EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Ego’s Poetic Powers

EPPH has long argued that artists mute their ego to gain access to poetic depths. Yet in the passage below Colin Wilson, the English philosopher and novelist who died last year, describes a more balanced understanding in which poets identify with nature (see, for instance, Artists as Animals) while profiting from the power of self-consciousness to achieve what animals cannot. In other words, he clarifies how ego-obliterating unity with nature does not prevent the poet from using that same ego to explore the deeper and more ancient levels of her mind. Here’s how Wilson put it:

“Self-consciousness brings heavy losses and enormous gains.  The greatest loss is that instinctive 'naturalness' that small children and animals possess.  But the vital gain is the sense of force, of power, of control.  Man became the willful animal, the most dangerous animal on the earth, never contented to live in peace for long, always invading the neighboring country, burning the villages and raping the women.  And this endless ego-drive has, in the past ten thousand years, separated him further and further from the apes in their dwindling forests and the swallows that fly south in the winter.

“He is not entirely happy with this civilization that his peculiar powers have created.  Its main trouble is that it takes so much looking after.  Many men possess the animals' preference for the instinctive life of oneness with nature; they dream about the pleasure of being a shepherd drowsing on a warm hillside, or an angler beside a stream.  Oddly enough, such men have never been condemned as sluggards; they are respected as poets, and the soldiers and businessmen enjoy reading their daydreams when the day's work is over.

“A poet [ie. artist] is simply a man in whom the links with our animal past are still strong.  He is aware that we contain a set of instinctive powers that are quite separate from the powers needed to win a battle or expand a business.  And he is instinctively aware of something far more important.  Man has developed his conscious powers simply by wanting to develop them.  He has traveled from the invention of the wheel to the exploration of space in a few quick strides.  But he had also surpassed the animals in another respect: in the development of those 'other' powers.  No animal is capable of the ecstasies of the mystics or the great poets.  In his nature poetry, Wordsworth is 'at one' with nature in a quite different sense from the hippopotamus dozing in the mud.  Self-consciousness can be used for the development of man's instinctive powers as well as those of the intellect.  The poet, the mystic, and the 'magician' have this in common: the desire to develop their powers 'downward' rather than upward.  In the Symposium, Socrates expresses the ideal aim: to do both at the same time - to use increased knowledge to reach out towards a state of instinctive unity with the universe.  In the two and a half thousand years since then, civilization has been forced to devote its attention to more practical problems, while the artists and mystics have continued to protest that 'the world is too much with us,' and that triumphant homo sapiens is little more than a clever dwarf.  If man is really to evolve, then he must develop depth, and power over his own depths.”¹

 

1. Colin Wilson, The Occult: A History (New York: Random House) 1971, pp. 31-4.