Beyond the Occult (20 page)

The statue seemed to me unpleasant and stupid and I felt terribly, deeply bored.
I couldn’t understand why I was in Indo-China.
What was I doing there?
Why was I talking to these people?
Why was I dressed so oddly?
My passion was dead.
For years it had rolled over and submerged me; now I felt empty.
But that wasn’t the worst: before me, posed with a sort of indolence, was a voluminous, insipid
idea.
I did not see clearly what it was, but it sickened me so much that I couldn’t look at it.
All that was confused with the perfume of Mercier’s beard.

And Sartre’s hero abruptly refuses to go on the mission.

We can see that what has happened is simply that Roquentin has been overwhelmed by the ‘Oh No!’
feeling, and that
he has been taken in by it
.
He has fallen into the elementary error of telling himself that this is ‘the truth’ and that his previous feeling that life is quite interesting was a delusion.
He has been overtaken by the ‘Ecclesiastes effect’.
And he makes the enormous mistake of believing that it is a
revelation
of meaninglessness, instead of recognizing that he has simply
allowed
himself to ‘let go’, like an exhausted man clinging to a window ledge.

Camus falls into the same error.
He writes in
The Myth of Sisyphus
about the problem of boredom.
‘Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm … .
But one day the “why” arises, and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.’
That is to say the feeling of ‘absurdity’ begins with a sense of futility, with the question, ‘Why on earth am I wasting my life like this?’
He goes on:

Men, too, secrete the inhuman.
At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime, make silly everything that surrounds them.
A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition, but you see his incomprehensible dumb-show; you wonder why he is alive.
This discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this ‘nausea’, as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd.
Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs, is also the absurd.

These examples reveal the flaw in Camus’s argument.
If you turn down the sound of the television at a moment of high drama the faces of the characters look absurd, with their mouths opening and closing like fishes.
But this is because you have deliberately robbed them of a dimension of reality — a dimension necessary to grasp fully what is going on.
Similarly, if you walked into a play halfway through it would mean less to you than to someone who had watched it from the beginning.
But you would not argue that your lack of understanding is somehow ‘truer’ than the view of the other person.
The same argument applies to the man gesticulating in the telephone booth.
You have been denied certain essential clues that would enable you to complete the picture, but it is obvious nonsense to allege that your incomprehension somehow proves his ‘inhumanity’.

Now it should be clear that Sartre’s ‘nausea’ and Camus’s ‘absurdity’ are not very different from our normal perception of the world.
For as Ouspensky points out, the essence of normal perception is that everything is
separate;
the world is ‘cut into little pieces’.
Nausea is just this separateness carried to an extreme:
all
‘connectedness’ has vanished.
In short,
ordinary consciousness is a form of nausea
.
The left brain has deprived us of a whole dimension of meaning.
If by ‘normal’ we mean something that tells us the truth, then Faculty X is far more normal than our everyday awareness and the reality seen by the mystics is the most normal of all.

We can also see why the flashes of duo-consciousness are accompanied by the sense of ‘absurd good news’, the ‘all is well’ feeling.
Our analysis has shown that narrow, left-brain consciousness is
not
‘normal’ consciousness but a rather specialized and abnormal form developed as a tool for controlling the world.
(Language is its first and most important means towards that end, as we saw in the example of Helen Keller.) The form of consciousness Proust experienced in his ‘flashes’ was normal — even if, paradoxically, human beings only experience it in flashes.
We were
intended
to have this richer and more complex form of consciousness, and — as Wordsworth pointed out — most children actually do
possess it.
Our consciousness of the world was intended to have a richness and warmth that would make everything appear to be ‘apparelled in celestial light’.
This is the kind of consciousness that most adults experience only during holidays, when the actual sight of new and interesting places awakens in them a sense of the complexity and variety of the external world.
But the original sense of ‘glory and freshness’ is lost as they are forced to cope with an increasingly complex environment and the ‘shades of the prison house begin to close’.

This seems to suggest an answer to one of the most puzzling questions about the brain: why does it possess two apparently identical halves which appear to duplicate one another’s functions?
So far no physiologist has succeeded in offering a convincing answer to this problem, the most plausible suggestion being that one half is intended as a ‘spare’ in case the other half is damaged.
The experiences of Toynbee and Proust suggest another answer: the brain has two halves so we can be in two places at the same time.
Which brings us, of course, back to our former question — and the question to which Proust devoted the twelve volumes of
A la recherche du temps perdu
: is there some
method
by which we could summon ‘duo-consciousness’ at will?

The foregoing analysis offers one important clue.
The real problem is what
prevents
us from achieving such states at will?
One basic obstacle is that we accept ‘everyday’ consciousness as ‘normal’, and it is this acceptance that keeps us trapped in our mechanical expectations.
Consider again the case of Toynbee on Mistra.
As he looks at the scenery he
tells
himself that this place was destroyed by invaders in the Greek war of independence; he is actively
imposing
his knowledge of history upon the evidence of his senses.
And his brain responds with some kind of ‘surge’ that transforms history into reality.
An ordinary tourist, looking down on Mistrà, would lack two of Toynbee’s advantages: his knowledge of Greek history and the sudden imaginative conviction that caused the ‘surge’.
In short the attitude of the tourist is relatively passive; Toynbee is using his imagination actively.

But the problem is not merely one of passivity.
We can see, in the example of Sartre’s Roquentin, that there is an actively negative element, which sets in motion the ‘vicious circle effect’.
This can be seen even more clearly in the well-known episode of the chestnut tree in
Nausea
.
Roquentin begins the diary entry by admitting that he feels crushed, but at least he now knows what he wanted to know.
‘The Nausea has not left me and I don’t believe it will … but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.’

He had, he explains, just been sitting in the park:

The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench.
I couldn’t remember it was a root any more.
The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface.
I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me … .
And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself.
It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence.
Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer.
This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder — naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.

What has happened is similar to his experience in Indo-China.
Boredom, a sense of futility, causes a collapse of his will power, a sudden feeling of ‘What am I doing here?’
It is a little like stage-fright — a sudden desire not to go on.
But this experience then goes a stage further than stage-fright.
We do not need to know that Sartre’s own experiences of nausea were due to a bad mescalin trip to understand what happens next.
The writhing, snake-like appearance of the
roots produces a mixture of revulsion and terror.
He
knows
it is a tree and perfectly harmless, but the collapse of his will power, of his will to live, makes him feel totally vulnerable.
It is basically the same mechanism of revulsion and
mistrust
that makes Dylan Thomas regard a girl’s sexual organs as a ‘foul mousehole’.

We are all subject to a more or less permanent degree of mistrust.
If you reach out to open a door and the doorknob is wet and sticky, you snatch your hand away in disgust.
If you pick up a fallen apple from under a tree and find a slug on the underside, you drop it in disgust.
We are always vaguely prepared for things to be not as they seem: that is part of our self-preservation mechanism.
But if we allow it to go too far, it develops into the state known as paranoia.
The Victorian scientist Sir Francis Galton wanted to find out how easy it was to slip into a state of paranoia, and deliberately induced a persecuted state of mind by telling himself that everyone he passed in the street was a spy.
He was alarmed to discover how easy it was to make himself feel persecuted: when he passed a cab-stand he even had a feeling that all the horses were staring at him.
Professor Peter McKellar was intrigued by this experiment and tried persuading friends in a restaurant that the waiter had something against them and was determined not to serve them; in
Mindsplit
he records that it was surprisingly easy to induce a state of mild paranoia.
And when Aldous Huxley took mescalin he also realized how frighteningly easy it would be to ‘embark upon the downward, the infernal road… .
If you started the wrong way, everything that happened would be a proof of the conspiracy against you.
It would all be self-validating.
You couldn’t draw a breath without knowing it was part of the plot.’

All this is explained, of course, by the Stan and Ollie mechanism.
Ollie tells himself that everybody is against him, but he doesn’t really believe it.
But Stan believes it, and before long Ollie is horrified to realize that he has become the victim of Stan’s negative responses.
And this is what has happened to Sartre’s Roquentin.
He knows the
root is not a snake or a writhing octopus, yet the sense of paranoia is so strong that the root seems to exude alien menace.

The important thing to note is that Roquentin’s intellect tells him that he is looking at the root of an ordinary tree, but his negative emotions convince him that it is nasty and frightening.
His paranoia assures him that he ought not to take the root for granted; his attitude should be one of mistrust.
But we can also see that the real problem is that Sartre’s intellect then ratifies the whole transaction.
Instead of telling himself, ‘Nonsense, this is just a chestnut root,’ he proceeds to convince himself that the, world is really a far nastier and more frightening place than most of us realize.
He tells himself that when we look at things, we do not
really
believe they exist; we treat them as if they were stage scenery.
And now he suddenly realizes that things exist in their own right, and that their sheer reality seems to mock our attempt to keep them in their ‘proper place’.
This
is the real root of Sartre’s problem: he has allowed his emotions to convince his intellect that human existence is short, brutal and futile, and that — as he says in
Being and Nothingness
— ‘it is meaningless that we live and meaningless that we die.’