John Cowper Powys - A Philosophy of Solitude

A FORMULA... THINKING OF OUR SKELETONS... WHAT CAN ELEMENTALISM DO FOR YOU?... OUR WICKEDNESS... THE CONTEMPT OF FATE... SIMPLIFYING HAPPINESS... THE ART OF SELF-TRANSMUTATION... THE MIND AS A MAGICIAN

The only justification I have for naming the way of thinking and feeling that I am trying to isolate and clarify here by so ponderous an appellation as Elementalism is that it implies a certain particular attitude towards these non-human aspects of our planetary environment which in common parlance are called the Elements.

Lift up your hand! It is upon this miracle that the whole of civilization depends. Lift up your heart! It is upon this miracle that the whole of philosophy depends.

Let us bring this thing down, as people say, to bedrock. Philosophy is of no avail until it becomes something very definite and very tangible; until it gives you a symbol, in fact, that you can hold palpably before you.

This is the crux of the matter. Our philosophy must reduce itself and narrow itself down to a formula that is much more than a formula; that is much more, in fact, than a rational act. It must be a formula that holds the clue to a psychic act, a mental act, a volitional act, a creative act, an act wherein the ego shares the primeval creative energy of the First Cause.

Every attempt at philosophizing implies a struggle to satisfy the craving of something in us that no longer finds what it wants. This is the origin of all genuine philosophies. Spinoza tells us that his philosophy began in a search for something permanent and unchanging towards which he could direct his love.

What it seems to me we need nowif the tendency of thought that I am trying to articulate has any value at allis a clear, palpable, tangible formula that is also a living and a creative act.

At every crisis, when we are harassed, driven, hunted, persecuted, thoroughly confused, miserably humiliated, we need some significant mental image that we can resort to quickly and decisively, some image that is at once a gesture and an idea, some image that is at once a mental picture and a challenge to a psychological effort, some image that is in fact already a psychological effort.

Such a formula, such an image-gesture, we may find in the realization of our consciousness as an indwelling power holding the body in its control, using the senses of the body to its own purpose.

To enhance this image-gesture and make it more effective, nothing could be better than to think of our bodythus dominated by our mindas in the form, which in all probability it will eventually take, of a skeleton.

In this thinking of our body as a skeleton, made to gesticulate and move about and patiently endure many evils, there will be attained a wonderfully close relationship with the elements.

Indeed if the train of thought indicated in this book has any cogency at all, it will soon become apparent why the best of all image-gestures for the secret ritual of our days would be a skeleton moved about by an invisible spirit. Such an image-gesture ought soon to turn into a definite sensation, under the stress of which you will feel yourself hovering about this skeleton like an invisible spiritual presence.

Such a presence neither lies clown, nor gets up, as it makes the skeleton do, but is always there, hovering about this skeleton-shape, so thickly clothed upon by flesh, commanding it to do this or to do that; or to refrain from doing this or that.

Not all the combined disintegrations of the human ego by modern psychology can alter the fact that from the beginning of consciousness man has been aware of an interior or overshadowing identity that has the power of saying I am I and which dominates the bodys motions.

Lift up your hand! and the body obeys. Lift up your heart! and the vital spirits of the body rush to obey.

Thus the obscure mental image of mind and body which underlies all our personal life precipitates itself into a perfectly clear and definite feeling, which can be isolated from all our other feelings and intensified by habit.

But why think of your body as a skeleton in place of what it appears to yourself and to others? For a deep psychological reason; for which we can find many precedents in history. The old Stoics who were, so to speak, priests of the art of character, always spoke of the conscious soul as carrying about a corpse.

In ancient mediaeval pictures a certain awareness of the skullthat familiar and inescapable adjunct of Homo Sapiensindicates the same tragic symbolism. When our body is fretted with discomfort and our nerves are jangled; when in our flesh we groan under pain; when a sickening weariness weighs down all the buoyancy of our senses; it is then that to think of the soul as independent of the body, it is then that to feel the I am I as a living entity carrying a skeleton about with it, becomes a curious comfort. And it becomes a comfort because this image is double-edged. On the one handin the skeletonit represents the grimness of our endurance. On the other handin the soulit represents the triumph of our enjoyment.

We indeed use here the same sort of subtle psychological ascesis practised by the old mediaeval religionists and by the old stoical philosophers, which made them both so formidable to endure the world and so sensitive to enjoy the Beatific Vision.

The mistake our generation has made is to throw away all the deep wisdom of these subtle habits of feeling just because we can no longer believe in the questionable theology that accompanied them.

Nothing is more preposterous in the crowd-consciousness of our time than a certain sham paganism that advocates ways of life totally alien to everything that is most subtle, most dignified, most intellectual, most beautiful in our inherited tradition.

This sham paganism is certainly not Homeric.

The crafty Odysseusthe darling of Pallas Atheneif he visited our shores and observed our habits, would drag his much-enduring companions away by force from our corrupting society even as he did from that of the Lotus-Eaters!

You cannot throw away all the old dualism between soul and body which has been a tradition of faith and a habit of feeling for ten thousand years without falling into every sort of nervous malady, into every sort of unhappiness, into every sort of despairing futility.

It is no use saying that modern Scientists have totally given up the use of the word soul. They may have given up the word. They cannot help making use of the thing. The truth is that humanitys belief in the soul through such vast aeons of time is enough to have half-created the soul. This indeed is the whole point! Perhaps it has half-created it; and even now the crowd-consciousness of our age is engaged in trying to destroy what the anonymous generations have almost succeeded in creating.

But whether we have created it or not, whether we ever will create it or not, the fact remains that we have the feeling of an I am I within us which can command the body, and upon the basis of this feeling is founded the way of life, isolated here and indicated by the name elementalism.

By thinking of the body as a skeleton, in place of something plump and handsome, the I am I within us is encouraged to struggle to free itself more and more from flesh and blood, thus fulfilling the intention of that magical urge in living things, that goes by the name of Evolution, and which is forever striving towards a condition of Being at present unthinkable. And the freedom and individuality, as a nucleus of life, which the self has been slowly acquiring for a million years, grows imperceptibly more emphatic the more it is able to dominate its body.