The Essential Colin Wilson (29 page)

But then, perhaps it is a mistake to emphasise this element of empathy or sympathy. I had a similar experience when writing a book about Bernard Shaw. A friend had borrowed a book that I wanted to consult; and on this particular morning, he returned it. So I sat down at my typewriter feeling pleased I had it back. It was a pleasant, warm day, with the sun streaming through on to my desk. I was writing the chapter about Shaw's marriage and 'breakthrough', after years of plodding around London's theatres and concert halls as a critic. No doubt I was 'identifying' with Shaw, imagining what it must have been like to feel that you have sailed out of a storm into a quiet harbour. But this was not what explained that sudden feeling of intense joy, as if my heart had turned into a balloon and was sailing up into the air. It was not just Shaw's life that was somehow passing through my mind; it was something bigger: a sense of the multiplicity of life itself. In a sense, I was back in Edwardian London; but it could just as easily have been Goethe's Weimar or Mozart's Salzburg.

In fact, this 'other mode' of consciousness is a state of
perception
rather than empathy—an awareness of a wider range of 'fact'—of the actuality of the world outside me. What has changed in such experiences is our perspective. I am used to seeing the world in what might be called 'visual perspective'—that is, with the objects closest to me looking realler and larger than the objects in the middle distance, which in turn look realler and larger than the objects on the horizon. In these experiences, we seem to sail up above this visual perspective, and the objects on the horizon are as real as my fingers and toes.

This is the experience that lay at the heart of
The Outsider
. The 'Romantic Outsiders'—Rousseau, Shelley, Hoffmann, Hölderlin, Berlioz, Wagner, Dostoevsky, Van Gogh, Nietszche—were always experiencing flashes of the 'other mode' of consciousness, with its tantalising hint of a new
kind
of perception, in which distant realities are as real as the present moment. But this created a new problem: intense dissatisfaction with the ordinary form of consciousness, with its emphasis on the immediate and the trivial. So the rate of death by suicide or tuberculosis was alarmingly high among writers and artists of the nineteenth century. Many of them seemed to feel that this was inevitable: that death and despair were the price you paid for these flashes of the 'other mode'. Even a relatively latecomer to the scene like Thomas Mann continued to think of the problem in terms of these bleak opposites: stupidity
and
health, or intensity
and
death.

I was inclined to question this equation. In many cases, the misery seemed self-inflicted. Eliot was right when he snapped: 'Shelley was a fool.' Shelley was a fool to fall in love with every pretty face that came by, a fool to believe England could be improved by violent revolution, a fool to give way to self-pity every time he got depressed, and to feel that the situation could be improved by 'lying down like a weary child to weep away this life of care'. The same criticism applies to a large number of 'romantic outsiders'.

Still, even when full allowance was made for weakness and self-pity, there was another problem that could not be dismissed so easily. L. H. Myers had called it 'the near and the far' (in the novel of that title). The young Prince Jali gazes out over the desert in the light of the setting sun, and reflects that there are two deserts, 'one that was a glory for the eye, another that it was a weariness to trudge'—the near and the far. And the horizon, with all its promise, is always 'the far'. The near is trivial and boring. Huysmans had made the same point amusingly in
A Rebours
, where, after reading Dickens, the hero, Des Esseintes, has a sudden craving for London. While waiting for his train he goes to the English tavern near the Gare St Lazare, and eats roast beef and potatoes, and drinks pints of ale. Then it strikes him that he has, so to speak, tasted the essence of England, and that 'it would be madness to risk spoiling such unforgettable experiences with a clumsy change of locality'. So he takes a cab back home.

Yet Myers had also glimpsed an answer when he made Jali reflect: 'Yes, one day he would be vigorous enough in breath and stride to capture the promise of the horizon.' He may not have believed it himself, but it was still the correct answer: vitality. In 1960, my conviction was confirmed by the work of an American professor of psychology, Abraham Maslow. Maslow said he had got tired of studying sick people because they never talked about anything but their illness; so he decided to study healthy people instead. He soon made an interesting discovery: that healthy people frequently had 'peak experiences'—flashes of immense happiness. For example, a young mother was watching her husband and children eating breakfast when a beam of sunlight came through the window. It suddenly struck her how lucky she was, and she went into the peak experience—the 'other mode'. Maslow made another interesting discovery. When he talked to his students about peak experiences, they began recollecting peak experiences which they had had, but which they had often overlooked at the time. Moreover, as soon as they began thinking about and discussing peak experiences,
they began having them regularly
. In other words: the peak experience, the moment when the near and the far seem to come together,
is
a product of vitality and optimism. But it can also be amplified or repeated through
reflection
, by turning the full attention upon it instead of allowing it merely to 'happen'.

The case of the young mother reinforces the point. She was happy as she watched her husband and children eating, but it was an unreflective happiness. The beam of sunlight made her feel: 'I am happy', and instantly intensified it. It is as though we possessed a kind of mirror inside us, a mirror which has the power to turn 'things that happen' into
experience
. It seems that thought itself has a power for which it has never been given credit.

This was a major discovery. It meant that—contrary to the belief of the romantics—the 'other mode'
is
within our control. Shelley asked the 'spirit of beauty':

Why dost thou pass away and leave our state
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?

The answer, in Shelley's case, was clearly that he went around with the assumption that human existence
is
a 'dim vast vale of tears', and regarded the peak experiences as visitations of 'the awful shadow of some unseen power'—instead of recognising that the unseen power lay within himself.

What we are speaking about is what Gottfried Benn called 'primal perception', that sudden sense of 'matchless clarity' that gives the world a 'new-minted' look. We find it in the sharp outlines of Japanese art, with its white mountain peaks and electric blue skies. T. E. Lawrence describes one in Seven
Pillars of Wisdom
: 'We started out on one of those clear dawns that wake up the senses with the sun, while the intellect, tired after the thinking of the night, was yet abed. For an hour or two, on such a morning, the sounds, scents and colours of the world struck man individually and directly, not filtered through or made typical by thought: they seemed to exist sufficiently by themselves . . . '

Lawrence has also put his finger on the reason that we experience 'primal perception' so infrequently: the
filter
of thought, of the mind's expectations. It could also be described as the robot, the mechanical part of us. Our 'robot' is invaluable; it takes over difficult tasks—like driving the car or talking a foreign language—and does them far more easily and efficiently than when we are doing them consciously. But it also 'gets used' to spring mornings and Mozart symphonies, destroying 'the glory and the freshness' that makes the child's world so interesting. The robot may be essential to human life; but he makes it hardly worth living.

The robot seems to be located in the brain. This is clear from the effects of psychedelic drugs like LSD and mescalin, which apparently achieve their effect by paralysing certain 'chemical messengers' in the brain. The result is certainly a form of 'primal perception'—as Aldous Huxley noted when he took mescalin; he quoted Blake's statement: 'If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.' So cleansing the 'doors of perception' is basically a matter of brain physiology.

In the mid-sixties I began reading books on the brain; one result was a novel called
The Philosopher's Stone
, in which I suggest that the secret of primal perception may lie in the pre-frontal cortex. But it was more than ten years later that I came upon a crucial piece of research that threw a new light on the whole question. The result was revelatory.

From the magazine
Second Look
(edited by Robert Temple), October 1979

A couple of months ago, I found myself involved in the re-writing of a film script about that legendary hero Flash Gordon. In one of the scenes, Flash's old friend and ally, Professor Zarkov, is being held prisoner by the secret police of Ming the Merciless, who proceed to brain-wash him with a machine that is intended to turn him into a loyal servant of Ming. But ten minutes further on in the movie, Zarkov has to reveal that the brain-washing was unsuccessful. The reason given by the previous script writer was unconvincing, not to say absurd. I decided on something that sounds at least more technically convincing. The human brain has two halves that are almost identical, and the question of why this should be so is still unsolved by the science of brain physiology. We have, it seems, two separate memory systems, and to some extent, each half of the brain stores the same information. If Ming's secret police happened to be unaware of this because the inhabitants of the planet Mongo have 'single' brains—then they might well leave one of Zarkov's memory systems intact . . .

Which left me with an interesting question, to which I have since devoted some thought. What would a single brained being be like? How would he differ from us? Why, in fact,
do
we have two brains?

Since I am not a brain physiologist, or even a scientist, any answers I have to suggest will be by way of pure speculation. Still, even mistaken theories can be useful. One of the most stimulating books I have read in recent years is
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind
, by Julian Jaynes, in which he seriously suggests that our ancestors of a couple of thousand years B.C. lacked any kind of self-awareness—any sense of themselves as individual egos. I am certain that he is wrong; yet I've had more fun trying to work out why than in reading any number of more cautious and sober works of psychology. If my own suggestions can provide anything like the same stimulation, then the sufferings of Professor Zarkov will not have been in vain.

Let me begin by sketching the known facts. More than a century ago, the neurologist Hughlings Jackson noted that the left cerebral hemisphere seems to be concerned with expression—speech—while the right deals with recognition. The cerebral hemispheres—the top part of the brain—are the most specifically human part of us—our thinking apparatus. These hemispheres consist of two mirror-like halves, joined by a bridge called the commissure, the corpus callosum. But the purpose of this bridge is still obscure—Karl Lashley made the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that it was to stop the two halves of the brain from sagging. When the commissure is severed, as it sometimes is to prevent epileptic seizures, there is no obvious difference in the patient's behaviour. But in experiments with split-brain patients in Chicago in the early fifties, Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga began to note some basic changes. Patients could not write meaningful sentences with the left hand—which is connected to the right side of the brain; neither could they read with the left eye. If the left eye (connected to the right brain) is shown an apple, and the right eye an orange, and the patient is asked what he has seen, he replies 'An orange.' Asked to write what he has seen with the left hand, he writes 'Apple.' But if he is not allowed to see what he has just written, but is asked to state it, he replies 'Orange.' If he is shown a picture of a nude woman—among a number of neutral images—he grins or giggles; asked why he is grinning, he replies 'I don't know'.

The 'I' who responds to questions clearly lives in the left half of the brain. The person who lives in the right hemisphere is by no means an idiot; he can, for example, make a more accurate sketch of a house—complete with perspective—than the left. (The left makes flat, two-dimensional representations.) But he is fundamentally silent. A person with left brain damageis unable to express himself verbally, but his pattern-recognition is unimpaired. A person with right brain damage sounds perfectly normal and intelligent: but he cannot copy even the simplest pattern—say, a four-pointed star.

More significant is an observation of what happens to the mathematical faculty in brain-damaged patients. They seem to be able to add and subtract as well as ever, but their ability to solve more interesting problems is reduced almost to nil. The left brain is analytical; but real problem solving requires an over-all grasp of the problem, which requires a creative approach.

Robert Ornstein, another investigator in this field, made a significant observation about ordinary (non split-brain) subjects. When they are engaged in doing boring calculations—adding up a grocery bill—the right brain shows alpha rhythms, as if it is asleep or idling.

Another interesting experiment showed the way in which the two hemispheres seem to react like two different people. If the left eye (connected to the right brain) is shown a series of flashing lights, either red or green, and the patient is asked to guess what colour he has just seen, the score ought to be precisely 50/50, since the left hemisphere has no idea of what its partner is seeing. In fact, it was far higher than that—and for an interesting reason. The patient would often make the wrong guess, then jump—as if someone had kicked him under the table—and change his guess. The 'silent' hemisphere had heard the wrong guess, and nudged him in the ribs.