The Complex Vision

by John Cowper Powys

Since pain and pleasure, although so often the direct evocation of the soul's attribute of bodily sensation, are always composed of the primordial "stuff" of emotion; and since emotion is a projection of the soul independently of the body, it is natural that the soul should, in the reverse manner, colour its emotion with the memory of sensation. Thus it follows that although it is possible for the soul, when its emotional feeling is outraged or excited, to experience pain or pleasure apart from sensation, there is usually present in such an emotional pain or pleasure a residual element of sensation; for the soul is not a thing which simply "possesses" certain functions; but a thing which is present in some degree or other in all its various aspects of energy.

What we call "memory" is nothing more than the plastic consciousness of personal identity and continuity. And when once the pain or pleasure of a bodily sensation has been lodged in the soul, that pain or pleasure becomes an integral portion of the soul's life, to be worked upon and appropriated for good or evil by the soul's intrinsic duality.

Thus although the creative energy in the soul, emerging from fathomless abysses, can enable the soul to endure until death the most infernal torments, the fact remains that since the attribute of sensation, which depends entirely upon the existence of the bodily senses, is one of the soul's basic attributes and has its ground in the very substratum of the soul, the sensations of pain and pleasure whether coloured by emotion and imagination or left "pure" in the clear element of consciousness, are sensations from which the soul cannot escape.

From this we are forced to conclude that to affirm that the soul can remain wholly untouched and unaffected by bodily pain or pleasure is ridiculous. Bodily pain and pleasure are the soul's pain and pleasure; because the attribute of sensation, through which the bodily senses feed the soul, is not the body's attribute of sensation but the soul's attribute of sensation.

To say, therefore, that the soul can "conquer" the body or be "indifferent" to the body is as ridiculous as to say that the body can "conquer" the soul or be "indifferent" to the soul. The fact that the attribute of sensation is a basic attribute of the soul and that the attribute of sensation is dependent upon the bodily senses must inevitably imply that the pressure or impact of the bodily senses descend to the profoundest depths of the soul.

The thing that "conquers" pain in the invincible martyr is love, or "the energy of creation," in the soul. The abysmal struggle is not between the soul and the body or between the flesh and the spirit, but between the power of life and love, in the body and the soul together, and the power of death or malice, in the body and the soul together.

What we are compelled to assume with regard to those "sons of the universe," whose existence affords a basis for the objectivity of the "ultimate ideas," is that, with them, what I have called "the eternal idea of the body" takes the place in their complex vision of our actual physical body. Their complex vision must be regarded, if our philosophy is to remain boldly and shamelessly anthropomorphic, as possessing, even as our own, the basic attribute of sensation.

But since their essential invisibility, and consequent upon this their ubiquity under the dominant categories of time and place, precludes any possibility of their incarnation, we are compelled to postulate that their complex vision's attribute of sensation, in the absence of any bodily senses, finds its contact with "the objective mystery" and with the objective "universe" in some definite and permanent "intermediary" which serves in their case the same primal necessity as is served in our case by the human body.

If no such "intermediary" existed for them, we should be compelled to relinquish the idea that they possessed a complex vision at all, for not only the attribute of sensation, but the attribute of emotion also, demands for its activity something that shall represent the human body and occupy in their objective "universe" the place occupied by our physical bodies in our "universe."

As we have already shown, this primary demand for the "eternalizing of flesh and blood" is a demand which springs from the profoundest depths of the soul, for it is a demand which springs from the creative energy itself, the eternal protagonist in the world-drama. We must conclude, therefore, that although these super-human children of Nature cannot in the ordinary sense incarnate themselves in flesh and blood they can and do appropriate to themselves out of the surrounding body of the ether, and out of the body of any other living thing they approach, a certain attenuated essence of flesh and blood which, though invisible to us, supplies with them the place of our human body. This, therefore, is the "intermediary" which, in the "invisible companions" of our planetary struggle, occupies the place which is occupied by the physical element in our human life. And this is evoked by nothing less than that "eternal idea of the body," or "that eternal idea of flesh and blood," which the creative energy of love demands. A very curious and interesting possibility follows from this assumption; namely, that by a process which might be called a process of "spiritual vampirizing" the same creative passion which demands satisfaction in the eternalizing of "the idea of the body" actually suffers, by means of its vivid sympathy with living bodies, the very pains and pleasures through which these bodies pass.