The Complex Vision

by John Cowper Powys

I will give a concrete example of what I mean. Suppose a man to be seated in the yard of a house with a few patches of grass in front of him and the trunk of a solitary tree. The slanting sunshine, we will suppose, throws the shadows of the leaves of the tree and the shadows of the grass-blades upon a forlorn piece of trodden earth-mould or dusty sand which lies at his feet. Something about the light movement of these shadows and their delicate play upon the ground thrills him with a sudden thrill; and he finds he "loves" this barren piece of earth, these grass-blades, and this tree. He does not only love their outward shape and colour. He loves the "soul" behind them, the "soul" that makes them what they are. He loves the "soul" of the grass, the "soul" of the tree, and that dim, mysterious, far-off "soul" of the planet, of whose "body" this barren patch of earth is a living portion.

What does this "love" of his actually imply? It implies an outflowing of the very stuff and substance of his own towards the thing he loves. It implies, by a mysterious vibration of reciprocity, an indescribable response to his love from the "soul" of the tree, the plant, and the earth. Let an animal enter upon the scene, or a bird, or a windblown butterfly, or a flickering flight of midges or gnats, their small bodies illumined by the sun. These new comers he also loves; and is obscurely conscious that between their "souls" and his own there vibrates a strange reciprocity. Let a human being enter, familiar or unfamiliar, and if his will be set upon "love," the same phenomenon will repeat itself, only with a more conscious interchange.

But what of "malice" all this time? Well! It is not difficult to indicate what "malice" will seek to do. Malice will seek to find its account in some physical or mental annoyance produced in us by each of these living things. This annoyance, this jerk or jolt to our physical or mental well-being, will be what to ourselves we name the "fault" of the offending object.

The shadows will tease us by their incessant movement. The tree will vex us by the swaying of its branches. The grass will present itself to us as an untidy intruder. The barren patch of earth will fill us with a profound depression owing to its desolate lack of life and beauty. The dog will worry us by its fuss, its solicitation, its desire to be petted. The gnats or midges will stir in us an indignant hostility; since their tribe have been known to poison the blood of man. The human invader, above all; how loud and unpleasing his voice is! The eternal malice in the depths of our soul pounces upon this tendency of grass to be "a common weed," of gnats to bite, of dogs to bark, of shadows to flicker, of a man to have an evil temper, of a woman to have an atrocious shrewishness, or an appalling sluttishness; and out of these annoyances or "faults" it feeds its desire; it satisfies its necrophilistic lust; and it rouses in the grass, in the earth, in the tree, in the dog, in the human intruder, strange and mysterious vibrations of response which add to the general poison of the world. But the example I have selected of the activity of emotion may be carried further than this. All these individual "souls" of human, animal, vegetable, planetary embodiment, are confronted by the same objective mystery and surrounded by the same ethereal "medium."

By projecting a vision poisoned by malice into the matrix of the objective mystery, the resultant "universe" becomes itself a poisoned thing, a thing penetrated by the spirit of evil. It is because the universe is always penetrated by the malice of the various visions whose "universe" it is, that we suffer so cruelly from its ironic "diablerie." A universe entirely composed of the bodies and souls of beings whose primordial emotion is so largely made up of malice is naturally a malicious universe. The age-old tradition of the witchery and devilry of malignant Nature is a proof as to how deep this impression of the system of things has sunk. Certain great masters of fiction draw the "motive" of their art from this unhappy truth.

And just as the universe is penetrated through and through by the malice of those whose universe it is, so we may suppose that the ethereal "medium" which surrounds all souls, before they have visioned their various "universes" and found them to be one, is a thing which also may be affected by malice. It is an open question and one which, in the words of Sir Thomas Browne, "admits a wide solution," whether or not this ethereal "medium," which in a sense is of one stuff both with the objective mystery and with the substratum of the soul, is itself the "elemental body," as it were, of a living ubiquitous soul.

If this should be the case—and it is no fantastic hypothesis—we are then provided with an explanation of the curious malignant impishness of those so-called "elementals" who tease, with their enigmatic oracles, the minds of unwise dabblers in "psychic manifestations."

But what we are concerned with noting now is that just as the primordial malice of all the souls it contains continually poisons the universe, so the primordial love of all the souls it contains continually redeems and transforms the universe. In other words it is no exaggeration to say that the unfathomable universe is continually undergoing the same ebb and flow between love and malice, as are the souls and bodies of all the living things whereof it is composed.

And what precisely is the attitude of love towards the physical body? Does it despise the physical body? Does its activity imply an ascetic or a puritanical attitude towards the body and the appetites of the body? The truth is quite the contrary of this. What the revelation of the complex vision indicates is that this loathing of the body, this revulsion against the body, this craving to escape from the body, is a mood which springs up out of the eternal malice. It is from the emotion of love in its attitude to the body that we arrive at the idea of the sacredness of the body and at the idea of what might be called "the eternal reality of the body."

This idea of the eternal reality of the body springs directly from those ideas of truth, beauty and goodness which are pre-existent in the universe and therefore springs directly from that emotion of love which is the synthesis of these.