The Outsider

by Colin Wilson

  Nevertheless, the paintings are valuable as a part of Blake’s exposition of his ‘world view’ in a way that Van Gogh’s are not.

  Van Gogh’s mysticism was all unconscious, and there is no exposition of it in his prose. Blake made all of his work, as well as his life, a systematic exposition of his mysticism.

  At this point, it would not be unreasonable to ask: What exactly do we mean by mysticism? And, in fact, there could be no better point at which to ask it, for Blake can provide us with the answer.

  Mysticism is derived from the Greek ìýåéí, to shut the eyes: exactly what Blake meant by it. ‘Seeing’ is not simply using the eyes. The retina of the eye records impressions which are carried to the brain, which interprets them. If the brain becomes lazy and ceases to interpret the impressions that the eye carries to it, one literally ceases to see. The experience is familiar to everyone. You are reading a book, and you are tired; your mind begins to drift, and suddenly you realize you have read half a page without its meaning anything to you. Your eyes have read it, but your brain failed to interpret it; therefore, to all intents and purposes, you have not read it. It is the same with seeing. You are on a long train journey; at the beginning of the journey you watch the fields passing with interest; the new sights stimulate all kinds of thoughts and impressions; at the end of the journey, you are almost asleep; nothing arouses the interest, nothing makes an impression. You are no longer seeing.

  Rimbaud grasped the essence of this experience when he wrote to a friend: The poet should be a visionary; one should make oneself a visionary....’ ‘One makes oneself a visionary by a long, immense, ordered derangement of the senses.’ He claimed that he had trained himself to visual hallucinations, to see ‘a mosque instead of a factory... calashes on the roads of the sky, a drawing-room at the bottom of a lake’. Rimbaud had realized that seeing is an affair of the brain, and the brain can be affected by the will. Man’s own inner being orders what he sees.

  Rimbaud’s ‘ordered derangement of the senses’ may strike us as being rather silly, or at least rather youthful, but it is not entirely so. Rimbaud was not advocating drug-taking or alcohol; he was advocating the use of the Will. He set out to use his Will-power on the senses. The result was a sharpening, an intensifying, a cleansing of the senses, that altered everything he saw. He was seeing differently; he was seeing visions.

  I have already spoken of that cleansing of the senses in connexion with Lawrence. This is Blake’s most important utterance on it:

  The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed by fire at the end of six thousand years, is true, as I have heard from Hell.

  For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life; and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.

  But first, the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged, this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away and displaying the infinite that was hid.

  If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

  For man has closed himself up, til he sees all things thro’ chinks of his cavern.29

  This can be supplemented by another quotation from the introduction to ‘Europe’:

  Five windows light the caverned man; through one he breathes the air, Thro’ one hears music of the spheres; through one the eternal vine Flourishes that he may receive the grapes; thro’ one can look And see small portions of the eternal world which ever groweth, Thro’ one himself pass out what time he please; but he will not For stolen joys are sweet, and bread eaten in secret pleasant!30

  This is clear enough; Blake claims that the outside world is infinite and eternal, and would appear so to everyone if everyone could see things without the grime on their windows of perception. No doubt if Blake could have lived long enough to see Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ or the ‘Road at Dusk with Cypresses’, he would have said without hesitation: This man sees things as they are.

  There is another great passage in ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’ where Blake makes clear what happens when the brain refuses to do its work of interpretation, or what happens when something affects it to warp its interpretations:

  They told me that the night and day were all that I could see

  They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up

  And they inclosed my brain into a narrow circle

  And sunk my heart into the abyss, a red round globe, hotburning, Til all from life I was obliterated and erased. Instead of morn arises a bright shadow, like an eye In the eastern cloud; instead of night, a sickly charnel house....31

  What Blake is intimating here is that the vision of things as ‘infinite and holy’ is not an abnormal vision, but the perfectly normal emotional state. And yet man is not born with such a vision, and he can five so far from it that he can decide at the end of his life that ‘not to be born is the best thing, and death is better than life’. Why? Blake cannot say why; he can only account for it by utilizing the legend of a Fall; by saying, as it were, ‘Men are born like smashed radio sets, and before they can function properly, they must repair themselves’. (Blake lived before the machine-age, or no doubt he would have used the same kind of simile.) In short, he used the legend of Original Sin.

  For readers who approach this argument for the first time, the most doubtful part about it is the proposition that men ought to see the world like Van Gogh’s Nuit Etoile as a matter of course. They may object: ‘We agree that man could see a starry night that way, but to claim that he ought to, perhaps that he did, once upon a time, and lost the faculty because he ate an apple from a forbidden tree‘ This is reasonable, and it can

  be answered by saying that the concept of Original Sin does not insist on the Garden of Eden, or even that man did possess the visionary faculty once upon a time and has lost it since; it only insists that the visionary faculty is man’s norm. Just as you would not count a man ‘normal’ if he had a mouth but no voice, or eyes but no sight, so you cannot count him normal if he has a brain but no visionary faculty. Most men live from moment to moment, with no fore-sight or hind-sight. Immediate physical needs occupy all their attention, just as with animals. The average man is distinguished from dogs and cats mainly because he looks farther ahead: he is capable of worrying about his physical needs of six months hence, ten years hence. The dogma of Original Sin insists that man lost his visionary faculty because he spends all his energy thinking about practical things. At least, that is the interpretation that the great religious teachers seem to put on it: Jesus telling the Jews not to waste so much time getting and spending, but to observe the lilies of the field.

  Another example might make clearer what I mean by Visionary faculty’. T. E. Lawrence tells that when he showed the Arabs the portraits of themselves that Kennington painted for The Seven Pillars, most of them completely failed to recognize that they were pictures of men; they stared at them, turned them upside-down and sideways, and finally hazarded a guess that one of them represented a camel, because the line of the jaw was shaped like a hump! This seems incomprehensible to us because we have been looking at pictures all our lives. But we must remember that a picture is actually an abstraction of lines and colours, and that it must require a certain mental effort to interpret those lines and colours as a man or a sunset. We make the effort unconsciously, and so are not aware of it. There are some mathematicians who can see the answer to a complex geometrical problem by merely glancing at a diagram; again, this is because their brains do all the work subconsciously, and can perceive relations where most of us would only see a confusion of lines and angles. None of our senses would operate if the brain did not do all the work. If a European can see a sunset on a canvas where a practical-minded Arab can only see a blur of colours
, it is not illogical to suppose that a development of the same faculty might lead the practical-minded European to see things where he saw nothing before. And this is the faculty that Blake possessed instinctively, and claimed that all men could possess, if they spent less time being practical, and more time trying to discipline the visionary faculty. Such an injunction is a commonplace in religion:

  My Lord taught my brother and myself to concentrate our attention on the tip of the nose, and as I did this, I began to notice, after three weeks, that my in and out breathing seemed like smoke coming out of a chimney. At the same time, my body and mind became bright internally, and I could see the whole world becoming clear and transparent like a crystal ball.... Then my mind became en

  lightened, and I attained to a state of non-intoxication32

  This is a quotation from the Surangama Sutra, a Buddhist scripture, written down about a.d. ioo from a tradition that was probably a great deal older. A hundred similar examples could be chosen from the world’s scriptures. All of them point to the same truth: that a discipline of the mind leads to a completely different way of seeing the world. Blake, like Nietzsche, only rediscovered something fundamental about human nature. And we can learn from Blake that the Visionary faculty’ is not something you might just happen to have, or something you could catch like the measles, but is the result of a long, rigorous discipline of the senses, a discipline that tries to force the mind in a direction that is completely foreign to its everyday activities, and as different from it as vertical is from horizontal.

  Perhaps the simplest approach to Blake, in a section as necessarily short as this, would be to examine his works briefly in chronological order. But first, a reference to some earlier points might be advisable.

  In Hesse’s Steppenwolf and Demian, we have a summary of those problems that Blake must certainly have known from a very early age. There are two worlds; or rather, two distinct ways of looking at the same world, and they can be called (for convenience) the Inspired and the Uninspired. It is the task of the artist to connect them; Steppenwolf bored, irritable, sick, and Steppenwolf touched by music or poetry and made to feel suddenly harmonious, whole; the world of practical things, hard work, dreariness, and the world of art, music, intellectual pleasure. But where do the two worlds meet? Certain men are acutely susceptible to this second world, to harmony in art or nature, and we say of these men that they are ‘sensitive’, ‘artistic’, etc. But they will tell you that art is one thing, living another. There is a poignant section in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks that describes the young Hanno Buddenbrooks going to a performance of Lohengrin, and how, the next morning, he gets up to go to school, now hating the world he lives in, the cold dawn, the thin drizzle, the smell of wet garments in the schoolroom. There is the romantic Outsider’s problem in essence; and there are the two worlds, the ecstatic, vital world of Lohengrin and the dull world of the schoolboy.

  Thomas Mann is, like Hesse, a descendant of Novalis and the German Romantics, and the way he states the problem makes the two worlds seem tragically, impossibly distant. But there are other artists and poets who are more optimistic about the relation of the two, who can stand with a foot in both worlds without undue discomfort: Synge, Joyce, Herrick, Shakespeare, Rabelais. And Blake belongs with these men.

  His first step, as a poet, was to make a very elementary picture of the two worlds: The Songs of Innocence, and The Songs of Experience, After this, he set out to treat the problem more complexly in his first long poem, ‘The Book of TheP. Thel, the innocent virgin, is troubled by the problem of death; she questions a lily, a cloud and a worm, and all assure her of the fundamental harmony of the world, the Fatherhood of God. Then she enters the grave (there are signs that Blake added this episode as an afterthought), and is terrified by a voice from her own grave-plot that speaks of the Contra in the universe, the element of discord:

  Why cannot the ear be closed to its own destruction Or the glistening eye to the poison of a smile?33

  Thel’ is Blake’s own version of Demian, and its message is the same: Chaos must be faced.

  In the poems that Blake engraved after TheF, the atmosphere of innocence is gradually dissipated. In ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’, Oothoon is raped, and her husband is possessed by morbid hatred and jealousy at the thought that another man has known her body. (It is interesting to compare this with modern versions of the same situation in D. H. Lawrence’s Shadow in the Rose Garden and William Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury.) The greater part of the poem consists of Oothoon’s pleas, assuring her husband that innocence is undefilable. It is useless; Theotormon has allowed the emotion to cloud the ‘doors of perception’. In him, a version of the Fall has taken place.

  In ‘America’, Blake uses the American Revolution and the freeing of the slaves as symbols of release from the imprisonment of the five senses. The poem contains the tremendous lines:

  The times are ended, shadows pass, the morning ‘gins to break,

  The fiery joy that Urizen perverted to ten commands

  What night he led the starry host through the wide wilderness.

  That stony law I stamp to dust, and scatter religion abroad

  To the four winds as a torn book, and none shall gather the leaves....

  To renew the fiery joy and burst the stony roof

  That pale religious lechery, seeking virginity

  May find it in a harlot, and in coarse clad honesty

  The undefiled; tho’ ravished in her cradle night and morn.

  For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life

  Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defiled

  Fires inwrap the earthly globe, yet man is not consumed,

  Amid the lustful fires he walks; his feet become like brass

  His knees and thighs like silver, and his breast and head like gold.34

  In ‘Europe’, he uses woman as a symbol of imprisonment, for the female temperament is literal, practical, down-to-earth.

  Enitharmon, the female counterpart of Los, the Outsider-principle, cries:

  Go, tell the human race that woman’s love is sin

  That an eternal life awaits the worm of sixty winters

  In an allegorical abode where existence hath never come.. .85

  The symbolism here is plain enough: literal thinking perverts the inspired truths of religion into superstitions. And Blake’s accusation, hurled at the whole world, is that it thinks literally. Blake’s particular bugbears were the rationalists and the ‘natural-religionists’, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the scientists Priestley and Newton. (Modern counterparts of these would be the Secular Society, or thinkers like Dewey and Russell.) Such men, Blake swore, were ‘villains and footpads’, men subjugated to the woman’s literal way of thinking.

  In ‘Europe’, Newton’s heresies bring about the Last Judgement (and anyone who will take the trouble to look into Newton’s On the Prophecies will see why Blake detested him so much); and Los, symbol of imaginative vitality, ‘calls all his sons the strife of blood’. Blake, like Shaw after him, toyed with the idea that one day it might be necessary for the ‘men of imagination’ to shed the blood of the literal-minded who make the world unfit to live in.

  ‘Europe’ is the first of a series of poems that deal with the narrow, literal state of mind, ‘single vision and Newton’s sleep’. This, Blake believed, was the real enemy. To facilitate his analysis of Outsider problems, he divided man into the same three divisions that we arrived at in Chapter IV: body, heart and intellect, calling them respectively Tharmas, Luvah and Urizen. His major poems, the three epics ‘Vala’, ‘Milton’ and Jerusalem’, deal with the interaction of these three in a series of Apocalyptic scenes, that, on the surface, seem to lack simple coherence. Yet in spite of their confusion, it is in these epic prophecies that we can see Blake’s creative thought most clearly at work. All the action takes place inside the hero, the Giant Albion (man), as he lies stretched out on the rock of ages. (This method
will bring to mind in most readers that other epic of obscurity Finnegans Wake, which also takes place in the hero’s mind while he lies asleep.) And perhaps the best idea of the import of these poems is contained in the line from ‘Milton’ (put into the mouth of an ancient bard, and repeated at intervals to drive it home) :

  Mark well my words—they are of your Eternal Salvation

  It is a line that could be put as an epigraph on the title-page of Blake’s Works.

  To his three principles, Luvah, Tharmas, Urizen, Blake added a fourth, Los, symbol of the imagination,’ identified at times with the saviour, Christ. But by ‘imagination’ Blake did not mean what Milton meant when Satan ‘His proud imaginations thus displayed’, nor what Schiller meant in his distinction between imagination and fancy; Milton’s imagination was primarily a matter of intellect, Schiller’s a matter of emotion. Blake’s was a complex that involved intellect, emotions and even body. For Blake knew the importance of the body as well as Nietzsche; no poet sings the body so frankly (except perhaps Whitman); for, after all, ‘body is only that portion of soul discerned by the five senses’; body has its place in imagination.