field as far as his own work was concerned. Man is a million years old; the Hittite invasion of Asia Minor occurred in 1,900 BC. For this reason, he was delighted to see me in Diyarbakir, for my own book on the civilization of the Hittites had been the standard work since its publication in 1980.
For my own part, I found Reich a fascinating man. My own mind is at home in any period from 2,500 BC to the end of the tenth century AD. Reich’s mind was at home in any period from the Carboniferous age onward, and he could speak of the Pleistocene—a mere million years ago—as if it were recent history. I was present once when he examined a dinosaur tooth, and he remarked casually that it could not possibly be as recent as the Cretaceous age—that he would place it in the late Triassic—about fifty million years earlier. I was also present when a Geiger counter verified his guess. His instinct for this kind of thing was quite uncanny.
Since Reich will play a considerable part in this story, I should say something about him. Like myself, he was a big man; but unlike myself, his bigness owed nothing to surplus fat. He had the shoulders of a wrestler, and an enormous, prognathous jaw. His voice always gave surprise, for it was gentle and rather high—the result, I believe, of a throat infection in childhood.
But the main difference between myself and Reich lay in our emotional attitude towards the past. Reich was a scientist through and through. For him, figures and measurements were everything; he could derive enormous pleasure from reading through a column of Geiger readings that extended over ten pages. His favourite assertion was that history should be a science. Now I have never tried to hide the powerful element of the romantic in my composition. I became an archaeologist through an almost mystical experience. I had been reading a volume on the civilization of Nineveh by Layard, which I had picked up casually in the bedroom of the farm at which I was staying. Some of my clothes were drying on a line in the yard, and a burst of thunder made me hurry outside to get them in. Just inside the farmyard there was a large pool of grey water, rather muddy. As I was taking the clothes from the line, my mind still in Nineveh, I happened to notice this pool, and forgot, for a moment, where I was or what I was doing there. As I looked at it, the puddle lost all familiarity and became as alien as a sea on Mars. I stood staring at it, and the first drops of rain fell from the sky, and wrinkled its surface. At that moment I experienced a sensation of happiness and of insight such as I had never known before. Nineveh and all history suddenly became as real and as alien as that pool. History became such a reality that I felt a kind of contempt for my own existence, standing there with my arms full of clothes. For the remainder of that evening I walked around like one in a dream. From then on, I knew I had to devote my life to ‘digging up the past’, and to trying to reconstitute that vision of reality.
It will be seen, in a moment, that all this has great relevance to my story. It meant that Reich and I had totally dissimilar attitudes towards the past, and constantly amused one another by minor revelations of our individual temperaments. For Reich, science contained all the poetry of life, and the past merely happened to be the field in which he exercised his ability. As to myself, science was a servant of poetry. My earliest mentor, Sir Charles Myers, had strengthened this attitude in me, for he had t
he most total contempt for all that was modern. To see him working on a digging was to see a man who had ceased to exist in the twentieth century, and who looked down on history like a golden eagle from some mountain peak. He had a shuddering distaste for most human beings; he once complained to me that most of them seemed ‘so unfinished and shabby’. Myers made me feel that the true historian is a poet rather than a scientist. He once said that the contemplation of individual men made him dream of suicide, and that he could reconcile himself to being human only by considering the rise and fall of civilizations.
During those first weeks at Diyarbakir, when the rainy season made it impossible for us to do field work on the Karatepe diggings, we had many long discussions during the evenings, while Reich drank beer by the pint and I drank a most excellent local brandy. (Even here the differences in our temperaments revealed themselves!)
Now it happened that one evening, I received a letter from Baumgart. It was very brief. He stated simply that he had discovered certain papers in Weissman’s filing cabinets that convinced him that Weissman had been insane for some time before his suicide: that Weissman had believed that ‘they’ were aware of his efforts, and would try to destroy him. Baumgart said that it was clear from the context that ‘they’ did not refer to human beings. He had therefore decided not to go ahead with his negotiations for the publication of Weissman’s psychological papers; he would leave it for my return.
Naturally, I was puzzled and intrigued. It happened that Reich and I had reached a certain point in our work where we felt we had a right to rest and congratulate ourselves; so our talk that evening was concerned entirely with Weissman’s ‘madness’ and suicide. During the early part of the discussion, there were also present two of Reich’s Turkish colleagues from Izmir, and one of them mentioned the curious fact that the suicide rate in the rural areas of Turkey had risen in the past ten years. This surprised me; for while the urban suicide rate had increased steadily in most countries, the country populations, on the whole, seemed immune from the virus.
This led one of our guests, Dr. Omer Fu’ad, to tell us about the researches that his department had been conducting into the suicide rate of the ancient Egyptians and Hittites. The later Arzawa tablets mention an epidemic of suicide in the reign of King Mursilis the Second (1334-4306 BC), and give the figures for Hattusas. Strangely enough, the Menetho papyri, discovered in 1990 in the monastery at Es Suweida, also mention an epidemic of suicide in Egypt in the reign of Haremhab and Sethos the First, covering approximately the same period (1350-1292 BC). His companion, Dr. Muhammed Darga, was an admirer of that strange piece of historical charlatanism, Spengler’s Decline of the West, and proceeded to argue that such epidemics of suicide could be predicted accurately according to the age of the civilization and its degree of urbanization. He went on to evolve some far-fetched metaphor about biological cells and their tendency to ‘die voluntarily’ when the body has lost its ability to be stimulated by the environment.
Now all this struck me as nonsense, since the civilization of the Hittites was barely 700 years old in 1350 B.C., while that of the Egyptians was at least twice as old. And Dr. Darga had a rather dogmatic manner of stating his ‘facts’ that annoyed me. I became rather heated—the brandy may have had something to do with it—and challenged our guests to produce facts and figures. They said, very well, they would—and would submit them to the judgment of Wolfgang Reich. And, having to fly back to Izmir, they took their leave fairly early.
Now Reich and I engaged in a discussion that sticks in my mind as the true beginning of the story of the fight against the mind parasites. Reich, with his clear, scientific intelligence, quickly summarized the pros and cons of our earlier arguments, and allowed that Dr. Darga seemed to have little gift for scientific detachment. Reich then went on:
‘Consider the facts and figures that are available to us about our own civilization. How much do they actually tell us? These suicide figures, for example. In 1960, a hundred and ten people of every million committed suicide in England—a doubling of the rate since a century earlier. By 1970, this rate had doubled again, and by 1980, it had multiplied by six…’
Reich had an astonishing mind; he seemed to have stored all the important statistics of the century in it. Now usually, I detest figures. But as I listened to him, something happened to me. I felt a touch of coldness inside me, as if I had suddenly become aware of the eyes of some dangerous creature. It passed in a moment, but I found myself shuddering. Reich asked: ‘Cold?’ I shook my head. And when Reich stopped talking for a while, to stare out of the window at the lighted street below us, I found myself saying:
‘When all’s been said, we know almost nothing about human life.’
He said cheerfully: ‘We know enough to be getting on with, and that’s all you can expect.’
But I could not forget that feeling of coldness. I said:
‘After all, civilization is a kind of dream. Supposing a man suddenly woke up from that dream? Wouldn’t it be enough to make him commit suicide?’
I was thinking about Karel Weissman, and he knew it. He said:
‘But what about these delusions about monsters?’
I had to agree that this failed to fit my theory. But I could not shake off the cold touch of depression that had settled on me. What is more, I was now definitely afraid. I felt that I had seen something that I could not forget—to which I would have to return. And I felt that I could easily slide downhill into a state of nervous terror. I had drunk half a bottle of brandy, yet now I felt horribly sober, coldly aware that my body was slightly drunk, yet unable to identify with it. The idea that came to me was terrible. It was that the suicide rate was increasing because thousands of human beings were ‘awakening’ , like me, to the absurdity of human life, and simply refused to go on. The dream of history was coming to an end. Mankind was already starting to wake up; one day it would wake up properly, and there would be mass suicide.
These thoughts were so awful that I was tempted to go back to my room and brood on them. Yet I forced myself, against my will, to express them to Reich. I don’t think he fully understood me, but he saw that I was in a dangerous condition, and with inspired insight, he said the exact words that were necessary to restore my peace of mind. What he began to talk about was the strange part that coincidence had played in archaeology; coincidence that would be too wild to use in fiction. He talked of how George Smith had journeyed from London with the absurd hope of finding the clay tablets that would complete the epic of Gilgamesh, and how he had, in fact, found them. He talked of the equally ‘impossible’ story of Schliemann’s discovery of Troy, of Layard’s finding of Nimrud—as if some invisible thread of destiny had pulled them towards their discovery. I had to admit that, more than any other science, archaeology inclines one to believe in miracles.
He followed it up swiftly. ‘But if you can agree with that, then surely you must see that you’re mistaken in thinking that civilization is a kind of dream—or a nightmare? A dream appears to be logical while it lasts, but when we wake up we see that it had no logic. You are suggesting that our illusions impose a similar logic on life. Well, the stories of Layard, Schliemann, Smith, Champollion, Rawlinson, Bossert, contradict you flatly. They really happened. They are real life stories that make use of outrageous coincidence in a way that no novelist would risk…’
He was right, and I had to agree. And when I thought of that strange destiny that had guided Schliemann to Troy, Layard to Nimrud, I recollected similar examples from my own life—for example, of my first major ‘find’—of the parallel texts in Phoenician, proto-Hattian and Kanisic at Kadesh. I can still remember my overwhelming sense of destiny, of some ‘divinity that shapes our ends’—or at least, in some mysterious law of chance—that came over me as I scraped the earth from those clay tablets. For I knew, at least half an hour before I found those texts, that I was going to make a remarkable discovery that day; and when I stuck in my spade in a casually chosen spot, I had no fear
that it would prove to be a waste of time.
In less than ten minutes, Reich had talked me back into a state of optimism and sanity.
I did not know it, but I had won my first battle against the Tsathogguans.
(Editor’s note: from this point onward, the tape recording has been supplemented by Professor Austin’s Autobiographical Notes, by kind permission of the Librarian of Texas University. These notes have been published separately by the University in Professor Austin’s Miscellanies. I have attempted to use the notes only to expand material mentioned in the tape recording, which continues for another ten thousand words or so.)
The luck of the god of Archaeology was certainly with me that spring. Reich and I worked together so well that I decided to take a flat in Diyarbakir and remain there for at least a year. And in April, a few days before we set out for the Black Mountain of Karatepe, I received a letter from Standard Motors and Engineering, Karel Weissman’s former employers, saying that they would like to return a great many of Weissman’s papers to me, and enquiring as to my present whereabouts. I replied that letters would reach me care of the Anglo-Indian Uranium Company at Diyarbakir, and that I would be grateful if they would return Weissman’s papers to my London address, or to Baumgart, who was still in Hampstead.
When Professor Helmuth Bossert first approached Kadirli, the nearest ‘town’ to the Black Mountain of the Hittites, in 1946, he had a difficult journey over muddy roads. In those days, Kadirli was a tiny provincial town with no electricity. Today it is a comfortable but quiet little town with two excellent hotels, and within an hour’s reach of London by rocket plane. The trip from there to the Black Mountain, Karatepe, cost Bossert another arduous day’s travel over shepherds’ paths overgrown with prickly broom. We, in our own helicopter, reached Kadirli in an hour from Diyarbakir, and Karatepe in a further twenty minutes. Reich’s electronic equipment had already been brought by transport plane forty-eight hours earlier.