by Colin Wilson
And here I made my first important observation—the one that has been the foundation stone of all my subsequent thinking. I called it “the St Neot margin.” It is the recognition that man’s moments of freedom tend to come under crisis or challenge, and that when things are going well, he tends to allow his grip on life to slacken. Auden wrote:
Put the car away; when life fails What’s the good of going to Wales?
I should explain how I became aware of this problem of the “St Neot margin.” One hot day in 1954, I was hitchhiking up the Great North Road to Peterborough, in a state of fatigue and “life-devaluation.” I didn’t want to go to Peterborough-it was a boring duty call—and neither did I particularly want to return to London, where I was working in a dreary plastic factory and quarreling with my landlady. I felt so depressed that I did not even feel grateful when a truck finally stopped for me. After a mile or so, there was a knocking sound from his gearbox, and the driver explained that he would have to pull into a garage to have it repaired. So I got out and went on thumbing lifts. A second truck stopped for me. Again, I felt no gratitude or relief. But after ten minutes or so, an absurd coincidence happened; there was an odd knocking noise from his gearbox too, and he said: “It looks as if I’ll have to drop you off at the next garage.” And for the first time that day I felt a positive emotion, a feeling of “Oh no!” However, he drove on cautiously, and found that the noise stopped when he drove at less than 20 miles an hour. After half an hour of this—both of us listening with strained attention for the noise—he said: “Well, I think we’ll make it if we keep going at this speed.” And I suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of relief and delight. And I caught myself feeling it, and noticed its absurdity. Nothing had been “added to me” in the last half hour, nothing given. All that had happened was that I had been threatened with inconvenience, and the threat had been removed. The threat had stimulated me, aroused my latent will power. I formulated this recognition rather clumsily, in the words: “There is a margin of the human mind that can be stimulated by pain or inconvenience, but which is indifferent to pleasure.” And as we were passing through the town of St Neots, I labeled it “the St Neot margin,” so I wouldn’t forget it.
It was an absolutely fundamental recognition. It meant that “life-devaluation”—the opposite of freedom—is due to our curious laziness, to a childish “spoiledness” that gets resentful and bored in the face of minor problems. And freedom—the moment of vision, of poetry—is due to a certain unconscious discipline of the will.
The vision, the freedom, comes from a subconscious region inside us. And yet, in an odd way, we have power over this subconscious region. Discipline and effort are all-important.
Once I had my clue, other things began to fall into place. There was Ramakrishna, who received his first “vision of God” when about to plunge a sword into himself. There was Raskolnikov, with his thought that he would prefer to live on a narrow ledge forever rather than die at once. There was Graham Greene, who tells how in his teens he suffered from a perpetual and total boredom, which he would dissipate by taking his brother’s revolver on to Berkhamstead Common and playing Russian roulette: that is, he inserted one bullet, spun the chambers, pointed it at his head and pulled the trigger. When there was only a click, “it was as if a light had been turned onI felt that life contained an infinite number of possibilities/’ And Sartre was getting at the same thing when he said that he had never felt so free as under constant threat of death during the German occupation.
All this, of course, is inherent in The Outsider. But when I wrote this book. I could still see no answer. My novel, Ritual in the Dark, is an exploration of the same problem. (All my novels are based upon my recognition that there are things that can be said in fiction that are unsayable in a work of philosophy.) The hero, like Rilke’s Make or Sartre’s Roquentin, sits in his room and hurls his mind at the problem of the negative nature of freedom. It is absurd—like buying an expensive car and discovering that it will do 90 miles an hour in reverse, and only ten miles an hour going forward.
Gradually, it became clear to me that what we are dealing with is a problem of evolution. In this book, I have compared outsiders to fast trains who are likely to go off the rails. An even better comparison is with the problem of airplanes and the sound barrier. When an airplane travels at a speed approaching that of sound, the air cannot get away from in front of its wings quickly enough, and builds up into a kind of concrete barrier. In the early days of jet travel, planes tended to disintegrate against this concrete barrier of air. But even when the designers had succeeded in making a plane that would smash through the “sound barrier” (with the supersonic “bang”), the problem was not solved. The planes always went into a steep dive, and crashed, and the harder the pilot pulled on the stick, the steeper became the dive. And then one day, an exceptionally gifted test pilot tried doing something absurd. Instead of frantically pulling back the stick, he tried pushing it forward—which, logically ought to have made the dive steeper than ever. Instead, the plane straightened out. At speeds greater than that of sound, some of the usual laws of nature get reversed.
This, it seemed to me, is a picture of the “outsider” problem. One might say that evolution has been trying to create a human being capable of traveling faster than sound. Capable, that is, of a seriousness, a mental intensity that is completely foreign to the average human animal. The nineteenth century is covered with the wrecks of the unsuccessful experiments. Yet this does not mean that the problem is insoluble. I knew that I had found more than half my answer in my concept of the “St Neot margin.” The main trouble is our ignorance of the strange laws of supersonic travel.
The evolutionary aspect interested me. There is a passage at the beginning of Wells’ autobiography in which he argues that certain men of today are trying to become pure creatures of the mind, as a fish is a creature of the water or a bird of the air. There are men—like Wells himself—to whom you can say: “Yes, you love, you hate, you work for a living... but what do you really do?” They possess imaginative and creative interests that make everyday life boring to them. (I had written of the hero of Ritual in the Dark: “There was a futility about physical existence that frightened him.”) Wells had gone on to compare men to the earliest amphibians, who dragged themselves out of prehistoric seas and wanted to become land animals; but they only possessed flippers, so that a short period on land would exhaust them, and they would have to get back to the comfortable, sustaining medium of the sea—which they hated. Here it is again, the outsider problem, the Faust problem, the St Neot margin. So man wishes to become a creature of the mind, of the imagination—but a few hours in this inner land, and they have to get back to the physical world, with its stupid, repetitive problems. The world of the mind exhausts them.
Before I go on, let me make an important observation. I say: “Man wishes to become a creature of the mind.” But how many do? That problem can be answered with some accuracy. It was my friend Robert Ardrey who pointed out the answer. In the Korean war, the Chinese discovered that they could prevent the escape of American soldiers by segregating the “leader figures” and keeping them under heavy guard, and leaving the others without any guard at all. The leaders were always precisely five percent of the total number of soldiers. And it so happens that this figure holds good for most species of animals too. The “dominant minority” is always five percent.
This does not mean that mankind consists of five percent “outsiders/’ Most of the five percent is made up of other dominant types—soldiers, politicians, businessmen, sportsmen, actors, clergymen, and so on—that is to say, of people whose “dominance” is by no means intellectual. The difference between these men and Wells’ “amphibians”—the intellectual dominant minority—is that soldiers, actors and the rest need other people to express their dominance. A Napoleon without his army, an actor without his audience, is a nobody. The peculiarity of the poet, the man of creative imagination, is that he doesn’t need o
ther people to express his dominance. The great writer or thinker isn’t writing primarily for other people; he is exploring the world of his own being. The huntsman needs a fox to give the chase excitement; the philosopher pursues an abstract fox across the landscape of his own mind.
And yet he is not yet capable of remaining in that mental universe for more than an hour or so. After that, he becomes tired, bored, depressed; he has to get back to the physical world and his ordinary little concerns. Everyone has at some time noticed this odd inability to remain in the world of the mind. If you try to finish a long book in one sitting, you not only find your eyes getting tired; you feel yourself sinking morally lower, getting somewhat sick and depressed. We cannot stay in the world of the mind for long.
This is a fascinating problem. Julian Huxley suggested in 1913 that just as there is an obvious difference between dead matter and living matter (say a piece of protoplasm), so there is the same basic difference between animal material and human material. One might compare dead matter to a straight line, which has length but no thickness—that is, which has existence but no freedom. In that case, you could say that animal material is like a square, for it has an extra dimension of freedom. And, according to Huxley, you could go on to compare man to a kind of cube, for he has yet another dimension of freedom—this mental realm. The animal is stuck in a perpetual present. It has no mind to speak of—its mental processes are a mere reflection of its environment.
I believe Huxley is mistaken (although he and I have argued about it). Man does not yet possess this third dimension. The black room experiments prove this. If you put any human being in a totally black and soundless room, he goes to pieces after a day or so, because his mind is totally dependent on the outside world, upon external stimuli. (The Chinese are said to use the black room for brain washing—it is far more effective than torture.) In other words, because man is still an amphibian, a sea creature with flippers instead of legs. IF he was truly a creature of the mind, the black room wouldn’t worry him.
In short, man does not yet exist. He is still a mere animal.
And yet the problem now becomes so serious that it threatens his existence. Why is the crime rate rising so steadily? Why has juvenile delinquency become such an acute problem? Why is the suicide rate climbing? Why are mental homes overcrowded? The answer to all these questions is the same. Because the modern world provides no outlet for a large number of the dominant minority. A hundred years ago, there were a hundred ways in which a dominant person could express himself—the chief one being fighting, for there was always a war going on somewhere. Today we cannot afford war, and our civilization has become so complex and mechanized that there is simply nothing for the dominant person to do. This is why our civilization is bursting at the seams with crime and neurosis. Man must learn to express his dominance in a new way— in the realms of the mind. But at present, even the most imaginative and creative men are not truly “creatures of the mind.”
There are a number of possible answers. I thought I had discovered one when I first read Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, describing how mescaline plunged him into this “world of the mind,” and made him aware of its immensity. You could put a man in the black room with mescaline, and the blackness wouldn’t worry him in the least; he’d simply plunge like a diver into his own mind.
And yet I was suspicious of this answer. Huxley admitted that mescaline destroys will power; one is so delighted with this strange and beautiful world that one has no desire to do anything but sit still and stare. Huxley concluded: “A world in which everyone took mescaline would be a world in which there are no wars” (and so the basic problem of the dominant minority would be solved) , “but it would also be a world in which there is no civilization, for we just couldn’t be bothered to build it.”
I verified this when I took mescaline in 1963. (I have described it at length in an appendix to Beyond the Outsider.)
Mescaline plunged me into a fascinating world in which I was aware of a kind of basic universal benevolence. But it was like becoming a baby again; you are ecstatically happy—and also helpless and defenseless. It reduces you, in a way to an animal level. I tried to explain this by saying that mescaline destroyed my mental VHF system. (Radio sets have a VHF attachment so that you can pick up a single station clearly, without getting 20 other stations interfering.) My mind became a kind of giant receiving set, with 20 stations all clamoring away together. My capacity for concentration is usually excellent—I have, for example, been able to write this postscript in a single sitting; mescaline destroyed this. So while it was a superb mental holiday, destroying all the mind’s tensions, turning one truly into a ‘creature of the mind,” it was useless and dangerous. (It can cause complete mental breakdown in a neurotic or morbid person.)
But clearly, this is the direction in which the answer must lie. Mescaline is no answer. We need to get its advantages—the sense of deep vision, the connection with the deepest sources of one’s vital powers—without its disadvantages.
Let me try to explain a little more fully. Suppose you are driving down a road at night with your headlights on. Apart from the narrow beam of light ahead of you, you feel completely isolated in your narrow world of blackness. And you can’t really see anything in your headlights, for you are moving too fast. Now if you turn off your headlights and drive on your sidelights, an interesting thing happens. Your world expands. You become aware of the shapes of trees and houses looming in the darkness. You can look out of your side windows, and see things going past. It is a far more interesting world. But you are forced to drive at five miles an hour.
This expresses the problem of mescaline. It plunges you into a delightful world of twilight where you become aware of some of the strange fish that inhabit the depths of your own mind. But you become a drifter.
But now supposing someone invented a kind of open spotlight that went on the roof of your car. You could now see ahead of you and around you—and behind, if necessary. It would, of course, be somewhat inconvenient for other motorists—but then, in the world of the mind, this objection obviously doesn’t apply. Can we, in other words, create forms of mental discipline that will produce some of the effects of mescaline—that sense of contact with our inner source of power, meaning and purpose—without impairing our ability to concentrate?
There are such disciplines, and, to a certain extent, I have discovered how to use them. I can create in myself most of the effects of mescaline by purely mental disciplines. I am not speaking of yogic disciplines, but of processes of thought, of what Husserl calls “phenomenological disciplines.” Primarily, they are concerned with the creation of new language, a new conceptology; for our problem is that we spend too much time looking at the external world to make any close acquaintance with the world of the inner mind. We have no maps, no geography, no signposts, of this inner world. But my own work has been a consistent attempt to create such a geography.
This is obviously the point where I should be starting this postscript, not finishing it. I can only suggest that interested readers follow me through the remaining books of the Outsider sequence, and through such novels as Necessary Doubt and The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme. (The title is not mine; it was chosen by the American publisher.)
Let me offer one more clue, concerning how the “St Neot margin” notion can be applied. (For this is the core.) De Quincey tells an interesting story about Wordsworth. He had asked Wordsworth how he came to write poetry, and Wordsworth’s answer was not satisfactory. But later in the day, they went to meet the mail cart, which was coming from Keswick. Wordsworth knelt down with his ear to the ground to listen for its rumble; when he heard nothing, he straightened up, and his attention was caught by an evening star, which suddenly appeared to him to be intensely beautiful. Wordsworth said: “Now I can explain to you how I come to write poetry. If ever I am concentrating on something that has nothing to do with poetry, and then I suddenly relax my attention, whatever I see when I relax appears to me t
o be beautiful.”
This is obviously another version of what happened to me in the truck—the threat of inconvenience causing a certain concentration of the attention, and then the removal of the threat, which allows the senses to expand with relief, causing a sensation of delight, of life-affirmation.
Try a very simple experiment. Take a pencil and hold it in front of your eyes, a few feet away. Narrow your attention to the pencil itself, so you cease to be aware of the room. Then let your attention expand, so you become aware of the room as its background. Then narrow your attention again. Do this a dozen times. At the end of this time, you will begin to experience a curious mental glow, not unlike what happens if you exercise your muscles. Because, in fact, you are exercising a muscle of whose existence you are normally unaware. You take your perception foir granted, as something that merely ‘‘happens” when you open your eyes. But, as Husserl knew, perception is intentional You would not see anything unless you made a subconscious effort of will to perceive.
Freedom and imagination are also muscles that we never exercise; we rely upon external stimuli to make us aware of their possibilities. We tend to be trapped in a world of everyday premises that we take for granted. (Husserl calls this “the natural standpoint.”) The problem is to use the mind in such a way that we become detached from this world of the natural standpoint, able to criticize it and analyze it. This latter is the key to the phenomenology.
I have taken more than ten years to create my “new existentialism,” and it seems to me that I am working upon the most interesting problem in the world, the only interesting problem. In America, there are others who are working along similar lines—Hadley Cantril and Abraham Maslow, for example (both experimental psychologists). England is totally unaware of these problems; intellectually, we have always been the most backward country in the world. Europe has little to offer, besides the dead philosophy of Sartre and Heidegger. And yet in spite of this, I feel that immensely exciting things are about to happen, that we are on the brink of some discovery that will make our century a turning point in human history.