Strange Powers (7 page)

When I had been at The Beacon House, he had shown me the typescript of a 'book', actually a volume of essays, called
The Philosophy of an Escapist;
I had been puzzled by the title, until he explained that by 'escapist', he meant someone who wanted to escape the rat-race and retire to a place where he could meditate. I had wanted to borrow the typescript, but it was the only one and he was unwilling to let it out of his hands. Now he brought me a photocopy to Cornwall, and I had a chance to study it in more detail. I found it an immensely interesting document, which provided me with a great deal more insight into his character; but as far as explaining his 'powers' was concerned, it was again a disappointment. All the same, it did provide certain insights. It was clear from the opening paragraphs that Leftwich is a typical 'outsider' figure. 'The idea of settling down away from the influences of modern civilization and its appalling artificiality originated in my mind almost immediately after I left College... ' An 'outsider', in the terminology I developed, is a self-actualizes who wants to sidestep the demands of everyday life and get down to creation. He (or she) wants to evolve, to move on. Maslow's classic case was of a girl who had been a brilliant sociology student at college, and was forced to take a job as a personnel manager in a chewing gum factory during the depression years; she became so depressed she even ceased to menstruate. Maslow cured her by simply suggesting that she should continue her studies at night school. She was getting sick of marking time, staying in the same place. W. B. Yeats had a fantasy of a 'Castle on a Rock' where a community of poets and artists could spend their lives growing vegetables and living the life of the mind. What really destroyed Van Gogh was not the mental strain of being a visionary; it was the strain of never knowing where his next meal was coming from, of always being poor, of having to live off his brother who, unburdened by a powerful creative urge, was able to bring himself to work for a living. Gauguin hoped to find his freedom in the South Seas, but poverty followed him there.
This
is the basic problem of the Outsider; he just wants
time
to sort himself out, to be creative.

In my own teens, I dreamed of retiring to one of those stone huts on the Aran Isles, formerly occupied by religious ascetics. This problem—of how to stay alive and develop my potentialities, in a society that insisted that I work forty-five hours a week for just enough money to keep me alive—was solved by the success of
The Outsider.
It is true that it brought as many problems as it solved; but it certainly solved that basic problem: of how to avoid working in a factory or office, doing somebody else's business instead of my own. So I had solved the problem by the time I was twenty-four. The writer's life still has plenty of problems—
The Author
has conducted a survey that showed that less than a hundred writers in Great Britain can live wholly from their working—but at least they are problems you can feel strongly about, not problems that strike you as infinitely boring and irrelevant.

Robert Leftwich had faced the problem logically, and set out to solve it in a sensible, determined way: to save enough money to retire while fairly young, and be able to devote the last third of his life to 'self-actualization'. 'I began to economize very enthusiastically by depriving myself of all unnecessary luxuries......ad had a shot at the same method, working for a few weeks to make a little spare money, then sleeping out in a sleeping bag to save rent, and eating in cheap workman's cafes. I also had reason to sympathize with Robert's divagation, if that is the word: '... ultimately, the basic desire for female companionship superseded these good intentions, with the result that... I eventually found myself engaged.' I had also found myself married and a parent; I fled the dilemma, rather than solved it, by separating from my wife after eighteen months. Robert had behaved more decently; he married, produced children, and continued to work towards the ideal of 'escape', while continuing to take full responsibility for his wife and children. He had recognized, after a while, that marriage and parenthood would not provide a substitute for what he really wanted. When I first met him, he felt he had about another year before he could 'escape'; at the time of writing, two years later, he is somewhere in the South of France with a caravan, while Patricia and the children are in England.

The desire for escape has been Leftwich's lifelong preoccupation. And it suggests a reason for the development of his unusual powers. He set himself a long-distance aim—a
very
long-distance aim, since it has taken him until he is fifty to achieve it. Now anybody who has ever set out determinedly to lose weight knows about the curious effect of 'moral uplift' that can come from self-discipline. Once you've embarked on the course, and see your weight vanishing at a rate of five pounds a week, you become a kind of miser about every mouthful of bread. You begin to calculate—by Easter you'll have lost twenty-five pounds... Being hungry becomes a kind of pleasure. It even becomes a kind of addiction; doctors are familiar with cases of girls who diet to achieve 'Twiggy figures', and then continue to starve until they are suffering from serious undernourishment, and have to be force-fed. But even dieting is a fairly short-term discipline; at the end of three months or so, you can go back to normal eating. Robert Leftwich has been subjecting himself to a rigorous self-discipline for twenty-five years or so.

Now what does discipline do? Basically, it increases one's 'vital reserves'—or, rather, makes them more available. It makes one more 'free'. Satre said he had never felt so free as during the war, when he was in the Resistance, was likely to be arrested and shot at any moment. Why? Because he had to maintain a higher level of alertness, of 'preparedness'. Similarly, the disciplines evolved by Gurdjieff—and practised at his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau—aimed at keeping his pupils in a state of constant alertness: they might be asked to leap out of bed in the middle of the night and instantly assume some difficult position. A young boy, Fritz Peters, was induced to make greater and greater efforts mowing the lawns, until he could do vast areas in one day. The aim was to keep everyone bubbling with energy. 'Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake,' said William James, who might almost have been quoting Gurdjieff. (Gurdjieff would have said that, compared to what we ought to be, we are fast asleep.) 'We are making use of only a small part of our mental and physical resources.' 'We live subject to arrest by degrees of fatigue which we have come only from habit to obey. Most of us may learn to push the barrier further off, and to live in perfect comfort on much higher levels of power.' And he adds: 'The transformation, moreover, is a chronic one; the new level of energy becomes permanent.' All these quotations are from his important essay 'The Energies of Man'.

It is not only ignorance—or laziness—that keeps us 'below our proper selves'. All animals are complicated systems of drives
and
inhibitions. Different circumstances require different responses. In battle, it is of great advantage to be carried away by anger; in peace time, it could be a great disadvantage. A self-controlled man would be able to
allow
himself to be carried away by anger when it suits him, and to inhibit it when it doesn't: that is to say, he sets up a system of control even over the ability to lose control. Such complexities are bound to defeat their own purpose sometimes—particularly in modern civilized life: hence Rousseau's nostalgia for the life of the noble savage; hence the rising rate of neurosis in our society. The sheer entanglement of inhibitory systems and anti-inhibitory systems and systems for overruling anti-inhibitory systems is bound to produce a certain energy wastage through tension. Psychologists have observed that when a patient is hypnotized, and told that he cannot move his arm, he finds it impossible to move it, no matter how hard he tries. On examining what is happening in more detail, it has been found that, for example, a patient who has been told to bend his arm is actually contracting his flexor muscles, but is also contracting the extensor muscles to prevent him from bending it; his self-division (in this case, an artificial one caused by the hypnotist) causes him to
cancel out
an action he is attempting to perform. On the other hand, tests on patients under hypnosis have also shown that they can be made to exert far more strength than they are capable of exerting when 'awake': up to one-third more. Their mental performance can also be improved in a similar ratio. We might say, then, that our natural powers are inhibited by a self-consciousness that has the same basic nature as embarrassment or stage fright. I can overcome this 'canceling' process in two ways: either by relaxing completely (perhaps with the aid of drugs or alcohol, or by meditation techniques), or by making such a steady and determined effort that I launch myself onto a higher plane of energy, in which the forward drive completely overrules the inhibitory mechanism.

In his book, Leftwich says he isn't sure whether his tireless energy is due to his 'self-imposed restrictive way of life', or whether he was 'fortunate enough to inherit a very high basic metabolic rate'. I would plump for the first.

I read a great deal
of Philosophy of an Escapist
that first night he stayed with us, and it was then that I definitely decided that I would like to write about him, whether or not I could satisfy my curiosity about his powers. I have to admit that I had misgivings about having Robert actually around the premises. I usually write all day; then, at six o'clock, I'm ready to pour a glass of wine and spend a long evening listening to music or reading, or even watching TV if there is some culturally rewarding program such as
Maigret
or
The Avengers.
I like to 'switch off and become purely receptive; and I tend to resent it if I have guests who want to discuss questions of philosophy or psychology; it may be relaxation for them, but for me, it is talking shop. But Robert wasn't as bad as I'd anticipated. I was amused to watch Joy's reaction to him; I could see she didn't quite know what to make of him, bewildered by the impact of his schoolboy exuberance and completely non-offensive—because totally candid—egoism. He repeated some of the things he had said to me before—for example, about dowsing, or the ability to make things happen—and I noted that he repeated them in almost exactly the same words. This reinforced my feeling of his basic honesty; a man who is letting his imagination run away with him tends to change things slightly each time, to embroider...

This ability to make things happen, was, in effect, an extension of his trick of making the schoolmaster ask him to repeat the only lines he'd learned, and I found one story particularly interesting. Robert said he'd been talking with a friend about the power of the mind. They were walking through central London, and Robert said: 'For example, we could walk into any shop and take anything without paying for it.' When his friend showed skepticism, he offered to demonstrate. They walked into a shop that had two assistants. As they did so, one assistant said 'I'm going to the store room' and went out. At that moment, the telephone rang, and the other assistant said: 'Excuse me,' and also went out, leaving them alone: Robert said: 'You see.' 'But that's just coincidence,' said his friend. 'All right, I'll do it again.' They went into another shop. Within a few minutes, a woman fainted and all the staff went to her aid, leaving them free... By this time the friend was looking worried. 'It's still coincidence...' 'All right, we'll do it again.' And they did. On the third occasion, they went into a shop and he warned that they were playing with very dangerous forces. They had hardly been in there for two minutes, when there was an accident in the road outside causing all the staff and customers to leave.

If this story sounded astonishing, his next statement was even more so. In order to establish beyond all doubt that this was a 'power' of the mind he was using, he decided to do it a
thousand
times. And he claims he did. He didn't say how long this took him, but he did mention that he devoted his 'proceeds', such as they were, to charity.

No doubt this anecdote will arouse more skepticism than any so far. I find it consistent with Leftwich's other premises. There can be no doubt that the chief fault we have developed, through the long course of human evolution, is a certain basic
passivity.
When provoked by challenges, human beings are magnificent. When life is quiet and even, we take the path of least resistance, and then wonder why we feel bored. A man who is determined and active doesn't pay much attention to 'luck'. If things go badly, he takes a deep breath and redoubles his effort. And he quickly discovers that his moments of deepest happiness often come after such efforts. The man who has become accustomed to a passive existence becomes preoccupied with 'luck'; it may become an obsession. When things go well, he is delighted and good humored; when they go badly, he becomes gloomy and petulant. He is unhappy—or dissatisfied—most of the time, for even when he has no cause for complaint, he feels that gratitude would be premature; things might go wrong at any moment; you can't really trust the world... Gambling is one basic response to this passivity, revealing the obsession with luck, the desire to make things happen.

The absurdity about this attitude is that we fail to recognize the active part we play in making life a pleasure. When my will is active, my whole mental and physical being
works
better, just as my digestion works better if I take exercise between meals. I gain an increasing feeling of control over my life, instead of the feeling of helplessness (what Sartre calls 'contingency') that comes from long periods of passivity. Yet even people who are intelligent enough to recognize this find the habit of passivity so deeply ingrained that they find themselves holding their breath when things go well, hoping fate will continue to be kind.