Bastian Balthazar Bux's passion was books ...

 Human passions have mysterious ways, in children as well as grown-ups. Those affected by them can't explain them, and those who haven't known them have no understanding of them at all. Some people risk their lives to conquer a mountain peak. No one, not even they themselves, can really explain why. Others ruin themselves trying to win the heart of a certain person who wants nothing to do with them. Still others are destroyed by their devotion to the pleasures of the table. Some are so bent on winning a game of chance that they lose everything they own, and some sacrifice every thing for a dream that can never come true. Some think their only hope of happiness lies in being somewhere else, and spend their whole lives traveling from place to place. And some find no rest until they have become powerful. In short, there are as many different passions as there are people. Bastian Balthazar Bux's passion was books. 

If you have never spent whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair, for getting the world aroundyou over a book, forgetting cold and hunger -If you have never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early — 

If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless - 

If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastian did next. 

(...)

Atreyu thought a while. Then he asked:. 'That big stone gate with the sphinxes. Is that the entrance?' 

'That's better,' said Engywook. 'Now we'll get somewhere. Yes, that gate is the entrance, but then come two more gates. And Uyulala's home is behind the third - if one can speak of her having a home.' 

'Have you yourself ever been with her?' 

'Don't be absurd!' replied Engywook, again somewhat nettled. 'I am a scientist. I have collected and collated the statements of all the individuals who have been there. The ones who have come back, that is. Very important work. I can't afford to take personal risks. It could interfere with my work.' 

'I see,' said Atreyu. 'Now what about these three gates?' 

Engywook stood up, folded his hands behind his back, and paced. 

'The first,' he lectured, 'is known as the Great Riddle Gate; the second is the Magic Mirror Gate; and the third is the No-Key Gate...' 

'Strange,' Atreyu broke in. 'As far as I could see, there was nothing behind that stone gate but an empty plain. Where are the other gates?' 

'Be still!' Engywook scolded. 'How can I make myself clear if you keep interrupting? It's very complicated: The second gate isn't there until a person has gone through the first. And the third isn't there until the person has the second behind him. And Uyulala isn't there until he has passed through the third. Simply not there. Do you understand?' 

Atreyu nodded, but preferred to say nothing for fear of irritating the gnome. 

'Through my telescope you have seen the first, the Great Riddle Gate. And the two sphinxes. That gate is always open. Obviously. There's nothing to close. But even so, no one can get through' -here Engywook raised a tiny forefinger - 'unless the sphinxes close their eyes. And do you know why? The gaze of a sphinx is different from the gaze of any other creature. You and I and everyone else — our eyes take something in. We see the world. A sphinx sees nothing. In a sense she is blind. But her eyes send something out. And what do her eyes send out? All the riddles of the universe. That's why these sphinxes are always looking at each other. Because only another sphinx can stand a sphinx's gaze. So try to imagine what happens to one who ventures into the area where those two gazes meet. He freezes to the spot, unable to move until he has solved all the riddles of the world. If you go there, you'll find the remains of those poor devils.' 

'But,' said Atreyu, 'didn't you say that their eyes sometimes close? Don't they have to sleep now and then?' 

'Sleep?' Engywook was shaken with giggles. 'Goodness gracious! A sphinx sleep? I should say not. You really are an innocent. Still, there's some point to your question. All my research, in fact, hinges on that particular point. The sphinxes shut their eyes for some travelers and let them through. The question that no one has answered up until now is this: Why one traveler and not another? Because you mustn't suppose they let wise, brave, or good people through, and keep the stupid, cowardly, and wicked out. Not a bit of it! With my own eyes I've seen them admit stupid fools and treacherous knaves, while decent, sensible people have given up after being kept waiting for months. And it seems to make no difference whether a person has some serious reason for consulting the Oracle, or whether he's just come for the fun of it.' 

'Haven't your investigations suggested some explanation?' Atreyu asked. 

Angry flashes darted from Engywook's eyes. 'Have you been listening or haven't you? Didn't I just say that so far no one has answered that question? Of course, I've worked up a few theories over the years. At first I thought the sphinxes' judgment might be guided by certain physical characteristics - size, beauty, strength, and so on. But I soon had to drop that idea. Then I toyed with numerical patterns. The idea, for instance, that three out of five were regularly excluded, or that only prime-numbered candidates were admitted. That worked pretty well for the past, but for forecasting it was no use at all. Since then I've come to the conclusion that the sphinxes' decision is based on pure chance and that no principle whatever is involved. But my wife calls my conclusion scandalous, un-Fantastican, and absolutely unscientific.' 

'Are you starting your old nonsense again?' came Urgl's angry voice from the cave. 'Shame on you! Such skepticism only shows that the bit of brain you once had has dried up on you.' 

'Hear that?' said Engywook with a sigh. 'And the worst of it is that she's right.' 

'What about the Childlike Empress's amulet?' Atreyu asked. 'Do you think they'll respect it? They too are natives of Fantastica, after all.' 

'Yes, I suppose they are,' said Engywook, shaking his apple-sized head. 'But to respect it they'd have to see it. And they don't see anything. But their gaze would strike you. And I'm not so sure the sphinxes would obey the Childlike Empress. Maybe they are greater than she is. I don't know, I don't know. Anyway, it's most worrisome.' 

'Then what do you advise?' Atreyu asked. 

'You will have to do what all the others have done. Wait and see what the sphinxes decide - without hoping to know why.' 

Atreyu nodded thoughtfully. 

Urgl came out of the cave. In one hand she held a bucket with some steaming liquid in it, and under her other arm she was carrying a bundle of dried plants. Muttering to herself, she went to the luckdragon, who was still lying motionless, fast asleep. She started climbing around on him and changing the dressings on his wounds. Her enormous patient heaved one contented sigh and stretched; otherwise he seemed unaware of her ministrations. 

'Couldn't you make yourself a little useful?' she said to Engywook as she was hurrying back to the kitchen, 'instead of sitting around like this, talking rubbish?' 

I am making myself extremely useful,' her husband called after her. 'Possibly more useful than you, but that's more than a simple-minded woman like you will ever understand!' 

Turning to Atreyu, he went on: 'She can only think of practical matters. She has no feeling for the great overarching ideas.' 

The clock in the belfry struck three. 

By now Bastian's father must have noticed - if he was ever going to — that Bastian hadn't come home. Would he worry? Maybe he'd go looking for him. Maybe he had already notified the police. Maybe calls had gone out over the radio. Bastian felt a sick pain in the pit of his stomach. 

But if the police had been notified, where would they look for him? Could they possibly come to this attic? 

Had he locked the door when he came back from the toilet? He couldn't remember. He got up and checked. Yes, the door was locked and bolted. 

Outside, the November afternoon was drawing to a close. Ever so slowly the light was failing. 

To steady his nerves, Bastian paced the floor for a while. Looking about him, he discovered quite a few things one wouldn't have expected to find in a school. For instance, a battered old Victrola with a big horn attached -God only knew when and by whom it had been brought here. In one corner there were some paintings in ornate gilt frames. They were so faded that hardly anything could be made out - only here and there a pale, solemn-looking face that shimmered against a dark background. And then there was a rusty, seven-armed candelabrum, still holding the stumps of thick wax candles, bearded with drippings. 

Bastian gave a sudden start, for looking into a dark corner he saw someone moving. But when he looked again, it dawned on him that he had only seen himself, reflected in a large mirror that had lost half its silvering. He went closer and looked at himself for a while. He was really nothing much to look at, with his pudgy build and his bowlegs and pasty face. He shook his head and said aloud: 'No!' 

Then he went back to his mats. By then it was so dark that he had to hold the book up to his eyes. 

'Where were we?' Engywook asked. 'At the Great Riddle Gate,' Atreyu reminded him. 'Right. Now suppose you've managed to get through. Then -and only then - the second gate will be there for you. The Magic Mirror Gate. As I've said, I myself have not been able to observe it, what I tell you has been gleaned from travelers' accounts. This second gate is both open and closed. Sounds crazy, doesn't it? It might be better to say: neither closed nor open. Though that doesn't make it any less crazy. The point is that this gate seems to be a big mirror or something of the kind, though it's made neither of glass nor of metal. What it is made of, no one has ever been able to tell me. Anyway, when you stand before it, you see yourself. But not as you would in an ordinary mirror. You don't see your outward appearance; what you see is your real innermost nature. If you want to go through, you have to - in a manner of speaking - go into yourself.' 

'Well,' said Atreyu. 'It seems to me that this Magic Mirror Gate is easier to get through than the first.' 

'Wrong!' cried Engywook. Once again he began to trot back and forth in agitation. 'Dead wrong, my friend! I've known travelers who considered themselves absolutely blameless to yelp with horror and run away at the sight of the monster grinning out of the mirror at them. We had to care for some of them for weeks before they were even able to start home.' 

'We!' growled Urgl, who was passing with another bucket. T keep hearing "we". When did I ever take care of anybody?' 

Engywook waved her away. 

'Others,' he went on lecturing, 'appear to have seen something even more horrible, but had the courage to go through. What some saw was not so frightening, but it still cost every one of them an inner struggle. Nothing I can say would apply to all. It's a different experience each time.' 

'Good,' said Atreyu. 'Then at least it's possible to go through this Magic Mirror Gate?' 

'Oh yes, of course it's possible, or it wouldn't be a gate. Where's your logic, my boy?' 

'But it's also possible to go around it,' said Atreyu. 'Or isn't it?' 

'Yes indeed,' said Engywook. 'Of course it is. But if you do that, there's nothing more behind it. The third gate isn't there until you've gone through the second. How often do I have to tell you that?' 

'I understand. But what about this third gate?' 

'That's where things get really difficult! Because, you see, the No-Key Gate is closed. Simply closed. And that's that! There's no handle and no doorknob and no keyhole. Nothing. My theory is that this single, hermetically closed door is made of Fantastican selenium. You may know that there's no way of destroying, bending or dissolving Fantastican selenium. It's absolutely indestructible.' 

'Then there's no way of getting through?' 

'Not so fast. Not so fast, my boy. Certain individuals have got through and spoken with Uyulala. So the door can be opened.' 

'But how?' 

'Just listen. Fantastican selenium reacts to our will. It's our will that makes it unyielding. But if someone succeeds in forgetting all purpose, in wanting nothing at all - to him the gate will open of its own accord.' 

Atreyu looked down and said in an undertone: 'If that's the case - how can I possibly get through? How can I manage not to want to get through?' 

Engywook sighed and nodded, nodded and sighed. 

'Just what I've been saying. The No-Key Gate is the hardest.' 

'But if I succeed after all,' Atreyu asked, 'will I then be in the Southern Oracle?' 

'Yes,' said the gnome. 

'But who or what is Uyulala?' 

'No idea,' said the gnome, and his eyes sparkled with fury. 'None of those who have reached her has been willing to tell me. How can I be expected to complete my scientific work if everyone cloaks himself in mysterious silence? I could tear my hair out - if I had any left. If you reach her, Atreyu, will you tell me? Will you? One of these days my thirst for knowledge will be the death of me, and no one, no one is willing to help. I beg you, promise you'll tell me.' 

Atreyu stood up and looked at the Great Riddle Gate, which lay bathed in moonlight. 

'I can't promise that, Engywook,' he said softly, 'though I'd be glad to show my gratitude. But if no one has told you who or what Uyulala is, there must be a reason. And before I know what that reason is, I can't decide whether someone who hasn't seen her with his own eyes has a right to know.' 

'In that case, get away from me!' screamed the gnome, his eyes literally spewing sparks. 'All I get is ingratitude! All my life I wear myself out trying to reveal a secret of universal interest. And no one helps me. I should never have bothered with you.' 

With that he ran into the little cave, and a door could be heard slamming within. 

Urgl passed Atreyu and said with a titter: 'The old fool means no harm. But he's always running into such disappointments with this ridiculous investigation of his. He wants to go down in history as the one who has solved the great riddle. The world-famous gnome Engywook. You mustn't mind him.' 

'Of course not,' said Atreyu. 'Just tell him I thank him with all my heart for what he has done for me. And I thank you too. If it's allowed, I will tell him the secret - if I come back.' 

'Then you're leaving us?' Urgl asked. 

'I have to,' said Atreyu. 'There's no time to be lost. Now I shall go to the Oracle. Farewell! And in the meantime take good care of Falkor, the luckdragon.' 

With that he turned away and strode toward the Great Riddle Gate. 

Urgl watched the erect figure with the blowing cloak vanish among the rocks and ran after him, crying: 'Lots of luck, Atreyu!' 

But she didn't know whether he had heard or not. As she waddled back to her little cave, she muttered to herself: 'He'll need it all right - he'll need lots of luck.' 

Atreyu was now within fifty feet of the great stone gate. It was much larger than he had judged from a distance. Behind it lay a deserted plain. There was nothing to stop the eye, and Atreyu's gaze seemed to plunge into an abyss of emptiness. In front of the gate and between the two pillars Atreyu saw only innumerable skulls and skeletons - all that was left of the varied species of Fantasticans who had tried to pass through the gate but had been frozen forever by the gaze of the sphinxes. 

But it wasn't these gruesome reminders that stopped Atreyu. What stopped him was the sight of the sphinxes. 

He had been through a good deal in the course of the Great Quest - he had seen beautiful things and horrible things - but up until now he had not known that one and the same creature can be both, that beauty can be terrifying. 

The two monsters were bathed in moonlight, and as Atreyu approached them, they seemed to grow beyond measure. Their heads seemed to touch the moon, and their expression as they looked at each other seemed to change with every step he took. Currents of a terrible, unknown force flashed through the upraised bodies and still more through the almost human faces. It was as though these beings did not merely exist, in the way marble for instance exists, but as if they were on the verge of vanishing, but would recreate themselves at the same time. For that very reason they seemed far more real than anything made of stone. 

Fear gripped Atreyu. 

Fear not so much of the danger that threatened him as of something above and beyond his own self. It hardly grazed his mind that if the sphinxes' gaze should strike him he would freeze to the spot forever. No, what made his steps heavier and heavier, until he felt as though he were made of cold gray lead, was fear of the unfathomable, of something intolerably vast. 

Yet he went on. He stopped looking up. He kept his head bowed and walked very slowly, foot by foot, towards the stone gate. Heavier and heavier grew his burden of fear. He thought it would crush him, but still he went on. He didn't know whether the sphinxes had closed their eyes or not. Would he be admitted? Or would this be the end of his Great Quest? He had no time to lose in worrying. He just had to take his chances. 

At a certain point he felt sure that he had not enough will power left to carry him a single step forward. And just then he heard the echo of his footfalls within the great vaulted gate. Instantly every last shred of fear fell from him, and he knew that whatever might happen he would never again be afraid. 

Looking up, he saw that the Great Riddle Gate lay behind him. The sphinxes had let him through. 

Up ahead, no more than twenty paces away, where previously there had been nothing but the great empty plain, he saw the Magic Mirror Gate. This gate was large and round like a second moon (for the real moon was still shining high in the sky) and it glittered like polished silver. It was hard to imagine how anyone could pass through a metal surface, but Atreyu didn't hesitate for a moment. After what Engywook had said, he expected a terrifying image of himself to come toward him out of the mirror, but now that he had left all fear behind him, he hardly gave the matter a thought. 

What he saw was something quite unexpected, which wasn't the least bit terrifying, but which baffled him completely. He saw a fat little boy with a pale face - a boy his own age - and this little boy was sitting on a pile of mats, reading a book. The little boy had large, sad-looking eyes, and he was wrapped in frayed gray blankets. Behind him a few motionless animals could be distinguished in the half-light - an eagle, an owl, and a fox - and farther off there was something that looked like a white skeleton. He couldn't make out exactly what it was. 

Bastian gave a start when he realized what he had just read. Why, that was him! The description was right in every detail. The book trembled in his hands. This was going too far. How could there be something in a book that applied only to this particular moment and, only to him? It could only be a crazy accident. But a very remarkable accident. 

'Bastian,' he said aloud, 'you really are a screwball. Pull your self together.' 

He had meant to say this very sternly, but his voice quavered a little, for he was not quite sure that what had happened was an accident. 

Just imagine, he thought. What if they've really heard of me in Fantastical Wouldn't that be wonderful? 

But he didn't dare say it aloud. 

A faint smile of astonishment played over Atreyu's lips as he passed into the mirror image - he was rather surprised that he was succeeding so easily in something that others had found insuperably difficult. But on the way through he felt a strange, prickly shudder. He had no suspicion of what had really happened to him. 

For when he emerged on the far side of the Magic Mirror Gate, he had lost all memory of himself, of his past life, aims, and purposes. He had forgotten the Great Quest that had brought him there, and he didn't even know his own name. He was like a newborn child. 

Up ahead of him, only a few steps away, he saw the No-Key Gate, but he had forgotten its name and forgotten that his purpose in passing through it was to reach the Southern Oracle. He had no idea why he was there or what he was supposed to do. He felt light and cheerful and he laughed for no reason, for the sheer pleasure of it. 

The gate he saw before him was as small and low as a common door and stood all by itself- with no walls around it - on the empty plain. And this door was closed. 

Atreyu looked at it for a while. It seemed to be made of some material with a coppery sheen. It was nice to look at, but Atreyu soon lost interest. He went around the gate and examined it from behind, but the back looked no different than the front. And there was neither handle nor knob nor keyhole. Obviously this door could not be opened, and anyway why would anyone want to open it, since it led nowhere and was just standing there. For behind the gate there was only the wide, flat, empty plain. 

Atreyu felt like leaving. He turned back, went around the Magic Mirror Gate, and looked at it for some time without realizing what it was. He decided to go away, 

' Mo, no, don't go away,' said Bastian aloud. ' Turn around. You haw to go through the No-Key Gate!' 

but then turned back to the No-Key Gate. He wanted to look at its coppery sheen again. Once more, he stood in front of the gate, bending his head to the left, bending it to the right, enjoying himself. Tenderly he stroked the strange material. It felt warm and almost alive. And the door opened by a crack. 

Atreyu stuck his head through, and then he saw something he hadn't seen on the other side when he had walked around the gate. He pulled his head back, looked past the gate, and saw only the empty plain. He looked again through the crack in the door and saw a long corridor formed by innumerable huge columns. And farther off there were stairs and more pillars and terraces and more stairs and a whole forest of columns. But none of these columns supported a roof. For above them Atreyu could see the night sky. 

He passed through the gate and looked around him with wonderment. The door closed behind him. 

The clock in the belfry struck four. 

Little by little, the murky light was failing. It was getting too dark to read by. Bastian put the book down. 

What was he to do now? 

There was bound to be electric light in this attic. He groped his way to the door and ran his hand along the wall, but couldn't find a switch. He looked on the opposite side, and again there was none. 

He took a box of matches from his trouser pocket (he always had matches on him, for he had a weakness for making little fires], but they were damp and the first three wouldn't light. In the faint glow of the fourth he tried to locate a light switch, but there wasn't any. The thought of having to spend the whole evening and night here in total darkness gave him the cold shivers. He was no baby, and at home_or in any other familiar place he had no fear of the dark, but this enormous attic with all these weird things in it was something else again. 

The match burned his fingers and he threw it away. 

For a while he just stood there and listened. The rain had let up and now he could barely hear the drumming on the big tin roof. 

Then he remembered the rusty, seven-armed candelabrum he had seen. He groped his way across the room, found the candelabrum, and dragged it to his pile of mats. 

He lit the wicks in the thick stubs — all seven — and a golden light spread. The flames crackled faintly and wavered now and then in the draft. 

With a sigh of relief , Bastian picked up the book.

Neverending Story 

Michael Ende

Postmodern Antiques: Patience (After Sebald)

 

The first time I saw Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker – when it was broadcast by Channel 4 in the early 1980s – I was immediately reminded of the Suffolk landscapes where I had holidayed as a child. The overgrown pill boxes, the squat Martello towers, the rusting groynes which resembled gravestones: this all added up to a readymade science fiction scene. At one point in Grant Gee’s Patience (After Sebald) (2011) – an essay film inspired by W G Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn – theatre director Katie Williams makes the same connection, drawing a comparison between the demilitarised expanses of the Suffolk coast and Tarkovsky’s Zone.

When I read Rings of Saturn, I was hoping that it would be an exploration of these eerily numinous spaces. Yet what I found was something rather different: a book that, it seemed to me at least, morosely trudged through the Suffolk spaces without really looking at them; that offered a Mittel–brow miserabilism, a stock disdain, in which the human settlements are routinely dismissed as shabby and the inhuman spaces are oppressive. The landscape in The Rings of Saturn functions as a thin conceit, the places operating as triggers for a literary ramble which reads less like a travelogue than a librarian’s listless daydream. Instead of engaging with previous literary encounters with the Suffolk – Henry James went on a walking tour of the county; his namesake MR James set two of his most atmospheric ghost stories there – Sebald tends to reach for the likes of Borges. My scepticism was fed by the solemn cult that settled around Sebald suspiciously quickly, and which seemed all-too-ready to admire those well-wrought sentences. Sebald offered a rather easy difficulty, an anachronistic, antiqued model of ‘good literature’ which acted as if many of the developments in 20th century experimental fiction and popular culture had never happened. It is not hard to see why a German writer would want to blank out the middle part of the 20th century; and many of the formal anachronisms of Sebald’s writing – its strange sense that this is the 21st century seen through the restrained yet ornate prose of an early 20th century essayist – perhaps arise from this desire, just as the novels themselves are about the various, ultimately failed, ruses – conscious and unconscious – that damaged psyches deploy to erase traumas and construct new identities. The writer Robert Macfarlane has called Sebald a ‘postmodern antiquarian’, and the indeterminate status of The Rings of Saturn – is it autobiography, a novel or a travelogue? – points to a certain playfulness, but this never emerges at the level of the book’s content. It was necessary for Sebald to remain po-faced in order for the ‘antiquing’ to be successful. Some of Gee’s images of Suffolk take their cue from the black and white photographs which illustrate The Rings Of Saturn. But the photographs were a contrivance: Sebald would photocopy them many times until they achieved the required graininess.

Gee’s film was premiered as part of a weekend of events superbly curated by Gareth Evans of Artevents under the rubric After Sebald: Place and Re-Enchantment at Snape Maltings, near Aldeburgh, in Suffolk. In the end, however, Sebald’s novels fits into any discussion of place and enchantment only very awkwardly: his work is more about displacement and disenchantment than their opposites. In Patience (After Sebald), the artist Tacita Dean observes that only children have a real sense of home. Adults are always aware of the precariousness and transitoriness of their dwelling place: none more so than Sebald, a German writer who spent most of his life in Norfolk.

Patience (After Sebald) follows Gee’s documentaries about Radiohead and Joy Division. The shift from rock to literature, Gee told Macfarlane, was one that came naturally to someone whose sensibilities were formed by the UK music culture of the 1970s. If Sebald had been writing in the 1970s, Gee claimed, he would surely have been mentioned in the NME alongside other luminaries of avant-garde literature. Gee started reading Sebald in 2004, after a recommendation from his friend, the novelist Jeff Noon. The film’s somewhat gnomic title was a relic of an earlier version of what the film would be. It now suggests the slowing of time that the Suffolk landscape imposes, a release from urban urgencies, but it is actually a reference to a passage in Sebald’s novel Austerlitz: ‘Austerlitz told me that he sometimes sat here for hours, laying out these photographs or others from his collection the wrong way up, as if playing a game of patience, and that then one by one, he turned them over, always with a new sense of surprise at what he saw, pushing the pictures back and forth and over each other, arranging them in an order depending on their family resemblances, or withdrawing them from the game until either there was nothing left but the grey tabletop, or he felt exhausted from the constant effort of thinking and remembering and had to rest on the ottoman.’

Gee had originally intended to make a film about the non-places in Sebald’s work: the hotel rooms or railway station waiting rooms in which characters ruminate, converse or break down (Austerlitz himself comes to a shattering revelation about his own identity in the waiting room at Liverpool Street station). In the end, however, Gee was drawn to the book which – osten-sibly at least – is most focused on a single landscape.

Gee filmed practically everything himself, using a converted 16 mm Bolex camera. He wanted something that would produce frames that were ‘tighter than normal’, he said, ‘as if a single character is looking’. Gee sees Patience (After Sebald) as an essay film, in the tradition of Chris Petit’s work and Patrick Keiller’s Robinson trilogy. But when I put it to him that Patience lacks the single voice that defines Petit or Keiller’s essay films, Gee responded self-deprecatingly. He had tried to insert himself into his own films, but he had always been dissatisfied with the results: his voice didn’t sound right; his acting didn’t convince; his writing wasn’t strong enough. In Patience, as in the Joy Division documentary, the story is therefore told by others: Macfarlane, Dean, Iain Sinclair, Petit, the literary critic Marina Warner and the artist Jeremy Millar. Millar provided one of the most uncanny images in Patience. When he lit a firework in tribute to Sebald, the smoke unexpectedly formed a shape which resembled Sebald’s face, something which Gee underlines in the film by animating a transition between Millar’s photograph and an image of the novelist.

More than one of the speakers at the Towards Re-Enchantment symposium acknowledged that they misremem-bered The Rings of Saturn. There’s something fitting about this, of course, given that the duplicity of memory might have been Sebald’s major theme; but my suspicion is that misremembering of a different kind contributes to the Rings of Saturn cult; that the book induces its readers to hallucinate a text that is not there, but which meets their desires – for a kind of modernist travelogue, a novel that would do justice to the Suffolk landscape – better than Sebald’s actually novel does. Patience (After Sebald) is itself a misremembering of The Rings of Saturn which could not help but reverse many of the novel’s priorities and emphases. In The Rings of Saturn, Suffolk frequently (and frustratingly) recedes from attention, as Sebald follows his own lines of association. By contrast, the main substance of the film consists of images of the Suffolk landscape – the heathland over which you can walk for miles without seeing a soul, the crumbling cliffs of the lost city of Dunwich, the enigma of Orford Ness, its inscrutable pagodas silently presiding over Cold War military experiments which remain secret. Sebald’s reflections, voiced in Patience by Jonathan Pryce, anchor these images far less securely than they do in the novel. At Snape, some of those who had re-created Sebald’s walk – including Gee himself – confessed that they had failed to attain the author’s lugubrious mood: the landscape turned out to be too energising, its sublime desolation proving to be fallow ground for gloomy psychological interiority. In a conversation with Robert Macfarlane after the screening of the film, Gee said that it was not really necessary that Sebald had taken the walk. He meant that it was not important whether or not Sebald actually did the walk exactly as The Rings of Saturn’s narrator described it, in one go: that the novel could have been based on a number of different walks which took place over a longer period of time. But I couldn’t help but hear Gee’s remark in a different way: that it was not necessary for Sebald to have taken the walk at all: that, far from being a close engagement with the Suffolk terrain, The Rings of Saturn could have been written had Sebald never set foot in Suffolk.

This was the view of Richard Mabey, cast in the role of doubting Thomas at the Towards Re-Enchantment symposium. Mabey – who has written and broadcast about nature for 40 years, and whose latest book Weeds has the glorious subtitle How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature – argued that Sebald was guilty of the pathetic fallacy. When he read The Rings Of Saturn, Mabey said, he felt as if a very close friend had been belittled; although he had walked the Suffolk coastland countless times, he couldn’t recognise it from Sebald’s descriptions. But perhaps the issue with Sebald is that he wasn’t guilty enough of the pathetic fallacy, that instead of staining the landscape with his passions, as Thomas Hardy did with Wessex, or the Brontes did with Yorkshire, or, more recently, as the musician Richard Skelton has done with the Lancashire moorland – Sebald used Suffolk as a kind of Rorschach blot, a trigger for associative processes that take flight from the landscape rather than take root in it. In any case, Mabey wanted a confrontation with nature in all its inhuman exteriority. He sounded like a Deleuzean philosopher when he expostulated about the ‘nested heterogeneity’ and ‘autonomous poetry’ of micro-ecosytems to be found in a cow’s hoof print; of how it was necessary to ‘think like a mountain’, and quoted approvingly Virginia Woolf’s evocation of a ‘philosophising and dreaming land’. I was struck by the parallels between Mabey’s account of nature and Patrick Keiller’s invocation of lichen as ‘a non-human intelligence’ in Robinson in Ruins. With its examination of the ‘undiscovered country of nearby’, Robert Macfarlane’s film for the BBC, The Wild Places of Essex, shown as part of the Towards Re-Enchantment symposium, was also close to Mabey’s vision of a nature thriving in the spaces abandoned by, or inhospitable to, humans. (Macfarlane’s film now seems like a counterpart to Julien Temple’s wonderful Oil City Confidential, which rooted Dr Feelgood’s febrile rhythm and blues in the lunar landscape of Essex’s Canvey Island.) Patience (After Sebald) could appeal to a Sebald sceptic like me because – in spite of Sebald – it reaches the wilds of Suffolk. At the same time, Gee’s quietly powerful film caused me to doubt my own scepticism, sending me back to Sebald’s novels, in search of what others had seen, but which had so far eluded me.

Ghosts Of My Life 

 Mark Fisher

On Bobby Fisher and the chess game played with the dead

 Two months later Joan and I and our children flew to Iceland to watch Joan's brother Bobby Fischer compete for the chess championship of the world against then-champion Boris Spassky from the USSR. Joan had taught Bobby to play chess when they were children on vacation in an old seaside cottage by the New Jersey shore. Joan was ten and Bobby was five when they serendipitously came across an old scrapbook containing several years of carefully collected chess puzzles from a local paper. Joan taught her little brother the moves with the aid of a one-dollar plastic chess set, and the rest, as they say, is “history.”

It had been a tremendous struggle to get notoriously tem-peramental Bobby to agree to sign up for any financial or official physical arrangements. Finally, with tireless handholding and brilliant negotiation at home and abroad by my attorney Andrew Davis—for which he was of course unpaid—Bobby actually got on a plane to Iceland. After forfeiting a game over playing conditions (a TV tower on the stage), Bobby won the match 12½ to 8½ and became the first and thus far only U.S. Chess Champion of the World. The gentlemanly Spassky came to Iceland to celebrate chess. Bobby came to Iceland to crush Spassky.

That's what we call single-pointed focus of attention. And the outcome is what one would expect. The Hindu sage Patanjali taught that with this intense focus, you can learn to see into the distance as well as the future. You can even heal the sick and diagnose illness and that teaching corresponds to my own parapsychology research findings through the years, as well as the Russians', though at that time the Russians were mainly interested in distant behavior modification (things like remote strangulation, described in my book The Mind Race). The Russians were afraid that Bobby was using some kind of ESP trick to crush Spassky, so they insisted on taking apart his special leather chair. But, when asked about ESP and mental conditioning, Bobby said in an interview before the match, “I don't believe in psychology. I just believe in good moves.”

One bright night while we were still in Iceland with Bobby (it was July), we all went bowling at the U.S. Army base. Of course I can't see bowling pins very well, but I throw the ball really hard, and it often hits something. The next day, newspapers published a story about how Bobby had rudely thrown food at a waiter in the hotel restaurant that evening. He wasn't even in the hotel! But newspapers have never been kind to Bobby. In fact, whenever I have been personally involved in a news story—whether about lasers, ESP, or Bobby—the story has been significantly bogus or distorted, offering more opportunities to question reality.

(...)

THE BOBBY SAGAIn the winter of 1992, Joan went to Europe for an extended visit with Bobby, whom she had seen very little of in the past twenty years, since he'd won the World Chess Championship in Iceland. Bobby had just won a twentieth anniversary rematch of that famous event with Boris Spassky—with a score of ten wins, five losses and fifteen draws—at a seaside resort in Yugoslavia. Because of the regional conflicts in various parts of that country, the first President Bush had declared a trade embargo on Yugoslavia, but Bobby chose to play there anyway. By winning the match, he came away with about $3.5 million. Since the president apparently had no other ideas about what to do regarding the Yugoslav situation, he declared the Chess Champion of the world to be persona non grata, and subject to immediate arrest should he appear in the U.S. Bobby wisely decided to go to Budapest and stay with his good friends the Polgar family and their three attractive, chess-playing daughters—grandmaster Judit, along with Zsuzsa and Sofia. Judit became a grandmaster at fifteen, making her the youngest in history—even younger than Bobby. Today at thirty, she is still the strongest woman chess player, having beaten many of her male counterparts. There in Budapest is where Joan met up with Bobby.

Bobby Fischer never returned to the U.S. He lived in Hungary, Germany, and Japan. He was greatly celebrated in Japan, even though that country is not usually thought of as a chess-playing people. But in fact, there is an active chess community, and in August 2004 Bobby became engaged to marry Miyoko Watai, the Japanese women's champion and president of the Japanese Chess Association. He had been happily living with Watai in Japan and traveling with her all over the world for the previous four years, when he was suddenly and unexpectedly arrested on July 14, 2004, at Tokyo/Narita airport while on his way to the Philippines. Japanese immigration told him that he was on a U.S. watch list because his U.S. passport had been cancelled—in spite of the fact that he had renewed it at the U.S. embassy in Switzerland only three months earlier. Since he no longer had a valid U.S. passport, the U.S. government connived with the Koizumi government to imprison Bobby for the crime of being in Japan without a valid passport! Bobby was forced to spend the next eight months of his life in a stinking Japanese jail for absolutely nothing—on this bogus Kafkaesque charge.

During Bobby's imprisonment, I worked with Bobby's fiancée, Watai, and a very hardworking Canadian reporter in Japan, John Bosnitch, to try and get Bobby a German passport, since his father of record, Gerhardt Fischer, was a German citizen at the time of Bobby's birth. Although we made many calls and I miraculously located and sent all the required passports and birth certificates for both Bobby and Gerhardt to the German Bureau of Citizenship, they dragged their feet, and nothing happened. We were told through back channels at the German Consulate in the United States that the powerful German foreign minister, Joshka Fischer—no relation—didn't want to grant Bobby German citizenship because of his outspoken and quite crazy anti-Semitic remarks. In fact, from the perspective of German Blood Law, Bobby was a German citizen ipso facto because of his father's native-born citizenship. But, it didn't help.

Just as Bobby was about to be turned over to the U.S. marshals to be brought back to the U.S. in chains for a “show” trial and to spend the rest of his life in prison, the Icelandic government decided—through the passionate urging of his many friends in Iceland—to give Bobby full Icelandic citizenship because of the great credit and celebrity he had brought to Iceland during the 1972 World Championship match. We all were thrilled. Watai and his Icelandic friends, who had come to Japan to pick him up, were especially thrilled. But Bobby, as usual, was marching to a different drummer. On his supposed last day in jail in Japan, the guards were serving hard-boiled eggs for breakfast to the low-security inmates, and they gave Bobby an egg. But Bobby wanted two eggs, and a scuffle ensued between the diminutive guards and six-foot-three-inch, 220-pound Bobby. That landed him in solitary confinement, instead of on a plane to freedom in Iceland. We all had to beg the Japanese to let the rascal go. On March 25, 2005, after four days of face-saving, he was finally released, and he and Watai successfully left for Iceland, where they were living very quietly on Bobby's winnings from the Yugoslav match until Bobby's untimely death on January 17, 2008. Bobby's situation in Iceland was akin to the chess position called zugzwang, where a player is safe in his present position, but will greatly worsen his position wherever he moves. Bobby was safe in Iceland, but he could have been arrested by Interpol at any foreign airport.

(...)

Exploring the Survival of Bodily Death

We now have, for the first time in the history of our species, compelling empirical evidence for belief in some form of personal survival after death.

—Robert Almeder, PhD, professor of philosophy, Georgia State University

It is no more surprising to be born twice than to be born once.

—Voltaire

Throughout my life and my work, I have continually been impressed by the evidence, everywhere I turn, that awareness, which is what we are, can in-flow information from all of space-time and out-flow healing intention to the present, and perhaps the future and the past. This all happens because space-time is nonlocal, and there is no separation in consciousness.

The Buddhist Four Noble Truths teach: First, that there is suffering in the world, and second, we don't like it. I have not found any disagreement with this so far. Third, the source of that suffering is said to be impermanence, craving, and the fear of death. That's the one that we all are principally worried about. The fourth Noble Truth teaches that there is a path to the end of suffering—it is called The Eightfold Way. But, regarding impermanence, there is evidence from many sources that something does indeed survive death. This includes F. W. H. Myers's mediumistic studies and a very exciting, recently published scientific paper that indicates how much of our personality may indeed survive death and bodies.

Twenty years ago a chess match was apparently played between living and deceased chess grandmasters. A German psychologist and a Swiss investor were involved in this remarkable investigation of survival. Wolfgang Eisenbeiss and Dieter Hassler published this grandmaster game from the beyond, “An Assessment of Ostensible Communications with a Deceased Grandmaster as Evidence for Survival,” in the British Journal of Psychical Research in April 2006. The trance medium, Robert Rollans, who worked with the researchers, was asked to psychically find a deceased grandmaster who was willing and able to play a match with the living grandmaster Victor Korchnoi. He found the Hungarian grandmaster Geza Maroczy who had died in 1950. I sent the reported final chess score to Bobby Fischer— who, as I mentioned earlier, lived in Iceland, having been rescued from a Japanese jail by the kindness of the Icelandic government. Bobby wrote to me saying that “anyone who can go fifty-two moves with Victor Korchnoi is playing at a grandmaster level.” This case is of great interest to survival researchers, because it shows that a medium can demonstrate a skill of the deceased communicator, in addition to just information. Grandmaster Maroczy provided, through the medium, all sorts of personal, intimate, and humorous information about his life and his interactions with the grandmasters of his day, including the Cuban José Raul Capablanca and the Russian, Alexander Alekhine (both world champions). Korchnoi said that Maroczy played the same kind of intensely complicated middle game he was famous for in the 1920s. In his prime, Maroczy was the second strongest player in the world, just as Victor Korchnoi was. It was a hard-fought match. But, in the end the living player won. Incidentally, the match was held in the late 1980s, when there was no computer that could have stood in for Maroczy.

The nineteenth century English scholar F. W. H. Myers spent a good part of his life investigating mediumistic evidence for survival of human personality after death of the body. His great book, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, gives many examples of spirit communications that sound surprisingly like long-distance phone calls from the dead. Nonetheless, he felt that the only way one could be certain that a spiritual communication could be definitely assigned to a previously alive person, rather than just clairvoyance on the part of the medium, would be for the spirit to communicate information that the medium could not know, even psychically. That's why the previously described postmortem chess game is so important. This would be the only way to falsify the so-called super-psi mind-reading/clairvoyance hypothesis. After Myers died, he apparently carried out this experiment posthumously. The deceased Myers sent independent fragmentary messages to three well-known and widely separated mediums—in England, India, and the United States. The messages made sense only when they were combined and analyzed at the Society for Psychical Research in London. These celebrated communications are known as the “cross--correspondence cases.” They are like three meaningless pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that show a recognizable picture only when all three are put together. Many of these complex transmissions were drawn from Myers's extensive knowledge of Classical Greek and Roman plays and poetry, described in Francis Saltmarsh's fascinating analysis of this cross-correspondence material in his book, The Future and Beyond.

(..)

The Return of the Bobby Snatchers (or Bye-Bye Bobby)

I played my first game of chess with Bobby Fischer more than fifty years ago. I was courting his sister, Joan, and he was fourteen. He beat me, even though he was playing blindfolded, eating a bowl of chicken soup in the kitchen, and I had the pieces and the board right in front of me. But it took him more than five minutes. The greatest chess player the world has ever known died on January 17, 2008. After traveling around the sun once for each of the sixty-four squares on his chessboard, Bobby Fischer died of kidney failure, after many months of distress, in a Reykjavik, Iceland, hospital. He refused medical treatment until the very end. In death, as in life, he wanted to do it his own way.

Although there have been many fabulously brilliant chess players, such as Alekhine, Capablanca, Gary Kasparov, and the astonishing American Paul Morphy, none have ever shown the analytic genius and demonic will to win that Bobby showed in his brief career. On my way home to America from Bobby's funeral in Iceland, I had a chance to discuss this with Icelandic grandmaster Throstur Thorhallsson, who happened to be sitting just in front of Patty and me on the plane. (Little Iceland with 300,000 people, has nine grandmasters.) In the 1971 Candidates Tournament leading up to his world championship bid, Bobby cleanly knifed through his grandmaster opponents Mark Taimanov and Bent Larsen with the unprecedented and likely unrepeatable scores of 6–0 and 6–0. This would be like winning a Grand Slam tennis tournament without your opponent ever hitting the ball—like a match between Targ vs. Federer. Fischer went on to beat the great Tigran Petrosian 6.5–2.5 and qualified to challenge Boris Spassky for the World Championship in 1972.

That so-called Match of the Century, possibly the most famous match in chess history was played in Reykjavik. It had a shaky start. Bobby lost the first game. He then forfeited the second, complaining about the large canvass-wrapped TV tower on the stage creating visually distracting playing conditions. But he turned up for the third game and won it brilliantly. The great Spassky, then World Champion, won only one more game in the rest of the match and was eventually beaten by Fischer by a score of 12.5–8.5. Bobby thereby crushed the Russian chess machine at the height of the Cold War, and became an enduring world celebrity.

Many years ago, I was standing in Washington Square Park with the renowned mathematician Prof. Kurt Friedrichs, who was cofounder of the New York University Math Institute. I asked the young man standing next to me if he was in Prof. Friedrichs's class. He said, “No. I'm Professor Kranzer. Professor Friedrichs is in a class by himself!” Similarly, it is generally agreed that even among the great grandmasters of chess, Bobby Fischer was in a class by himself.

Bobby's last years were, in their own way, as spectacular and bizarre as his earlier years of glory. In July of 2004, Bobby was at Narita airport outside Tokyo on his way to visit his (we believe) daughter, Jinky, and her mother, Marilyn Young, in the Philippines. As I described earlier, his passport was grabbed by Japanese Immigration officials because it had been declared invalid by the U.S. government, who wanted him in the U.S. for a show trial just before the 2004 presidential election. Bobby was taken to a Japanese jail where he languished for he next eight months, “because he was in the country without a passport!” Just before he was to be deported to the U.S. in March of 2005, to be tried for playing chess in Yugoslavia, he was generously granted Icelandic citizenship, so that he could leave prison and move to Iceland, where he remained for the next three years. He lived in an apartment overlooking the Reykjavik harbor, where he frequented the nearby restaurants and bookstores.

Late in the evening of Thursday, January 17, 2008, I received a phone call from Gardar Sverrisson, Bobby's neighbor and one of his closest friends of the last few years. He told me that Bobby had died in the hospital that evening. I knew that Bobby had been very ill. The previous week, our family had sent him photos of his mother Regina at his request. I told Gardar that my wife and I would come to Iceland that Sunday to help arrange the burial and put Bobby's affairs in order in a respectful manner. Patty and I took the red-eye and arrived at Reykjavik airport early Monday morning. We visited a lawyer that my son had found and then took a nap.

At two o'clock that afternoon, we were awakened by the lawyer to learn that Bobby's body had been taken from the hospital at midnight by Miyoko Watai (a Japanese woman's chess champion) and Gardar. Miyoko was waving a Japanese document which she claimed was a Japanese marriage license and consequently the hospital released the body to the pair. The document turned out to be her Japanese identity papers. With the body in the back of his station wagon (hopefully in a coffin), Gardar and Miyoko drove to the town of Selfoss, 60 km south of Reykjavik. According to the lawyer, the grave was dug secretly in the darkness of the white frozen landscape—ready for Bobby Fischer's last getaway. All this covert rush made it impossible for our family to participate, which was probably their desire. Not even the minister, whose churchyard it was, knew of the burial planned for the following morning.

According to the news reports, only five people attended that brief service early on Monday, conducted in darkness before the short Icelandic day had properly begun. Among them was Gardar, who had organized the digging of the grave, bypassing the customary process of requesting permission of Iceland's Lutheran Church or of the State authorities. Recent reports in the press suggest that the legality of Bobby Fischer's quiet burial in the small cemetery at Laugardalur church may be called into question. Gardar had also secured the services of a Roman Catholic priest from Reykjavik. Bobby was not a Catholic, of course. Another mourner, who may or may not have been Fischer's wife, was Miyoko Watai. Canadian journalist John Bosnitch, who worked tirelessly to free Bobby from jail, swears she was indeed Bobby's wife. However, the people I talked with in Iceland all claimed that Bobby said he wasn't married nor did he intend to be married. I trust we will know soon enough.

The following day, Tuesday, Patty and I met the very congenial Lutheran minister Kristinn Agust Fridfinnsson, in whose front yard Bobby had been planted. Rev. Fridfinnsson conducted a very thoughtful and moving memorial in English for Patty and me and three members of the Reykjavik Spiritual Association. These three men, who surprisingly located us the day we arrived, had been of enormous help to us in understanding what was going on and dealing with the impossibly difficult Icelandic language. (They have six more consonants than we have in English and they use every one of them.) Rev. Fridfinnsson said that although he had no prior knowledge of the burial right in front of his church, he was happy to take good care of Bobby, who is a hero in chess-crazy Iceland. Although a peaceful man, he wasn't thrilled that a Catholic priest from Reykjavik had performed a service in his churchyard without asking.

As we sat in the little church listening the service conducted for our group, artist Patty noticed that the large oil painting behind the alter contained a figure of a man who greatly resembled Bobby, looking adoringly at Jesus. The photo below, shows Bobby shortly after he arrived in Iceland from the Japanese prison and the head of the Bobby look-alike in the painting. We all thought that this striking likeness was a good omen for his happy resting place.

Patty, me, and the minister, Rev. Fridfinnsson, standing in front of the altarpiece which includes the Bobby figure

The following day, we attended an art opening at the Reykjavik Art Museum, where the president of Iceland, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson would formally open a new exhibition. I was happy to have an opportunity to express our family's gratitude to him and the people of Iceland for generously providing Bobby sanctuary from the Japanese jail. I also wanted to discuss a concern I had over the proposed grave marker, which was to be a crucifix. Since at least one of Bobby's parents was Jewish (another contentious issue we won't dwell on here), I thought that this was not an appropriate memorial, although it was approved by the Catholic priest who buried him and the Lutheran minister who owns the churchyard where he is buried. I proposed to President Grímsson that, in the interest of religious harmony, a chess king would be a more suitable marker. Since that chess piece already has a little cross on top, it should be acceptable to all factions. Grímsson said that religious peace between Lutherans and Catholics had been an issue for hundreds of years in Iceland, and my proposed solution might be just the thing. What a wonderful country where the President has time to try to soothe everyone's sensibilities! Finally, what we remember is that Bobby had an inventive and brilliant mind, which was the hallmark of his genius. As a chess player and an American, he achieved real victories and, for a moment, carried the freedom torch during the Cold War when he won the World Chess Championship. Unmistakably, he also faced some great personal challenges. He had a wonderful sense of humor and was capable of great warmth. Bobby was a loved part of our family and he will be deeply missed. May he finally rest in peace.

Do you see what I see? : memoirs of a blind biker

Russell Targ.

Belief Management: The No. 1 Psychic Conspiracy

 

Nearly five hundred years ago, the famous Swiss physician, chemist and alchemist, Paracelsus (1493-1541), rather drily observed: “It is all one whether you believe in something real or in something false; it will have the same effect on you. It is always faith that works the miracle, and whether the faith is aroused by something real or something false, its miraculous power is the same.”

As we shall now begin to see, this statement reflects what may be considered one of the most penetrating psychic insights ever achieved during the last two-thousand years. The truth in this statement has also been one of the most carefully guarded psychic secrets of all time, which has, in turn, resulted in many abysmal psychic conspiracies that have affected billions of people throughout the centuries.

The best way to quickly get into at least some of the parameters involved is through an illustration involving an actual event. There are many such remarkable events that might be used, but I’ve selected one recorded in Guy Lyon Playfair’s 1985 book entitled If This Be Magic because Playfair’s analysis goes far beyond the astonishing aspects of the event itself.On May 25, 1950, a sixteen-year-old boy named John was admitted to the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, England, where he was to undergo plastic surgery by the renowned surgeon Sir Archibald McIndoe and his team. John was suffering from “fish-skin” disease. The anesthetist for the operation was Dr. Albert A. Mason, who was also a skilled hypnotist.

Mason was not familiar with the true nature of fish-skin disease. When John was first wheeled into the operating room, Mason thought, as he later wrote, that the patient had large warty excrescences that covered his legs and arms and most of his body. John’s hands were horrible, enclosed with a rigid horny casing that had cracked and become chronically infected. He had been born with this disease and, naturally, was treated like an outcast at school because of his obviously ugly appearance and the appalling smell issuing from the many infections.

Dr. McIndoe was going to attempt skin grafts on the palms of John’s hands. They scraped the hard coating from the boy’s palms and replaced it with some skin from his chest. A month later it was seen that the operations had not succeeded. The newly grafted skin had thickened and turned black. A second attempt proved no more successful.

Dr. Mason, who continued to think the boy was suffering from extensive warts, suggested to Dr. McIndoe that perhaps hypnosis could help. Mason had successfully removed warts from other patients by using hypnosis. At this point Mason believed it was warts that were the issue. If hypnosis could remove one wart, perhaps it could also remove the thousands covering John’s body.

Dr. McIndoe, already annoyed that the skin grafts were not successful, was not responsive to this idea and sourly suggested that Mason himself undertake this impossible approach. Mason duly hypnotized John and told him that the warts on his left arm were going to fall off revealing what appeared now to be normal skin. In another five days, John’s left arm was completely clear from wrist to shoulder.

Rather pleased with his success, Mason took John to Dr. McIndoe, bragging that hypnosis did well with warts. McIndoe was shocked—“Jesus Christ,” said he, “do you know what you’ve done?” He briskly informed Mason that they were not dealing with warts but with a rare congenital condition known as “ichthyosiform erythrodermia of Brocq” and suggested that the hypnotist go to the medical library and look it up.

It was now Mason’s turn to be shocked. Ichthyosiform erythrodermia is a congenital condition, meaning it is also structural and organic, in which the skin has no oil-forming glands that would enable its outer layers to flake off and renew themselves. The skin would just go on building up until a hard, black armour-plating accumulated. Mason found that one of England’s leading hypnotists, Dr. Stephen Black, had already concluded that this appalling and disfiguring condition had been considered incurable since 1904 and would remain with the patient throughout what was to be an obviously short life.

Mason, somewhat unnerved since he had caused not a normal hypnotic “cure,” but a miracle, now became somewhat famous for having done so. McIndoe presented the strange cure at a meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine, at which several doctors who attended were profoundly impressed. One doctor, surprised that a structural, organic congenital condition should respond to any kind of treatment at all, much less that of hypnosis, felt that a total revision of the current concepts of the relation between the mind and body was called for. A dermatologist was astounded and noted that the cure was unprecedented and inexplicable. The case thereafter became quite celebrated as more and more specialists became apprised of what had happened.

Thereafter, the story becomes considerably more complicated. Encouraged by the initial success with John, Mason continued hypnotic treatments involving other parts of John’s body. The legs, which had been completely covered by the black armour, improved by some 50 percent along with 95 percent of the arms and a complete clearing of the palms, although the fingers were “not greatly improved.”

A year later, John’s mental state had changed dramatically. He had developed into a “normal happy boy” and gotten a job as an electrician’s assistant. The cure was not total, but it seemed to be permanent as far as it went. The cured areas stayed cured.

When Mason asked John if he would care to try to clear up what remained of the black patches, John agreed to try. But Mason found, to his bewilderment, that he could no longer hypnotize the boy. In fact, John seemed somewhat frightened by the idea of being hypnotized. Mason decided to leave the situation as it was.

He went on to undertake hypnotic cures with eight other cases of congenital ichthyosis, reporting in the British Medical Journal in 1961 that every one of them had been a complete failure. However, an Oxford general practitioner, Dr. C. A. S. Wink, published an account of his own successful hypnotic treatment of two similar cases—two sisters aged seven and five. Like Mason, he had worked on one part of the body at a time and had also failed to bring about a total clearing of the entire body.

The questions began to pile up as mysteries. As Guy Lyon Playfair points out, why should a hypnotist succeed with one patient and not with eight others and why should he be unable to hypnotize his star patient at a later time? Why should Wink succeed with two patients? Why should various parts of the body respond and not others? And, finally, why should the body respond at all when the condition is congenitally structural in that the affected skin suffers from an absence of certain dermal tissues? When one considers this last question, only the wildest conjecture is possible—as long as the situation is limited only to physiological phenomena and the beliefs that govern the “normal” medical view of them.

Mason’s own original conclusion was that a psychological factor lay behind the cause of ichthyosis, that it was possible to influence a congenital organic condition by psychological means or, of course, a combination of both. In either event, though, just what psychological factors may have been involved clearly lay beyond any normal explanation or, in fact, any normal logic and reasoning.

Thirty years later, when Mason was living in California and had become a psychoanalyst, having given up hypnotism altogether, he wondered if perhaps John’s skin had somehow contained “tiny remnants” of glands that had “come to life” under the stimulus of suggestion under hypnosis. But, he added, the stimulus for such a profound change must itself be equally profound.

Now, an important shift of reasoning takes place regarding these mysterious events, a shift of reasoning that I like very much since I have used it in regaining some of the psychic abilities once forfeited in an effort to become normal, as mentioned earlier. The shift comes from the inquiring mind of Guy Lyon Playfair, who began to wonder not what caused the cures in the first place, but what prevented them from continuing to take place.

Playfair points out that when Mason first saw John, he thought he was looking at a case of extensive warts. He had already cured warts by hypnosis, and saw no difference between those warts and the “warts” on John’s body, save, perhaps, one of magnitude. Further, Mason had been motivated to succeed since his surgeon colleague had practically dared him to try hypnosis. At that point, Mason did not comprehend that John was suffering from congenital ichthyosis and McIndoe was unaware that Mason did not know that. Although Playfair does not mention it in his book, it might also be assumed that John, himself only sixteen at the time, probably had very little medical understanding of the difference between warts and ichthyosis.

In sum, it was “warts” that was cured and not congenital ichthyosis, although the miraculous result was the same. At this early point in the series of events, nowhere was the idea present that it was ichthyosis, as a structural, organic congenital disease that was being treated—and that this disease was incurable. Here, in modern times, and under incontestable scientific scrutiny, the insight of Paracelsus was seen working: It doesn’t matter if you believe in something real or something false. The result will be the same. Whether the faith is aroused by something real or something false, its miraculous power is the same.

It was only after the first events had occurred that Mason first began to realize that he had not treated warts at all, but rather an incurable, congenital situation. And, we might also assume that young John, probably undergoing endless inspections by curious doctors, himself eventually began to understand that he had been cured of an “incurable” disease.

The parameters of the beliefs involved and thus the psychological underlining of the hypnosis were changed. This occurred in both the hypnotist and the patient, with the result that the same “cure” became “impossible.” As these new truths sank in, John even became “afraid” to be hypnotized. In a direct sense, then, both Mason and John had become “infected” with a new psychological reality that, once adopted by them, acted psychologically to prevent a continuance of the first naïve cure. What had entered into the picture was an intellectual construct that, once adopted as “reality,” inhibited the psychological (rather we might say “psychic”) wholes of both Mason and John. And we shall see more easily verifiable instances of intellect-blocking psychic processes throughout this present book.

John’s case of “warts” provides us, through the analysis of Guy Lyon Playfair, a partial but nonetheless revealing access into the mysteries of psychic belief-dependent processes. Using this case as a beginning example, we can follow its implications throughout the warp and weave of the confusing fabric that our Western culture has woven around things psychic.

Normal versus Paranormal

If the condition of our beliefs represents a strategic point between whether or not we will ever be in contact with the miraculous realms of the paranormal, then it becomes somewhat obvious that the greatest mistake has been to divide the normal and the paranormal into two different categories of phenomena. This mistake is greatly enlarged when the normal is considered acceptable, rational, and “legal,” while the paranormal is considered unacceptable, irrational, and “illegal.”

That all this has been done in our Western culture is beyond argument. The division is absolutely complete and thorough. Individuals are taught this division, and the mechanisms of education and peer pressures enforce and perpetuate it. Furthermore, the division is enhanced and enforced by both spoken and unspoken codes that condemn the paranormal and punish any adherents who might come forth while the normal is rewarded by expressions of brotherhood and the comforts of confraternity.

At the very least, obloquy is heaped upon the paranormal, but history shows that interest in the paranormal has been punished through mental and physical torture and by horrible deaths witnessed by large publics who, we discover, enjoyed the spectacles, and lusted for more of them. The actual burning of witches has been over for some time, but the “need” to punish the paranormal is not yet finished with.

Not one psychical researcher or parapsychologist of the last hundred years has been without those who would, if the laws of the land did not prevail, hound them to actual physical extinction. Instead, the persecutors of the paranormal are forced to try other means—instigating plots to blemish the scientific reputations of psychical researchers, submitting them to extreme psychological duress whenever possible, trying to interdict any research funding efforts, attempting to blacklist them amongst their peers and in educational institutions and pillorying them in an all-too-willing media. They do so under the “justification” that these methods are only extensions of the democratic process at work—to wit, that the psychical researchers say the paranormal exists, while the “skeptics” of the paranormal say otherwise and that their anti-psychic view deserves to be heard. They imply that their perspective should in fact, be given precedence because it represents the “normal” view.

If we accept the validity of the view that is now coming into some prominence—that at some unknown, little understood levels, everything is interconnected—then this normal-versus-paranormal situation takes on shades and hues that elevate it above a mere intellectual squabble. In reality, there is a staggering amount of evidence, both scientific and circumstantial, that supports conclusions that the paranormal exists. The sum of this evidence is beginning to be accepted within the new age sense of things. On the other hand, the anti-psychic skeptics are hard pressed to prove that the paranormal does not exist and are forced to use non-scientific methods to make their point.

But in this sense the truths of the matter play a very small role and the skeptics are obviously trying to arouse and reconfirm a disbelief in the paranormal. Thus, their tactics relate more to belief-management than to a scientific search for the truths of the matter.

Now it can easily be shown that our Western culture has a long, long history of attacking the paranormal, beginning, in full force, in approximately 300 AD and continuing in various guises into the present. The problem is not that this division of the normal from the paranormal occurred, although this is visibly unfortunate. And neither does this situation represent one of mere carping about something that once happened in the past and, as such is no longer relevant.

The problem centers on the observable fact that this artificial division or dividing is not strictly under conscious control, but has set in motion a psychic set of circumstances and substratum effects that apparently operate out of control of rational consciousness.

This effect shows up, hypothetically to be sure, in the illustration given above. There can be little doubt that John would have wished for a complete cure of his unfortunate congenital ichthyosis, a cure that in fact had commenced. Likewise, there can be little doubt that Mason wished to continue to ameliorate the disease through hypnotic measures, which had in fact commenced in the case of John, but he was unable to do so with John himself and with eight others who suffered from the same congenital disease.

The factor that entered in was, more or less, a “congenital” disbelief that an incurable disease could be cured. The cure stopped and both patient and hypnotizer began to exhibit fear of the paranormal, which resulted in John’s inability to be hypnotized and Mason’s eventual abandonment of hypnotic techniques altogether in favour of a more normal profession, that of psychoanalysis.

The well-documented facts attest that a 75-percent cure of John’s congenital ichthyosis did, in fact, take place—and indicate that the prevailing medical opinion that congenital ichthyosis is incurable must, then, somehow be false. But this false belief had the same effect as a real belief in that not only did the cure cease, but the mysterious curing processes that set the cure in motion also ceased. Neither the hypnotist nor the patient was able to manage their disbelief and, in fact, probably never understood that belief management was at issue.

Our civilization is entering a mode of thinking about universals that is highly reminiscent of that of the ancients. This has to do with the idea that the universe exists because all of its elements are in some sort of organized relationships, in a sense, interconnected. In other words, the universe and everything in it are obeying sets of laws that achieve balance and harmony—although it is observed that this balance and harmony is subject to change.

This implies that the universe is an ordered system rather than a random system, which would, if it were random, self-destruct in no time at all. 

In fact, even the most ancient myths as well as our modern sciences are in agreement with this principle of universal order.

The ancient myths hold that “something” brought order to chaos, thereby establishing the ordered universe, the entire contents of which manifest through the phenomena of given “laws.”

Our modern sciences, indeed, witness these laws, and strive to uncover them for what they are for the edification of our rational intellects.

If this be true, as it obviously is, then there are no phenomena that can manifest in the universe unless they obey certain laws, which we humans ultimately have to observe as being natural. In other words, there can be no real categories of “normal” and “paranormal.” And therefore any attempt to divide phenomena in this way is an artificial contrivance—a lie.

Any so-called paranormal phenomena are not disobeying the natural laws that make them possible in the first place. Even the discovery that belief in something false acts in the same manner as belief in something real must be following certain natural laws that allow for the false belief to emerge as a real event.

We cannot, of course, comprehend how this can be within the given limits of our present knowledge. But we can observe it happening—and happening all around us all the time.

Bearing all this in mind, it must be pointed out that when psychical research commenced in an organized fashion in 1882, the original psychical researchers gave themselves the unenviable task of trying to comprehend the abnormal and paranormal.[14] In essence, they undertook the task of trying to figure out how the paranormal worked. Now, down at the bottom line, this is actually no different than trying to prove a lie to be the truth, for, in the natural laws of the universe entire, no such category as “paranormal” or “abnormal” truly exists.

Any judgment of what is normal or paranormal results only from a given human viewpoint that arbitrarily establishes and perpetuates the two artificial categories. The results of all this ultimately manifest as disasters or something hideous—but then, there must be laws that govern the manifestation of disasters and of the hideous—of which we shall see something in the pages ahead.

Since 1882, psychical researchers and parapsychologists have operated in a mindset that assumed the paranormal was indeed paranormal which, in turn, led them to believe that the paranormal operated through a second set of laws different from the first set that governed the normal. I’ll leave it to each reader to guess what was the result. Other than accumulating impressive archives filled with “evidence” for the existence of so-called paranormal categories, they got nowhere in terms of explaining any of the evidence in either normal or paranormal terms.

The psychic neophyte (beginner) reading this book should therefore be well warned that if he or she possesses a normal-versus-paranormal mindset (which is sure to be tucked away somewhere in everyone’s psyches), the discovery of and the progress along the psychic path is going to be very difficult indeed.

It is only natural that one should begin to wonder where, when, and why an unnatural division of phenomena into the false normal and paranormal categories began. A detailed analysis of this is largely beyond the scope of this book excepting those particular anti-psychic phenomena that have contributed to confusing the psychic issues herein discussed, although a short overview of the entire matter will be helpful.

Out of all possible social structures and patterns, humans generally have used only two: the hierarchy model and another model of what is de-meaning-ly referred to as “the masses,” “the herd,” “the crowd,” and “the mob.”

The hierarchy model is figured like a pyramid with an elite or governing group at the top, several layers of what we call bureaucrats and a vast base of the masses, the herd, the crowd, and the mob at the bottom. The hierarchy model is considered an ordered society, while the herd’s model is considered chaos.

The hierarchs seek to unify the mob and the masses into a unit, and if successful, the system turns into a pyramid. When the pyramid no longer serves the masses, it is pulled down by the mob into what is called a “period” of anarchy. The human situation stays anarchical until a new pyramid emerges. Definite “laws” that govern all this have been discovered and are generally available to those wishing to study them in detail.

Any pyramid is viable only as long as it stays stable, and its stability is totally dependent upon whether or not they at the base believe themselves to be content, at which time the masses will serve what they believe to be the best interests of the pyramid as a whole. This is something every informed hierarch near the top of the pyramid understands only too well. In essence, the real power lies not in the hands of the chief hierarchs, but in the hands of the herd.

Keeping the masses stable or relatively stable, and thereby the entirety of the whole pyramid, thus becomes the chief concern of the top echelons of the hierarchy. Many measures to attain this stability have been experimented with through the ages, the most basic one being, of course, force and slavery, which has, at times been very successful. But, eventually, great parts of the herd ceased agreeing to this method and other experiments had to be tried.

One that seemed to work well was the ideology concept. Ideologies can be concrete or abstract, but defects tend to reveal themselves in concrete ideologies more frequently than they show up in abstract ideologies.

As history attests, humans like abstract ideologies they believe are serving some general or personal abstract interests that seem feasible, even if they don’t understand what the abstract interests actually represent. At any rate, and as history again attests, the masses will go so far as to die for either a concrete or an abstract ideology. As it can be imagined, this suits the purposes of the hierarchs quite well.

Now, relative to the pyramid as a whole, the herd is as stable as its beliefs are firm and are, as far as the herd is concerned, identical to the pyramid as a whole. The only way the herd can perceive whether the pyramid is stable or not is by the institution of the norms that, as long as they are well and functioning, indicate it is stable. It is the duty of any soul who seeks to govern from the top of the pyramid to provide, and then to enforce, these norms, the whole of which can get quite complicated.

A “normal” state is thus defined, and by implication, an “abnormal” state also comes into existence. This is a rather natural extension of the fact that the masses are unified by recognizing samenesses amongst themselves or, at least, what they believe to be samenesses. As any talented hierarch comes to recognize, the masses are content only insofar as they believe themselves to be content. The top of the pyramid must reinforce the beliefs that result in the contentment. Thus, belief-management has always been a top priority for those occupying the top positions in the hierarchy.

In the ideal sense, belief management should concern itself only with certain realities needed to keep the pyramid sane and rational and provide it with a dependable real future. A good part of this involves an accurate recognition of the limits of what is known and shared as knowledge, and what is not known but should be found out about. Unfortunately, this ideal sense usually comes into conflict with the realities those at the top of the hierarchy are using to keep the masses stable.

It is then usually only one brief step from belief management to belief manipulation and belief modification with all the conspiracies these latter two demons imply. When one investigates these belief pyramids for very long, it quickly becomes apparent that the beliefs through which the top hierarchs govern themselves and the beliefs through which they govern the masses at the base of the pyramid frequently are not the same. Rather great conspiracies arise to prevent the masses from understanding this “double standardizing” of beliefs. Something of the mechanics of this, in their physical aspects, will be undertaken in the pages ahead.

The point here is that the establishment of our two false categories—of the normal and the abnormal or paranormal—does take place within the hierarchy of all social arrangement.

The normal becomes acceptable and, hence, desirable.

The abnormal and paranormal are rejected and, hence, become undesirable, and beliefs about them are manipulated so that they take on threatening, dangerous, and fearsome “anti-qualities” or, at any rate, become incompatible with the normal beliefs.

These two separate sets of beliefs thence act as realities—termed in our present modern times as “consensus” realities, meaning those realities the majority holds to be true or not true.

Our problem here, within the context of this present book, is that beliefs, whatever they may be, exert a terrific psychical power over their holders. In fact, the entire situation is a psychical one, for it is quite difficult to imagine that mere psychic-chemical interactions in the brain by themselves can create beliefs of any kind at all—that physical matter, as we understand it now, can adjudicate or judge, for example, that Christians are “good” and Jews “not good,” or that the Jews are God’s only chosen people, while the rest of humanity is thus unchosen.

Yet for quite some time now, scientific materialism and its pragmatic sciences have asked us to believe that matter, by itself, can somehow do this. Scientific materialism is, itself, a pyramidal structure with senior scientists occupying the top, academia operating as the bureaucracy, and the rest of us being, of course, the scientifically untrained, naïve herd. In this structure, the normal theory (belief) is that all phenomena will eventually be explainable and demonstrable in materialistic terms, whereas anything that can be seen to violate material “laws” is abnormal and paranormal, and thus must be explainable by other, more normal, factors—or doesn’t exist at all.

To people unfamiliar with the inner workings of modern science, it might seem that scientists have all the answers or are at least heading in the right direction. But nothing could be further from the truth and, in fact, responsible senior scientists will be the first to agree that there is no absolute scientific explanation of anything at all.

In fact, our scientific knowledge is made up of certain observations about apparent facets of things existing, and of these we know something of their effects—and can use certain parts of these effects to good advantage. But we understand nothing else in terms of absolute explanations.

In science, just when one theory begins to achieve wide acceptance as a valid representation of some law, a discrepancy in the theory is revealed and the theory has to either be modified or abandoned altogether. This continual modification or abandonment of all theories more or less represents the true story of science and it is one that most scientists have understood from the beginning of our scientific age.

It is therefore exceedingly strange to find materialists saying that all will be explained through matter, and that matter represents the “normal” aspects of science against which everything else can be charged as abnormal or paranormal. This is all just simply ridiculous, of course, as is the whole normal versus paranormal paradox in the first place.

Yet it is something that needs to be dealt with, for it is clear that the human penchant for trying to understand or reject paranormal things in terms of what is considered normal represents something akin to a psychic plague of long duration. The commensurate beliefs, whatever they are, that act as substructures to this paradox may be false in fact, but also in fact they operate as realities and their effects are tangible in many ways. The whole of this is, of course, psychic in nature.

All this makes for an immeasurably complicated scenario.

Add the fact that Paracelsus was not the first to comprehend that whatever is considered normal is lesser than the whole of which it is a part.

We are not dealing with normal paranormal, but a whole in which the distinction, if it exists, is an artificial distinction—a product of some functions of the human mind—which is itself a psychic thing.

Thus, if we try to interpret what we consider paranormal within the terms of what we consider normal, we shall never be able to do so.

Resurrecting the Mysterious

Ingo Swann’s ‘Great Lost Work’

by Ingo Swann

presented by Nick Cook

Auden on Shakespeare

 These lecturesd were delivered at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village during the academic session 1946-7. Arthur Kirsch has pieced them together from the records of four people who attended them. To have one’s lectures assembled from students’ notes years after they were given is a rare mark of distinction; offhand I can only think of Saussure and Wittgenstein, though possibly one could add the name of Jesus. Pascal’s Pensées were put in some kind of order long after his death, but he had written them down, so no allowance needs to be made for mishearing, faults of memory, or the occasional failure of the student to follow the argument. Some disagreement about what was actually said seems inevitable, and it has proved to be so in the case of Saussure. Kirsch, however, has one very dependable witness, Alan Ansen, who was soon to become the poet’s secretary. Ansen was an exceptionally alert, well-read note-taker, but he missed a few of the lectures, and for them the editor has to turn to the much less reliable Howard Griffin (who also, in his turn, became Auden’s secretary) and to two other volunteers, women who had preserved their notes from the spring term.The result reads like a remarkably full account of what the poet said about Shakespeare but also about many other matters. At the time of the lectures he was nearing forty and settled in New York. The last few years had been extraordinarily productive even by Auden’s standards. New Year Letter (or, in the USA, The Double Man) appeared in 1941, For the Time Being (a volume also containing The Sea and the Mirror) in 1944. A ‘Collected’ came out in 1945 and The Age of Anxiety, on which he was working at the time of the lectures, was published in 1947. These works, and especially the superb Tempest sequel or commentary, The Sea and the Mirror, testify to a major poet at the height of his power. A model of professional industry, he was also in these years writing a good deal of prose.Presumably he agreed to do this heavy lecture course for the same reason he wrote prose, namely because he needed the money, but they show few signs of being put together hastily or impatiently, or treated as a weekly chore. He not only gave the lectures but sacrificed his Saturday afternoons to meet with small groups of students in a situation where they could do some close work and not merely listen to him ‘boom away’ at them in a large lecture theatre. He must have spent much time on preparatory reading, criticism as well as the actual texts. He didn’t write the lectures out but spoke from notes which he later threw away; it does not seem to have occurred to him to use them as the basis of a book. Some of the ideas tried out there do turn up in the group of Shakespearian essays in The Dyer’s Hand, fifteen years later, but a lot more thinking had been done in the interim. For instance, the well-known piece about Othello in The Dyer’s Hand is remembered for its treatment of Iago as a practical joker, but in the relevant lecture nothing is said about this aspect of Iago’s wickedness; instead he is called an ‘inverted saint’ and credited with an acte gratuit of the sort St Augustine committed when he stole some pears he didn’t want, and fed them to pigs. Over so long a period alterations of emphasis were only to be expected, and Kirsch has had to be careful about supplementing Ansen’s notes from material in the later essays. He does make it clear when and why he occasionally finds it necessary to do so.

Auden was by this time a practised lecturer, and his unprofessorial manner on the platform appealed strongly to his audiences, which were large – as many, it is said, as five hundred. Somebody remarked that the crowd couldn’t have been more enthusiastic if Shakespeare had been lecturing on Auden. They might well have been on the look out for the odd joke or teasingly perverse remark, and there are some; but they must also have been willing to listen from time to time to lectures that might quite often have been mistaken for sermons.Under the influence of Reinhold and Ursula Niebuhr he had been trying to come to terms with Christianity, and from his reading of Pascal (instructive concerning doubt), Augustine (authoritative concerning sin), Buber, Tillich and above all Kierkegaard, he had arrived at a variety of Christian existentialism which is repeatedly expounded in these lectures. He was particularly impressed by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s book Out of Revolution, which gives a very idiosyncratic account of Christian history, ‘tracing patterns unimaginable by others’, as Edward Mendelson remarks – a disparaging view the poet himself later accepted. Throughout the time he was working on The Age of Anxiety the tone of his thinking was rather bleakly religious. The poem is set on the night of All Souls, a feast of which the establishment in 998 AD seemed to Rosenstock-Huessy, as Mendelson puts it, ‘one of the great transforming events of European history’. On the other hand, surrounded by Jewish intellectuals, and now fully conscious of the horror of the Holocaust, another transforming event, he had become very interested in Judaism and even, at one moment, contemplated conversion. At the end of the poem Malin, a Canadian Air Force officer, returns to duty and is ‘reclaimed by the actual world where time is real and in which, therefore, poetry can take no interest’. These were some of the preoccupations he brought to his Shakespeare course.He was almost from the outset offering instruction on the difference between the essential and the existential self. This kind of thing must have been hard going for the audience, which had presumably come to hear about Shakespeare and wasn’t expecting Kierkegaard and the like; and it still doesn’t always seem very transparent on the page. The excuse for its first appearance is that it leads into a discussion about Richard III’s ugliness, which compelled him to make his essential self a not-self and absolutely strong; whereas Don Giovanni, introduced for contrast, has an existential self, and ‘the existential drive evolves into an infinite series’, hence the list of conquests. There is quite a lot of this kind of thing.Auden himself had a passion for lists, accompanied by another passion for dividing his topics up into sections, less, one feels, to make the lecture more readily understandable by the audience than to satisfy some personal need. ‘We must distinguish the different senses of the term nature,’ he will begin. ‘Two senses are then distinguished, one relating to that which is distinctively human, the other to “the physical frame” in which we have to live. Whereas Classical and Chinese writers use the term in the first sense, the modern West uses it in the second, which can be divided in turn into four subcategories …’ This by way of introduction to a discussion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Shakespeare ‘mythologically anthropomorphizes nature, making nature like man and reducing the figurants of nature to size in comic situations’. There follows a disquisition on myth, with reference to Totem and Taboo, Milton’s ‘Nativity Ode’ and Dante. As to the interference of fairies in human life, we have to accept it as demonstrating the ills, major and minor, that fortune brings on us and which we are obliged to bear. This is a matter of duty: ‘our duties are … (1) … (2) … (3) …’ Along the way he turns aside to explain that nature as manifested in the climate of New York is displeasing to him; Nature, he remarks, never intended anybody to live in such a place, ‘only in a little bit of Europe and New Zealand’. A welcome moment of light relief.In relation to All’s Well, ‘there are two kinds of ego satisfaction …’ In Measure for Measure, there are ‘four claims to be made against a law we consider unjust’, in Othello we can identify ‘two types of despair’. To understand Macbeth one must recognize ‘three classes of crime’ and ‘three kinds of societies’. The rhetoric of love may also be said to be of three kinds. Less schematic but not a bit less serious are disquisitions on such subjects as the Comic, which includes the observation that masters have essence but servants only existence – it’s a pity servants are going out of fashion, they were a useful dramatic resource (see ‘Balaam and his Ass’ in The Dyer’s Hand).These explanations can go on so long that there isn’t always time to say much about the plays themselves. Auden’s head is full of ideas about Christian ethics and psychology which an encounter with Shakespeare provides an occasion to expound, the more so in that Shakespeare’s assumptions concerning these matters are evidently Christian. What is society? How ought I to love my neighbour? How must I love God? ‘Beliefs are religious or nothing,’ he declared. He thought his own earlier poetry was marred by fake beliefs. Shakespeare’s wasn’t.It seemed to follow from these convictions that the aesthetic, art in general and especially his own art of poetry were, when understood in relation to the seriousness of religious belief, pretty unimportant. ‘On one side the artist starts with an acute ego problem. Art is completely unnecessary. Like love, it is not a matter of duty.’ He accepted Kierkegaard’s distinction between the aesthetic and the ethical, which condemns the former as despair. What is important is the ethicalreligious awareness of one’s relation to God. This view, expressed more directly and forcibly in other writings, affects much that Auden says about Shakespeare, as it was to affect his own poetic practice. Later he tried to write poetry that was as near to prose as possible without sacrificing verse altogether, and here he singles out for admiration a passage from Cymbeline v.3.28 – 51, a speech ‘often cut by directors’; it is a ‘kind of writing that is not immediately noticeable, but anyone who practises verse writing returns again and again to such passages, more than to spectacular things … A writer wanting to learn his trade can find out how to write verse by studying them.’This is one of Auden’s rather rare comments on Shakespeare’s language. He might say of a particular passage, like Henry V’s soliloquy about the cares of kingship, that it is ‘terribly bad poetry’, but he doesn’t say anything more, except that this ‘is just as it should be’. He would read aloud long passages and pass on without recorded comment. The effect is a sort of compliment to the audience; they don’t require laborious explanations, for their presence is in itself a claim to be qualified to recognize good writing. His editor says ‘he can, of course, respond with perfect pitch to Shakespeare’s verse’, and this is indeed of course, but he chooses to do so rather rarely. When he does he sometimes depends, wisely, on George Rylands’ Words and Poetry, a book published in 1928 and, in its kind, never superseded. Auden may very well have said more on the subject of Shakespeare’s poetry than has survived; but it is still true that his main interests were elsewhere.In a sense, he believed that Shakespeare’s were, too. ‘I find Shakespeare particularly appealing in his attitude towards his work. There’s something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one’s life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously.’ In the circumstances this is about the biggest compliment he could have offered.Auden was at this time involved in an anxious love affair, and while he naturally does not refer directly to his own life, he occasionally meditates on love, and, more generally, on the responsibilities of one person to any other person. He quotes Denis de Rougemont (romantic love is a rather absurd illusion), and admires Kierkegaard’s lofty view of marriage as the proving ground of a spiritual relationship. Such were his preoccupations; they stem from his own situation in those years, and are of interest to his biographers, though he himself believed that an artist’s biography was his work, other talk of his life being objectionable tittle-tattle. Sometimes he does, rather surprisingly, speculate about Shakespeare’s life, with the unspoken implication that as a poet he is better equipped to understand it than a non-poet. Artists had to learn and do a job, a job for which they might sometimes, perhaps always, feel some disgust. He is sure Shakespeare did. He identifies a period during which Shakespeare was ‘either ill or exhausted’ and during which he wrote, or perhaps only partly wrote, Timon of Athens, Cymbeline, and Pericles. And he is fairly sure that Shakespeare would agree with him that art is often ‘rather a bore’.He makes some interesting remarks about the difference between minor and major writers, the latter ‘engaged in perpetual endeavours’, always trying something new and not caring if it fails, like Shakespeare, Picasso and Wagner, while the minor writer works on one masterpiece with the idea of bringing it to perfection in its kind, like Dante or Proust. The Sonnets worry him a little, as does all poetry that concerns itself with what look like private problems such as those caused by sexual desire. ‘Why,’ he asks, ‘should so much poetry be written about sexual love and so little about eating – which is just as pleasurable and never lets you down?’ He discusses these matters at some length in his lecture on Romeo and Juliet. And although for the most part he proceeds dutifully through the canon he occasionally jibs at plays he despises – The Taming of the Shrew is one, The Merry Wives of Windsor another. Indeed he declined to discuss The Merry Wives, and told the class that they could be grateful it was written because it provided the occasion for ‘a very great operatic masterpiece’. He then played a recording of Falstaff, a substitution that brought a protest from one of the students in the audience who claimed he was paying to hear Auden talk, not put on records.Other plays of which he takes an unconventionally disparaging view are Hamlet, Macbeth and Coriolanus. He feels sure Shakespeare was dissatisfied with Hamlet, disliking the soliloquies because they are in a way detachable from the play – a fair though contestable point – and, more freakishly, arguing that the whole thing must have been written to spite the actors. Sometimes he may not greatly like a play but still find a lot to say about it, as with As You Like It, where he goes conscientiously into ancient primitivism and Empson on pastoral, with quotations from an Old Irish poem, from Goethe, and from Alice in Wonderland. Discussing Love’s Labours Lost, he gives a summary account of Courtly Love based on C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, as well as a competent account of Renaissance Neo-Platonism, mostly, and legitimately, cribbed from Erwin Panofsky. He thinks this one of the most perfect of the plays, and says some fine things about its wit.The chapter on The Merchant of Venice is as good as anything I’ve read on the subject, with a clear view of Shakespeare’s idea of Venetian society, an excellent discussion of the usury question, and an account of Shylock that is both plausible and enlightened. But it is on the plays he most admired that he writes best – the Henry IV pair, and Antony & Cleopatra. The argument of the lecture on the first of these subjects is developed in The Dyer’s Hand. Auden loathes Prince Henry, the sort of person who becomes a statesman or a college president. (Mendelson describes his reaction to James Bryant Conant, the President of Harvard: ‘This is the real enemy.’) But he loves Falstaff, not in the old vacant, adoring, incomparable Sir John way, but as a man with a life, and an antitype to the ghastly prince; not a character you would choose to run a country or a university, but a man of style; fat, but compare his way of talking and behaving with Hal’s and it is the prince who seems fat. Auden then meditates on the reason why people get fat: they eat humble pie and swallow their pride as drink; and drink destroys the sense of time (time, as he argues, is very important in these plays), and makes one childlike, innocent. He is attached to life through Hal, and when he is rejected he dies. Falstaff would be an artist except that artists need not only the gift of liveliness, language and wit, but also something of Hal’s Machiavellianism and prudence.The Winter’s Tale iii.3. is praised as ‘the most beautiful scene in Shakespeare – it is the scene on the coast of Bohemia in which Antigonus deposits the baby Perdita and then, as the shepherds discover the child, is eaten by a bear. However, it is the situation, not the language, that Auden admires – he says you could describe it in other words and it would still be beautiful in the way a dream can be. Auden believed in the validity of myths, however they were told; and he distrusted language, which he also worshipped, as only a good poet has a right to do. But the famous speech of the old shepherd in that scene must surely have contributed to his sense of its exceptional beauty.Otherwise his highest praise is reserved for Antony & Cleopatra, of which he speaks with a certain magnificence. He regards with sympathy the love of the principals, so different from that of Romeo and Juliet or Troilus and Cressida; the first pair are just discovering sexual love, the second are coarse and false, but Antony and Cleopatra are having their last affair and its purpose is to enable them to escape the future, old age and death. ‘They need the fullest possible publicity and the maximum assistance from good cooking, good clothes, good drink.’ The poetry of their love talk is like fine cooking, a technique to maintain excitement even as the senses cool. He makes this point by quoting some ‘marvellous’ verses, and marvellous they are: 

Lord of lords!O infinite virtue, com’st thou smiling from 

The world’s great snare uncaught?

and the little scene, certainly a work of genius, in which ‘the god Hercules, whom Antony lov’d, / Now leaves him’ is called ‘beautiful’ by a critic who rarely uses such language. This play moved him more than any other, though he also loved some of the late romantic comedies because they represent ‘the world as you want it to be, and nothing makes one more inclined to cry’. But he is still more interested in the situation presented in the Roman play – the vast imperial setting, Ventidius doing Antony’s fighting for him on the remote eastern frontier, Octavius coldly planning in Rome, the future of the known world in the balance – while this couple, both ‘getting on’, say wonderful things to one another, and hate as intemperately as they love. ‘Tremendous power’, says Auden; but there is also a worldliness in which we all share, for ‘We all reach a time when the god Hercules leaves us’.A concluding lecture makes some just remarks about the superiority of Shakespeare to all his competitors in the brief years of flowering enjoyed by the Elizabethan-Jacobean drama. In a few years Shakespeare, serving it, developed his ‘middle style’, a style ‘paced with matter’, as Rylands remarked: a style that reaches an extraordinary and difficult maturity in the speeches of Leontes at the beginning of The Winter’s Tale, which have ‘a complete freedom of sentence style’. One wishes there were records of those Saturday afternoon sessions devoted partly to analysis of such passages.We are left, then, with a Shakespeare who, like his expositor, practised an art without taking it too seriously. ‘Increasingly he suggests … that art is rather a bore.’ Yet although this book contains many such remarks, it does take Shakespeare seriously, partly by remaking him in the image of the poet devised by the poet who is discussing him. We may wonder at the intensity of conscience and intellect Auden brought to a task he must sometimes have thought a waste of his time. That it never occurred to him to save the notes and make them into a book strengthens one’s respect for the book, now it has appeared. It is the tribute of a mature fellow-craftsman, with as much scholarship as he needed to serve his purpose – certainly nothing like the effort of research that went into John Berryman’s book on Shakespeare, but enough to illuminate the subject, and along the way to illuminate the lecturer. It is a remarkable achievement, done, to borrow Milton’s phrase, with the left hand.

Frank Kermode 

Peaces of My Mind