Read Hidden Minds Online

Authors: Frank Tallis

Hidden Minds (3 page)

BOOK: Hidden Minds
13.25Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

According to romantic philosophers, the universal unconscious contained its own memories. It was a storehouse of ancient lore, symbols, and leitmotif. Because the human unconscious resonated in sympathy with its deep, immemorial voice, certain themes and images were prone to recur in myth and folklore – all issuing from the same source. Needless to say, union with the universal unconscious was accomplished most successfully when the faculty of reason was suspended. Thus, powerful emotions, mental illness, inspiration, and dreams acquired special significance. Such altered states punctured the membrane separating lacklustre reality from the numinous, allowing primordial knowledge and impressions to seep into awareness. These views are evident in works such as
The Symbolism of Dreams
(1814) by Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, who argued that dreams incorporate universal, timeless symbols that can be interpreted irrespective of their temporal and geographical provenance.

By the early decades of the nineteenth century the unconscious had evolved into something very far removed from Leibniz’s now quite humble-sounding ‘minute perceptions’. It had acquired a complex set of properties and associations reflecting the preoccupations of romanticism. The unconscious was the font of inspiration and creativity – a hidden anvil on which the products of imagination were mysteriously hammered into existence. A dream factory in which the elements of arcane symbols were welded together. The source of deep feelings and a portal through which one might glimpse universal truths. In addition, a further sense of the unconscious had begun to emerge: that of the unconscious as a place or location. Somewhere inside the head that could actually be visited. A place where the Newtonian prison of time and space could be escaped from. A place of endless possibilities.

The notion of descent into a shadowy kingdom (albeit a descent that passes through layers of mind) resonates strongly with some of the most enduring myths of the western literary canon: Orpheus, Aeneas, and Dante all descended into their respective underworlds. It was inevitable that, once the unconscious was conceptualised as a place, people would want to go there. And in due course they did. But many of these early mind-travellers required a little help – from
Papaver somniferum,
the opium poppy. Nature’s passport to the unconscious.

The birth of romanticism in English literature is associated with the publication of the
Lyrical Ballads
(1798) by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In this and subsequent work it is plain that both men believed that the human mind was far more complex than a table clock, and its working infinitely more mysterious. Coleridge wrote of’the twilight realms of consciousness’, while Wordsworth described ‘Caverns … within my mind which sun/ Could never penetrate’.

It has been argued that the fundamental motivation for romantic creativity was not self-expression but self-exploration, and indeed many of the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge are perhaps best considered as products of self-enquiry or self-analysis. Of these two poetic giants, the process of self-enquiry is ostensibly more obvious in the work of Wordsworth. His epic poem
The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind
(1850), took nearly forty years to write and describes the development of Wordsworth’s own imagination. Although
The Prelude
is a verse autobiography, it is unusual (compared with previous autobiography) insofar as greater emphasis is given to internal, mental events than events that happen ‘out there’ in the ‘real world’.

Coleridge never wrote a vast autobiographical poem that compares with
The Prelude;
however, he was just as interested in his own mental processes -possibly even more so than Wordsworth was. Coleridge wrote extensively on the mind and was always jotting down relevant observations. Like Wordsworth, he had a special interest in the imagination, but he also wrote a great deal on topics that we would now recognise as ‘psychology’ (such as perception, memory, and melancholia). Indeed, Coleridge is often credited with having introduced the word ‘psychology’ into the English language (albeit as a German import).

Coleridge’s reflections on the mind and the imaginative faculty are arguably more penetrating than Wordsworth’s, but this may be because he had an unfair advantage. Unlike his more sober friend, Coleridge was into drugs. In the 1800s, opium was readily available from pharmacists, druggists, and physicians, who recommended its use as an analgesic. It was conventionally taken as laudanum, a tincture of opium diluted in wine or brandy. By 1801 Coleridge was addicted, and such were his experiences under the influence of opium that he speculated on the nature of mental phenomena for the rest of his life.

In 1816 – at the suggestion of a young Lord Byron – Coleridge published his unfinished ‘Kubla Khan’, a poem set in a strange, exotic landscape, replete with images of underground rivers, ‘caverns measureless to man’, and sunless seas. Coleridge consented to the publication of’Kubla Khan’, as a ‘psychological curiosity’, rather than a work of great artistic merit. This was largely due to the curious circumstances surrounding its composition.

Almost twenty years earlier Coleridge had been living in a ‘lonely farmhouse’ between Lynton and Porlock on the edge of Exmoor. He had taken some opium for a ‘medical complaint’, and while asleep experienced the spontaneous composition of an enormous, visionary poem, beginning with the now famous lines ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure dome decree.’ After writing a page or so Coleridge was disturbed by a person on business from Porlock’, and when Coleridge returned to complete the poem he was unable to do so. It was as though an internal door had closed. He no longer had access to his poetic vision.

‘Kubla Khan’ is extraordinary for many reasons. First of all, it is, as Coleridge suggested, a psychological curiosity. Its method of composition is as fascinating as its content. Coleridge felt that he could not properly claim authorship of’Kubla Khan’, as it was produced without ‘conscious effort’. It had bubbled up, just like one of the underground streams described in the poem, from his unconscious. Its very existence contradicted the fundamental assumptions made in the eighteenth century concerning the nature of poetic creativity. Poems were supposed to be crafted. Poems were the result of skill, artifice. They weren’t supposed to rise into awareness, complete, while the ‘author’ was asleep. Secondly, Coleridge’s sparkling description of Xanadu is so vivid it’s almost as though he went there. ‘Kubla Khan’ is nothing less than a postcard from Xanadu. And where was Xanadu? It could only be in one place – Coleridge’s own mind. But a part of his mind only accessible during sleep. The deep, fathomless sleep of an opium addict.

Unfortunately for Coleridge, once he had become addicted to opium the pleasure domes of Xanadu were swiftly replaced by a sort of bespoke version of hell. Coleridge’s notebooks are full of references to either disturbing opium-related experiences or the dreadful physical symptoms that accompanied periods of abstinence. Nights were particularly bad. He wrote of’these Sleeps, these Horrors, these Frightful Dreams of Despair’ and he was visited by ‘a pandemonium of all the shames and miseries of the past … bronzed with one stormy Light of Terror & Self-Torture.’ He also suffered from hallucinations. Opium seemed to liberate the contents of the unconscious. The wellhead of imagination could be chemically encouraged to release its enchanted rivers, colourful demons, and unwanted memories into the narrative of dreams and hypnagogic visions.

Although Coleridge became well acquainted with his own unconscious (and its products), he never published a detailed account of his travels there. This task was undertaken by Coleridge’s young admirer, Thomas De Quincey, whose scandalous
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
(1822) is arguably the first comprehensive literary celebration of unconscious mental life.

De Quincey was only twenty-one when he first met Coleridge in 1807. Just before this first meeting he had been told by a mutual friend that latterly Coleridge was less concerned with poetry and instead ‘applied his whole mind to metaphysics and psychology’. The accuracy of this assessment appears to be have been borne out by the subsequent conversation, which was rather one-sided and consisted mostly of an extended philosophical monologue courtesy of the older man. Although De Quincey’s first impression of Coleridge was of a corpulent, dreamy individual, Coleridge soon surprised De Quincey with his eloquence and ability casually to offer solutions to philosophical problems ‘that had existed for twenty-three centuries.’

De Quincey wasn’t, however, terribly impressed by Mrs Coleridge. But then, neither was Coleridge. While the two men were talking a woman appeared whom De Quincey described rather uncharitably as ‘full and rather below the common height’ (somewhat rich, given contemporary accounts of De Quincey’s own diminutive stature). Coleridge turned to De Quincey and made an introduction which was as economic as it was frigid. ‘Mrs Coleridge,’ he said. Whereupon Mrs Coleridge quickly withdrew. ‘I gathered’, wrote De Quincey, ‘… that Coleridge’s marriage had not been a very happy one.’

That evening De Quincey remarked to Coleridge that he had been obliged to take a few drops of laudanum because of a toothache, at which point Coleridge warned De Quincey very strongly ‘against forming a habit’. Fortunately for English literature De Quincey took absolutely no notice of Coleridge’s advice. Although – in actual fact – this particular piece of advice was already far too late.

In the autumn of 1804 De Quincey had suffered from what he described as ‘rheumatic pains of the head and face’. These pains had lasted for some twenty days. On the twenty-first day – a dreary, wet Sunday – De Quincey got up and, with no particular purpose in mind, wandered the streets of London. By chance he encountered an acquaintance who, on hearing about De Quincey’s affliction, urged him to try opium as a remedy. De Quincey immediately went shopping on Oxford Street, and was soon able to obtain a tincture of opium from the local ‘druggist’.

When De Quincey got back to his lodgings he wasted no time ín taking the prescribed quantity. His response is best described in his own words:

Here was a panacea … for all human woes: here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered: happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket; portable ecstacies might be had corked in a pint bottle: and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail coach.

Clearly, the effect of opium had been considerably more far-reaching than facial anaesthesia. De Quincey had had quite an experience. Yet, surprisingly (given De Quincey’s encomium), he didn’t become addicted immediately. Although he took opium regularly, it wasn’t until 1813 that he became dependent. That year marked the return of an old stomach complaint which De Quincey tried to manage by increasing his opium intake. The dose escalated, his use became immoderate, and thereafter he referred to himself as a ‘confirmed opium-eater’.

Like Coleridge, De Quincey began to hallucinate. He would lie awake, watching incredible scenes unfolding at the end of his bed, ‘vast processions’ and ‘friezes of never ending stones’; however, these processions and friezes paled into insignificance when compared with his subsequent dreams – ‘a theatre’, he wrote, ‘seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour’.

The realm that De Quincey visited in his dreams was not an elevated, transcendent realm. His consciousness did not rise up to occupy a vantage point in a higher, more refined reality. Rather, De Quincey had a distinct impression that he was sinking into himself:

I seemed every night to descend, not metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that 1 could ever reascend.

Unlike Coleridge, who peered into the chasm of the unconscious with a certain amount of dread and horror, one can’t help feeling that De Quincey undertook his descent with unnatural glee. For someone supposedly writing about the pains of opium, his language is suspiciously rapturous. He seems to relish the experience, images conjured before sleep were ‘drawn out by the fierce chemistry’ of dreams ‘into insufferable splendour’; he saw ‘gorgeous spectacles’.

De Quincey observed that in the dream world the rules of time and space (those stalwarts of the Newtonian universe) broke down completely: ‘Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity.’ Thus, De Quincey describes walking in impossible buildings, whose colossal architecture was well beyond tbe scope of Christopher Wren’s mathematics. Time became entirely meaningless. ‘I sometimes seemed’, he wrote, ‘to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time …’ He was trapped in pagodas for centuries, walked through narrow chambers in ‘eternal pyramids’, assumed different identities – from sacrificial victim to high priest – spoke with gods and animals, kissed crocodiles, and lay down in the mud of the Nile.

Confessions of an English Opium Eater
acquired cult status almost immediately after publication; however, De Quincey also wrote a lesser known sequel,
Suspina de Profanáis
(1845), which is in many ways even more fascinating. It is an extremely odd, lyrical work – a piece of preemptive psychedelia – populated by a cast of characters that, again, De Quincey became acquainted with during the course of his opium dreams: Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow, The Daughter of Lebanon, and The Dark Interpreter. All of them archetypal figures roaming the landscape of De Quincey’s unconscious.

But
Suspiria
is not merely a return journey – more lurid confessions and fantastic characters. In
Suspiria,
De Quincey begins to engage with his subject more analytically. For example, in one of the most poetic and penetrating passages he ever wrote, De Quincey considers the relationship between the brain, dreams, and ‘the shadowy’ (for which the word ‘unconscious’ might be legitimately substituted).

BOOK: Hidden Minds
13.25Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Blue Collar Blues by Rosalyn McMillan
La última batalla by C.S. Lewis
SOMETHING WAITS by Jones, Bruce
The Bridge by Jane Higgins
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Water Nymph by Michele Jaffe
Because of Low by Abbi Glines
Stolen Heat by Elisabeth Naughton
Monster by Phal, Francette