by Colin Wilson
By knowing himself better. By establishing a discipline to overcome his weakness and self-division. By making it his aim to become harmonious and undivided. These are the answers we have extracted from our analysis. Most men have nothing in their heads except their immediate physical needs; put them on a desert island with nothing to occupy their minds and they would go insane. They lack real motive. The curse of our civilization is boredom. Kierkegaard observed this acutely:
The Gods were bored, so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, so Eve was created.... Adam was bored alone, then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille, then the population of the world increased, and the people were bored en masse. To divert themselves, they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea itself is as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom had gained the upper hand. (Tr. D. F. Swenson.) 44
This is penetrating commentary; but then, it is only a reversal of Hesse’s statement that every man has a residue of unfulfil-ment at the bottom of him: boredom, unfulfilment, they amount to the same thing.
They do not know themselves. They live in prison. How can an individual hope to escape the general destiny of futility?
Blake’s solution was: Go and develop the visionary faculty. Good. But how?
It is a question to which, I must admit, I shall not be able to offer a selection from the full range of answers, as I have been able hitherto. The field is too big. In the next chapter, it must be deliberately limited to a few typical examples.
CHAPTER NINE
BREAKING THE CIRCUIT
In the vault of Axel’s castle, Sara and the young Count Axel stand clasped in one another’s arms. Sara has just shot at Axel with two pistols at a distance of five yards, but missed him both times. Sara rhapsodizes about the ‘world’ which they now hold in their hands: the markets of Bagdad, the snows of Tibet, the fjords of Norway, ‘all dreams to realize’. But Axel, ‘grave and impenetrable’, asks her: ‘Why realize them?... Live? No, our existence is full. The future? Sara, believe me when I say it—we have exhausted the future. All the realities, what will they be tomorrow in comparison with the mirages we have just lived?... The quality of our hope no longer allows us the earth. What can we ask from this miserable star where our melancholy lingers on, save pale reflections of this moment? ... It is the Earth—don’t you see—that has become illusion. Admit, Sara, we have destroyed in our strange hearts the love of life. ... To consent, after this, to live would only be a sacrilege against ourselves. Live ? our servants will do that for us.... Oh, the external world! Let us not be made dupes by the old slave... who promises us the keys to a palace of enchantments, when he only clutches a handful of ashes in his black fist…’1
Sara is convinced; they drink the goblet of poison together and die in ecstasy.
There can be no doubt what Nietzsche’s comment on this scene would have been; Axel, like his creator, is the most extreme type of other-worlder, and other-worlders are ‘poisoners, whether they know it or not’.
Yet is this quite fair ? Nietzsche himself began as an other-worlder, agreeing with Schopenhauer that ‘Life is a sorry affair’, and that the best way to spend it is in reflecting on it. We began this study of the Outsider with a man who spent his evenings looking through a hole in his wall and ‘reflecting’ on what he saw. Van Gogh retired from life when he spent his days painting in the yellow house at Aries; Gauguin went to the South Seas pursuing the same dream, ‘luxe, calme et volupte.’
And even Zarathustra councilled self-surmounters to ‘fly to solitude’ and escape the stings of the ‘flies in the market-place’ (i.e. other men).
No, Axel is on the right path, even if killing himself is a poor way out. ‘What can we hope from this miserable star... V But Sara has just spoken of ‘the pale roads of Sweden’ and the fjords of Norway. A visionary like Van Gogh would find a great deal to hope from such a world. It is the world of human beings that Axel is condemning. Other people are the trouble.
To confirm this point, we can appeal to another visionary, Thomas Traherne. It is Traherne who gives the famous description of his childhood in Centuries of Meditation, when
All appeared new and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. ... I was entertained by the works of God in their splendour and glory; I saw all in the peace of Eden— . The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped nor ever was sown.... The dust and stones of the streets were as precious as gold.... And young men [were] glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty....2
Why Traherne asks, did these ‘intimations of immortality’ cease? He answers:
It was eclipsed ... by the customs and manners of men. Grit in the eye or yellow jaundice will not let a man see those objects truly that are before it. And therefore it is requisite that we should be as very strangers to the thoughts, customs and opinions of men in this world.... They all prized things I did not dream of. I was weak and easily guided by their example.3
And he concludes with a statement that sounds like a form of the Pelagian heresy.*
* PAGE NOTE: Pelagius, the ‘arch-heretic’, denied the doctrine of original sin (as taught by St. Augustine), and wrote: ‘Everything good and everything evil ... is done by us, not born with us ... we are begotten without virtue as without vice, and before the activity of our own personal Will, there is nothing in man but what God has stored in him’ (Pro Libero Arbitrio, ap Augustine).
And that our misery proceeds ten times more from the outward bondage of opinion and custom than from any inward corruption or depravation of Nature; and that it is not our parents’ loins so much as our parents’ lives, that enthralls and blinds us. [Italics mine.]
But Pelagian or not, this is the Blakeian attitude, and the attitude of most mystics. And in it, we can see how closely Traherne’s mystical Christianity approaches the romantic attitude. Compare Yeats’s lines:
All things uncomely and broken, all things worn-out and old The cry of a child by the roadside, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.4
Yeats is implying that it is the sheer ugliness of the world, or certain aspects of it, that destroys his ‘intimations of immortality5 :
The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told
and this is what Axel would say. But Traherne and Blake hold a different view. Other people are the trouble. In another place Traherne tells of his moment of great decision:
When I came into the country, and being seated among silent trees and meads and hills, had all my time in my own hands, I resolved to spend it all, whatever it cost me, in search of happiness, and to satiate that burning thirst which nature had enkindled in me from my youth. In which I was so resolute that I chose rather to live upon ten pounds a year and to go in leather clothes, and feed upon bread and water, so that I might have all my time clearly to myself...5
This is an Outsider’s decision. When we met it in Hesse’s Siddhartha it did not seem abnormal, because it happened in India. But this decision to become a ‘wanderer’, a ‘seeker’ in a European country, to wear leather clothes like George Fox (who was roughly contemporary with Traherne), this seems strange to our Western mentality, and would probably lead us to doubt the sanity of any of our acquaintances who decided to do the same. And yet it is a sensible, straightforward decision. A man only has need of the common sense to say: ‘Civilization is largely a matter of superfluities; I have no desire for superfluities. On the other hand, I have a very strong desire for leisure and freedom.’ I am not attempting to assert the validity of this solution for all Outsiders; in fact, the practical objection to it is that the wandering life does not make for leisure or contemplation, and it certainly fails to satisfy the Outsider’s need for a direction, a definiti
ve act.
Nevertheless, the act of willing is important; the result, whether it proves a success or a disillusionment, is only secondary. Again, we might turn to Yeats for an example, an example that is admittedly rather less serious than the discussion we have in hand, but it would be a pity to leave it unquoted on that account. In the Introduction to CA Vision’, a young man called Daniel O’Leary tells of how, one night in the theatre, he suddenly felt an urge to express his dislike of the insipid way in which the actors were speaking Romeo and Juliet:
Suddenly this thought came into my head: What would happen if I were to take off my boots, and fling one at Mrand one at Miss... ? Could I give my future life such settled purpose that the act would take its place, not among whims, but among forms of intensity?... ‘You have not the courage,’ I said, speaking in a low voice. ‘I have,’ said I, and began unlacing my boots 6 [Italics mine.]
The sentence I have italicized is the important one. It is precise definition of the definitive act: To give one’s future life such settled purpose that the act would be a form of intensity. Admittedly, ‘forms of intensity’ may be a bit vague, but there can be no doubt of what Yeats is getting at. When Raskolnikov killed the old woman, he had committed such an act, that would give his future life a settled purpose; or at least, that is what he hoped. When Stavrogin raped the ten-year-old girl and stole a banknote from a poor clerk, he had not succeeded in committing a ‘form of intensity’. For, unfortunately for himself, Stavrogin was not really mean-souled enough to rape or steal, and his attempt to commit an act which should have a meaning independent of the emotion he put into it was a failure. For him, Blake’s dictum that ‘the true soul of sweet delight can never be defiled’ was all against him. Stavrogin had to learn that no act is evil in itself; man puts the evil into it by the motive with which he commits it, and the final standard of motive is Blake’s ‘that enthusiasm and life shall not cease’. Evil cannot co-exist with the striving ‘to live more abundantly’ which is the ultimate aim of religion. Stavrogin completely lacked motive.
It is unfortunate that we do not know enough about Traherne’s life to observe what happened when he made his decision to live on bread and water and wear leather clothes. We know in Fox’s case, though; we know that Fox was not a complete success by the Outsider’s stern criterion of success. Traherne became a priest to a country family, where he lived a quiet, meditative life, dying at the age of thirty-eight. To judge by the Centuries of Meditation, Traherne succeeded in permanently adjusting his vision until he saw the world with the same eyes as Van Gogh, the Van Gogh of the ‘Road with Cypresses’. That adjustment, I am inclined to believe, can only be achieved in solitude: Nietzsche understood that society is a hall of distorting mirrors.
By way of comparison with the Western mystics we have been dealing with, we might turn to the life of a great Hindu mystic, Ramakrishna. Here the environment is different. India has its tradition of contemplation and ‘self-surmounting’ (although at the time of Ramakrishna’s birth, 1836, Western ideas were pushing that tradition into the background). Here we can see what happens when the Outsider can slip into a tradition where he ceases to be a lonely misfit.
(In the following pages I am quoting from the anonymous Life of Ramakrishna issued by the Advaita Ashrama in Madras. It is, on the whole, informative and well-balanced; in its latter more than in its earlier part.)
Sri Ramakrishna was born of Brahmin parents in a little Indian village in Bengal. From a very early age he showed that he saw the world with the same eyes as Traherne. Acting in plays at the local religious festival, he would plunge into a trance of joy, so that onlookers felt as if he really were the ‘baby Krishna5 whom he was acting. He was an imaginative child who loved to read religious stories and legends aloud to the villagers (these, of course, would be the only imaginative literature available to him); in fact, he so obviously entered into the spirit of the stories that his parents thought it was a sign of hysteria or nervous instability.
When Ramakrishna was only seven, he had an important experience, which I give in his own words:
One day in June or July ... I was walking along a narrow path separating the paddy fields, eating some puffed rice, which I was carrying in a basket. Looking up at the sky, I saw a beautiful, sombre thundercloud. As it spread rapidly over the whole sky, a flight of snow-white cranes flew overhead in front of it. It presented such a beautiful contrast that my mind wandered to far-off regions. Lost to outward sense, I fell down, and the puffed rice was scattered in all directions. Some people found me... and carried me home...7
It is immediately obvious that this experience has something in common with Nietzsche’s two ‘vastations5; Nietzsche was older, he was a child of a self-critical civilization that could not give itself so easily to extreme emotions. Yet both Nietzsche and Ramakrishna experienced a sense of harmony, a possibility of a way of seeing the world that would make life a continuous ‘form of intensity5. Or remember Nietzsche, walking around the lake of Silvaplana and crying ‘tears of joy5. ‘I have seen thoughts rising on my horizon, the like of which I have never seen before5; ‘Calm and peace spread over the mountains and the forests5; ‘Six thousand feet above men and Time5.
But there is an enormous difference. Ramakrishna lived in a little village. He was a Brahman’s son; his life was reasonably well shielded from violent and unpleasant things. His life was idyllic (all his life he could be plunged into ecstasy, literally, by considering the country-idyll episode of Krishna’s life). He was like a fine string that could resound sympathetically to the slightest vibrations of beauty or harmony in his surroundings. We might be excused for asking: Would he still have felt the world so harmonious if he had been born into Raskolnikov’s Petersburg, or the environment Graham Greene pictures in Brighton Rock?
It is true, I think, that Ramakrishna was lucky to spend his formative years in a peaceful environment, but that is not the whole answer. Nietzsche had his vision of ‘enthusiasm and life’ on the Strasbourg road, after days spent among the brutality and stench of a battlefield. But we must return to this point later. Ramakrishna’s spiritual temperament, or perhaps we should say his imaginative sensitivity, continued to develop throughout his youth. His elder brother became a priest in the Kali temple at Dakshineswar, a privately-owned place of worship, built by a wealthy Sudra woman and maintained by her, and in due course his younger brother joined him there.
Now Ramakrishna tended to think of God in terms of harmony, which was natural, since his mind dwelt constantly on a legendary Golden Age of Krishna’s life on earth, and since his ‘mystical experiences’, like the one of the paddy field, gave him an insight into a state of perfect internal serenity. Traherne said he was seeking ‘happiness’; Ramakrishna said he was seeking God; but they meant the same thing. Blake would have called it Vision. Ramakrishna recognized, just as Traherne had done, that serenity comes in moments of contemplation, by directing the thoughts towards the idea of harmony. So he began to go alone into places where he was not likely to be disturbed—a grove with a reputation for being haunted was his favourite—and would sit cross-legged, and try to make his emotions and intellect co-operate to give him perfect detachment from the world. In other words, he would try to achieve the state that Nietzsche could achieve listening to Tristan und Isolde or reading Schopenhauer: detachment.
Now, anyone who has ever tried this knows what immediately happens. Unless the imagination can keep the high ideal in sight, the thoughts tend to get earthbound, like a bird that cannot quite take off and flutters along the ground. You sit down intending to make the mind soar up to the sky, but after a few hours, the trees and the ground seem realer than ever, and the idea of ‘celestial regions’ seems nonsense. Things are too real. It is Roquentin’s Nausea again. This dead weight of uninterpretable reality is always one of the major difficulties of the solitary. Mixing with other people at least stimulates one to emulation, to strive to make comparisons favourable to oneself.
Would Joyce
’s Stephen Dedalus have taken such pride in regarding himself as an artist if he had not been able to tell himself that ‘their silly voices made him feel that he was different from other children’? That is what Zarathustra means when he tells the aspiring solitary:
A day shall come when you shall see your high things no more, and your low things all too near, and you will fear your exaltation as if it were a phantom. In that day you will cry: All is false.
Ramakrishna has told of how he too went through this stage; he prayed to the Divine Mother, Kali: ‘Are you real or are you a delusion? Am I making a fool of myself imagining that I can ever know you?’ He began to feel that all his worship and meditation were getting him no nearer to a vision of ‘pure Will’. He tells:
I was suffering from excruciating pain because I had not been blessed with a vision of the mother. I felt as if my heart were being squeezed like a wet towel. I was overpowered by a great restlessness, and I feared that it might not be my lot to realize her in this life. I could not bear the separation any longer: life did not seem worth living. Then my eyes fell on the sword that was kept in the Mother’s temple. Determined to put an end to my life, I jumped up and seized it, when suddenly the blessed mother revealed herself to me.... The buildings... the temple and all vanished, leaving no trace; instead there was a limitless, infinite, shining ocean of consciousness or spirit. As far as the eye could see, its billows were rushing towards me from all sides ... to swallow me up. I was panting for breath. I was caught in the billows and fell down senseless.8