Chapter One
Giving God Back His Entrance Ticket
When I was 16, I decided to commit suicide.
This was not a sudden emotional decision. When I
made it, it seemed to me entirely logical.
I had left school in July 1947, a month after my
sixteenth birthday. If it had been a possibility, I would have applied
for a university scholarship. But my father wanted me to go to work
and contribute to the family budget. He was in the boot and shoe
trade, and had worked throughout the 1930s for about £3 a week; even
now, he had to work as a barman in the evenings to make ends meet. My
younger brother Barry had left school at 14 to become a butcher's boy,
and my father was resentful that he had to support me for two years
longer.
It was my ambition to become a scientist. Ever
since reading Sir James Jeans's Mysterious Universe at the age of 12,
my daydream was to become Einstein's successor. But I needed a
Bachelor of Science degree, and the first step was to become an
apprentice at some large chemical firm like ICI, and study for a
degree in my spare time. But in my final exams at school, I failed to
get a credit in maths, which meant taking the exam again after leaving
school. Meanwhile, I took the only job the Labour Exchange could offer
me, working in a wool processing factory.
Going to work came as a shock. I started at eight
in the morning and left at six at night, with an hour for lunch. The
upper part of the factory was occupied by women standing in front of
winding machines. It was my job to keep them supplied with hanks of
wool, and when this had been wound on to bobbins, to take it
downstairs and pack it in crates. The work was hard, but dreary and
repetitive, and by the time I cycled home I was exhausted and
depressed. I would spend the evening reading poetry as an emotional
relief. I loved Keats and the romantics, but in this state of
dejection, found that my mood was reflected best by Eliot's Waste Land
and Hollow Men.
One day, when I had returned to my old school to
borrow some maths books, the headmaster told me that if I got the
extra credit in maths, I could return to school and work as a
laboratory assistant. And I would be given free time to work for my
inter-B.Sc. The idea sounded wonderful, and if this had happened a few
months earlier, would have filled me with delight. But there was now a
problem. Since I had been spending all my spare time soaking in
poetry, I had lost all interest in science.
I felt it would be unwise to admit this. So I
took my maths exam, gained my extra credit, and before Christmas 1947,
was back at school and wearing a white lab coat.
I had taken the exams in Birmingham, thirty miles
from my home town Leicester, travelling there daily on the train. I
loved the train journey, for I had so far done little travelling, and
even the flat Midland landscape seemed exciting. And one day I walked
into the Birmingham public library, which was far bigger than
Leicester's, and was overwhelmed by the high shelves that stretched to
the ceiling and had to be reached on ladders. There were books I
had always wanted to read; like most teenagers I loved horror stories,
and the sight of Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer and Lewis's The Monk made
me wish I lived in Birmingham. Standing in the library was almost a mystical
revelation. I suddenly knew what I wanted: to spend my days in some
vast library, reading from morning till night. I had realised that
books are a world in themselves, as immense and varied as the real
world.
I found the laboratory job an enormous relief
after the factory; it was like being let out of prison. But the
question of my future still worried me. The three months in the
factory had been a glimpse into an abyss of boredom and
repetitiveness. And now my loss of interest in science meant I no
longer had a future. It seemed that society had no place for people
like me, people who had no desire to 'get on in life'.
Sooner or later, the headmaster would find out
that I had no interest in applied mathematics or analytical chemistry,
and I would be without a job. And then I would go to the Labour
Exchange and be offered a choice of a dozen or so jobs that I found
equally repellent. As far as I could see, I was going to have to spend
my whole life doing jobs I hated.
I continued to find an escape in literature,
spending my weekends soaking in poetry. But this only made it harder
to go back to work on Monday morning. And the physics master who was
my immediate boss was a weak and trivial-minded man, who soon realised
that I was there under false pretenses, and took every opportunity to
inflict petty humiliations.
But I had discovered one marvellous way of
restoring a sense of purpose: writing. I had listened to a radio
programme about Samuel Pepys, and decided to start keeping a journal -
not just a diary of my daily activities, but a record of what I
thought and felt. I had borrowed from the library a book called I Believe,
full of statements of faith by people like Einstein, Julian
Huxley, H.G.Wells. One Saturday, after spending the morning in the
laboratory, I bought a fat notebook, and settled down to writing my
own statement of what I believed about my place in the world.
I wrote for page after page, with a wonderful
sense of freedom and release. I was objectifying doubts and miseries,
pushing them to arm's length. When I put down my pen, after several
hours, I had a feeling that I was no longer the same person who had sat
down at the writing table. It was as if I had been studying my face in
a mirror, and learned something new about myself.
From then on, I used my journal as a receptacle
for self-doubt, irritation and gloom. Wordsworth had discovered the same
trick in the 'Intimations of Immorality' Ode, when he begins
by complaining that the joy of childhood has faded – ‘the things I have
seen I now can see no more' - and then writes himself back into a
state of optimism: ‘'A timely utterance gave that thought relief/ And
I again am strong'.
The problem was that, after spending the weekend
writing myself back into a state of optimism, I had to go back to
school, to the niggling of the physics master and the bafflement of
crystallisation curves and the hydrodynamics of incompressible,
inviscid fluids. The optimism had evaporated by Monday afternoon, and
by Wednesday my mind felt dead.
After one particularly irritating day, I returned
home at tea time to find the house empty, and began pouring my
frustrations into my journal before I prepared to leave again for the
analytical chemistry class. It had been a very hot day, and I felt
exhausted. After an hour of writing, I began to feel the burden
lifting, and experienced a trickling of relief that was like cool
water. But I knew I would be feeling the same boredom and frustration
at the same time tomorrow and the next day and the next. And suddenly
it struck me that it was simply not logical to go on living like this.
I felt angry with God - or fate, or whoever had cast me down into this
irritating world - for subjecting me to these endless petty humiliations.
I did not even believe human life was real; it had often struck me that
time is some sort of illusion. But surely, I could turn my back on
the illusions by killing myself?
As soon as that thought occurred to me, I felt
oddly calm and relieved. Suddenly I felt in charge of myself and my
destiny. If God was responsible for putting me here, then I could
spite him by declining to go on playing this silly game.
As I cycled through the heat to my chemistry
class, I felt strong and almost exalted. I arrived late, as usual, and
endured the sarcasm of the professor with total indifference. And at
the first opportunity, I went into the other room, to the reagent
shelves, and took down the bottle of hydrocyanic acid, with its waxed
glass stopper. I removed this, and smelt that distinctive almond
smell. I knew that hydrocyanic acid would kill me in less than half a
minute. Mentally, I had already raised the bottle and taken a swig of
the bitter liquid.
Then an odd thing happened. I became two people. I
was suddenly conscious of this teenage idiot called Colin Wilson, with
his misery and frustration, and he seemed such a limited fool that I
could not have cared less whether he killed himself or not. But if he
killed himself, he would kill me too. For a moment I felt that I was standing
beside him, and telling him that if he didn’t get rid of this habit of self-pity
he would never amount to anything.
It was also as if this ‘real me’ had said to the teenager: ‘Listen,
you idiot, think how much you’d be losing’, and in that moment I glimpsed
marvellous, immense richness of reality, extending to distant horizons.
So I re-stoppered the bottle and went back to my
analytical chemistry. I felt relaxed and light-hearted and totally in
control of myself.
This mood of strength lasted for two or three
days, then gradually went away. But I no longer felt trapped and
vulnerable.
Forty years later, Maralyn Ferguson told me, as we
walked by a lake in California, that she believed that everyone who
achieves anything original in literature or philosophy has been at
some point on the brink of suicide. I suspect that this is because
anyone who has looked into this abyss achieves the separation of the
real self from the inessential self, which is like being born.
When, in 1955, I began to write my first book, The Outsider,
I knew that its central question was whether we would all be
more sensible to commit suicide. By that time I was aware that Albert
Camus had written a book, The Myth of Sisyphus, declaring that suicide
is the only serious philosophical question. I was also aware of the
many 'misfits', like myself, who had committed suicide: Kleist,
Beddoes, Stifter, Van Gogh, Hart Crane.
Van Gogh especially fascinated me because of that
feeling of life-affirmation in canvases like The Starry Night and Road
With Cypresses, in which trees looking like green flames surge towards
stars that are whirlpools of light. Yet when Van Gogh committed
suicide by shooting himself in the stomach, he left a note that
read: 'Misery will never end'. He seemed to epitomise the question
that Carlyle called 'Everlasting Yes versus Everlasting No'. The
question raised by The Outsider is: which has the last word?
I was inclined to come down on the side of
everlasting yes because the noes seemed to me often to be weak and to
lack self-discipline, or to be indulging in pessimism because it tends
to be more artistically effective.
One day in the late 80s, I attended a day-long
seminar in the Plymouth Arts Centre in which I shared the platform
with the poet David Gascoigne and the psychologist R.D. Laing. I had
known Gascoigne at the time of The Outsider, and been impressed by the
force of his religious poetry. Laing I had never met before, although
we had often come close to it on the 'New Age' lecture circuit in
America. He told me he had decided to write his first book The Divided
Self because he had read The Outsider and felt he ought to be able to
write something equally successful.
That day, Gascoigne lectured on surrealism, and
seemed to take the view that life itself is bizarre and surrealistic.
Laing argued his theory that the mentally ill are not really ill, but
are simply reflecting the sickness of our society. I explained why I
had come to reject the pessimistic existentialism of Sartre and Camus,
and had used the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the psychology
of Abraham Maslow to create a form of existentialism whose implications
are fundamentally optimistic.
To my surprise, Laing and Gascoigne seemed to take
this personally. When the three of us finally got together on the
platform for a symposium, they turned on me, taking the view that if I
could be optimistic, it must be because I was shallow and superficial.
They made no attempt to argue their case, but simply behaved like two
schoolboys ganging up on a third. I suddenly realised that they were
actually affronted by my optimism, not simply on a level of ideas, but
on a personal level.
Thinking about this later, I began to understand
the reason. Gascoigne had had several nervous breakdowns, and his
haunted eyes showed it. Laing was an alcoholic whose drunkenness led
to his deregistration as a medical practitioner - although I did not
know about this until I read a biography of him written after his
death in 1989.
'Outsiders' - and both Laing and Gascoigne were
undoubtedly of the Outsider type - are abnormally sensitive to this
problem of 'Everlasting Yes' versus 'Everlasting No’. A friend of mine,
the poet Charles Wrey Gardiner, wrote an autobiography entitled The
Answer to Life is No. Gascoigne and Laing had reached the same
conclusion. That was why they saw my optimism as some kind of
criticism of themselves.
What they were failing to grasp was that was that
this optimism was not a matter of temperament, but of logic. My
starting point in The Outsider had been those 19th century romantics
who had experienced moments of overwhelming delight, Chesterton's
'absurd good news', that filled them with optimism and affirmation -
and then awakened the next morning to wonder what the hell they meant
by it. So many of them had died insane or committed suicide - in
effect, having decided that 'the answer to life is No'.
Now the reason they felt that life is ultimately
tragic was because the 'moments of vision' seem to evaporate and leave
nothing behind. Pushkin compared the poet's heart to a coal that glows
red when the wind of inspiration blows on it, but turns into a black
cinder when the wind dies away. Most of my 'Outsiders' seemed to feel
that everyday life is a bore - what de Lisle Adam's Axel meant when he
said: 'As for living, our servants can do that for us'.
The problem, clearly, was that there was no simple
method of summoning the 'moment of vision'. What human beings seemed
to need, as far as I could see, was a kind of pump on the front of
their heads, like the pump of a primus stove, so they could increase
the inner pressure with a few strokes. It was true that drugs or
alcohol could sometimes do it, but they obviously carried heavy
penalties. There had to be some other way.
In 1962, I made the acquaintance of the American
psychologist Abraham Maslow, who provided me with an important part of
the solution. Maslow's research had convinced him that all healthy
people have what he called 'peak experiences', feelings of sudden
bubbling happiness. Typical was the experience of one of his students
who was working his way through college as a jazz drummer. One
morning, in the early hours, he suddenly had a burst of new energy,
and found himself drumming perfectly, unable to do a thing wrong.
But Maslow believed that such experiences occurred
by chance, and that there was no way of inducing them.
I could not wholly accept this view, for I had
noticed that peak experiences often occur after a sustained effort, or
with sudden release of stress, with its surge of relief.
One such occasion happened in the mid-sixties,
when I was driving back from Scotland with my family. We had set out
from Biggar, in Lanarkshire, and I had assumed we had a drive of a
hundred miles or so to reach the border. After driving for about an
hour, I saw a signpost and realised I had greatly overestimated the
distance; England was only about ten miles ahead. This meant we could
easily reach Leeds, where an old friend lived, and stay the night
there.
The realisation that I was closer than I thought
brought a surge of cheerfulness, and since it was a sunny morning, I
was soon in a mood of supercharged optimism. This feeling increased as
the great hills of the Lake District came in sight. This had always
been one of my favourite places, and I was familiar with its
geography. But soon I began to experience the odd sensation that I
could somehow see through the mountains, to what lay on the far side.
I do not mean, of course, that the hills seemed literally transparent;
but I felt as if I was a bird who could look down on them from a great
height. This state of intensified awareness lasted an hour or more.
Maslow discovered that when his students began to
discuss their own peak experiences, they began having peak experiences
all the time, And this makes sense. During the course of an ordinary
day, we are constrained by a kind of natural caution, an anticipation
of possible difficulties and problems, which tints our consciousness a
shade of grey. Talking and thinking about peak experiences makes us
realise how lucky we are, and that we can dispense with the caution
and constraint. It is like realising that you have more money in the
bank than you thought - or, in the case of the drive from Scotland,
realising that the border was closer than I thought, and that I
therefore had energy to spare.
Still, Maslow would point out that my Lake
District experience was a matter of chance, and I would have to agree.
But there was another occasion, in January 1979, when I achieved a
sense of control through deliberate effort.
On Saturday December 30, 1978, I set out to drive
to a village called Sheepwash, in Devon, where I was due to lecture.
It was raining when I set out, but as I drove through Launceston the
rain began to turn to snow. I arrived at the farm called Totleigh
Barton in the late afternoon, and gave my talk to a group of poetry
students after dinner. That night, as I went to my chalet, the snow
was thick on the ground and still falling. The next morning, it was
obvious that I was not going to be able to drive back home. The warden
had tried to drive home the night before but had to come back as his
car stuck in snow just outside the farmyard.
The next day I phoned my wife and told her I might
be stuck there indefinitely. That night - New Years Eve - the cold
froze the water supply.
The next day, we were running short of food, and
decided to try and get one of the cars out to the main road, about
half a mile away. One car failed to get up the slope out of the
farmyard, but my car went up it, and as the wheels began to spin on
the snow, the others pushed me. Then we all took shovels and began
clearing the snow. It took two hours or so to reach the gate. Then I
left my car at the gate, walked back to the farm for a bowl of soup,
then set out to drive home.
The narrow country lanes were deep in snow, and I
knew there were ditches on either side. If I landed in one of those I
would be stuck until the rescue services could arrive. But with
everything deep in snow, it was hard to see where the road ended and
the ditch began. I sat forward in my seat, driving in second gear and
staring through the windscreen with total concentration.
It took about two hours to reach the main Exeter
road, where the snow had been churned to dirty mud, and there I could
relax. I now discovered that the two hours of frantic concentration
had induced a state of heightened consciousness. Everything I looked
at seemed deeply interesting, as if twice as real as normal, and the
cottages I passed seemed to be so fascinating that I almost wanted to
stop and look more closely.
This state of intensity lasted all the way home,
where I found that the electricity was off, and that my wife had
delivered nine puppies in the night by the light of a torch.
The experience proved to me beyond all doubt that
Maslow was mistaken. States of heightened awareness could be induced
by sheer concentration.
I soon discovered the basic technique. When we are
slightly bored, we allow our inner pressure to leak away. And suddenly
it seems obvious that the world is a rather dreary place, for when our
inner pressure is low, everything looks boring. On the other hand,
when we have something to look forward to - even our favourite meal
at dinnertime - there is something inside us that resists such
leakage. The trick seems to be to induce this state of pleasant
anticipation by the use of imagination, the exercise of inner freedom,
even if you have nothing in particular to anticipate.
The state of boredom could be compared to a
concert audience awaiting the arrival of the conductor. There is a
buzz of conversation; everyone's attention is focused on something
different. Then the conductor comes in; the buzz dies away. Everyone's
attention is suddenly focused in the same direction.
What happens in boredom is that we feel there is
nothing 'out there' that is worth our full attention. But there is a
fallacy involved here - a fallacy I began to grasp on that drive back
from Sheepwash. Concentrating my attention because I might otherwise
land in the ditch generated a certain 'energy of attention'. And when
I was able to relax on the main road, all this accumulated energy made
me see that everything is interesting. And this state was sustained
during the rest of the drive home because I was now aware that the
world around me was interesting, so that I was looking at it with an
eager attention that generated yet more energy. I labelled this state
'positive feedback', as opposed to the negative feedback in which
boredom generates yet more boredom.
It has been the aim of my life to learn to generate
'positive feedback' by an act of will.