by Colin Wilson
I ordered a meal downstairs in the director’s restaurant, to which we had access. It seemed somehow safer to tell him there. And in the hour before his arrival, I lay back on the bed, my eyes closed, and deliberately tried to relax, to empty my mind.
The odd thing is that, by this time, it wasn’t difficult. This exercise of concentrating upon one’s own mind had an exhilarating effect. There were certain things that I began to understand immediately. As an unashamed ‘romantic’, I have always been subject to boredom. This boredom arises out of a kind of mistrust of the world. You feel you can’t ignore it, can’t take your eyes off it and forget it. So you sit staring at a corner of the ceiling when you could be listening to music or thinking about history, held by a strange sense of duty. Well, I now felt that my duty lay in ignoring the outside world. I knew what Karel meant: that it was vital for the parasites to keep us in ignorance of their existence. Merely to become aware of them was to gain a new feeling of strength and purpose.
Reich came sharp at half past six, and said I looked much better. We had a martini, and he told me what had been happening since I left the site—mostly squabbles about the best angle at which to sink the first tunnel. At seven o’clock, we went down to supper. They gave us a quiet table near the window, and several people nodded to us—we had both become international celebrities in the past two months. When we were seated at table, we ordered iced melon, and he reached for the wine list. I took it from him, saying: ‘I don’t want you to drink any more this evening. You’ll see why later. We shall both need clear heads.’
He looked at me in astonishment.
‘What’s happening? I thought you said you had nothing on your mind?’
‘I had to. What I’ve got to tell you has to be kept secret for the present.’
He said, smiling: ‘If it’s as bad as that, perhaps we’d better check the table for hidden microphones.’
I told him there was no need, because what I had to say wouldn’t be believed by an eavesdropper. He was looking baffled by this time, so I began by saying:
‘Do I strike you as fairly normal and sane?’
‘Of course you do!’
‘And supposing I told you that in half an hour you’ll be doubting my sanity?’
He said: ‘For Christ’s sake get on with it. I know you’re not mad. What is all this about? Not some new idea about our underground city?’
I shook my head; and since he was looking bewildered by this time, I told him that I’d been reading Karel Weissman’s papers all the afternoon. I said: ‘I think I’ve discovered why he killed himself.’
‘Why?’
‘I think you’d better read this particular one yourself. He explains it better than I could. But the main point is this. I don’t believe he was mad. It wasn’t suicide—it was some kind of murder.’
All the time I was saying this, I was wondering if he would think me mad, and I tried to appear as calm and sane as possible. But it was a relief to see that nothing was further from his thoughts. He only said:
‘Look, if you don’t mind, we’ll have a drink after all. I need one.’
So we ordered half a bottle of Nuits St. Georges, and I helped him drink it. And I told him, as succinctly as I could, Weissman’s theories about the mind parasites. I began by reminding him of my experience on the wall at Karatepe, and our discussion. Before I had finished speaking, my respect and liking for Reich had doubled. He would have been justified in humouring me and sending for a strait jacket as soon as he was out of my sight. And the brief account I gave him must have sounded insane enough. However, he realized that I had read something in Weissman’s papers that had convinced me, and he was willing to be convinced himself.
As we went back upstairs after the meal, I remember my sense of unreality. If I was right, then the conversation that had just taken place was one of the most important in human history. Yet here we were, two ordinary human beings, trying to get back to the privacy of my room, and being accosted by fat, prosperous looking men who wanted us to meet their wives. It all seemed too normal and commonplace. I looked at the enormous bulk of Wolfgang Reich ambling ahead of me up the stairs, and wondered if he really believed the science fiction story I had told him. I knew that, to a large extent, my sanity depended on his believing me.
In my room, we drank orange juice. Reich now understood why I wanted to keep an absolutely clear head. He did not smoke. I handed him the folder of the Historical Reflections, and showed him the passage that I have printed above. I reread it, seated beside him. When he had finished, he stood up and walked up and down the room without speaking. I said finally:
‘You realize that, if this is not just a mad dream, I’ve placed your life in danger by telling you?’
He said: ‘That doesn’t bother me. It’s been in danger before. But I’d like to know how far there is any real danger. I’ve not had your experience of these mind vampires, so I’ve no way of judging.’
‘Neither have I. I know as little as you. Weissman’s other volumes are full of speculations about them, but there’s nothing definite. We have to start almost from scratch.’
He looked at me steadily for several moments, then said: ‘You really believe this, don’t you?’
I said: ‘I wish I didn’t.’
It was absurd; we were talking like two characters out of a Rider Haggard novel; yet it was all real. We talked to no purpose for half an hour or so, then he said:
‘There’s one thing that we have to do immediately, anyway. We must both make a tape recording about all this, and deposit it in a bank tonight. If anything happened to us in the night, it would serve as a warning. There’s less chance of people thinking two of us are insane than one.’
He was right. We got out my tape recorder, and did what he suggested, reading extracts of Weissman’s notes aloud. Reich had the last word. He said that he was not yet sure whether all this was madness or not. But it sounded sufficiently likely to justify this precaution. We still did not know how Weissman died, and we had his diary for the day before his suicide with notes that sounded completely sane.
When the tape was finished, we sealed it in a plastic box, and walked down to drop it into the night safe of the A.I.U.C. bank. Then I rang the manager at home, told him that we had deposited a tape containing certain important ideas in his night safe, and asked for it to be kept in his vault until it was needed. We encountered no difficulty here; he assumed that it was some important information that concerned the diggings and A.I.U., and promised to give it his personal attention.
I said I thought we now both needed a night’s sleep, and explained my idea that the parasites have less power over the fully conscious mind. We agreed to keep an open telescreen line between us all night, in case either needed help. Then we separated. Without hesitation, I took a strong sedative—although it was barely ten o’clock—and went to bed. When my head touched the pillow, I willed myself not to lie awake and think, and I fell asleep immediately. My thoughts felt ordered and disciplined; I had no difficulty in preventing my mind from wandering.
At nine the next morning, Reich woke me up, and sounded relieved to find I was all right. Ten minutes later, he came over to have breakfast.
It was now, sitting in a sunlit room and drinking iced orange juice, that we did our first useful thinking about the parasites. Our minds felt alert and fresh, and we recorded the whole conversation on tape. First of all, we discussed the problem of how far we could keep our knowledge a secret from them. The answer was that we had no way of knowing. Yet Weissman had survived for six months, which indicated that the danger was not immediate. What is more, they knew that Weissman was on to them; they had actually resisted his attempts to turn his mind upon the problem. So he was a marked man from the beginning. On the other hand, I had felt no alien presences the day before as I read the Historical Reflections, and after I had mastered that initial feeling of anxiety and panic I had felt exceptionally healthy, mentally and physically. I was rising to the chall
enge. (My grandmother once told me that during the early days of the last World War, everyone seemed happier and more resilient than ever before, and now I understood perfectly.)
So it was possible that ‘they’ didn’t yet realize that Weissman’s secret was out of the bag. This was hardly surprising. We did not know their numbers—or even whether the concept of number applied to them—but if they had the problem of policing five billion people—the present world population—then the danger was not too great. Let us, said Reich, suppose that Jung’s theory is correct, and that the human race has one great ‘mind’, a vast ocean of the ‘subconscious’. We also suppose that these parasites are creatures that inhabit the depths of this ocean, and avoid coming too close to the surface for fear of detection. In that case, they might not discover what we know for years, provided we did not give ourselves away, as Weissman did, by alarming them.
That set a problem. On the previous evening, we had both felt that the best way to learn more about the parasites was to experiment with drugs that would enable us to explore our own minds. Now we realized that this would be dangerous. In that case, was there any way in which we could learn about the mind without the use of drugs?
Luckily for us, this was a problem about which Weissman had written at length. We discovered this in the course of the day, going through the Reflections page by page. Husserl’s phenomenology was the method we needed. Husserl was concerned to map the ‘structure of consciousness’ (or its ‘geography’ as we preferred to say) by means of conscious reflection alone. And as we thought about the matter, we saw that this was common sense. If you are going to map an unknown continent—let us say, one of the jungles of Venus—you do not have to waste much time plodding among the trees. You rely mainly on instruments, and on your helicopter. What is most important is that you should become proficient at recognizing what is below you—knowing how to recognize swamp land by its colour, and so on. Well, where the geography of the human mind is concerned, the main problem is not to plunge into the realms below consciousness, but to learn to fit words to what we do know about it. With the use of a map, I could walk from Paris to Calcutta; without a map, I might find myself in Odessa. Well, if we had a similar ‘map’ of the human mind, a man could explore all the territory that lies between death and mystical vision, between catatonia and genius.
Let me put this another way. Man’s mind is like some vast electronic brain, capable of the most extraordinary feats. And yet unfortunately, man does not know how to operate it. Every morning when he wakes up, man crosses to the control panel of that vast brain, and proceeds to turn knobs and press buttons. And yet this is the absurdity: with the immense machine at his disposal, he knows only how to make it do the simplest things, to deal with the most obvious, everyday problems. It is true that there are certain men whom we call men of genius, who can make it do far more exciting things: write symphonies and poems, discover mathematical laws. And then there are a few men who are perhaps the most important of all: men who use this machine to explore its own capabilities. They use the machine to find out what they can do with the machine. They know that it is capable of creating the Jupiter symphony and Faust and The Critique of Pure Reason and multidimensional geometry. Yet in a sense, these works have been achieved by accident, or, at least, by instinct. Well, many great scientific discoveries have been stumbled on by accident; but when they have been discovered, the scientist’s first task is to learn the hidden laws that govern them. And this electronic brain is the greatest of all mysteries, for to know its secret would turn man into a god. So to what better purpose can consciousness be employed than to explore the laws of consciousness? And this is the meaning of the word ‘phenomenology’, perhaps the most important single word in the vocabulary of the human race.
The sheer size of the task overawed us. Yet it did not depress us. No scientist could be depressed at the prospect of endless discovery. Again and again—I should say a thousand times over the next few months—we made the same remark: that we could understand the vampires’ need for secrecy. Because everything depended on the human race taking its mental sickness for granted as a natural condition. Once it began to question it, to fight it, nothing could stand in its way.
I remember that we went down to the canteen for tea at mid-morning. (We decided that coffee might qualify as a drug, and should be avoided.) As we crossed the main square of A.I.U., we found ourselves looking at these people around us with a kind of god-like pity. They were all so preoccupied with their petty worries, all enmeshed in their personal little daydreams, while we at last were grappling with reality—the only true reality, that of the evolution of mind.
There was one immediate result. I began to lose my excess weight, and my physical health became perfect. I always slept well and deeply, and awoke feeling calm and totally healthy. My mental processes began to gain a feeling of amazing precision. I thought calmly, slowly, almost pedantically. We both realized the importance of this. Weissman had compared the parasites to sharks. Well, the quickest way for a swimmer to attract the attention of a shark is to splash and shout on the surface. We were not going to make that mistake.
Both of us returned to the diggings, but soon made excuses to spend a minimum of time there. This was not difficult, for most of what remained to be done was a problem for engineers rather than archaeologists. Reich, in any case, had thought of moving his equipment to Australia, to investigate the site described by Lovecraft in The Shadow out of Time, since our present finds left no doubt that Lovecraft was some sort of clairvoyant, and the possibility was worth exploring. Now, in August, we simply decided to take a holiday, making the hot season our excuse.
Both of us were daily on the lookout for any sign of the parasites. We were working well and smoothly; both of us were experiencing the same sense of physical and mental well-being, and we maintained a constant vigilance for any of the kind of mental ‘interference’ that Karel had described. There was none, and we were puzzled about it. I accidentally discovered the reason when I revisited London in early October. The lease on my Percy Street flat needed renewing, and I could not make up my mind whether it was worth the trouble. So I took the morning rocket to London, and was in my flat by eleven in the morning. And the moment I entered, I knew they were watching me. Months of expecting them had sensitized me. In the old days, I would have ignored this sudden feeling of depression, of some obscure danger, dismissed it as indigestion. Since then, I had learned a great deal. I had learned, for example, that when human beings have that unheralded ‘shivery’ feeling, which they describe as ‘someone walking on my grave’, it is usually an alarm signal; some parasite has blundered too close to the surface of consciousness, and the shiver is due to awareness of the presence of the alien.
In my room, I knew immediately that the mind parasites were watching me. It may sound paradoxical to say that they were ‘there’ in my room, when I have already said they were inside me. This is due to the inadequacy of everyday language. In a certain sense, universal mind and universal space-time are coincidental, as Whitehead understood. Mind is not really ‘inside’ us in the same sense that our intestines are. Our individuality is a kind of eddy in the sea of mind, a reflection of the total identity of the universal humanity. So when I went into my room, the parasites were at once inside me and waiting for me there. It was the papers they were there to guard.
The weeks of training had had their effect. I allowed my mind to bend to the sway of their observation as a tree might bend in the wind, or as a sick man bends to his sickness. Again, I had a feeling of being observed by octopuses rather than sharks, by baleful creatures of stillness. I went about my business pretending not to notice them. I even went over to the cabinets and glanced inside, allowing the upper part of my mind to respond to the folders on psychology with its usual indifference. It was now that I became clearly aware that I had developed a new power of mind. I was quite detached from the human being I would have called ‘Gilbert Austin’ two months earlier, as de
tached as a puppet master from his puppet. And yet while I was being watched by the parasites, I blended into my old self, and became, so to speak, a mere passenger of my old self. I had no fear that I might give myself away. I was too well-controlled for that. I had switched over on to the circuits of the old ‘Gilbert Austin’, and it was now he who walked around the room, rang Hampstead to enquire after Mrs. Weissman’s health, and finally rang a storage firm to take away the furniture (which was my own) and the filing cabinets to a warehouse. After that, I went down and spoke to my landlord, then spent the rest of the day in the British Museum talking to Herman Bell, head of the archaeology department. All the time, I was still aware of being under the observation of the parasites, although more distantly now. Since I had told the removal firm to fetch the filing cabinets, their interest had obviously slackened.
For nearly forty-eight hours, I controlled my mind to think of nothing but routine matters connected with the Karatepe digging. This was not as difficult as it sounds (as many of my second stage readers will know.) It was merely a matter of identifying myself with my part, like a ‘method actor’, of participating in Bell’s excitement about the excavations, and so on. I walked around London and saw friends; I allowed myself to be lured to a ‘small party’ to be lionized. (It turned out to be an enormous party; the hostess rang about a hundred guests as soon as I promised to be there.) I deliberately allowed my mind to work in its old manner: that is to say, badly. I let myself get over-excited, and then depressed. On the plane home, I allowed myself to wonder whether the whole thing had not been a stupid waste of time, and made a resolution not to let myself be lionized in this manner again. When the A.I.U. helicopter landed me in Diyarbakir, I had a feeling that the sky was clear again; but I continued to shield my thoughts for the next forty-eight hours, just in case. Reich was luckily back at the diggings, so there was no temptation to relax my precautions. As soon as he returned, I told him my story. I said I thought that the removal of the filing cabinets into storage probably reduced ‘their’ interest in me to nil. But neither of us had any intention of allowing ourselves to become overconfident.