Waiting in the wings

He would have turned left out of Stansfield Road into Dalyell Road, left again into Pulross Road near the point where it joins up with Ferndale Road sneaking in at an acute angle under the railway, round past the post office, and into the main road.  Perhaps in his pram, initially, looking out and “facing the strange” (although it was said of him that he looked as though he’d been here before), then later, on his own two feet. From the quiet, slightly claustrophobic grey back streets, in just over five minutes, into the heart of Brixton, then as now arguably the most sensual, aurally and visually stimulating, informationally intense nexus anywhere in residential London. Markets, big stores, a war-battered populace struggling to get by in those icy, austerity winters, the clatter of green electric trains echoing through gaps in the buildings (the archetypal sound of south London)  – ricochet, ricochet - from viaducts high up and at unexpected angles; steamed up buses, crowds, humanity, the awareness of central London just a couple of miles away. Life itself.

 © R. Abbott 2016

Could these surroundings in any way have contributed to genius, to ambition, to a sense of mortality and of being an outsider, to an urge to make the most of what might be a tragically truncated life? Can places sometimes influence us to become what we become? Can they tell us what to do, can they reflect back at us who we are or should be? Some students of psychogeography might believe so.

I first heard David Bowie in the summer of 1969, on the radio. It was the same afternoon that a short, violent thunderstorm came and went, and had much the same effect – leaving one feeling … what was that?

By the end of the Sixties one was used to musical oddities, but this one, ‘Space Oddity’, was clearly something else. Apart from being a brilliant and timely song, as the manned Apollo lunar launch approached, after a few listenings one realised that this was in a league of its own. Here was a singer/songwriter who thought differently from most, who was thoroughly at home with wordplay of all kinds and with the most peculiar kinds of synaesthesia and obscure allusion, and who wrote about unconventional subjects in offbeat ways. To start with, the punning title itself, then the amazingly physical sensation of lift-off and bursting through clouds and atmosphere into space; the economy of the lyrics – “the papers want to know whose shirts you wear” and the double meaning of “planet Earth is blue”; the homonymic segue “can you hear me Major Tom, can you hear/here am I floating round my tin can”; and most bizarrely of all, the distortion of the vowel sound in “Major”, its increasing “cockneyfication” simulating Doppler shift. Even Lennon-McCartney rarely managed anything quite as concentratedly, cleverly weird.

Then nothing much for a year or two. I was on a train in Italy, joining a compartment of young Americans. “Hey, you’re British”, they exclaimed. “Do you know David Bowie?” There was some transatlantic difference of opinion about how to pronounce the surname; ambiguity even in something as fundamental as that. Interesting.

So, over more than forty years, we have been treated not just to an amazing  productivity of gorgeous songs, but to all kinds of extramusical and verbal intrigues,  fusions of styles and genres – as well as all the haircuts, the outfits, the different voices, the chameleonic adoption of styles and personas, the teasings about gender and sexuality, the acting roles, the manipulation of celebrity, that wonderful laugh, and all the rest of it. This was a man who, even at the age of 68, could invent funky yodelling (‘Girl Loves Me’) and produce the fabulously enjoyable cacophony that is “’Tis a pity she was a whore”. Genius, surely, if not actually a superman.

And it all began in those echoing streets near the railway lines. Though he never penned a specific anthem to the city he loved, in the way that Ray Davies wrote ‘Waterloo Sunset’, there were plenty of references, in ‘The London Boys’, ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’, and elsewhere, to central London as an attractant, albeit a fickle one, for a suburban adolescent craving escape and success. While domiciled in Berlin, LA, Switzerland, Mustique, Manhattan or wherever, London was, I suspect, always his psychological base.

Finally, posthumously, “Our Brixton Boy” was claimed back, by a district in some ways unrecognisable since the late Forties but in other ways unchanged. The trains are no longer uniformly green, the railway bridges have been boringly cosmeticised, the markets sell more exotic items, more languages are spoken, the tube has put in an appearance, but for the things that matter, still the days seem the same.

Bowie’s death was shocking, not only because it came so suddenly, so early, so unexpectedly against all the apparent evidence of continuing creativity but because, totally unreasonable though it is to say so, this was a man who, if anyone could manage it, would be – should be - immortal. All the while, though, as I’m sure he knew from an early age, time was waiting in the wings, its trick being David Robert Jones himself … and you and me. All the while, in those south London streets, from Brixton to Beckenham and Bromley and even the much maligned Penge (where you can sleep while dreaming of walking about in New York), time has been waiting. It’s still there, seeking another victim. Meanwhile, the sounds of those magnificent songs in the mind’s ear still haunt the streets, streets for now emptier, sadder, less hopeful.

From what we can guess, Bowie was a religious person, perhaps not conventionally so, but one who took the parable of the talents to the extreme. He set out to do what he was capable of doing, didn’t just do what anyone else can do, made the most of the gifts he had been given, gave immense pleasure to millions along the way through his extraordinarily fluent and glorious creativity and, while having fun with all the poses and images, remained just an ordinary guy from a backstreet. Any one of us. Well, almost ordinary. That is one of the reasons why we admired him and why we feel the loss so intensely now; he appealed to the outsider in us all, to anyone who has ever plodded the city streets wondering what to do with one’s life, asking forlornly what does it all mean? A protean human being onto whom we could all project ourselves.

 
In the end, though, not the air crash he for so long feared, not the loony’s bullets that did for his friend and hero John Lennon, but just a common and cruel disease. As mortal as the rest of us, for “everybody gets got” and, as is so often observed on such occasions; how utterly stupid and tragic and wasteful. His death, after and despite such immense achievements, after such a fascinating journey through life, brings home to us all the inevitability of our own future demise. But we were blessed to have had him around during our lifetimes.

The death of Colin Wilson, encyclopaedic outsider and cultural portal

I was saddened to learn last week of the death at the age of 82 of one of my earliest intellectual heroes  - though some would sniff “pseudo-intellectual”. Colin Wilson was a man curiously both slightly behind and slightly ahead of his time. He was an autodidact with an almost nineteenth century concern for self-improvement, a man with highbrow tastes seemingly unimpressed with modern popular culture, and someone driven by an urge for knowledge and experience who battled with his own information explosion long before the internet made that phenomenon a commonplace for every active, thinking, culturally engaged person.

The basic facts of Colin’s life are well known, including the hype - the early instinct for adopting a mediagenic persona (polo neck sweaters, sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath, the horsewhip episode) – and the unwise declarations of genius which were soon to backfire on him with such long lasting and devastating effect, revenge from the stuffier, less imaginative parts of the English establishment with whom he had not been to school or university.

My first awareness of him, in my mid-teens, a decade after his first (and possibly best) book “The Outsider”, was when he co-authored a rather juicy encyclopaedia of murder which provided a factual background for furtive explorations of dubious locales that I made with a friend, seedy sites that included Hilldrop Crescent, Rillington Place and Hanbury Street. It was evident to me from the start that Colin was a tad pervy, exactly in what way subsequently  revealed with embarrassing detail in his later autobiography, “Dreaming to Some Purpose”. Too much information, Colin.

And that was always it: too much information. As the years passed he became a one man encyclopaedia not just of crime but of … everything, or so it seemed. Eventually almost a self-caricature.

Over the years I gradually caught up on his back catalogue and bought each new book that he brought out. I was never very keen on his novels, but I devoured his non-fiction avidly and was intrigued by his concepts of, for instance, Faculty X and the St Neot margin. His writings acted for me like a portal to the works of philosophers, psychologists and others who otherwise would have remained unknown to me, at least for a long time; his writings provided a gateway and a short cut into areas that I was unfamiliar with, having had primarily a scientific education. Probably the most important thinker he “turned me on to” was Abraham Maslow, with his now-famous hierarchy of needs culminating in self-actualisation and his accounts of peak experiences. I could relate to that kind of thing, and to many other descriptions of essentially subjective experiences that were rarely discussed elsewhere, even in textbooks of psychology. Especially in textbooks of psychology. Colin wrote about things, as it were, from the inside. But he was obviously not quite respectable, for he was too omnivorous, not discriminating enough, with too evidently a taste for intellectually dodgy characters, would-be supermen and deviants of all kinds; there were far too many references to sadism and to what he always spelled as “fetichism” (which made it sound even kinkier than it was) - yet that degree of self-revelation was part of his attraction. Emerging into public life in the same year as Elvis, he built up quite a fan base around the world.

Subjective experiences like involuntary memory, peak experiences and déjà vu – things which, though unusual and disturbing, I thought everyone had - were fascinating to me, and Colin Wilson’s output furthered my interest in what I would call “normal” subjectivity. When he published “The Occult” I was briefly enthralled, but within a few years I began to feel that he had been “taken in” by many aspects of parapsychology and mysticism, which is not to say that even now I necessarily dismiss all such claims. Indeed, Colin was right at the leading edge of the 1970s popular infatuation with all things that became dubbed New Age. I remember going to Claude Gill’s bookshop in Oxford Street sometime in the mid-seventies; Uri Geller was there bending keys, on (I believe) his first visit to Britain, and he kept talking about Colin Wilson, asking if anyone knew him, and he said he was meeting him the following day. I don’t know if Geller is genuine - no one does - but from where I was standing I was convinced – perhaps fooled. Even so, my interest in parapsychology soon declined, and my scepticism grew. I felt that Colin may have been gullible in some respects; I was happier with “normal” subjectivity than with the supposed “paranormal” variety.

For me, Colin was an inspiration not only for what I read, but an encouragement to try writing myself. In more recent years I’ve read anything by or about him that came my way, rather more critically than formerly, while becoming increasingly irritated by his predictable lazy repetition and recycling of earlier themes. But there are other interesting aspects of the “flavour” of the man that enhance his appeal – for instance his association with Soho in the Fifties and Notting Hill in the Sixties, moody periods and places in our recent cultural past – the Angry Young Men, “Absolute Beginners”. And there is the parable of the provincial lad growing up in a town of – as he described it “cow like people” – feeling the draw of the metropolis as a place where he might meet like minded souls and achieve the success he craved; this is such a frequent and popular trope in modern British cultural life.

Colin was someone I could relate to. As a young adult, unsuccessful, provincial, often lonely, working in uncongenial surroundings but interested in ideas, in creativity and psychological phenomena, it was easy for me to identify (pretentiously, perhaps) with the “outsider” condition that he described – but then, unfortunately, so do the Anders Breiviks and Mark Chapmans of this world. The five percent of the population who fall into this bracket, according to Colin, include some very unpleasant people indeed, as well as your average misfit, not to mention your average person who perhaps thinks a bit differently from others and has different interests and concerns from the majority (me on a good day), plus the occasional oddball genius (Bowie fits the mould perfectly and, indeed, once cited “Col” as an influence). Outsiders are motivated by, driven by or tormented by their awareness of mortality, of the limited time available to try and make sense of “it all”, the few years in which to try and leave something behind that will survive a short while and establish that “they were here”. They struggle with the basic existential conundrums long after many people abandon them as impossible, and seek to make the best use of the talents they have been given, and of their allotted time here. It may be, of course, that “the outsider personality” is an overblown concept, and that we all sit somewhere on a spectrum of relative outsiderness.

Where Colin’s work particularly strikes home to me is his urge to devour information. In “The World as Information” (published by Intellect in 1999, immediately before the internet became such a central aspect of our lives), I described in some detail his huge appetite to consume and digest knowledge. In various publications he has given figures for the number of books and recordings he possessed, which were gradually taking over his Cornish bungalow, along with outbuildings constructed specially to house them. For instance, in “Dreaming to Some Purpose”, published in 2004, he wrote: “In July 1961 I note that I had 5,000 books and 1,500 records in the house. By 1963, I had 10,000 books and 4,000 records. Today I have about 25,000 books and the same number of records. This probably goes a long way towards explaining why we never had any money”. In the era we are now entering, when increasingly we are encouraged not to collect but to freely download from the internet, one wonders how he would have reacted and coped.

Being an outsider offers plenty of scope for pathology, but charitably one may say that Colin’s collecting instincts were part and parcel of his larger than life personality, the central motivation that drove his career as an author, and a feature that made him – to the distant reader – so human, so likeable, so easy to identify with. The outsider, whether it’s an exaggeration or not, is a personality type that increasingly we will encounter and will need to understand, to accommodate and to enable to succeed. Whatever the potential dangers, it is so often outsiders who drive things forwards, rather than those who are at ease with themselves, psychologically comfortable - with or without the infamous pram in the hall.

Arguably, Colin’s best output was early on. He once said that he had to write in the same way that a dog with fleas has to scratch; surely, he wrote too much, but quite apart from the dog that had to be scratched there was also the wolf that had to be kept from the door. With his passing, a serious re-evaluation of the life and works of Colin Wilson, especially one in the context of relevance to present day concerns, would be timely.

Colin Wilson was born in Leicester on 26th June 1931 and died in Cornwall on 5th December 2013.