by Colin Wilson
I find this difficult to explain, but I am sure that meaning is like a conjurer’s cloth, an invisible cloth, that the invisible conjurer drops between us and ‘reality’. I look out of my window at the Kentish Town Road. It fails to arouse any response in me; it is ‘Meaningless’. Suddenly a very old man walks below my window; he has a white beard, a filthy overcoat that brushes the pavement, and his dirty grey hair hangs half-way down his back. Instantly my attention is ‘caught’—and I imagine that this is because meaning has obtruded itself into my universe, reached out and hit me. But this is an illusion; it is something in me that imposed meaning on the old man. Perhaps he reminded me of Tolstoy, or aroused some idea of the ‘romance’ of being Outside Society, refusing to fit in. Or I put a Beethoven piano sonata on the gramophone; it fails to interest me. I make an effort, and think about Beethoven’s life—the arch-rebel shaking his fist at the thunder, etc., and the music immediately becomes meaningful. But it is I who have imposed the meaning on it.
But where sex is concerned, the problem is more mysterious. The violence of my responses convinces me that this is no auto-hypnosis. For example: two years ago I went to visit a friend in hospital. When I came out, I took a walk around the hospital grounds, then took a short cut between two buildings. I saw a porter standing against a corner, obviously trying to conceal himself, and looking out across the road; when he saw me, he turned round, and looked guilty. When I drew level, he winked at me, and said: ‘Look at that.’ Twenty yards away, a girl was sitting on a doorstep—I imagine she was a student nurse, from her cloak—with her legs wide open. The porter—a slobbery-looking man with thick glasses and a dripping nose—said: ‘She’s been on show like that for ten minutes.’ ‘I don’t suppose she knows we’re watching,’ I said. ‘Oh yes, she does. Watch this.’ He walked from behind the building, and walked along the road, in front of the girl, taking a long look between her legs as he went past. She pretended not to see him, and went on staring abstractedly ahead of her. I must admit that, left alone, I felt considerably excited. Somehow the presence of the porter had acted as a brake before—as if it would be a kind of self-exposure to be excited in front of him. I found it incomprehensible why the girl should be sitting like that, her panties on view to the world. If she’d been an ugly, sex-starved girl, I could have understood; but she looked about seventeen, and, as far as I could tell, was pretty. After a few minutes, the porter returned back down the road, this time keeping his eyes focused between her open thighs; he stopped near her and said something; I saw her nod, and he walked on, and came round the corner of the building. ‘I asked her if she was feeling OK,’ he said, ‘but she said she was.’ He had tried the only explanation that seemed fairly likely: that the girl felt ill, and was not aware that we were watching her. The porter said: ‘Walk by like I did. She won’t move. When you get close up you can see the hairs on her fanny.’ I wanted to, but would have felt ashamed; it was too obvious. I also wanted to talk to her. After all, she might be advertising a desire to lose her virginity. But again, I felt unsure of myself. Finally, realizing that I was only torturing myself—because from twenty yards, I could only see a blur of pink where the white of her thighs ended, and it was absurd to keep staring, as if longer exposure would reveal more—I turned and went home. This episode has stayed in my mind ever since, and recurs frequently—particularly when I feel sex-starved, when I daydream of what I might have done if I could have got her into a bedroom. Yet when I turn my full attention on it, the meaning vanishes. Why was she exciting? Because she aroused in me a whole response of secret lusts, far more violently than Caroline will arouse them tonight when she undresses in front of me. It is not that a girl’s body is exciting in itself; the conjurer threw veils of excitement between my eyes and the girl. (On considering this episode, I am now convinced she did it as a ‘dare’—that the other nurses bet that no girl would dare to sit on the doorstep with her thighs open, and that this girl probably replied: ‘Nonsense, what does it matter if men do look up your skirt? It doesn’t do you any harm’. . . .) All the secret repressions of civilization rose up, all the girls who walk past in summer dresses.
It may seem that in writing like this I am only indulging in a kind of intellectual onanism; but this would be to miss the point. There is a point. I keep trying to break into reality with this crowbar of reason. I don’t try a ‘systematic’ attack, like a philosopher or a theologian; I don’t want to ‘explain’ the world, like Thomas Aquinas. I want to keep jabbing, in the hope that the point of my crowbar will find a crack in the stones and be able to lever them apart. In a way, this diary is the ideal way to try and do it. My method of attack is the same as that of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Wells; fragmentary. Yet this is necessary. I make short, violent attacks on the faceless reality in an attempt to take it by storm, driven wholly by an intuition, not by reason. And sex is the ideal driving force for my pneumatic drill; my mind may get tired and bewildered brooding on the problem of how we ought to live; I think of sex, and feel a shock, as if I’ve touched a live wire. Something is revealed. And what I want to try and get at is this inconsistency in the sexual impulse. I feel as if I’m an accountant who has caught Life trying to fiddle the books. Because when I climb into bed with Caroline or Gertrude, I may or may not feel excitement; but it is not that magic that the strangeness of a woman evokes. The women who stay in my mind are the ones I never had. I remember a girl on the beach at Felpham; I lay behind a breakwater, watching her dress, watching the way she wrapped herself carefully in a bath towel before she shed her bathing costume; every single move was calculated to outwit the staring males. But a point came when she had to concede a certain amount, because it is almost impossible to pull on the panties without exposing something. I can still remember, with awful sick excitement, the sight of her standing there quite boldly, her dress raised for a moment above her waist, her legs very straight and braced apart to balance herself. And the longing is not merely sexual; it is also social. I don’t merely want to rape her. She looks healthy and beautiful; I want to meet her, talk to her, take her out. But she walks off the beach with her parents, and a man of about her own age who might be her brother or her lover or even her husband (but I think not; she seemed somehow unmarried) and I curse Fate, that has dangled this goddess in front of me but offered me no opportunity of making her acquaintance. Of course, she might not be a goddess . . . but even that would be a triumph. I remember once, when I was about thirteen, I sat on the bus behind a girl who had marvellous hair. I tried hard to see her face; she half-turned once or twice, and I saw that she was pretty. In the twenty minutes of that bus journey, I fell horribly in love, and was assailed by daydreams as endless as the Arabian Nights. My stop came; but I decided to stay on, and watch her for just a few minutes longer. Then someone she knew got on the bus, and shouted: ‘Allao, Sheila luv, ’ow are you?’ And the girl in front of me replied in exactly the same voice, the noisy, high-pitched yawp of the Midlands, as devoid of tone as cats making love. I hurried off the bus, my adoration in fragments—and yet perversely glad to be free again, glad not to be a slave of daydreams.
And yet it would be untrue to pretend that a girl of this kind could not be as desirable as any débutante with a carefully modulated voice. Shaw is right when he says of Anne Whitefield: give her a cast in one eye and strike all the aitches out of her speech, and she will still make men dream. I know this to be true. I remember once observing one of these ‘suburban Cleopatras’ in Birmingham. I was waiting on a street corner; she was talking to a boy in overalls on a bicycle; she was not particularly pretty, although she had a good figure; she kept twisting and turning as she talked to him, as if with a kind of impatience; possibly she was aware that I was watching her with admiration. Her manner was definitely coquettish. But there was something indefinably vital about her as she stood there, shifting from one foot to the other, patting her hair, lacing her fingers together. I could hear her voice; it was what you’d expect of a
Birmingham working-class girl. I think she probably had a turned-up nose; she might have had a cast in one eye, and it would have made no difference. She was like an incandescent lamp, and I think most men would have taken her on any terms. I envied that stupid-looking mechanic with his face smeared with grease.
So this is sex—an appeal to something inside us of which we know nothing. It is like a spy signalling from the coast during the war; there are flashes from out there, at sea, and answering flashes from inside your own country—and yet you don’t know where the spy is.
Another point that struck me the other day, thinking of Christie. Why do murderers kill certain women, yet not others? Heath murdered two girls with sadistic cruelty, yet another girl with whom he spent the week-end between the two murders didn’t even suspect that he had sadistic leanings. What was it about her that made him gentle to her? Landru murdered a whole string of women, including one who had no money; yet he was also living with a girl with whom he had been having an affair for a year, and who had no suspicion that he was a killer. Kurten killed some of his female victims, yet other women who were ill-treated by him continued to go out with him without even suspecting that he might be a killer. What was it about his victims that incited him to kill them? What was it about his wife that made it impossible to ill-treat her? Surely the answer must be: the same curious vitality that made my ‘suburban Cleopatra’ so desirable?
So there is the problem, the discrepancy in the books kept by the Life Force. Yet no, I can’t believe that the vital excitement is an illusion. It is a glimpse into the possibility of an intenser form of existence, a life where there is no unsatisfied desire.
There is, of course, the opposite of this intensely-focused desire. For example, the girl about whom I spoke to Father Carruthers, the Communist tart, and the way that all my sexual desire drained away when I was in bed with her, as if she’d pulled out a plug. Why? Partly, of course, because I felt her to be worthless, a neurotic bitch with whom it would be dangerous to get involved; perhaps my instincts were reacting more perceptively than my conscious mind. Also because she lacked mystery. I remember Bill Payne telling me about the time when he was sleeping in the same flat as a girl who attracted him violently. He waited until everyone was in bed, then crept into her bedroom, where she was still reading with the light on. When he came in, she looked up and smiled, then threw back all the bed clothes. She was naked. He said his desire simply evaporated at the sight of that nakedness; it was too open, too honest. He turned and fled back to his own room; he told me that that was exactly what she had intended him to do (I would have supposed her movement to be an invitation, but Bill denied this strongly).
So all that we know as greatness is connected with the opening-up of horizons. Why do we all love a story about a frustrated man or woman who succeeds in realizing some dream? It is because we are all frustrated, trapped in this prison of a body. This is why I cannot believe that the lust I felt for the student nurse, for the girl on the beach, was somehow an illusion, a response intensified by frustrations. Certain ideas, certain works of art, evoke for me the absurd, ecstatic, metaphysical mystery of life. Van Gogh’s Starry Night does it; so does Beethoven’s last quartet, so does that picture of the three old sages around the Well of Life in Korea. These things are not illusions; they are glimpses into a possibility that might become a reality at any moment. Surely the same is true of sex? It presages a freer, cleaner existence, without endless obstructions and perplexities. And I’ve felt this often through sex. For example, that first night I slept with Caroline; after she’d fallen asleep it suddenly seemed to me that I’d been making a better job of life than I’d realized. It was like a stock-taking when you grasp that you’re a great deal better off than you thought yourself.
If I had to define the belief that drives me to torment myself, to bully my body, to drive myself instead of drifting and ‘taking life as it comes’, I would express it in this way: at any moment, it is possible that we shall make the ‘break-through’ in consciousness, that consciousness will suddenly leap to a higher level and turn us into something more like gods. With this intenser consciousness would come far more energy—or rather, I would know the secret of the source of my energy. Why do I feel as if life has somehow not yet begun, as if I am still a child, as if when I die, it will be as if I have never lived? Why did Yeats call life a long preparation for something that never happens? This I believe: we are still in the chrysalis stage; we live in a kind of daze, an oppression. And yet we could go on developing, growing, so that our present ‘adulthood’ at the age of twenty-one would seem no more than the first milestone on a hundred-mile journey. If we could discover the secret of the next stage, of getting past that first milestone, at which the human race has now been stuck for thousands of years—we would also have discovered the secret of living beyond our present seventy years.
Yes, we are attacking reality with our weapons of logic and language. The world induces a ‘conditioned’ reflex of blankness in us, like a snake staring at a rabbit; a weird paralysis; we merely accept it, without asking for its credentials. We do not ask why we are born and die; we do not ask why we suffer, or why ‘destiny’ carelessly throws us hours of silly bliss. We ought to ask, to refuse to accept anything without knowing the reason. I refuse to be hypnotized or to sink into a state of blank nausea. I place myself in circumstances where I can be most easily attacked, where I am most exposed—alone in this room, making no attempt to distract myself, only trying to look without blinking at the problem: what am I doing here? The world is a clever swindler; it robs us of our lives while it distracts our attention. It is like a dishonest gaoler who is paid an allowance for the upkeep of the prisoners, but who pockets the allowance; then, when the governor pays a visit and asks ‘Any complaints?’ somehow hypnotizes or bullies them into saying ‘No’. And what is this ‘allowance’ of which we are being robbed? I believe that, if we had the key, we could get past that first adulthood, become real living beings instead of the stupid, deluded, petty creatures we are. We have a right to become more godlike than we are; we have a right to more knowledge than we possess; we have a right to know what it is all about. Once human beings catch a glimpse of that new level of maturity, they will refuse to be robbed by the gaoler any longer; they will fix their eyes on it and demand it.
Sometimes, when listening to music, I catch a glimpse of it. For example, if I listen to certain things with deep concentration—the Liebestod, the final dance of the Firebird—time is destroyed, and I am suddenly back ten years, when I first heard them. That kind of conquest of time is a movement towards the godhead I speak of.
Later: Caroline came and interrupted me. She talked about marriage again, in a rather vague way; and I, to distract her, talked about her future success in the theatre. That’s Caroline’s trouble: like most of us, she can’t believe in her future; or even in her past. Only in the present.
She is curious about this diary. I went out of the room to put the kettle on; when I came back, she was looking at it, and to my horror, was looking at the page about Madeleine. I took it away; I don’t think she had time to read it. Certainly, she didn’t show any of the signs of having read it.
Oct. 31st.
A stupid thing happened last night, and makes me wonder if I shall ever get any sense. Caroline left at about eleven; she had early classes this morning; I settled down to fill in my diary, and decided to drink some wine. I took a bottle of Spanish burgundy out of the cupboard, and opened it standing over the bed. To my astonishment, as the cork came out with a pop, the bottom half of the bottle simply dropped away, soaking the bed with wine. I don’t know whether the glass had a fault, or whether I’d somehow cracked the bottle and wrenched it in half. Anyway, I was more worried about the state of the sheets and the mattress than about the wetness of the bed, so I rushed down to Carlotta and told her what I’d done. She came upstairs and whipped off the sheets and the blank
et next to the mattress; the mattress wasn’t too badly soaked anyway, and I don’t see why the landlady should ever see it. Carlotta said that the stains would come out of the sheets if she washed them right away, and I kept apologizing like a fool. I ended by going down and offering to help. Then I got the idea of opening the other bottle of wine. I stood around in her kitchen for ten minutes, getting in the way, then said I’d leave her the wine and go back upstairs; she immediately asked me where I was going to sleep. I said that the wine stain didn’t make much difference; I’d cover it over with newspapers. She then said she hadn’t any clean sheets, so I said I’d sleep between blankets. At this, she offered to let me sleep downstairs. I agreed; I suppose I half-wanted to sleep with her anyway. Then she stopped washing, and we drank the wine, and she found some German station on her radio playing old records of Willy Frisch and Marlene Dietrich, and began to sentimentalize about Munich. Finally, when we’d finished the wine, and she had asked me all kinds of personal questions about Caroline and Gertrude (which I answered truthfully), she said it was time she went to bed, and asked me if I’d be comfortable on the settee. I said yes, and went upstairs to get my blankets, and switch off my fire and light. When I came down, she was in bed, and told me that if I’d promise to ‘be a good boy’ I could sleep with her. I suppose this was what I’d been wanting—and not wanting. Temptation is very difficult to resist when it actually waves itself under your nose.