The Complex Vision

by John Cowper Powys

An isolated heterogeneous mass of dead chemistry is a monstrous illusion which only exists for us when the weakness of our creative energy and the power of the original malice in the soul destroys our vision. This dead body lying in its wooden coffin is certainly possessed of no more life than the inanimate boards of the coffin in which it lies. But the inanimate boards of the coffin, together with the inanimate furniture of the house or room that contains it, and the bricks and stones and mortar of such a house, are themselves nothing less than inevitable portions of the vast earth-body of our planetary globe.

And this planetary globe, this earth upon which we live, cannot under any conceivable kind of reasoning to which imagination has contributed its share, be regarded as a dead or a soulless thing. In its isolated integrity, as a separate integral personality, the soul has deserted the body and left it "dead." But it is only "dead" when considered in isolation from the surrounding chemistry of planetary life. And to consider it in this way is to consider it falsely. For from the moment it ceases to be the expression of the life of an individual human soul, it becomes the expression—through every single phase of its chemical dissolution—of the life of the planet.

In so far as the human soul, which has deserted it, is concerned it is assuredly no better than a dead husk; but in so far as the soul of the planet is concerned it is an essential portion of that planet's living body and in this sense is not dead at all.

Its chemical elements, as they resolve themselves slowly back into their planetary accomplices, are part and parcel of that general "body of the earth" which is in a state of constant movement, and which has the "soul of the earth" as its animating principle of personality. And just as the human corpse, when the soul has deserted it, becomes a portion of those chemical elements which are the body of the planet's "personal soul," so do the dead bodies of animals and plants and trees become portions of the same terrestrial bodies.

Thus strictly speaking there is no single moment when any material form or body can be called "dead." Instantaneously with the departure of its own individual soul it is at once "possessed" by the soul of that planetary globe from whose chemistry it drew its elemental life and from whose chemistry, although the form of it has changed, it still draws its life. For it is no fantastic speculation to affirm that every living thing whether human or otherwise plays, while it lives, a triple part upon the world stage.

It is in the first place the vehicle of the individual soul. It is in the second place the medium of the "spiritual vampirizing" of the invisible planetary spirits. And it is in the third place a living portion of that organic elemental chemistry which is the body of the terrestrial soul. Thus it becomes manifest that that "illusion of dead matter" which fills the human soul with so profound a melancholy is no more than an everlasting trick of the malice of the abyss.

And the despair which sometimes results from it is a despair which issues from no "dead matter" but from the terrible living depths of the soul itself. It is from a consideration of the especial kind of melancholy evoked in us by the illusion of "objective deadness" that we are enabled to analyse those peculiar imaginative feelings which sometime or another affect us all. I refer to the extraordinary tenacity with which we cling to our bodily form, however grotesque it may be, and the difficulty we experience in disassociating our living soul from its particular envelope or habitation; and the tendency which we have, in spite of this, to imagine ourselves transferred to an alien body. For the soul in us has the power of "thinking itself" into any other body it may please to select.

And there is no reason why we should be alarmed at such an imaginative power; or even associate its fantastic realization with any terror of madness. The invisible entity within us which says "I am I" can easily be conceived as suddenly awakening out of sleep and discovering, to its astonishment, that its visible body has suffered a bewildering transformation.

Such a transformation can be conceived as almost unlimited in its humorous and disconcerting possibilities. But no such transformation of the external envelope of the soul, whether into the form of an animal or a plant or a god, need be conceived of as necessarily driving us into insanity. The "I am I" would remain the same in regard to its imagination, instinct, intuition, emotion, self-consciousness and the rest. It would be only "changed" in regard to sensation, which is a thing immediately dependent upon the particular and special senses of the human body.

This is a truth to the reality of which the wandering fancies of every human child bear ample witness; not to speak of the dreams of those childlike tribes of the race, who in our progressive insolence we are pleased to name "uncivilized." The deeper we dig into the tissue of convoluted impressions that make up our universe the more vividly do we become aware that our only redemption from sheer insanity lies in "knowing ourselves"; in other words, in keeping a drastic and desperate hold upon what, in the midst of ambiguity and treachery, we are definitely assured of.