The Biographer's Tale (10 page)

His next effort, after investigating the connections between his mind and his body, was to investigate the mental condition of those who had, as he put it elsewhere, slipped down the unfenced precipice from the tableland of sanity. In this experiment he quite deliberately induced in himself a kind of paranoia, to “gain some idea of the commoner feelings
in Insanity. The method tried was to invest everything I met, whether human, animal, or inanimate, with the imaginary attributes of a spy. Having arranged plans, I started on my morning's walk from Rutland Gate, and found the experiment only too successful. By the time I had walked one and a half miles, and reached the cab-stand in Piccadilly at the east end of the Green Park, every horse on the stand seemed watching me, either with pricked ears or disguising its espionage. Hours passed before this uncanny sensation wore off, and I feel that I could only too easily re-establish it.”

His third experiment, after consciousness and madness, was with religion. In his attempt to penetrate idolatry and fetishism, he shows perhaps, safe in his London respectability, a certain cultural inadequacy which is perhaps evidenced also in his foxhunting invasion of Jonker or his crowning of Nangoro. (Or is it possible that we moderns, mocking the certainties and the innocence of the Victorians, misinterpret these events also; is it possible that Nangoro smiled with satisfaction under his player's tinsel in the mirror FG lent him?)

He wrote:

“The third experiment of which I will speak was to gain an insight into the abject feelings of barbarians and others concerning the power of images which they know to be of human handiwork. I had visited a large collection of idols gathered by missionaries from many lands, and wondered how each of those absurd and ill-made monstrosities could have obtained the hold it had over the imaginations of its worshippers. I wished, if possible, to enter into those feelings. It was difficult to find a suitable object for trial, because it ought to be in itself quite unfitted to arouse devout feelings. I
fixed on a comic picture, it was that of Punch, and made believe in its possession of divine attributes. I addressed it with much quasi-reverence as possessing a mighty power to reward or punish the behaviour of men towards it, and found little difficulty in ignoring the impossibilities of what I professed. The experiment gradually succeeded; I began to feel and long retained for the picture a large share of the feelings that a barbarian entertains towards his idol, and learned to appreciate the enormous potency they might have over him.”

He did not like conventional religion, though he submitted it, like everything else, to his questing intellectual stare. He even conducted a statistical survey of the longevity of those (queens, princes, bishops) regularly prayed for in churches, to see if the force of prayer improved their life expectancy. It did not. In his delicate analysis of mental imagery, he moved from systems of number maps and coloured mnemonics, to visions proper, distinguishing carefully between mental imagery, “after-images,” “phosphenes,” “light dust,” and hypnagogic processions, visualisations of named objects or involuntary showers of perfumed and metamorphosing roses. He recorded hallucinations and mirages, phantasmagoric crowds of faces and the curious combinations of dream objects—for instance a rolling, bullet-shaped head on a white surface, which turned out to be a conflated memory of a cheesemonger and his Dutch cheeses. He recorded Napoleon's hallucinatory star and those of other great men. He remarked that all these dreams and visions appeared to be common functions of normal consciousness. “When popular opinion is of a
matter-of-fact kind, the seers of visions keep quiet; they do not like to be thought fanciful or mad … But let the tide of opinion change and grow favourable to supernaturalism, then the seers of visions come to the front. The faintly perceived fantasies of ordinary persons become invested by the authority of reverend men with a claim to serious regard; they are consequently attended to and encouraged, and they increase in definition through being habitually ‘dwelt upon.' ”

He wrote a letter to
Nature
about a vision of his own, and apparently thought better of sending it. It is an arresting vision, and peculiarly interesting in his rigorous dissociation of it from the religious associations it might naturally have evoked. He was ill with bronchitis and influenza when it occurred.

“When fancies gathered and I was on the borderland of delirium I was aware of the imminence of a particular hallucination. There was no vivid visualisation of it, but I felt that if I let myself go I should see in bold relief a muscular bloodstained crucified figure nailed against the wall of my bedroom opposite my bed. What on earth made me think of this particular object I have no conception. There was nothing in it of the religious symbol, but just a prisoner freshly mauled and nailed up by a brutal Roman soldier. The interest in this to me was the severance between the state of hallucination and that of ordinary visualisation. They seemed in this case to be quite unconnected.”

“If I let myself go.” What did he mean? On this occasion, he did not. But, as we have seen, he had a kind of wild courage in regard to his investment of
mana
in cab-horses
and Mr. Punch. And in the African interior he saw things, both real and visionary, which he found in some way unbearable—though he recorded some of the real things, at least, in letters to his mother, with whom he was out of touch for two years. There
were
, for instance, the African women victims of one of Jonker's raids.

“I saw two poor women, one with both legs cut off at her ankle joints, and the other at one [
sic
]. They had crawled the whole way on that eventful night from Schelen's Hope to Barmen, some twenty miles. The Hottentots had cut them off after their usual habit, in order to slip off the solid iron anklets that they wear. These wretched creatures showed me how they had stopped the blood by poking the wounded stumps into the sand.”

He returned to these unfortunate women when recording his earlier medical experiences for his memoirs. He included them in an observation on the varying tolerance of pain.

“The stumps had healed when I saw them. I asked how they staunched the blood. They explained by gesture that it was by stumping the bleeding ends into the sand, and they grinned with satisfaction while they explained.”

In this version, both women had lost both feet.

He recorded also “one of Jonker's sons, a hopeful youth, came to a child that had been dropped on the ground and lay screaming there, and he gouged out its eyes with a small stick.”

He records these events, even in his letters to his mother, with no great expression of emotion—indeed, with a curious echo of British schoolboy japes, which may be a commentary on how he felt after his ritual exposure to these.

“The Ovahereros, a very extended nation, attacked a village the other day for fun, and after killing all the men and women, they tied the children's legs together by the ankles, and strung them head downwards on a long pole, which they set horizontally between two trees; then they got plenty of reeds together and put them underneath and lighted them; and as the children were dying, poor wretches, half burnt, half suffocated, they danced and sung round them, and made a fine joke of it. Andersson desires to be particularly remembered to all. With my best love to all the family, relations and friends, collectively and individually, Ever affectly. yours,
FG
”

Before he set out for Lake Ngami, he spent some time with the bushmen at Tounoubis. They regaled him with stories of the fabulous beasts who lived on the shores of the lake, and in the bush beyond. One had the spoor of a zebra and the horn of a gemsbok, mounted centrally on its forehead. FG wrote to his mother that the skins of this beast, stolen by a party of Kubabees, were quite new to all who saw them. “I really begin to believe in the existence of the beast [the unicorn],” he wrote, “as reports of the animal have been received in many parts of Africa, frequently in the North.” The bushmen also gave detailed descriptions of a kind of cockatrice—a climbing tree-snake with the comb of a guinea fowl and a cry like the clucking of a hen, but without the legendary wings. FG observed the bushmen's drawings with interest. “One of their habits is to draw pictures on the walls of caves of men and animals and to colour them with ochre. These drawings were once numerous, but they have been sadly destroyed by advancing colonisation and few
of them, and indeed, few wild Bushmen, now exist … I was particularly struck with a portrait of an eland as giving a just idea of the precision and purity of their best work.” In later life, he collected a description of a wild Bushman, from a tribe living in caves in the Drakenberg, and his method of drawing.

“He invariably began by jotting down upon paper or on a slate a number of isolated dots wch presented no connection or trace of outline of any kind to the uninitiated eye, but looked like the stars scattered promiscuously in the sky. Having with much deliberation satisfied himself of the sufficiency of these dots, he forthwith began to run a free bold line from one to the other, and as he did so the form of an animal—horse, buffalo, elephant or some kind of antelope—gradually developed itself. This was invariably done with a free hand, and with such unerring accuracy of touch, that no correction of a line was at any time attempted. I understood from the lad that this was the plan which was invariably pursued by his kindred in making their clever pictures.”

FG offers this, in his discussion of Mental Imagery, as an example of the projection of a complete mental image on to the paper. He follows it immediately with a description of the map-making abilities of the Eskimo, who could draw from memory accurate charts of the icy bays and inlets explored in their canoes. (Explored, it is also claimed, in spirit journeys undertaken by shamans who have never set flesh-foot in the accurately depicted estuaries, peninsulas, pools and promontories.) Karl Pearson, FG's biographer, commenting on his description of the Bushmen's prowess,
and his extrapolation of it into the evidences of the mental imagery of our ancestors of the Ice Ages, remarks that FG's artistic interest would have been aroused by the discovery of the cave paintings in Lascaux and other sites, made after his lifetime. These too, it is now generally thought, had shamanistic powers, could evoke presences or lead out souls into the fluid eternal pursuit of hunter and hunted, eater and eaten. Maybe it is not even fanciful to connect FG's observed reference points, “stars scattered promiscuously,” with some astrological divination. “Below, the boarhound and the boar / Pursue their pattern as before / But reconciled among the stars.”

[Quaere. Delete this?? S D-S]

I
T WAS A DREADFUL
and dangerous journey from Tounoubis to Lake Ngami. It was unbearably hot, and unbearably dry; there was no water to be had for 3½ days out of Tounoubis, and several of his oxen perished, not being fresh, in the remorseless heat. When he came there, he recorded a “waking vision” which came to him as he lay sleepless by the camp-fire at night.

“But in the dark, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush suppos'd a bear!” So
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, which contains a lucid dissertation on the mental constructions of the lunatic, the lover and the poet. Shakespeare must have had a lively interest in mental imagery. Both Hamlet and Antony discourse upon shapes, whales or dragons, discerned in the random configurations of cloud formations. I have made some study of the mental activities which go on when
we observe a stump, or something glistening in the dark holes between leaves, and take them for living creatures, a small dog, a raven, or a pair of bright eyes belonging to a hidden cat, large or small. I have noticed, walking in English parkland, that during the approach to an indeterminate object—say a large rock, with mossy growths, or a small log, the mind continues, from the minimal evidence, or sketched points of reference given, to
construct
the supposed creature. I have created whole ravens—heavy beak, claws, pinion-feathers, watchful eye—from what had to be
reconstructed
, seen again, as a hawthorn root. Here several times I have seen a lion crouched—tufted ears, shoulder muscles, softly lashing tail—where there was nothing but the movement of a bush in a breeze and a light catching on some shiny object, creating a vision of eyes to watching eyes. Something of this kind must have happened to me that night, but on a scale so awful and disgusting that I hesitate to relate it. Indeed I shall relate it only to attempt a rational exorcism. I believe the initial images may have risen in my poor brain, induced in part by our visit to Elephant Fountain, where the heaps of bones of those great beasts have suggested to the natives that it is a graveyard to which they go to die, to lay themselves down amongst their forebears and companions. Be that as it may, I suddenly saw the whole foreshore—on which there were a moderate number of big pebbles, small boulders, driftwood, etc. etc.—spread with bones. These bones were human bones, cloven skulls, severed spines, smashed femurs and tibia, little heaps of tiny phalanges and metatarsals. They gleamed white in the moonlight, and ruddy near at hand, in the light of the camp-fire. Wherever I looked, my gaze
seemed, as it were, to invest these dry bones with flesh. I thought irresistibly of Ezekiel in his valley of the dry bones. “Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord … And behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above; but there was no breath in them.” Ezekiel made his bones a living army but my creative eye went no further than to invest these with raw, slippery flesh, livid or freshly bleeding, hacked about and mauled, to which unspeakable things had been done. I had performed much butchery on beasts, in my sporting days, and in my explorations, and I was cognisant of the organs and limbs of the human body, from brain to toenail, from my medical days. But I can hardly believe that the horrible tortures, the ingenious mincing and carving up to which this mass of manhood had been subjected, came from my own subconscious. My mind retches at it still. Parts joined together in fantastic conjunctions—nipples with eye-sockets, and other unspeakable concatenations—all in pain, in pain. I walked amongst them, trying to discern a whole man, and came upon a half-flayed, severed head on a pole, out of which—I swear it
—my own eyes looked at me sorrowfully
. As if to say, why have you brought me to this pass?