The Outsider (45 page)

Blake, then, agrees with Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Hesse; the way forward leads to more life, more consciousness. Suicide is no answer, nor mind-suicide, nor the idea of
‘
an allegorical abode where existence hath never come
’
. Heaven-after-death is irrelevant. The way lies forward, into more life. Van Gogh shot himself and Nietzsche went insane, but Raskolnikov and Mitya Karamazov went through with the terrifying crucifixion of the answer to the Outsider
’
s problems: to accept the ordeal; not death, but
‘
ever further into guilt, ever deeper into human life
’
, into the ten years
’
exile, the purgation. Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.

It is unfortunate that lack of space prevents a longer examination of Blake
’
s work. But from the brief survey above, it should be clear that Blake
’
s philosophy began as an Outsider-philosophy, like Fox
’
s, Nietzsche
’
s, Dostoevsky
’
s. And the most important point to emerge from our analysis is the essentially religious nature of Blake
’
s solution. The ideas of original sin, salvation and damnation are the natural outcome of his attempt to face the world as an Outsider.

We can summarize Blake
’
s argument briefly: All men should
possess a Visionary faculty
’
. Men do not, because they live wrongly. They live too tensely, under too much strain,
‘
getting and spending
’
. But this loss of the visionary faculty is not entirely man
’
s fault, it is partly the fault of the world he lives in, that demands that men should spend a certain amount of their time
‘
getting and spending
’
to stay alive.

The visionary faculty comes naturally to all men. When they are relaxed enough, every leaf of every tree in the world, every speck of dust, is a separate world capable of producing infinite pleasure. If these fail to do so, it is man
’
s own fault for wasting his time and energy on trivialities. The ideal is the contemplative poet, the
‘
sage
’
, who cares about having only enough money and food to keep him alive, and never
‘
takes thought for the morrow
’
. This is a way of thought that comes more easily to the Eastern than to the Western mind. Professor Whitehead has acutely observed:

The more we know of Chinese art, Chinese literature, Chinese philosophy of life, the more we admire the heights to which that civilization attained.
...
And yet Chinese science is practically negligible. There is no reason to believe that China, if left to itself, would have ever produced any progress in science. The same may be said of India.
...
[
Science and the Modern World,
Chapter I
]

The reason for this should be obvious enough. The Eastern way of thought is essentially Blake
’
s way. It does not make for a mechanical civilization with atom bombs and electronic brains. Hence Blake
’
s detestation of Newton and the Industrial Revolution. It is difficult for the Western man to think of the word
‘
contemplative
’
without instantly thinking:
‘
dreamy
’
‘
unworldly
’
,
‘
impractical
’
. He finds it hard to realize that whole civilizations have made contemplation the basis of their culture, and have, in most respects, been flourishing, prosperous and well-regulated. Blake is a good example of the contemplative temperament. There is nothing of the futile dreamer about him; all his values are clean and clear-cut:

Men are admitted into heaven, not because they have curbed and governed their passions, or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The
treasures of heaven are not .negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate, uncurbed in their eternal glory. The fool shall not enter into heaven, be he ever so holy.
³⁸

The culmination of the Western misunderstanding of the contemplative temperament can be seen in the Marxian viewpoint that states:
‘
I have no use for religion because it
’
s not practical.
’
It is a failure to grasp the mental attitude that sees religion as completely practical, completely commonsense.

Our civilization has grown steadily closer, in its everyday life, to the Marxian attitude. That is why we are producing Outsiders. Because the Outsider is a man who feels in the Chinese way. His revolt against Western standards takes the form of a sense of their futility, the sense that is expressed in Eliot
’
s
‘
Hollow Men
’
. He asks questions about things that all his fellow Westerners take for granted, and his final question tends to be the cry of Bunyan
’
s Pilgrim: What must I do to be saved? It is a cry that springs out of bewilderment. He sees the world as a
‘
devil-ridden chaos
’
and he is not sure of his own identity in it. Steppenwolf expresses the sense of sin:

Every created thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. The way to innocence lies ever further into guilt, ever deeper into human life.
⁸⁹

and this view is close to the orthodox Christian conception. Newman writes:

I look out into the world of men, and see a sight that fills me with unspeakable distress. The world seems simply, to give the lie to the great truth, of which my being is so full. I look into this busy, living world, and see no reflection of its creator. To consider ... the defeat of good, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the dreary, hopeless irreligion... all this is a vision to dizzy and appal, and inflicts upon the mind the sense of profound mystery which is absolutely
beyond human solution And so I argue ...
‘
If there be a
God ... the human race is implicated in some terrible, aboriginal calamity.
⁴⁰

Note the phrase
‘
which is absolutely beyond human solution
⁵
. Humanism denies that there are problems that are beyond human solution. And in using the word
‘
human
’
, let us also bear in mind SteppenwolPs:
‘
Man is a bourgeois compromise.
’

The passage from Newman is a classic exposition of the doctrine of Original Sin,
‘
some terrible, aboriginal calamity
’
. Newman
’
s way of seeing the world is pessimistic. It is Dos-toevsky
’
s way, Blake
’
s way, Kafka
’
s way; we can find the same vision in a modern novelist like Graham Greene (although Greene
’
s deliberately conceived
‘
popular
’
devices exclude him from serious consideration). It is the way of the Western Outsider.

Yet Blake and Dostoevsky are pessimistic only up to a point. Then, it seems a ray of light enters from a direction we had forgotten, from the poetic genius, the faculty of Yea-saying:

Ethinthus, queen of waters, how thou shinest in the sky

My sister, how do I rejoice, for thy children flock around Like the gay fishes on the wave when the
cold moon drinks the dew. ..
⁴¹

It is the strange faculty that can see
‘
a world in a grain of sand
’
or in a leaf
‘
just a leaf, slightly brown at the edges
’
. Newman lacked it, in common with Kafka and Greene.

From this tentative definition of the idea of Original Sin, we can see the outline of the meaning of
‘
salvation
’
and
‘
damnation
’
. Damnation is to belong hopelessly to the
‘
devil-ridden chaos
’
, to be of it, in it, hopelessly lashed to it. From the Outsider
’
s viewpoint the world justifies complete pessimism.
‘
We have not begun to live
’
, Yeats writes,
‘
until we conceive life as a tragedy.
’
Newman confessed that he considered most men to be irretrievably damned, although he spent his life
‘
trying to make that truth less terrible to human reason
’
. Goethe could call his life
‘
the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever
’
. Martin Luther told a woman who wished him a long life:
‘
Madam, rather than live forty more years, I would give up my chance of paradise.
’
No, the Outsider does not make light work of living; at the best, it is
hard going; at the worst (to borrow a phrase from Eliot)
‘
an intolerable shirt of flame
’
,

It was this vision that made Axel declare:
^‘
As for living, our servants will do that for us.
’
Axel was a mystic; at least, he had the makings of a mystic. For that is just what the mystic says:
‘
I refuse to Uve.
’
But he doesn
’
t intend to die. There is another way of living that involves a sort of death:
‘
to die in order to Uve
’
. Axel would have locked himself up in his castle on the Rhine and read Hermetic philosophy. He saw men and the world as Newman saw them, as Eliot saw them in
‘
Burnt Norton
’
:

...
strained, time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time
⁴²

But he was not willing to regard himself as hopelessly damned merely because the rest of the world seems to be. He set out to find his own salvation; and although he did it with a strong romantic bias for Gothic castles and golden-haired girls, he still set out in the right direction.

And what are the clues in the search for self-expression? There are the moments of insight, the glimpses of harmony. Yeats records one such moment in his poem
‘
Vacillation
’
:

My fiftieth year had come and gone

I sat, a solitary man

In a crowded London shop

An open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed

And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness

That I was blessed, and could bless
⁴³

It is an important experience, this moment of Yea-saying, of reconciliation with the
‘
devil-ridden chaos
’
, for it gives the
Outsider an important glimpse into the state of mind that the visionar
y wants to achieve permanently.

It will be seen at once that
‘
visionary
’
, in this context, does not mean literally
‘
a seer of visions
’
, like the St. John who wrote the Apocalypse, but only someone who sees the world as positive. It might be objected that a drunken man conforms to this requirement; and this, in fact, is quite true. I have already quoted William James on the subject of drunkenness, and his point that alcohol stimulates the mystical faculties of mankind. There is obviously even a point to which ordinary physical well-being, the feeling after a good dinner, can be interpreted as
‘
mystical affirmation
⁵
; but here we must walk carefully. The point about ordinary once-born affirmation, the attitude of the good-natured, eupeptic vulgarian who sees life through rose-tinted spectacles, is that it cannot be controlled. If it disappears, due to illness or some misfortune, then it has disappeared for good, unless it comes back of its own accord.

The Outsider cannot regard such affirmation as meaningful or valid because it is beyond his control; he wants to say
‘
I accept
’
, not because fate happens to be treating him rather well,
but because it is his Will to accept.
He believes that a
‘
Yea-saying
’
faculty can actually be built in to his vision, so that it is there permanently. There is a premonition of such a faculty in Van Gogh
’
s
‘
Green Cornfield
’
and
‘
Road with Cypresses
’
; there is a premonition in the last movement of Beethoven
’
s
‘
Hammerclavier
’
Sonata, as well as certain canvases of Gauguin, and page after page of
Also Sprach
Zarathustra.
The Outsider believes that he can establish such a way of seeing permanently in himself. But how?