The philosophy of being and super-being

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32494, 2 January 1971, Page 10

The philosophy of being and super-being

Poetry and Mysticism. By Colin Wilson. Hutchinson. 227 pp. (Reviewed by H. D. McN.) There can be few books by famous writers which begin so promisingly and yet manage to _ disappoint the reader so completely within five pages. The dominant fault is that it fails to live up to the subject advertised in the title, and it soon becomes apparent that Wilson’s “mysticism” is just another word for “self-realisation.” The first half of this book expounds Wilson’s philosophy of being and superbeing, and the second half purports to substantiate this by discussing four poets (Brooke, Yeats, Rowse and Kazantzakis), of whom at least three were not mystics, in anything but a very loose sense. Wilson’s achievement is that he has devalued mysticism into an item of uninteresting tautology: mystical experience is a normal potentiality of everyday consciousness.” This would perhaps be defensible if Wilson followed up such a statement with a systematic method verification, but this he does not do: what this book seeds, in stead of the numerous j.-ague

promises that some day soon the-man-in-the-street will be able to swallow his daily dose of mysticism as readily as the local smog, is a day by day scheme for psychic expansion, accompanied by a guarantee from the author and an assurance that it has worked for him. Characteristically, Wilson has regulated this book by his own tastes in literature and autobiographical evidence of his own precociously astute literary appreciation; he avoids discussion of his own mystical experiences and contacts with mystics. One difficulty the reader will encounter is that Wilson rejects most conventional systems of termifiology, and substitutes a rather cumbersome jargon of his own. He also does not distinguish between a platitudinous statement of the obvious and a penetrating, original observation of his own: many are the paragraphs that one struggles through and wonders in retrospect what the author intended it to contribute. Allusions to literary works (apart from the four main ones) are numerous and arbitrary; his reason for selecting the

four authors for special study are also vague. “It would be hard to choose four poets more unlike than Brooke, Yeats, Rowse and Kazantzakis.” Most readers will find in this an easy challenge. “I have done so to emphasise the one thing they have in common: the feeling they convey of the ultimate frustration of the poet’s aim.” But this could be found in virtually any poet who is aware of his limitations, and what poet is not? A much more spectacular choice would be Coleridge, who also has a well-substantiated claim to mysticism: why avoid such an obvious example? Simply because the case of Coleridge contravenes Wilson’s initial assertion that real poets are not dependent on drugs. This book is a muddled piece of writing which does not compare favourably with Wilson’s best work. Although individual chapters are worth the attention of those specially interested in the writers under discussion, the book lacks any useful unity and appears to be carelessly written in places. {