5
The necessity of illusion

It now looked as if some of the spiritual dangers to be faced in this matter of coming to see as the painter sees were concerned with the transfiguration of the external world; in fact, with a process of giving to it something that came from within oneself, either in an overwhelming or a reviving flood. Also this process could be felt as a plunge – a plunge that one could sometimes do deliberately but which also sometimes just happened, as when one falls in love. But although the mechanism seemed to be a giving out of something from within oneself and the experience of such a giving could feel like a plunge, I could not understand at first what it was that one gave; also I did not know the difference between this intense kind of feeling about something one was looking at and the more ordinary ways of looking, I did not know whether it was a difference of kind or only of degree. But then I chanced to read something which did seem to throw light on what might be happening. It suggested that the bit of oneself that one could give to the outside world was of the stuff of one’s dreams, the stored memories of one’s past, but refashioned internally to make one’s hopes and longings for the future.

The passage was, in fact, written, not by a painter but by a philosopher, and the writer’s position in philosophy appeared to have an idealist bias which would not be entirely appropriate to my particular needs.* But as pure description what I read did fit in with what seemed to happen in this matter of coming to feel the significant reality of the external world.

In the first flash of reading this I had felt it was right. But then I wondered, what could the writer mean by saying the dream comes first and is the primary phase of consciousness; for a dream must be of something, there must have been something there to start with to dream about. Then I thought the answer was that the first phase of experience is a dream rather than a perception simply because we are not born knowing the difference between thoughts and things, not born knowing the difference between subjective and objective, it is a knowledge only slowly acquired. Thus at first, although we are already experiencing the difference, finding that our pangs of hunger are only stilled when there is a real person there to feed us, we are not yet aware of it. Our experience is as yet a wholeness in which subject and object are still united, in which the breast that satisfies us and the hunger that it satisfies are a mystical unity. But if so, then how did this experience of wholeness and the memory of it which then became the desire for its repetition, how did this ever develop into perception? How did we ever come to realise that there was an external reality which could alone make the dream come true again, how did we take the momentous step of knowing that what we hunger for is a

reality outside ourselves? In Santayana’s words, how does our dream become symbolic of its external conditions, how do we ever come to feel that our mother’s breast and all the later sources of life are relevant to our destiny? Certainly in the Noah’s Dove state of mind nothing seemed relevant to mine. But I read further:

Yes, happily grown significant, that was surely the point, implying that it did not always occur and that any of us may possibly at times relapse into a state of mind where that precarious achievement is lost, where we lose the power to endow the external world with our dreams and so lose our sense of its significance. For I read on:

Thus the substance of experience is what we bring to what we see, without our own contribution we see nothing. But I wanted to add that of course imagination itself does not spring from nothing, it is what we have made within us out of all past relationships with what is outside, whether they were realised as outside relationships or not. I thought that Santayana’s sentence did not mean that thought actually starts first and is more ‘real’ than things (though I knew some philosophers believed this) but that our inner dream and outer perception both spring from a common source or primary phase of experience in which the two are not distinguished, a primary ‘madness’ which all of us have lived through and to which at times we can return. And this also was, I thought, why Santayana could say:

Such statements, although in contrast to so much of the generally accepted views of our relation to the world, did give a meaning to certain most vivid experiences which up to now I had never known how to explain. They threw light, for instance, on the persistent feeling about parts of the country that I loved most, that these were haunts of the gods, places where indefinable presences were about. They threw light on the conflict between common sense which said these presences were something I was endowing the place with, out of fancy, imagination, and another sense which was intensely aware of the value of the experience and loth to believe it was ‘only imagination’; just as when in love one can struggle against knowing that the miraculous quality is something one is oneself creating. But Santayana’s statements also suggested that it was a mistake to call an experience ‘only’ imagination; they suggested that to try to decide which was more ‘real’, thoughts or things, imagination or perception, was to be caught in a false dichotomy which ignored the true nature of the relation between them. Although I could not yet see clearly how to formulate this relation I could already guess that it might be prejudice that made the knowledge of one’s own part in the transfiguration detract from the value of it.

Having reached so far it was now much easier to understand such statements as:

If all this were true it certainly threw further light on the nature of such moments as that plunge into the abyss of a painting when the eye was lost in a secret germination and a coloured state of grace. For, I thought, what did it mean if these ideals which are ‘significant’, perpetual and as constant as the nature which expresses them really are our dreams? What did it mean if these spirits in our pantheon which, temporarily or permanently, find resting places in the outer world of persons or places or things, what did it mean if they are really our dreams, really the inner created pictures of what we love most in the world, pictures of what we hunger for? Did it mean that though it is an illusion when one thinks one has found the exact embodiment of that goodness in the external world, since outer reality is never permanently the same as our dreams, yet such moments are the vital illusions by which we live? Did it mean that they are the actual moments when the forms of imagination do happily grow significant and without which, somewhere in our lives, we should have no drive to seek permanent objectives in the external world, without which we should only be driven by blind instinct and animal appetite? Did it mean that they are moments in which one does not have to decide which is one self and which is the other – moments of illusion, but illusions that are perhaps the essential root of a high morale and vital enthusiasm for living – moments which can perhaps be most often experienced in physical love combined with in-loveness, but also which need not always require bodily contact and physical sexual experience, but which can be imaginatively experienced in an infinite variety of contacts with the world?

Now I thought I could answer my own doubts about the passing of the transfigurations and see their place in the context of ordinary living. For I read:

If this were true then it was surely by those moments that one comes to know what one loves, comes to hammer out over the years the knowledge of what it is worth striving for; and by this comes to achieve a growing integration in one’s living. They were surely moments when, by the temporary fusion of dream and external reality, the dream itself becomes endowed with the real qualities of the peg that momentarily carries it; thus each time one’s gods descend they themselves become enriched by that very incarnation. Or rather they become enriched as soon as one takes action to bring this transfigured object nearer to oneself. For it seemed likely that it was not simply the descent of one’s gods that automatically enriched the dream, it was the action such a vision stimulated that really enriched it. If it was a person who became thus transfigured one sought to bring them closer, perhaps to share one’s life with them, if it was the place of one’s dreams, to live in it, if a knowledge or skill that one became enamoured of, one sought to find out all about it and so make it one’s own. And in so doing the dream itself became changed, it grew through one’s own activity.

Incidentally, the phrase ‘sublime victory of mind over matter’ surely needed some comment; did it not suggest a disparagement of material things, perhaps equally inappropriate with the phrase ‘only imagination’ only the other way about?

While trying to get these ideas into words there was one image that would not go away. For days my eye had wandered lost over a whole rich countryside and found nothing to rest upon, except one thing: the chance-seen glimpses of clear streams, places where the pebbly bottom showed through the water and thereby gleamed with qualities that did not show at all in the dry stones on the path. And now I remembered too that other image, from the August diary, how the thought of sand showing through the crisp froth of small waves had stayed in my mind for weeks. In fact there was now no escaping the idea that those diary notes, made blindly on a seaside holiday, had provided in condensed symbolic form the first statements of problems that it was becoming less and less easy to evade; problems to do with how one ever comes to believe in the full reality of the ‘other’ at all. At the time of making the diary it had never occurred to me what an achievement such a belief is, not the intellectual or philosophical belief, but the working implicit assumption on which one’s power to perform any voluntary action depends; so there had been no reason to ask how one achieves it.

There was another aspect of the problem, however. Even if this idea of the necessity of illusion did provide a useful formulation of certain observed facts of living, even if it were true that one did need, at times, not to have to decide which was the other and which was oneself, such a state obviously had its dangers. It might become so alluring that one did not wish to return to the real world of being separate; like the man in the folk tales who, coming home alone at night, chances on the fairies at their revels and joins them and is never seen again; or only returns so many years later that his whole world is changed and nobody knows him.

Later it became clear that one of the free drawings, called ‘Rats in the Sacristy’ (Fig. 34) illustrated this danger, as well as the opposite one of being a separate person, with all the responsibilities that involves. But I did not understand this yet and meanwhile there was another problem demanding attention, the fact that not only one’s gods could take up their abode in shrines in the external world, but also one’s devils. This problem was emphasised by a consideration of the painter’s instructions on how one should get ‘action’ into one’s drawings from life and also by a study of the meaning of some of the free drawings. For it seemed that, having found at least a way of thinking about the connection between madness and sanity, I could now bring myself to look at these drawings more carefully.