The Complex Vision

by John Cowper Powys

And this reality must, from the conclusions we have already reached, take two forms. It must take the form of a plurality of subjective "universes" answering to the plurality of living souls. And it must take the form of one objective "universe," answering to the objective standard of truth, beauty, and nobility, together with the opposites of these, which is implied in the tacit appeal of all individual souls to their "invisible companions."

In this double reality; the reality of one objective universe identical in its appearance to all souls but dependent for its identity upon an implicit reference to the "invisible companions," and the reality of as many subjective universes as there are living souls; in this double reality there is obviously no place at all for that phantom-world of unconscious "matter," which in the form of soulless elements, or soulless organic automata, fills the human mind with such devastating melancholy.

The dead pond with its dead moonlight, with its dead mud and its dead snow, is therefore no better than a ghastly illusion when considered in isolation from the soul or the souls which look forth from it. To the soul of which those elements are the "body" neither mud nor water nor rain nor earth-mould can appear desolate or dead. To the soul which contemplates these things there can be no other way of regarding them, as long as the rhythm of its vision is unimpeded, than as the outward manifestation of a personal life, or of many personal lives, similar in creative energy to its own.

Between the soul, or the souls, of the elements of the earth, and the soul of the human spectator there must be, if our conclusions are to be held good at all, a natural and profound reciprocity. The apparent "deadness," the apparent automatism of "matter," which projects itself between these two and resists with corpse-like opacity their reciprocal understanding, must be one of the ghastly illusions with which the sinister side of the eternal duality undermines the magic of life.

But although in its objective isolation, as an absolute entity, this "material deadness" of earth and water and rain and snow and of all disintegrated organic chemistry must be regarded as an "illusion," it would be a falsifying of the reality of things to deny that it is an "illusion" to which the visions of all souls are miserably subject. They are for ever subject to it because it is precisely this "illusion" which the unfathomable power hostile to life for ever evokes.

Nor must we for a moment suppose that this material objectivity, this pond, these leaves, this mud, this snow, are altogether unreal. Their reality is demanded by the complex vision and to deny their reality would be the gesture of madness. They are only unreal, they are only an "illusion," when they are considered as existing independently of the "souls" of which they are the "body." As the expression and manifestation of such "souls" they are entirely real. They are indeed, in this sense, as real as our own human body.

The human soul, when it suffers from that malignant power which has its positive and external existence in the soul itself, feels itself to be absolutely alone in the midst of a dark chaotic welter of monstrous elemental forces. In a mood of this kind the thought of the huge volumes of soulless water which we call "oceans" and "seas" crushes us with a devastating melancholy. The thought of the interminable deserts of "dead" sand and the vast polar ice fields and the monstrous excrescences that we call "mountains" have the same effect. But the supreme example of the kind of material ghastliness which I am trying to indicate, is, as may easily be surmised, nothing less than the appalling thought of the unfathomable spatial gulfs through which our whole stellar system moves. Here also, in this supreme insistence of objective "deadness," the situation is relieved when we realize that this unthinkable space is nothing more than the material expression of that indefinable "medium" which holds all souls together.

Moreover we must remember that these stellar gulfs cannot be thought of except as the habitation of innumerable living souls, each one of which is using this very "space" as the ground of its creation of the many-coloured impassioned "universe" which is its own dwelling. In all these instances of "objective deadness," whether great or small, we must not forget that the thing which desolates us and fills us with so intolerable a nostalgia is a thing only half real, a thing whose full reality depends upon the soul which contemplates it and upon the soul's implicit assumption that its truth is the truth of those "invisible companions" who supply us with our perpetually renewed and reconstituted standard of what is "good" and what is "evil."

There is an abominably vivid example of the kind of melancholy I have in my mind, which, although obviously less common to normal human experience than the forms of it I have so far attempted to suggest, is as a rule even more crushing in its cruelty. I refer to the sight of a dead human body; and in a less degree to the sight of a dead animal or a dead plant.

A human corpse laid out in its coffin, or nailed down in its coffin, how exactly does the particular attitude towards life, which for convenience sake I name the philosophy of the complex vision, find itself regarding that? Such a body, deserted by its living soul, is obviously no longer the immediate and integral expression of a personal life. Is it therefore no more than a shred or shard or husk or remnant of inconceivably soulless matter? The gods forbid! Certainly and most assuredly it is more than that.