Mind Parasites [Colin Wilson Pasożyty Umysłu].pdf

Colin Wilson

THE MIND PARASITES

1967

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Release notes:

I found the text on the web in a somewhat messed up state. The main problem was a lot of split

words (almost as many as there are lines in the text), and random paragraphs. But surprisingly few

mistakes. So the main credit goes to an unknown person who scanned it. I read it, corrected along the

way, and checked and divided into paragraphs by an edition in Russian (having no English copy).

Respect goes to oneWon from demonoid for supplying (typing out) the Preface and several

discovered missing pages in the text. So here we may hope to have the book in its entirety and pretty

readable. Yet, to be in the perfect order, it still needs someone possessing an English paper copy to

proofread the text, set the correct paragraphs, italics etc. This gem is definitely worth it!!!

Meanwhile, cheers and enjoy! =)

dustfire , April 2011

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For August Derleth

who suggested it.

PREFACE

The story of how I came to write a 'Lovecract novel' for Arkham House is a curious one. Several

years back--it must have been about 1959--I had stopped at the Dorset farm of an old friend--an

American named Mark Helfer. The setting of this place would have delighted Lovecraft. The small

town of Corfe Castle is little more than a village, with winding streets and an ancient inn that sells

superb beer. The castle itself is an impressive ruin dating back to the eleventh century and from its

ramparts you can look out over the 'wind blasted furze' of Hardy's Egdon Heath. To get to Mark

Helfers's farm, you turn under an ancient bridge, then climb a step and narrow road into the hills. And

finally, on a high exposed hilltop, you reach the grey stone farmhouse, many hundreds of years old,

with its thick walls and tiny windows. Its ceilings are low; the floors are of stone slabs; it has that smell

of age and coldness which is not unpleasant.

And then I lay in a bed at half past eleven at night, the bedside lamp flickering (for the

electricity was produced by a dynamo that thumped away in the distance), pleasantly drunk on

Marks's home made cider. (In England, all cider is alcoholic.) But I felt like reading before I dropped off

to sleep, so I poked around the room for a book. And apart form old bound volumes of Punch and the

Illustrated London News, all I could find was a book called The Outsider and others by H. P. Lovecraft.

The title interested me for a simple reason. Some three years earlier, I had been hurled into

notoriety by the completely unexpected success of my first book, The Outsider , a rather heavy tome

on existential philosophy. It had become an overnight best seller--to the publisher's amazement--and

was translated in sixteen languages within the course of a year. I knew my title was not original. The

Negro writer Richard Wright had written a book of the same title in the early fifties. Camus's

L'Etranger, called The Stranger in America, is translated into English as The Outsider . There are at least

three more novels of the same title. Still, I felt that my use of the word had a certain originality, for

before my book, an outsider had simply meant somebody who didn't belong. ('We can't have that

bounder in the club. He's a demned outsidah.')

I opened the Lovecraft book--I'd never heard his name before. It was an old, black-bound

edition, printed in the late months of 1939, and it was on crumbling yellow paper that smelt musty.

And before falling asleep I read The Outsider , the Rats in the Walls, and In the Vault, the story about

the mortuary keeper who chop off the corpse's feet to make it fit the coffin.

I knew immediately that I had discovered a writer of some importance. So the next morning,

when I left, I borrowed the book. And driving back towards my home in Cornwall, I brooded on the

question of the horror story, and the type of imagination that produces it. I brooded to such good

purpose that as soon as I got home, I began to write a book called The Strength to Dream , in which

Lovecraft figures largely.

I must confess that my estimate of Lovecraft would not have pleased his most ardent admirers.

The view I expressed in that book was that, while Lovecraft was distinctly a creative genius in his own

way, his pessimism should not be taken too seriously: that it was the pessimism of a sick recluse and

had about an element of rassentiment , a kind of desire to take revenge on a world that rejected him.

In short, Lovecraft was a 19th century romantic, born in the wrong time. Most men of genius dislike

their own age, but the really great ones impose their own vision on the age. The weak ones turn away

into a world of gloomy fantasy.

Well, the book appeared in England in 1961, and I thought I had done with Lovecraft. But later

that year, I found myself in Providence, lecturing at Brown University. There I met the Blake scholar

Foster Damon, who looks and sounds like Mark Twain, and he showed me the house where Poe had

lived and told me of legends that still survived. But here, in this town of clapboard houses, with its

streets ankle-deep in leaves, my imagination was haunted by anther writer-- Lovecraft. I found that

his stories now returned to mind a dozen times a day. I went and looked at the house in which

Lovecraft had lived; I spent hours in the university library reading Lovecraft's letters in manuscript,

and a thesis that somebody had written on his life and work. Here I read for the first time The Case of

Charles Dexter Ward and The Shadow Over Innsmouth. And I had to admit that there was something

about Lovecraft that makes him very hard to dismiss. In many ways, I found him more impressive than

Poe. Poe's imagination was simply obsessed by death. In some ways his most typical story is The

Premature Burial , which is the kind of nightmare that might occur to any of us. Basically, Poe is a

gentle romantic, a lover of beautiful pale women and ancient Gothic mansions set among wooded

hills. Lovecraft is not so concerned with death as with terror. Poe is pre-Dracula; Lovecraft is very

much post-Dracula. Poe's world is the world we all live in, seen through eyes that were always aware

of 'the skull beneath the skin'. Lovecraft's world is a creation of his own, as unique and nightmarish as

that of Hieronymus Bosch or Fuseli.

I found the address of Arkham House in a bookseller's catalogue, and wrote to enquire what

books of Lovecraft were still available. The result was a friendly letter back from August Derleth who

knew my work. As a result of some of Derleth's comments, I made several alterations of the Lovecraft

sections in the American edition of The Strength to Dream (although he still considered it unfair to

Lovecraft). And at some point in our correspondence, Derleth said: 'Well, if you're so critical about

Lovecraft, why don't your write a fantasy novel, and see whether it's any good. . .'

For a long time, it was only an idea floating in the back of my mind. Whenever I thought about

it, I always came up against the same problem--a problem that has also given some trouble to Derleth,

Robert Bloch, Donald Wandrei, and various other writers in the HPL tradition. It is this. You begin your

story with the old house or farm or whatever it is, and its queer goings-on. Then the narrator goes to

investigate. Then Something Awful Happens--a rotting corpse knocks on the front door, a monster

with tentacles on its belly tears down the wall, etc. This is inevitably the climax of the story, and it is

hard to think up something that really terrifies you enough to make you terrify the reader.

And then one day, when writing a chapter on phenomenology in a book about my own kind of

existentialism, I saw the solution-- monsters inside the mind. . . . The result is my first fantasy novel--

and probably the only one I shall ever write.

* * *

But to return to Lovecraft, I am now willing to admit that my assessment of his in The Strength

to Dream was unduly harsh. But I am still no nearer to understanding why Lovecraft exercises such a

curious hold upon my imagination, when the work of Arthur Machen, for example, strikes me as only

mildly interesting.

I suppose what makes Lovecraft both good and bad is the fact that he was an obsessed writer.

And this is also the reason that so few of the works in the Lovecraft tradition have touched the same

level of imaginative power. August Derleth or Robert Bloch can capture the Arkham atmosphere and

style excellently, but it doesn't express their true centre of gravity as writers. Bloch is really himself in

the all-too-possible horrors of Psycho , with its motel rooms and atmosphere of realistic nastiness such

as you might find in the pages of any True Detective magazine. As to Derleth, his finest work is in a

sphere far removed from horror of fantasy--books about everyday life in Sac Prairie, about the

changes of season, the animals and birds. (His work reminds me in many ways of that of a much

underrated English novelist, Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter, as well as of that strange

nature mystic, Richard Jefferies.) He is a writer in the great American tradition of Thoreau and

Whitman--even, to some extent, of Sinclair Lewis.

This explains why Lovecraft has remained unique, in spite of the number of writers who have

been fascinated by his mythical world and by his style. He created the Cthulhu Mythos out of inner

necessity.

* * *

All of this amounts to admitting that Lovecraft possessed genius. And it is this, I think, that

makes him basically a tragic figure. It also links him with my own 'Outsider' thesis, and with the

present novel.

My stating point in The Outsider was that, round about the year 1800, a strange change come

over the human race--or over an important part of it. Quite suddenly, there appeared a new sort of

man --romantic man. In the days of ancient Greeks, romantic man would have been regarded as

wicked and dangerous. Because some deep instinct tells him that man is not a mere insect, a

'creature', but is, in some important sense, a god. The Greeks called this sin hubris , and it was

punishable by madness and death. And that is why the fate of so many of the romantics would have

confirmed the Greeks in their view that these men were wicked and dangerous. When you come to

think of it, the list of men of genius who died insane, or in accidents, or of tuberculosis, or committed

suicide, is terrifying and impressive. Shelley, Keats, Poe, Beddoes, Holderlin, Hoffmann, Schiller, Kleist,

Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Lautreamont, Dowson, Johnson, Francis Thompson, James

Thomson . . . the list could be extended for pages. And these are only some of the famous ones. How

about all the would-be poets and artists who never made the grade and died quietly in some dirty

lodging house?

Now all romantics have one thing in common. They are like those Greek sailors who heard the

Syren's song, and prefer to fling themselves overboard rather than return to the dull world of

everyday existence. Or like the lame child in the Pied Piper who describes how, when the Piper

played, he heard a 'joyous land', 'where everything was strange and new', and who now spends the

rest of life mourning for the lost vision. Most people seem contented to plod through commonplace

lives; the romantic has glimpsed something beyond the commonplace. All romanticism is summed up

in the great sentence of Axel (in the play by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam), 'As for living, our servants will do

that for us'.

There is a great novel by the British writer L. H. Myers (who committed suicide in the 1940's)

called The Near and the Far , and its opening chapter has the perfect symbol of the romantic longing. It

takes place in India in the 16th century, and opens with the young Prince Jali standing on the tip of a

palace, looking out across the desert--over which he reflects that there are two deserts; one is glory

to the eye; the other is agony to the feet as you plod across it. And the two deserts never come

together; if Jali goes out of the palace, seeking the desert that is so beautiful to the eye, he will

encounter the other desert, the one that is a weariness to the trudge. The near and far . . . this is the

basic problem of the romantics. As Yeats one said:

'Nothing that we love overmuch

is ponderable to the touch'

This is why romantics find the real world so dreary and unpleasant. Sometimes they loathe this

real world so much that their work becomes a paean of blasphemy, like the work of De Sade or

Lautremont.

It is a story that is repeated over and over again. I am acquainted with the author of one of the

finest supernatural novels ever written: E. H. Visiak--on old man now approaching his nineties. His

Medusa is a novel of such strange power that it haunts the mind for years after one has read it. A few

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