The Complex Vision

by John Cowper Powys

Such a fact may crumble to pieces and give place to another. Such an intuition may melt into air under the shock of experience. The craving of the soul is not satisfied by the discovery that "matter" resolves itself into "energy," nor is the misery of the heart assuaged by the theory that time is an attribute of fourth-dimensional space. The lamentable beating of blood-stained hands upon the ultimate walls does not cease when we learn that two straight lines can or cannot meet in infinity; nor does the knowledge that history is an "ideal evolution" heal the aching of the world-sorrow.

Could we know for certain that the dead were raised up, even that knowledge would not reduce to silence the bitter cry of the outraged generations. So poisonous and so deep is the pain of life that no kind of knowledge, not even the knowledge that annihilation must at last, sooner or later, end it all, can really heal it.

But truth is not knowledge. Truth is not the recognition of an external fact. Truth is a creative gesture. It is a ritual, a rhythmic poise, a balance deliberately sustained between eternal contradictions. It is the magical touch which reduces to harmony the quivering vibrations of many opposites. It is the dramatic movement of a supreme actor at the climax of an unfathomable drama. It is music resting upon itself; music so exquisite as to seem like silence, music so passionate as to have become calm.

The apex-thought of that pyramid of conflicting flames which we call the complex vision holds itself together at one concentrated point. And this point is the arrow point of our human soul; that soul which is shot across immensity in the eternal war between life and the opposite of life.

Although for the purpose of emphasizing and elucidating the essential nature of this apex-thought it has been found advisable to use such metaphorical and pictorial images as the one just indicated, it must be remembered that what we are actually and in direct experience confronted with is the mystery of a real human personality inhabiting a real human body.

This real personal soul inhabiting a real objective body and surrounded on all sides by a real unfathomable universe, is the original revelation of the complex vision from which there is no escape except by death.

The philosophy of the complex vision finds its starting point in an acceptance of this situation which is nothing more than an acceptance of the complex vision's own harmonious activity. An acceptance of the reality of the human body is an essential part of this harmonious activity because among the aspects of the complex vision are to be found certain attributes, such as sensation, instinct and imagination, which would be negated and rendered abortive if the human body were an illusion.

If the "starting point" of our philosophy demands recognition of the reality of the body, the "ideal" of our philosophy must have a place for the body also. Flesh and blood must therefore play their part in the resultant harmony at which we are all the while aiming; and no contempt for the body, no hatred of the body, no refusal to recognize the supreme beauty and sacredness of the body, can be allowed to distort or pervert our vision.

The activity of the apex-thought, though we have a right to use any metaphorical image we please about it in order to elucidate its nature, must always be considered as using the bodily senses in its resultant rhythm. It must always be considered as using that portion of the objective universe which we name the body as an inevitable "note" in its musical flight from darkness to darkness. It must always be conceived as following the attraction of an eternal vision, in which "the idea of the body" is an imperishable element.

This "eternal vision," which it is the rhythmic motive of the apex-thought to seek, carries with it the witness and "imprimatur" of the gods; and although no man has ever "beheld" the gods, and although the gods by reason of their omnipresent activity, cannot be thought of as being "incarnated," yet since they are living souls, even as we are, and since every living soul has, as the substratum of its identity, what might be called a "spiritual body," there is nothing in the revelation made to us through the activity of our complex vision to forbid our free and even fanciful speculation as to its use, by the very highest of superhuman personalities, even, let us say, by the Christ himself, of this mysterious energy of the soul which I have named the "apex-thought."