Recent Personal Musings

I’ve lately been reading Colin Wilson’s new autobiography, Dreaming to Some Purpose. Some twenty-five years ago, a friend gave me an original hardcover edition of The Outsider, Wilson’s notorious first book of philosophy, published when he was 24 with much fanfare, celebrity and initial critical acclaim, followed by a great deal of hostility and ridicule from the press. Nevertheless, he went on to publish 80 or more books, of which I’ve read and enjoyed about 25, skipping his many books on occult subjects, the paranormal, violence and murder, preferring the neo-existentialist tomes of literary criticism and philosophy--favorite titles include Religion and the Rebel and Poetry & Mysticism--as well as his novels and the biographical studies of Jung, Gurdjieff and Aleister Crowley.Throughout Wilson’s prodigious output, he again and again comes back to a single, principle idea that has obsessed him throughout his life: to what extent are the mental habits of our everyday, machinelike thought patterns preventing the access to a broader, exultant consciousness that is purely affirmative of life, a state he often refers to as “absurd good news,” quoting Chesterton. Whereas the traditional existentialist notes the utter meaninglessness of existence and generally arrives at a final “No” to life, characterized by a sense of defeat and absurdity, Wilson is emphatic that the true and sensible response to life, when the habitual, negative, and limited mind has been cleared of its cobwebs, can only be and must be an “Everlasting Yes.” In this light he quotes Blake’s famous dictum,

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

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

Much of Wilson’s life has been devoted to noting those times in himself and others when those doors of perception have flown open and the cobwebs cleared—either spontaneously or through a concentrated act of will—resulting in this “bird’s eye view” of life, a broader vision, a seeing way beyond the “narrow chinks” of our self-centered, isolated, mental caverns. He observed that such “peak experiences” often occur following the resolution of a crisis of some sort, when the attention is deeply focused—one is perhaps in danger—and then is suddenly relaxed. He provides numerous examples of this phenomenon: Hemingway saying “Nobody ever lived their life all the way up except bullfighters.”; Sartre reporting that he never felt so free and alive as when he was in the Underground, in constant danger of betrayal and death; and perhaps his favorite example, Graham Greene’s habit of playing Russian roulette with a loaded revolver, finding that the confrontation with imminent death and the subsequent reprieve would instantly fill him with a sense of expanded consciousness and appreciation of life. Those who have had a “near-death experience” often report a new-found clarity of purpose and aliveness afterward, with everything appearing more vivid; Greene merely preferred to induce such an event as needed, to enliven his existence when it teetered into the dead zone of automaticity and taking things for granted. Wilson is also fond of Gurdjieff’s take on all this, that we are fundamentally asleep to our true nature, and once we recognize this, can awaken ourselves through the sheer and active exertion of will, self-remembering, and if all else fails, a self-induced--or Gurdjieff-induced--crisis. Being an archetypal, neurotic Jewish depressive myself, my tendency, if I don’t actively fight against it, is towards the “Everlasting No.” In fact, Minyan is saved from being merely a dark and humorous account filled with fear and negativity only through the presence of the character of Reb Miltie, (as well as through Mordecai, the fictitious, ecstatic poet Miltie creates.) And Miltie only arrives at his affirmative stance after losing everyone he loved to Nazi Germany. It is only when he learns to dance on the graves of his beloveds that his life and soul are restored, and he is empowered to transmit a joyful “Yes” to his future disciples. That one image felt so important to me that I chose to feature it in the artwork on the cover, depicting Reb Miltie, bigger than life, dancing in a graveyard, surrounded by an aura of light. (In the characters of Reb Miltie and Norbert, I was also trying to come up with a Jewish equivalent of the Castaneda books, or the “Karate Kid”—a mentor-disciple relationship embedded inside a culture with which I was more familiar. Where Don Juan took Carlos on peyote trips, Reb Miltie would take Norbert to the Second Avenue Deli, with similar revelatory results.)It seems to me that Miltie’s solution is the only way to achieve a sense of affirmation in this otherwise dreadful world we all currently inhabit: to find a way to dance and celebrate in the graveyard, for everywhere we turn we are confronted by yet another tombstone. On one is written “Here Lies the Environment”; on another, “Dead of Starvation”; still another, “Victim of Terrorism,” and so forth—I needn’t belabor the list. We live in a frightful, sorrowful cemetery of misery, pain, violence and death, and if we are not to commit suicide in the face of the endless suffering in ourselves and in the world, we must find a way to dance, to make art, to sing and celebrate, to pierce the vale of tears and gaze at human existence with a combination of the Buddha’s unbearable compassion, Teilhard’s “adoration,” and Zorba the Greek’s ebullient response of leaping on a table. For some of us, this is easier said than done. Many of my generation, myself included, have often relied on the temporary vision and relief offered by marijuana and psychedelic drugs to remind us that there is far more to this world than meets the sorrowful eye; in fact, an unfathomable and infinite world of mystery and wonder surrounds us at every moment, no matter how we feel or what we think! Others, myself included, have plunged into long years--or at least weeks--of deep and arduous meditative and other spiritual practices to achieve the same end. To paraphrase the 60s oldie, “Waking Up is Hard to Do,” but it’s the only game in town worth playing. Of course there are apparently some people—William James’s “once-born” types—who do not need to do anything, who follow no path, and need not be “born again” in order to arrive at an essentially positive worldview. Rather, they seem to have been gifted with an innately joyful temperament, a natural and easy optimism. (Unfortunately, I can’t really write or conjecture much about such people, as they are as foreign to me as an African Bush person or an alien from outer space. Perhaps, when asked who my audience is, who it is I write for, I should just reply: “The miserable people.”)In any event, despite—or perhaps because of--Colin Wilson’s self-confessed, lifelong fascination with female “knickers,” he continues to champion the possibilities of human consciousness; he is still Dreaming to Some Purpose.