Beyond the Occult (18 page)

All this is rather puzzling, for it seems to contradict our commonsense view of imagination, which is simply another name for fantasy.
In ordinary language, imagination means forming an
image
of something that is not actually present, and such an image is bound to be a poor copy of the original.
What Toynbee did at Pharsalus or Ephesus is obviously quite different.
This was no mere fantasy based on his historical knowledge, but something much more hallucinatory, as if he was actually watching — or rather taking part in — the original event.
Ordinary fantasy is passive, like a spectator sitting in a cinema; Toynbee’s imagination had taken on an active quality, much more like a film director marshalling the actors in a crowd scene.
The fundamental distinction here seems to be between passive and active imagination.

Active imagination involves a sense of participation, as we can see from another example cited in
A Study of History
.
Toynbee describes how, as a student, he was reading an
account in Livy of the war between Rome and her Italian allies.
Mutilus, a Roman who was fighting on the side of the Italians, had succeeded in making his way home to his wife’s house in disguise: when his wife refused to let him in, scolding him for having a price on his head, Mutilus plunged his sword into his breast and spattered her door with his blood.
Toynbee says that as he read this account he was ‘transported, in a flash, across the gulf of Space and Time … to find himself in a back yard on a dark night witnessing a personal tragedy that was more bitter than the defeat of any public cause’.
This flash of ‘active imagination’, which took place in the year before his trip to Greece, was clearly due to sudden intense personal sympathy with Mutilus, but it presages the experiences of the ‘time-pockets’ of the following year.

It seems that the mind itself is suddenly raised to a higher level of power — as if the watch-spring in the grandfather clock has suddenly become far more powerful.
But this access of power seems to happen by accident, as in the case of William James’s sudden glimpse of ‘ranges of distant facts’.
It is as if some natural faculty has been accidentally galvanized.
This becomes clearer in Toynbee’s account of another ‘illumination’ that sounds altogether more like the mystical illuminations described in an earlier chapter:

On each of the six occasions just recorded, the writer has been rapt into a momentary communication with the actors in a particular historic event through the effect upon his imagination of a sudden arresting view of the scene in which this long-past action had taken place.
But there was another occasion on which he had been vouchsafed a larger and a stranger experience.
In London in the southern section of the Buckingham Palace Road, walking southward along the pavement skirting the west wall of Victoria Station, the writer, once, one afternoon not long after the end of the First World War — he had failed to record the exact date — had found himself in communion, not just with this or that episode in History, but with all
that had been, and was, and was to come.
In that instant he was directly aware of the passage of History flowing through him in a mighty current, and of his own life welling like a wave in the flow of this vast tide.
The experience lasted long enough for him to take visual note of the Edwardian red brick surface and white stone facings of the station wall gliding past him on his left, and to wonder — half amazed and half amused — why this incongruously prosaic scene should have been the physical setting of a mental illumination.
An instant later, the communion had ceased, and the dreamer was back again in the everyday cockney world … .’

It is very plain that Toynbee’s mind was raised momentarily to a higher level of power, so that for a moment it
hovered
over the whole of human history like some mythical bird, as the mind of a mathematical prodigy must hover over the whole number field.
James found that one thing reminded him of another, and that reminded him of something else, and that of something else — all so fast that his rational intellect had no time to catch up.
In Toynbee’s case the ‘connecting process’ seems to have been instantaneous.

It is also clear that these experiences of Faculty X can be explained in simple and logical terms — for example, of brain physiology.
Toynbee’s experiences may have been due to some sudden surge of vitality which caused the brain to ‘glow’ as a surge in the electric current causes a light bulb to glow more brightly.
Such illuminations are certainly accompanied by a switch from left-brain consciousness to right-brain consciousness.
The left brain is always in a hurry, concentrating on the next thing that has to be done, so it has no time to linger over impressions or intuitions.
Right-brain consciousness begins with a feeling of relaxation and relief.
Instead of rushing forward, consciousness spreads gently ‘sideways’, taking in the present moment, looking
at
things instead of through them.
The result is the sense of increased reality that Anne Bancroft experienced as she looked at the blackbird.

In the same way, right-brain memory seems to be quite different in kind from left-brain memory.
Left-brain memory brings back the salient features of what we want to remember; right-brain memory brings back the very
smell
of reality.
Proust devoted a whole vast novel to the distinction between the two:
A la recherche du temps perdu
, whose title could be more accurately translated
The Search for the Past
than (as it is in English)
Remembrance of Things Past
.
He says gloomily, ‘And so it is with our own past.
It is a labour in vain to try to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile.
The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect… .’
Yet his hero
does
recapture it by accident, coming home cold and tired and tasting a little cake called a madeleine which he dips in herb tea:

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.
An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.
And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory — this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather, this essence was not in me, it
was
me.
I had now ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal… .

Several more tastes of the madeleine dipped in tea finally reveal to him that the ‘exquisite pleasure’ was due to memories of childhood in a little town called Combray, when his Aunt Leonie used to give him a taste of her own madeleine dipped in lime blossom tea.

But why
should
Proust’s autobiographical hero experience this almost mystical sensation of sheer happiness merely because he recalls his childhood?
Proust shows himself fairly adept at analyzing the reason.
In the second volume he describes how, on a train journey to the seaside town of Balbec, at a small country station, he sees a young girl selling
milk and coffee.
‘Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky.
I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness.’
Proust has undoubtedly placed his finger on the very essence of the human problem.
We keep on
forgetting
how delicious life can be, and allow ourselves to slip into a state of mind in which it scarcely seems worth the effort.
Proust says, ‘And we deliver on life a pessimistic judgement which we suppose to be accurate, for we believed that we were taking happiness and beauty into account, whereas in fact we left them out and replaced them by syntheses in which there was not a single atom of either.’
We may believe we have preserved the essence of some past pleasure in the memory: in fact it is really little more than a poor carbon copy — a piece of paste jewellery in place of the original diamond.

Proust’s hero experiences the same illumination in the final volume,
Time Regained
, when, feeling rather depressed and discouraged, he is on his way to a reception.
In the courtyard he steps back to avoid a car and almost loses his balance on an uneven paving stone.
Yet once again, ‘all my discouragement vanished, and in its place was that same happiness which had been given to me at various epochs of my life … .’
And once again he is able to remember why he feels so happy: the uneven flags have suddenly recalled the uneven paving stones in the Baptistery of St Mark’s in Venice.
Twice more in the next quarter of an hour he experiences similar flashes of ‘magic’, once when a servant accidentally knocks a spoon against a plate, reminding him of a railwayman testing wheels with a hammer on the Balbec line, and once more when he wipes his mouth with a napkin, releasing a flash of memory of performing the same action on holiday in Balbec.
Brooding once again on this problem Proust reaches the conclusion that the reason for that odd feeling of ‘immortality’ is that such experiences occurred ‘outside time’.
This explanation arouses understandable misgivings, since the ‘flashes’
did
occur in time — if only in a split second.

In fact Proust has stumbled on the real explanation in an earlier sentence, when he says that he ‘experienced them at the present moment and at the same time in the context of a distant moment,
so that the past was made to encroach upon the present…’
(my italics).
This also answers the question about why these
memories
of Balbec and Venice cause such intense pleasure when the original experiences were often rather boring.
The explanation, we can see, is not that the ‘flashes’ were timeless, but that they caused a state of
duo-consciousness.
This
is what produces the flood of delight, the sensation of ‘ceasing to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal’.
It is the recognition that consciousness is not restricted to the boring, down-to-earth present in which we are all stuck for most of our lives.
It can achieve a strange double-focus that can suddenly arouse in us ‘the desire to live which is reborn whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness’ — Graham Greene’s sudden recognition that life contains an infinite number of possibilities.

Once again we confront that most baffling of all problems: how is it possible that human beings can
cease
to want to live?
Whenever we experience intense happiness — or danger — we suddenly feel that it would be perfectly easy to go on living forever.
It is the feeling Dostoevsky expresses in
Crime and Punishment
when Raskolnikov reflects that if he had to stand on a narrow ledge forever, in eternal darkness and tempest, he would still prefer to do that rather than die at once.
The same recognition came to Hans Keller, former head of the BBC music department, when he was in Germany in the late 1930s.
Keller was aware that fellow Jews were vanishing into concentration camps, and described in a broadcast how it had suddenly struck him that
if only
he could escape from Germany he would never be unhappy again for the rest of his life.
Then how is it possible for us to lose that vision?
The answer lies in Bergson’s recognition that the intellect was not made for grasping the living quality of experience; it keeps on reducing the world to symbols and measurements.
And we
forget
just how marvellous life can be.

Apart from Proust, the modern writer who was most
continually concerned with this paradox was — oddly enough — G.
K.
Chesterton, although the light-hearted style in which he expresses it has tended to obscure the importance of what he is saying:

The Gallows in my garden, people say,

Is new and neat and adequately tall.

I tie the noose on in a knowing way

As one that knots his necktie for a ball;

But just as all the neighbours — on the wall —

Are drawing a long breath to shout ‘Hurray!’

The strangest whim has seized me … .
After all

I think I will not hang myself today.

Tomorrow is the time I get my pay —

My uncle’s sword is hanging in the hall —

I see a little cloud all pink and grey —

Perhaps the Rector’s mother will
not
call —