Below the Iceberg Read online

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  Below the Iceberg

  by Colin Wilson

  From Issue #57 of Magical Blend Magazine

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  When awareness focuses to a laser-like beam, the meaning and magic of life spill forth.

  Recently I was asked to choose what I regard as the most important of my nonfiction books. I replied without hesitation, "Beyond the Occult," first published in 1988. It unites two main currents in my thinking: the "existentialist" ideas developed in The Outsider, and the ideas that developed from my study of "the occult." Beyond the Occult is my most important synthesis.

  Oddly enough, I had no desire to write it. It came about because I was approached by an old friend who had been the editor of many of my early books-among them, The Space Vampires and A Criminal History of Mankind. He was now working for another publisher and wanted to commission another "occult" book from me. I was anxious to oblige, but had no desire to write another book about the occult. Finally, I allowed myself to be persuaded. In retrospect, I have never been so satisfied with any decision I have ever made.

  My first book, The Outsider, appeared in 1956, and brought me overnight notoriety that I found astonishing and exhausting. Since the ideas of The Outsider play such an important part in Beyond the Occult, I must begin by trying to explain them.

  Ever since childhood, I have been baffled by a strange phenomenon: how can we want something badly and then feel bored almost as soon as we get it? I had noticed it particularly at Christmas time. For months before Christmas Day, I would look forward to owning some long-coveted toy, yet a few hours after receiving it, I was already beginning to take it for granted and even to find it slightly disappointing. I noticed the same thing about school holidays-how eagerly I would look forward to them during the school term, and how easily I became bored with them.

  The Limitless Realm

  I glimpsed the solution to this problem when I was still a thirteen-year-old schoolboy. One day, at the beginning of the six-week long August holiday, I went to a church bazaar and bought for a few pence some volumes of an encyclopedia called Practical Knowledge for All. It contained courses on every imaginable subject, from accountancy, aeronautics, astronomy, biology, botany, and chemistry to philosophy and zoology. I had been fascinated by astronomy and chemistry since the age of ten, and now I conceived the preposterous idea of trying to summarize all the scientific knowledge of the world in one notebook. I gave it the grandiose title of A Manual of General Science, and wrote steadily throughout that August holiday, filling four notebooks with my round schoolboy handwriting.

  And I noticed that I never became bored. Learning and writing about geology, biology, and philosophy kept me happier than I had ever been in my life. And I continued writing the book over Christmas, when I began the seventh volume-devoted to mathematics. All the time I was writing this book, I had an almost drunken sensation of the sheer immensity of the world of ideas, which seemed to stretch, like some marvellous unknown country, to a limitless horizon. Every day, when I began writing, I felt like a traveller preparing to discover new lakes and forests and mountain ranges. I felt sorry for the other boys at school, who were ignorant of this magical kingdom where I spent my evenings and weekends.

  I had learned a basic lesson: that the secret of avoiding boredom is to have a strong sense of purpose. Unfortunately, when I had finished the book, the problem of boredom returned, for I had no idea what to do next. I spent one long school holiday trying to read all the plays of Shakespeare and his major contemporaries: Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, and the rest. During another holiday, I read all the works of the major Russian writers: Aksakov, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Tchekov. During yet another, I studied the history of art, and discovered Van Gogh and Cezanne. Yet, because I was merely reading and not writing about them, even this left me bored and dissatisfied.

  When I was sixteen, however, I came upon another important clue. It was soon after the war, and a British publisher had started to reissue the novels of Dostoevsky. I bought Crime and Punishment with my pocket money. In the Translator's Preface, I read Dostoevsky's letter to his brother Mihail describing how he-and other condemned revolutionaries-were taken out on the Semyonovsky Square

  to be shot:

  They barked orders over our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by prisoners condemned to execution. Being third in the row, I concluded I had only four minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones, and I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, to bid them farewell. Suddenly the troops beat a tatoo, and we were unbound, brought back to the scaffold and informed that his Majesty had spared our lives.

  One of his fellow prisoners went insane.

  It struck me that if Dostoevsky had been offered his pardon on condition that he promised never to be bored for the rest of his life, he would have accepted gladly and been quite certain that it should be possible-indeed, that it should be easy. And it seemed for me he would obviously be correct. Surely, someone who had been through such a crisis would only have to remember being in front of the firing-squad in order to be ecstatically happy.

  A Cause For Rejoicing

  In fact, it was this episode-and the years in Siberia that followed-that turned Dostoevsky into a great writer. Before he was arrested, he was a good but minor writer-in the tradition of Dickens and Gogol. But, as a human being, he was touchy and self-obsessed to the point of paranoia. His arrest and long imprisonment in Siberia made him aware that even to be alive is a cause for rejoicing. The result of this new insight is expressed in a passage in Crime and Punishment where the hero is afraid he may be executed for the murder of an old woman. He thinks: "If I had to stand on a narrow ledge for ever and ever, in eternal darkness and tempest, I would still rather do that than die at once." He had seen that "life failure"-to be bored, miserable, tortured by guilt-is a form of childish spoiltness.

  In my mid-teens, my problem was not simply boredom with my working-class existence (My father was a boot and shoe worker who earned about £3 a week.), it was a longing to escape from it and to retreat into that magical world of the mind that I had discovered when writing the Manual of General Science. This was intensified by my discovery-through Practical Knowledge for All-of the realm of English poetry. I left school when I was sixteen, and for a few months worked in a factory while I prepared to take the mathematics exam a second time. Factory work made me so miserable that I spent my evenings and weekends reading poetry-all kinds of poetry, from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Eliot's Waste Land. I quickly discovered that half an hour immersed in the world of Keats or Shelley or Wordsworth would turn my rage and despair into a gentle melancholy, which slowly transformed into a sense of happiness and optimism, as if I was floating above the world, looking down on it like a bird. When, in the writings of Richard Wagner, I later came across the phrase: "art that makes life seem like a game, and withdraws us from the common fate," I understood instantly what he meant.

  The only problem with this state of mind-the bird's eye view-was that it made it twice as difficult to go back to work the following morning and accept the worm's eye view of boredom and triviality. Years later, when I read Thomas Mann's novel, The Buddenbrooks, I recognized my own problem in the episode where young Hanno Buddenbrook goes to the opera to see Wagner's Lohengrin, and is so transported into ecstasy that he feels he is walking on clouds. But when he has to get up in the freezing dawn and make his way to school through the dark, icy streets, his despair is twice as deep because he has experienced ecstasy the night before.

  It then seemed to me the problem of human existence can be expressed very simply. At long intervals, we experience moments of strength and happiness in which we feel that we have the pow
er to change the world and our lives. But such moments are brief. For most of the time, we experience the sense of being victims of circumstance, like dead leaves carried along by a river, with no ability to choose our course. And, when circumstances become especially difficult, it is easy to imagine that fate will afflict us with a series of misfortunes, like Job, that will destroy all our security and leave us completely helpless.

  Being and Becoming

  As I read my favorite writers-Plato, Hoffman, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Eliot-or listened to the music of Beethoven, or looked at the paintings of Van Gogh, it seemed to me that all shared an awareness of this problem. Plato said that the universe is divided into a world of being and a world of becoming. The world of "becoming" is this everyday world of matter, of endless change, in which we are trapped. The world of "being" is the world of intellect and ideas, the world of truth and values that lies hidden behind the facade of the material world. As he prepares to commit suicide, Socrates declares that the philosopher spends his life trying to live in a world of true being, and, therefore, that he should welcome death which finally frees him from the distractions of the world of mere "becoming."

  This, I realized, was why so many romantics were fascinated with death. Yet I still found the idea of death stupid and repellent. It was an attempt to escape from reality. And the moments of ecstasy, of "bird's eye vision," seemed to promise that life could be lived on the level of continuous joy and affirmation.

  When, in my late teens, I began to write a novel, it was inevitable that it should be about this problem of the bird's eye view and the worm's eye view. The hero of Ritual in the Dark is a young man who has spent years working in boring jobs, and whose strongest desire is to have the freedom to read and think and listen to music. Then he receives a small legacy which enables him to rent a cheap room and spend his days in libraries and art galleries. And he finds that this kind of freedom is curiously boring. Then he becomes accidentally involved with a man he suspects of being a murderer, and feels ashamed that, because he now has something to maintain his "interest," he no longer feels bored. He is ashamed, because it has taken an external stimulus to renew his sense of being fully alive, when he feels that he ought to be able to do it himself. Surely he ought to wake up every morning with a feeling of immense gratitude for not having to go to an office? What is wrong with the human mind that makes it so incapable of freedom?

  It was while I was writing this novel that I decided to break off and try to express some of its basic ideas in a volume of philosophy. Inevitably, this book was about "Outsiders," people who felt a longing for some more purposeful form of existence, and who felt trapped and suffocated in the triviality of everyday life. It was a book about "moments of vision" and about the periods of boredom, frustration, and misery in which these moments are lost. It was about men like Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Van Gogh, T.E. Lawrence and William Blake, who have clear glimpses of a more powerful and meaningful way of living, yet who find themselves on the brink of suicide or insanity because of the frustration of their everyday lives. The problem of the Outsider is summarized in the life of Vincent Van Gogh. His painting Starry Night is full of mystical vitality; yet Van Gogh committed suicide and left a note that read: "Misery will never end."

  Here, then, is the vital question: Was the tragedy of Nietzsche and Van Gogh inevitable, or should there be some way in which human beings can live on a higher level of intensity?

  Tradition of Defeat

  My own conclusion was that tragedy was not inevitable. Many Outsiders caused their downfall through self-pity. In other words, they allowed themselves to become weak. Why? Because they were inclined to feel that life is futile and meaningless-or, at least, that it is so difficult that it is not worth the effort. In the twentieth century, this feeling has been expressed most clearly in the works of Samuel Beckett. It is recorded that when he was a young man, he stayed in bed all day because he could see no reason to get up. And his works are part of a long tradition of "defeatism" that goes back to Ecclesiastes, with his "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," and "There is nothing new under the sun." This is the feeling that haunts so many Outsiders, particularly when they become tired and discouraged. It was expressed with a certain gloomy power in the philosophy of Schopenhauer. I labelled this sense of boredom and futility "the Ecclesiastes effect."

  This sense of meaninglessness was also expressed by a Greek philosopher who died fifty years before Plato was born. Heraclitus argued that the world of "becoming" is the only reality. Everything changes constantly. Permanence is an illusion of the senses. Therefore man can make no real "mark" on the world, for any "mark" we make vanishes again as quickly as the tide washes away words written in sand. This view also implies, of course, that there is no such thing as good or evil, and that "values" are an illusion.

  This is certainly the feeling we get when we are exhausted with effort, and life seems to be an endless vista of problems and complications. Yet the truth is that it is impossible to be a genuine follower of Heraclitus. According to Heraclitus, death is inevitable, and it is therefore no use making any efforts. Yet if Heraclitus had fallen into a river, he would have struggled to get out again. And if someone had put a knife to his throat and asked: "Shall I cut your windpipe and save you the trouble of living?" he would have shouted: "No!"

  Still, Heraclitus has undoubtedly put his finger on our most basic problem: that everything is soon undone by time. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writes: "Rising, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, according to the same rhythm But one day, the "why" arises, and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement." Camus calls this sudden revelation "the Absurd," a word he borrowed from his friend Sartre, who also coined a word for man's reaction to the Absurd: "nausea." Nausea is the recognition that we are "unnecessary" and that the world of matter that surrounds us is the only reality. "Meaning" is an illusion.

  A Little More Like Gods

  Yet Heraclitus, Sartre, and Camus contradicted themselves. Sartre recorded that he had never felt so free as when he was working for the French Resistance and was likely to be arrested and shot at any moment. And, on the evening before his execution, the hero of Camus's novel, The Stranger, is overwhelmed by a feeling of happiness and affirmation that sounds like Van Gogh's starry night. He writes: "I had been happy, and I was happy still."

  And this, obviously, brings us back to Dostoevsky facing the firing squad. He suddenly knows that life is not pointless and meaninglessness. And we all know the same thing whenever we are faced with any serious problem or crisis. We know that the statement, "Life is meaningless," or "Nothing is worth doing," is the self-indulgence of a philosopher who is both lazy and weak.

  But moments of crisis are not the only moments in which we recognize that the philosophy of Heraclitus and Samuel Beckett is nonsense. The same thing happens in all moments of sudden happiness-the feeling we experience on a spring morning or when setting out on holiday. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence describes such an experience:

  We started on one of those clear dawns that wake up the senses with the sun, while the intellect, tired of the thinking of the night, was yet abed. For an hour or two, on such a morning, the sounds, scents, and colors of the world struck man individually and directly, not filtered through or made typical by thought: they seemed to exist sufficiently by themselves, and the lack of design and carefulness in creation no longer irritated.

  This is the basic poetic vision, the sheer affirmation experienced by Wordsworth and Shelley and William Blake. And Lawrence has also identified the problem: the "tired intellect" which questions everything. Elsewhere he referred to it as his "thought-riddled nature."

  It is the "thought-riddled nature" that causes Outsiders to see life as meaningless. They are in a position of someone who wears dark glasses and complains that the world is dark.

  But, if it is thought that has caused this problem, surely thought is a
lso capable of identifying and overcoming it.

  Let me again define the problem. It is the feeling that "nothing is worth doing," that life is so complicated, and the world is in such a state of endless flux that all our actions our futile. It is the feeling that we cannot do.

  Yet this feeling vanishes-and is seen to be an illusion-every time we experience "the spring morning feeling" described by T.E. Lawrence. Optimism gives us the certainty that action is worthwhile and that the use of the intellect can bring freedom. We only have to look around us to see the truth of this assertion. We are living in a world that has been completely transformed in the course of little more than a century by science and optimism. In fact, since the days of the cave man, human effort and optimism have steadily transformed the world. Individual men have died in failure and misery, yet the efforts of the human race have altered our lives until we are no longer mere animals, living and reproducing and dying. We are slowly learning to become something a little more like gods.

  This, then, is the basic philosophy I reached after The Outsider. Dr Johnson once said: "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." The pessimism of Heraclitus and Samuel Beckett is basically due to a lack of concentration. Our sense of futility, the feeling that life is just one damned thing after another," is an illusion due to fatigue.

  But how can we rescue ourselves from this feeling? First of all, we have to study it and understand it, as I tried to understand it in The Outsider. Our most important ally in this battle is the imagination. If you can imagine the feelings of Dostoevsky as he stood in front of the firing squad, then you are already learning to overcome the petty annoyances and childish weaknesses that make most people feel unhappy. The truth is that we have no right to be unhappy. It is an insult to the spirit of life. A man who is dying of AIDS knows that, if only he could be cured, he would live his life on a far higher level of purpose and optimism.