John
Cowper Powys: The Magic of Detachment
From
The Aryan
Path, October 1933.
Real Detachment begins when we think of our soul as a wayfarer from a
far‑off country, lodged for a while, "hospes comesque corporis -- guest
and companion of the body," among the tribes of men and upon this
satellite of the voyaging sun.
In the spirit of a visitor to this whole Cosmos we thus think of the "
I am I " within us, in large measure alien, though not unsympathetic to
the traditions of this astronomical Hostelry of our temporary sojourn; in
large measure alien, though not hostile, to the customs, ways, habits,
mythologies, of the human race into which, by some cosmic chance or
cosmic law, we have come to be born.
Scrutinizing its planetary surroundings it grows aware of the
possibility of a certain illuminated happiness, of a certain ecstasy even,
that it can reach, and help other sentiencies to reach, by various
detached ways of handling all these things. It soon indeed arrives at the
conclusion that one of the chief causes of personal unhappiness in this
world is the soul's lack of the power of detachment.
At any given moment of night or day there are qualities, essences,
emanations, adhering to the chemistry of the primordial elements around
us, calculated to fill us with a thrilling ecstasy. But it is only by
detaching ourselves from almost all of the idols of the market‑place that
we can be thus transported.
These qualities, inherent in the various substances around us, need not
reveal what is loosely and popularly known as beauty, unless you
are prepared to take that word in a very comprehensive sense. It is enough
that they are what they are, in a perfectly ordinary, natural, normal way.
Thus for instance it is not necessary that the section of road, or
mountain, or desert over which we may chance to be travelling as we
experience this mysterious ecstasy, should be in any particular fashion
remarkable. If when we look down at our feet we see dust or sand or gravel
or earth‑mould, it is entirely unnecessary that it should be beautiful
dust, beautiful sand, beautiful gravel, beautiful earth‑mould! The " I am
I," inhabiting its clothed‑upon skeleton, in contact through its senses
with dust, sand, gravel, earth‑mould, air, fire, water, if it uses its
mind in a certain particular way can feel from the mere ouch of these
primeval things an incredible vibration of mystical happiness.
It may indeed be said that the first step in our approach to the
only secret of happiness that does not fail us as we get older, is not an
ascending step, but a descending step. And Detachment is necessary from
the very start in this descent which is also an ascent; yes! we have to
detach our soul from everything that exists in order to learn the art of
creating existence and of dispensing with existence. And we have to begin
with our own body. Only by detaching ourselves from our bodies can the
magnetic currents of life‑to‑life that reach us from these inanimate
things be saved from troubling hindrances and gross impediments.
By detaching the soul from the body I do not mean leaving the body.
The detachment I speak of consists in a motion of the mind by which
the mind feels itself to be independent of the body even while, like a
hand in a well‑fitting glove, it is still intimately and inseparably
wearing the body. And just as the mind, to get the full effluence of the
life‑to‑life flowing into the soul from earth, air and water, must make
the interior motion of freeing itself from the body while it still wears
the body, so the particular phenomenon of earth and rock and sand and
water and vapour and fire that we are contemplating at the moment must be
detached from its claim to form part of any pattern of beauty, and must be
regarded in its integral texture, colour, smell, sound and taste as a
unique essence, itself, itself alone, just as our own soul is a
self alone!
To give a practical and concrete illustration of what I am hinting at, in
this first step to the art of detachment, consider for the moment that you
are sitting on a large stone by a rapid stream, with your feet on
the margin of a slope of smaller stones, past which the water flows. And
now what are the present hindrances to any calm happiness of contemplation
offered by your existing circumstances ? Your body is a little
uncomfortable. Well! if you have not acquired the trick of detaching your
mind from a slight discomfort of your body, you are certainly handicapped
at the start. Then you are teased by the fact that the water that flows
before you where you are seated is not beautifully checkered by
sun‑splashes or sun‑flakes falling through overhanging foliage, as are the
same river's waters a little way below.
In the other direction too ‑- so you now begin teasing yourself with
aggravating comparisons -- there are much more comfortable stones to sit
upon, and these smaller stones by the water's edge are sprinkled by
exquisite moss or interspersed by delicate grass. The restless craving for
beauty of the poet in us would be driving us on, up the stream, down the
stream, ever in search of lovelier spots, of more perfect natural
pictures. But a Being who is beginning to understand the secret of
Detachment remains where the accident of his wayfaring has led him to
rest. Enough for him is the mere primal fact that water ‑- that miracle of
miracles -‑ flows by, at his feet, clear and fast, that the stones beneath
it gleam with the broken lights, darken in the shadows, gather about them
the mysterious suffusion of the aqueous twilight, have the impenetrable
aloofness simply of being what they are, fragments of the
sub-structure of our earthly home, parts and parcels of the primordial
virginity of matter.
Suppose the sun to be setting as we sit alone by this flowing
water and by these naked stones, the sensuous exigency of the poet would
be fretting for the clouds to be touched with some especial glory; but the
soul in us that is acquiring the secret of Detachment would find in the
pure fire of the great orb itself a living fountain of that life-to‑life,
that breath of the "inanimate" going out to the "animate", and vice-versa,
which is the ultimate reciprocity of our present world.
The beginning of the art of Detachment is the isolation of the central
identity within us. It matters not how you name this inner self. Call it
the soul; call it the breath of life ; call it the mind, the
consciousness, the " I am I " of our inmost being. The name is nothing.
"Feeling", as Goethe says, "is all in all. The name is sound and smoke,
obscuring heaven's clear glow."
But once arrived at the feeling of of the detached "I am I," it matters
nothing whether you call this feeling "Soul," "Self," "Mind," "
Consciousness". To use it, to practise with it, to train it, to discipline
it is the essential thing. It grows more and more of an integral entity -‑
whatever it is and wherever it comes from -‑ as you concentrate upon it or
as, if you will, it concentrates upon itself. To use it, to work it, is
the thing! It grows in the practice thereof. Its reality lies in its
interior motion.
The grand advantage, from the viewpoint of personal happiness, of this art
of Detachment, lies in the escape from restlessness and from unfulfilled
desire which it offers. In the simple instance I have given above, of a
living man crouching on a naked stone above flowing water, and detaching
his mind from any fretting,chafing desire to change a position thus given
him by the accident of the way, it can be seen how the soul can enjoy the
material world around it by a process of austere simplification.
Let it not be supposed that I am advocating any self‑punishing puritanism
in all this, or any auto‑cruelty, or asceticism for the sake of
asceticism. The natural test of all these tricks of the mind is the test
of great creative Nature herself -- namely the simple feeling of
happiness. If the Detachment I am describing does not, very soon after
the tension of the initial effort, bring you a flood of happiness, you may
be sure that something is wrong and that you are on the wrong path. Such
happiness cannot infallibly or invariably be procured; but by the art of
Detachment and by a drastic simplification of the relations between the
Self and the Not‑Self it can be procured in a constantly increasing
measure.
Returning for a moment to my imaginary man or woman seated on the stone by
the water, suppose as you contemplate this water, feel this stone, and
gaze at the great orb of flame going down in the West you are aware of no
answering flood of happiness -- what then ? But are you at the end of your
resources ? That is the whole point. Not until you have exerted your
will, or what used to be called "will", to the utmost of your
strength, have you a right to cry out in the popular American slang, "
Nothing Doing! "
All mortal creatures, men and women along with the lower animals,
experience moods, under certain conditions, of exultant, flowing,
luminous, thrilling happiness. Such happiness -‑ what Wordsworth calls
"the pleasure which there is in Life itself" -‑ is surely the most
wonderful and desirable thing in the world! Put anything else, out of all
mortal experience, in the scales against it, and it will out weigh all.
When such happiness flows through you, transforming, illuminating,
inspiring your whole being, you feel at once that you, are in touch with
an "absolute", with something absolute anyway, if not with the
absolute.
Now the whole and sole purpose of the art of Detachment isto supply a
practical technique for the attaining of this rare mood.
The great thing is to begin with the deliberate isolation of the
soul without teasing ourselves to prove the soul's "existence". To
"exist," to be "real", to be "true" adhere like varying tones and colours
and odours to the soul's creative life; but the soul's life has many
aspects, and among those which are nearest the centre of its revolutions
are certain magical powers that though they only "exist" in the
imagination are more precious and more alive than "reality". All these
logical conceptions of solid, outward, unmalleable, inflexible, unporous
objects, "marching", as Walt Whitman says, "triumphantly onwards", are
conceptions from which it is necessary for the soul to detach itself.
But it is in relation to individual human beings that Detachment is most
necessary of all. The wise man spends his life running away. But luckily
he can run away without moving a step. We are all -- men and women alike
-- teased by the blue‑bottle flies who want to lay their eggs. These are
the people who have never learnt and never could learn the art of
detachment. They are blue‑bottle flies -- as my sister Philippa says ‑-
and they want to lay their eggs; and they can only lay their eggs in
carrion. Not one of us but has carrion in him, carrion in her; and the
buzzing blue‑bottles, among our fellows, smell this afar off, and fly
towards it, and would fain settle upon it and lay their eggs.
Here indeed, here most of all is it necessary to exercise the very
magic of Detachment, that magic that makes it possible for you to be in
one place -‑ like the man seated on the naked stone by the flowing water
-‑ and yet to be in the heart of the flaming sun and at the circumference
of the divine ether. For if you fail to exercise the magic of Detachment
upon the blue‑bottle flies who infest your road, they will really lay
their eggs -‑ the eggs of the maggots of civilization -‑ in your soul. And
then you will believe in the justifiability of vivisection; in the
sacrosanct importance of private property; in the virtue of patriotic war;
in slaughter-houses, in brothels, in slavery, and in the great, noble,
scientific, gregarious, loving, human, un-detached art of -‑
Advertisement. Rousseau was right. It is only by detaching yourself from
human civilization that you can live a life worthy of a living soul.
~~~
The
Aryan Path editors' introduction to this essay begins: "Everybody has
been talking about John Cowper Powys because of his new book, an
extraordinary novel -- A Glastonbury Romance. Critics are much
puzzled as to the meaning and the purpose of such a piece of writing.
Perhaps one kind of clue may be found in this essay founded on Mr Powys's
ideals and his endeavour to practise them..."
Despite affinities with other traditions, and like Whitman 'containing
multitudes' , JCP's angle of world-view, both visionary and practical, is
surely very European. The
Aryan editors' puzzlement might have been a difficulty in taking
Glastonbury at its face value?
In December JCP wrote another article, "Egotism and Impersonality",
commissioned
by the Aryan Path ... 'The Great White Lodge... are they superhuman
spirits? ... The T.T.has resolved to type my rather specious and
plausible & over scholastic article... which I think they may refuse in
Bombay but which I think they will pay for in New York. We shall see..'
The river past Phudd -- its sunlit glitter, its golden underwater stones,
its rocks, its droughts, its floods, its ice, its fish -- runs freely
through JCP's life Upstate.
4th June 1933
(Whitsunday)
Then O my unknown Reader! when I reached the stream where last night I had
left that wretched pool full of fish & could only rescue one of them &
those white fowls like Vultures hovering round & that wild crying
yellowish Meadow-Lark or Kill-Deer screaming above for their death --
behold and lo! This heavenly Rain had filled the river so that it had
reached that wretched Pool! Shantih! Shantih! Shantih! as the "Wasteland"
ends! All therefore is well. It reached the Pool & only stopped a few
yards below it! Went on to Alders River & here I sat down on the grey
stones by the willow the little willow & that expanse of shallow muddy but
never drying up water where the stream flows broadest & calmest. Here
still sitting for the Great Spirit -- The [pneuma 'agon] -- The
Holy Ghost -- gives not a fig no! not a fart! whether you worship Him the
Third Person of the Great Trinity sitting standing sneezing sleeping
dunging pissing coughing, fucking, running, walking, hopping, skipping, or
in any other activity or meditation or posture -- All is Equal as long as
you worship the Spirit. But and And the Sin against the Spirit is
[to] limit its Power and its Virtue and its Inspiration to any Shape or
Form or Pharasaic Rite or meticulous Ritual -- Thus I, the arch-Pharisee &
super-Ritualist worshipped on White Sunday, sitting hunched up by that
muddy water! And the inspiration did flow through Petrushka! ... Had a
lovely lesson. And read aloud standing Hoc Est Corpus Meus!
[their recent morning reading had included St Matthew and Dante's
Inferno]
7th June.
... Went upstairs to work & began with a good deal of grinding of ropes &
hawling [sic] of pulleys my $75 article on "Detachment" for that
Aryan Bombay paper of "the Great White Lodge"! ... 12th June.
... I want the T.T. to buy herself a new dress out of my Aryan Path.
White Dress? Which Dress? which Dress ???? ... 13th June. She
cannot decide on her New Dress -- shall it be the Athletic costume or the
Garden Party costume...
19th June.
... still no Rain -- Not a drop of water from the sky... I stood
in ecstasy by our rocks where there is water flowing still
a little [...] I could see lovely reflections in it & a tiny
trickle of melodious water came over the Rocks. And a great mass of
Golden Buttercups looked so wondrous against the grey stones The grey
stones the grey stones where the flood carried and deposited them.
That is what I like so much in this country. I do like so very well
the actual strata The sub-soil The soil, the rocks, the stones. To
like the Soil of a place is most important -- only Second to the Air
of a place. And I have real fondness for these grey stones these slaty
stones with white quartz in them. Had our Lesson -- Homer, St Mark,
Dante, Peter denying Christ and Virgil terrified at the ramparts of Dis.....
From The
Powys Society Newsletter, No 51, April 2004
