A Rapturous Calm

In this final extract from The Reveries Of The Solitary Walker Rousseau has improbably been knocked to the ground by a Great Dane dog in his Second Walk, hitting his head forcibly against the pavement. He describes his semi-concussed state like this:

Night was coming on. I perceived the sky, some stars, and a little greenery. This first sensation was a delicious moment. I still had no feeling of myself except as being "over there". I was born into life at that instant, and it seemed to me that I filled all the objects I perceived with my frail existence. Entirely absorbed in the present moment, I remembered nothing; I had no distinct notion of my person nor the least idea of what had just happened to me; I knew neither who I was nor where I was; I felt neither injury, fear, nor worry. I watched my blood flow as I would have watched a brook flow, without even suspecting that this blood belonged to me in any way. I felt a rapturous calm in my whole being; and each time I remember it, I find nothing comparable to it in all the activity of known pleasures.

I find this reaction fascinating. It contains echoes of mystical writing and accounts of "out of body" and "near death" experiences. It brings to mind Colin Wilson's 1st book The Outsider (1956), and later books of his, in which he documents those peak, epiphanic moments we all experience from time to time in our lives. It recalls Aldous Huxley's experiments with mescaline in The Doors Of Perception (1954) and his exploration of the mystical writers in The Perennial Philosophy (1945).

I've written before about this sublime but usually tantalisingly-just-out-of-reach state in my posts Mad, Mystic Moments and Dharmakaya Light.

Illness and injury can definitely under certain circumstances bring about something akin to a state of ecstasy. I experienced this first hand a few years ago when recovering from a particularly virulent virus I caught on a plane flying back from Venice. There was a turning-point day when the virus receded - and I felt an overwhelming, cathartic feeling of immense calm and tranquillity.

Memory And Imagination

While the New Year is a time for anticipation and looking forward, Christmas is a time for reflection and looking back.

The future is by definition an imagined land. But what's often forgotten is that the past is also imaginary to a great extent. I've been looking back again through my old notebooks of quotations as I did before here and here. At the head of one of these notebooks I see that I've written this: to remember is also to imagine.

There was a time when I used to read a lot of John Fowles. I copied down these 2 quotations from his Victorian-pastiche novel The French Lieutenant's Woman:

His statement to himself should have been, 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy', instead of what it so Victorianly was: 'I cannot possess this for ever, and therefore am sad'.

It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more. But I am a heretic. I think our ancestors' isolation was like the greater space they enjoyed: it can only be envied. The world is literally too much with us now.

These short passages still resonate strongly with me. And how relevant the 2nd one is in these days of instant, unrelenting communication by text and email, by mobile phone and Internet.

I also used to read a lot of Aldous Huxley. These extracts are taken from Texts And Pretexts:

All 'feelings and opinions' are temporary; they last for a while and are then succeeded by other 'feelings and opinions'... The 'all' feeling is brief and occasional; but this is not to say that a metaphysical system based upon it must necessarily be untrue... Our experience is divided up into island universes. We jump from one to the other - there are no bridges.

The mind purifies the experiences with which it is stored, composes and informs the chaos. Each man's memory is his private literature and every recollection affects us with something of the penetrative force that belongs to the work of art.

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.

The magic of irrelevance is one of poetry's most powerful instruments. Why are poetical phrases poetical? In most cases, because they contain ideas which we normally regard as irrelevant one to another, but which the poet has contrived to make relevant... Every good metaphor is the mating of irrelevances to produce a new and more vivid explosion.

Dominic Rivron has been ruminating recently on metaphor in his blog - how about that for a brilliantly succinct description of metaphor, Dominic?

In case we nail all our colours with utter and complete abandon to the mast of Art, it's salutary to be reminded occasionally that Art and Beauty can sometimes lead to dangerous excess (as Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray showed only too well):

The religion of imagination is a dangerous faith, liable to the most deplorable corruptions.

Finally in Texts And Pretexts Huxley states a great truth about nature that many cosy nature writers fail to recognise:

Very few 'nature poets' have the courage to admit that their goddess lives with an unknown mode of being, that she sometimes reveals herself unequivocally as the most terrifying and malignantly alien of deities.

I'm sure that Gary Snyder and Robinson Jeffers would agree with this!