Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

The Secret Life of Aphasia

The other day I was listening to a neuroscientist on Radio 4 talking about intuition. The scientist in question, Mark Lythgoe, is decribed as an 'intuition sceptic'. I wonder what it is exactly that he's sceptical about? I certainly didn't find it clear from what he said on the programme. In any case, to me intuition is just something that's self-evident. I would not be able to write without intuition. It is more essential to the writing process than my hand. That's how I know it's there. My interest in the group unconscious also stems from my experience of the creative process, but I'm getting off the point a bit. I feel like denying the intuition is like denying the existence of the unconscious. I have heard people deny the existence of the unconscious. "Well, if I'm not conscious of it, then how can it exist!?" is the usual feeble reasoning. Let's see, hmmm, do you consciously control your heartbeat, your digestion, the growth of your hair? No? And yet it happens. How? Unconsciously - by means of the unconscious. I think we can move on now.

And the intuition and the unconscious are - of course - very much linked. Perhaps it would be enough to say that your intuition is simply your mind doing what Lovecraft hoped human minds never could do - correlating all its contents, or at least a vast amount of them, and considerably faster than the conscious mind can. I'm not sure the explanation stops there, but I don't, at this moment, insist on more to the intuition than that. (Well, I did mention group unconscious, didn't I? That would be part of the 'more' factor of intuition.)

I don't think that intuition is a simple or single thing, anyway, but, whatever it is, I'd like to give here an illustration of my own intuition. What do you make of this? It's twenty minutes long, so don't feel obliged to watch the whole thing:



I first saw this - the whole thing, in fact - some time ago and felt that there was something wrong about it intuitively. Now, I'm sure many people will say that you don't need your intuition to say that there's something wrong with this video, that reason is perfectly adequate to the task, we know that our thought-forms don't create reality, because otherwise there would be no gap between our fantasies and our actual experience. But that is not what I find to be wrong with this. I'm willing to accept that thought can be very powerful in creating our experience, and even see it as a possibility that thought composes the entirety of our experience. That begs the question, then, why we can't control our experience... Well, I'll come to that.

No, the thing that to me felt wrong about this whole thing was that it is offensively cheesy. The urgency of the opening sequence, the whispered voices, the sub-Hollywood/sub-Da Vinci Code mystical-historical imagery. I think I had a similar feeling when a perfectly reasonable (outwardly) person tried to recruit me for a marketing scheme recently. I'd like to stress here that my immediate judgement in the case of this film was aesthetic, and therefore instinctive and intuitive. Afterwards rationalisations came to me, but they were slower. One obvious rationalisation, which is fundamentally linked to the tackiness of the film, is the fact that although the talking heads here speak of positive thinking as a force by which you can be 'anything you want to be', none of them seem to have the imagination to think beyond, "I want to be a person with a flashy new car." Oh dear. How about, "I want to be a saffron, inter-dimensional sea-urchin whose ectoplasmic spines penetrate into different universes enabling me to sup upon the experiences of a myraid different beings at once, converting them into a hybrid dream which I then shoot through a labial blowhole into a higher dimension beyond the ever-collapsing cycles of time, where they are further refined into iridescent droplets of spray, each splashing against the rockface of nothingness in an ecstasy of perdition, at once wholly alien to all that has passed within biological experience, and yet containing a pink, fairy-light tincture of something that was once personality!"? I mean, that would be a start.

But no, it's all "I want a new house with a neat, white fence" and so on.

There's something else. I have, over the years, been accused - it may be difficult for some of you to believe, as it is for me - of being negative. Thinking about it now, 'negative' is a really piss-poor criticism of anything. I think it evinces the same lack of imagination as that to be found in the custodians of the 'secret'. But I have, from habitual doubt, always supposed that those who made such accusations about me, and recommended to me that I should think positively, were right. Recently I come to feel that positive thinking is not something that I have 'failed to acheive', or been too stubborn to adopt. Positive thinking is really the most negative thing of all - to have to screen your thoughts constantly in the fear that you'll think something depressing and lose that happy-clappy momentum that had almost brought you within reach of your brand new conservatory! Yeah, what am I missing out on?

Bollocks to that.

I did say I'd get round to the explanation of why, if life is composed entirely of thought - and, you know, of course, I'm not certain that it is - there is such a gap between fantasy and lived experience. Well, I think there's an explanation here that refutes 'positive thinking' as much as it refutes the reason of Mark Lythgoe. I remember Larkin writing in a letter to a friend - and I believe he was drawing on what he had read of D. H. Lawrence - that whatever systems and explanations psychiatry comes up with to cure everyone, or politics comes up with to build the perfect world, the unconscious will always come up with something new to fuck it up. You can't control your unconscious. You either are it, or it controls you.

Labels: Mark Lythgoe, positive thinking, The Secret