The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson (1967)
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It's a perfectly fair question: if you find post-1937 tales in the Lovecraft mythos subgenre so bad, why insist on continuing to read them?
First, because when I started reading Lovecraft in the early 1980s his books - and those of his epigones - were rarer than hen's teeth. I still get emotional when I recall finding a single Zebra paperback of Bloch's Mysteries of the Worm on the wire rack at the local newsstand.
Second, because writers in the subgenre today are simply better than in previous decades. Reggie Oliver joins Ramsey Campbell on the slopes of this minor Parnassus. Laird Barron and Steve Duffy bring an astounding versatility and a robust taste for gracing novellas with their refreshing and arresting voices.
By comparison, The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson, published in 1967, seems like it came out of the ark. Wilson gives us a thousand page sci-fi/fantasy adventure-type novel (later perfected - if that is the word - by Lumley) digested down to a 250 page sketch, a tale described instead of narrated.
Wilson wrote books about thinkers, their funks, and the saving "power of positive thinking" as non-fiction first, then tried compressing them into crime thrillers. He had his best luck when he tried to shape his ersatz petty bourgeois subjectivism using the armature of science fiction. Like Hubbard, Van Vogt, and John W. Campbell, Wilson used his pop philosophy to give us the story of a new cohort of human overmen; he portrays them evolving as they tangle with a semi-conscious cancer retarding the mind-over-matter potential of the brain.
Absurd good news
....One of the central scenes in The Mind Parasites, Austin's nightlong battle with the mind parasites, was already prefigured in a passage in my first book The Outsider (1956) in which I described the terrifying experience that came to the psychologist William James, as well as to his father, Henry James Sr., and which the latter called (borrowing the word from Swedenborg) 'the vastation'.
Here, first, is the father:
'One day towards the close of May, having eaten a comfortable dinner, I remained sitting at the table after the family had dispersed, idly gazing into the embers of the grate, thinking of nothing and feeling only the exhilaration incident to a good digestion, when suddenly—in a lightning flash, as it were—'fear came upon me, and trembling made all my bones to shake'. To all appearances it was a perfectly insane and abject terror without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape, squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life. The thing had not lasted ten seconds before I felt myself a wreck, that is, reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful manhood to one of almost helpless infancy. I felt the greatest desire to shout for help to my wife…but by an immense effort I controlled these frenzied impulses and determined not to budge…until I had recovered my self-possession. This purpose I held to for a good hour…beat upon meanwhile by an ever-growing tempest of doubt, anxiety and despair. '
James Senior's 'vastation' eventually drew him to the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and to a kind of religious conversion that led him to write a book Society, the Redeemed Form of Man.
His son's experience happened in 1870, when he was 28, during a period when he was beginning to doubt whether he would ever make anything of his life, and whether he had not already wasted too much of it:
'Whilst in a state of philosophic pessimism, and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight…when suddenly there came upon me, without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously, there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day…moving nothing but his black eyes, and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing I possess can defend me from that fate if the hour should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid in my breast gave way, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this, the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before.'
The most interesting phrase here is that 'if the hour should strike for me…nothing could defend me from that fate'. That is to say, James felt completely passive and helpless. It was as if he possessed no free will. This sounds absurd—you only have to wiggle your fingers to demonstrate that you have free will. But we have to understand that there was at that time a powerful movement in philosophy that insisted that man is an automaton, and that everything we do is a response to a stimulus, like a coin in a vending machine. And in moods of weariness and depression, when every effort is painful, that seems all too plausible.
At this point, James came across a passage in one of his favourite philosophers, Charles Renouvier, who pointed out that the reality of free will is shown by the fact that we can sustain a thought when we could just as easily think of something else. That struck James as irrefutable, and he wrote in his diary: 'My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will'. And from that moment his depression began to lift.
All this was at the back of my mind as I wrote The Mind Parasites, for I had spent one of the gloomiest periods of my early teens wrestling with this same problem. As a committed believer in science, I had been struck at the age of 13 by the thought that even science has no answer to the problem of where space ends. Renouvier solved it to his own satisfaction by deciding that the word infinity is meaningless, like the square root of minus one. But my own increasing conviction that science has no solid foundations filled me with a feeling of insecurity which occasionally produced a sensation like falling into emptiness.
Fortunately, this negativity was frequently counterbalanced by the sudden upsurge of the sensation that G. K. Chesterton called 'absurd good news', the mystical conviction that everything is good. This often came when I set out on long cycle rides in the country, or reading my favourite poets, and had on me the same effect as James's conviction that free will really exists. Its effect was to cause my will to bestir itself—which, of course, begins to recharge the vital batteries that have been drained by inaction, like a car left standing for too long in the garage. The moment the engine roars into life, the batteries begin to recharge....
While Wilson presents himself as an apostle of bootstrapping "good news," his decision to write a novel in the Lovecraft mythos subgenre (the subgenre of "absurd bad news") is the clearest example of espousing his views via contrast.
The first half of The Mind Parasites is the strongest, before our heroes begin toying with world war and the orbit of the moon. Narrator Austin's accumulating insights during nighttime brooding at an archeological dig in Turkey are well-conveyed:
....I walked up the hill, and into one of the chambers of the upper gate. Then I climbed the stairs to the top of the wall, and stood there looking out over the moonlit plain. I admit that my mood was romantic, and that I experienced a need to intensify it. So I stood there, hardly breathing, thinking of the dead sentries who had stood where I now stood, and of the days when only the Assyrians lay on the other side of those mountains.
All at once, my thoughts took a gloomy turn. I felt totally insignificant, meaningless, standing there. My life was the tiniest ripple on the sea of time. I felt the alienness of the world around me, the indifference of the universe, and a kind of wonder at the absurd persistency of human beings whose delusions of grandeur are incurable. Suddenly it seemed that life was no more than a dream. For human beings, it never became a reality.
The loneliness was unbearable. I wanted to go and talk to Reich, but the light in his tent had gone out. I felt in my upper pocket for a handkerchief, and my hand encountered a cigar that I had accepted from Dr Fu'ad. I had taken it as a ritual gesture of friendliness, for I am almost a non-smoker. Now its smell seemed to take me back to the human world, and I decided to light it. I cut off its end with a penknife, and pierced the other end. As soon as I took the first mouthful of smoke, I regretted it. It tasted foul. I placed it on the wall beside me, and continued to stare out over the valley. After a few minutes, its pleasant smell led me to take it up again. This time I took several more deep pulls at it, swallowing the smoke. My forehead felt damp, and I had to lean on the wall. For a while I was afraid I was about to vomit and waste my excellent supper. Then the nausea passed, but the feeling of disembodiment persisted.
At this point, I looked at the moon again and was suddenly overwhelmed with an inexpressible fear. I felt like a sleepwalker who wakes up and finds himself balancing on a ledge a thousand feet above the ground. The fear was so immense that I felt as if my mind would dissolve; it seemed impossible to bear. I tried hard to fight it, to understand its cause. It was connected with this world I was looking at with the realization that I was a mere object in a landscape. This is extremely difficult to make clear. But I suddenly seemed to see that men manage to stay sane because they see the world from their own tiny, intensely personal viewpoint, from their worm's eye view. Things impress them or frighten them, but they still see them from behind this windshield of personality. Fear makes them feel less important, but it does not negate them completely; in a strange way, it has the opposite effect, for it intensifies their feeling of personal existence. I suddenly seemed to be taken out of my personality, to see myself as a mere item in a universal landscape, as unimportant as a rock or fly.
This led to the second stage of the experience. I said to myself: 'But you are far more than a rock or a fly. You are not a mere object. Whether it is an illusion or not, your mind contains knowledge of all the ages. Inside you, as you stand here, there is more knowledge than in the whole of the British Museum, with its thousand miles of bookshelves'.
This thought, in a sense, was new to me. It led me to forget the landscape, and to turn my eyes inside myself. And a question presented itself. If space is infinite, how about the space inside man? Blake said that eternity opens from the centre of an atom. My former terror vanished. Now I saw that I was mistaken in thinking of myself as an object in a dead landscape. I had been assuming that man is limited because his brain is limited, that only so much can be packed into the portmanteau. But the spaces of the mind are a new dimension. The body is a mere wall between two infinities. Space extends to infinity outwards; the mind stretches to infinity inwards.
It was a moment of revelation, of overwhelming insight. But as I stood there, totally oblivious of the outside world, straining all my powers to stare into those inner spaces, something happened that terrified me. This is almost impossible to describe. But it seemed that, out of the corner of my eye - the eye of attention that was turned inward - I caught a movement of some alien creature. It was a strange shock, the feeling you would get if you were relaxed in a warm bath, and you suddenly felt a slimy movement against your leg....
....The everyday world demands our attention, and prevents us from 'sinking into ourselves'. As a romantic, I have always resented this; I like to sink into myself. The problems and anxieties of living make it difficult. Well, now I had an anxiety that referred to something inside me, and it reminded me that my inner world was just as real and important as the world around me.
Abstract villainies
The mind vampires throw a series of roadblocks at Austin and his comrades. Some are on an individual level: one dark night of the soul results in the deaths and suicides of several dozen Austin initiates. Later, the parasites take control of Obafeme Gwambe, who quickly becomes dictator of the United States of Africa, wielding an energy weapon in an attempt to destroy Europe. He is able to obliterate Jerusalem.
Gwambe's opposite number is Felix Hazard, who "had a high reputation among the avant garde for his curious blend of sadism, science fiction and world-weary pessimism. He was apparently paid a regular sum by a Berlin nightclub that catered for perverts, simply to come and sit there for a stated number of hours every month and be admired by the clientele. Fleishman described some of Hazard's work to us, and added the interesting information that he had begun life as a drug addict, but now claimed to have cured himself. Everything he told us about Hazard seemed to indicate that this man was another 'zombi' of the mind parasites." He becomes dictator of a rebord German empire built on race hate.
Wilson's lack of serious curiosity about politics is his Achilles heel in both non-fiction and fiction. The Mind Parasites, in which entire populations succumb to race hate at the drop of a hat, and the portrayal of world leaders never raises above a caricature of the narrow horizon of bourgeois right, stymies the reader's suspension of disbelief in the novel's second half. Austin and his supermen try to bamboozle the world with the prospect of an imminent alien invasion, eventually pushing the moon further from the earth to weaken the power of the parasites.
Austin and his team adapt, evolve, and overcome. Wilsin slingshots his protagonists and his readers to empyrean heights of abstraction.
....I have said that man draws his power from a secret life source in the depths of his being. This source is man's inviolable centre of gravity, his real being. It is completely indestructible. The parasites therefore had no access to it. All they could do was to 'steal' energy in transit from this deep source to man's conscious being.
And now I can perhaps explain something of what I discovered when I made a fresh attempt to enter into myself, although my warning about language must be constantly borne in mind.
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First of all, I observed an extraordinary stillness in my mind. There was no longer any turbulence of any kind. This was because it was at last my mind, with no interlopers. At last, it was my own kingdom.
This also made an immense difference to my dreams and memories. Anyone who has tried to sleep when his brain is over-tired, or he has a touch of fever, knows that awful sensation when all the thoughts seem to be fishes rushing about at a great speed, and they all seem alien. The inside of the head, which should be a 'fine and private place', is like a fairground crowded with strangers. Well, I had never realized until this moment how far the brain is always a fairground crowded with parasites. For now it was completely calm and silent. My memories stood in orderly arrays, like troops at a royal salute. At a single order, I could make any one of them step forward. I realized the truth of the statement that every thing that has happened to us is carefully stored in the memory. Memories of my earliest childhood were as accessible as memories of yesterday. What is more, memories of previous lives were now connected in a continuous sequence with memories of my present life. My mind was like a completely calm sea, that reflects the sky like a mirror, and whose water is so clear that the bottom is as visible as the surface. I understand what Jacob Boehme meant when he talked of a 'Sabbath of the spirit'. For the very first time in my life, I was in contact with reality. No more fever, no more nightmare, no more delusions. The thing that astounded me most was the tremendous strength of human beings, to have succeeded in living, in spite of the terrible veil of insanity that hides them from reality. They must be one of the hardiest species in the universe.
Now I descended through my mind like a man walking through the halls of a castle. For the first time, I knew what I was. I knew that this was me. It was not 'my mind', because the adjective 'my' refers to only a minute section of my being. It was all me.
I penetrated through the 'nursery' layers, those bright energies whose purpose is to establish man's moral balance, to act as moral policemen. When a man is tempted to believe the world is evil, and has to be fought with evil, these powers are drawn to the surface as white blood corpuscles are drawn to an infected area of the body. All this was clear to me for the first time.
Below them was the great sea of motionless life. It was now no longer a sea of darkness and nothingness. As I descended into it, I became aware that it had a quality of luminescence and warmth. This time, there was no obstacle, no force of blindness and malevolence to push me back.
And then I began to understand something which is almost impossible to express. There was no point in going deeper. Those depths contained pure life, and yet, in a sense, they also contained death, the death of the body and of consciousness. The thing we call 'life' on earth is a combination of the pure life forces with the body; it is liaison between life and the inanimate. I say 'the inanimate' because 'matter' would be the wrong word. All matter is alive in so far as it exists. The key word here is 'existence'. No human being can understand the word 'existence' because he is in it. But to exist is not a passive quality; it is to thrust out from non-existence. Existence in itself is a shout of affirmation. To exist is to defy non-existence.
You can see that it is all a problem of language. I am being forced to make do with one or two words when I need about fifty. It is not quite analogous to describing colours to a blind man, because no human being is entirely 'blind'; we all have glimpses of freedom. But freedom has as many colours as the spectrum.
All this means that in trying to descend towards the 'source' of my life I was leaving behind the realm of existence, for the source does not exist; that is to say, it does not stand out from non-existence.
(The above passage comes from a manuscript written in 2005. (M. F.- WHA-3271). We have included it for the sake of continuity. This whole problem is covered in minute detail in Austin's monumental Life, Being and Language (2025-2041), particularly Vol. 8, chaps. 7-9.)
* * *
All this was freedom; the beautiful, inexpressible intoxication of freedom. My mind was my own; and I was the first human being to achieve super humanity. And yet I had to leave these fascinating prospects to consider the problem that had brought us into outer space: the earth and the mind parasites. So I came reluctantly back to the surface. And I looked on Reich as a stranger, and saw that he was looking at me in the same way. We smiled at one another, like two actors who have just finished rehearsing a scene in which they are enemies.
I said: 'What happens now?'
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….And here, I believe, we have the answer to the question about the origin of the parasites - of the 'irritant' that caused the cancer. Lower forms of life - fishes and mammals - are unaffected by the 'watchers'; they live on an instinctive level, and the alien presence seems quite natural to them. But man slowly proceeds to become the master of the earth, and he does this by developing his intellect, his conscious mind. So he becomes 'split', separated from his instinctive drive. Frustrations build up, and turn into fiery little pockets of suppressed energy. And at this point, the 'irritant' of the moon, the constant psychic pressure of half-frozen life, begins to produce its predictable effects. The mind-cancers begin to develop.
It may seem that all this theorizing was built upon rather slender evidence. This is not true. It was all built upon logic starting from that puzzling question: Why were the parasites afraid of outer space?
An immediate answer suggested itself. As man loses touch with his 'inner being', his instinctive depths, he finds himself trapped in the world of consciousness, that is to say, in the world of other people. Any poet knows this truth; when other people sicken him, he turns to hidden resources of power inside himself, and he knows then that other people don't matter a damn. He knows that the 'secret life' inside him is the reality; other people are mere shadows in comparison. But the 'shadows' themselves cling to one another. 'Man is a political animal,' said Aristotle, telling one of the greatest lies in human history. For every man has more in common with the hills, or with the stars, than with other men.
The poet is a more or less unified being; he has not lost touch with his inner powers. But it is the other men, the 'shadows', who are subject to mind-cancer. For them, human society is the reality. They are entirely concerned with its personal little values, with its pettiness and malice and self-seeking. And since the parasites are a projection of these creatures, is it surprising that the parasites themselves cling to human society? They had no place in our space ship, for we were all men who knew the secret: that man is never 'alone', for he is directly connected to the universal powerhouse.
In other words, even if we had not gone out in space, our minds would have been no harbour for the parasites. In us, the cancer was slowly dying of starvation. Our journey into space had only hastened the process. As we separated from the rest of humankind, our first sensation was a terrible fear and loneliness, like a child being separated from its mother for the first time. In that moment, one faces the great question. Is man really a social being who has no existence apart from other men? If that is true, then all our human values are lies: goodness, truth, love, religion and the rest - for these values are, by definition, absolute, more important than other human beings.
That fear caused a new turning-inward, to the 'source of power, meaning and purpose'. Those false telephone wires that connect us to other human beings are cut. This does not mean that other human beings cease to be important. They become far more important, for you realize that, in a certain sense, they are immortal. But you become aware that all our so-called 'human' values are false, based on man's devaluation of himself.
That was why the parasites were forced to leave us. The deeper we journeyed into space, the more certainly we faced that truth: that other men do not supply our values. Other men do not matter in the sense we have always believed. Man is not alone. You could be the last man alive in the universe, and you would not be alone.
Reich and I talked for the rest of the night. And when dawn came - or the hour that would be dawn on earth - something had happened to both of us. Within the past few hours we had changed. The chrysalis had become the butterfly.
We no longer belonged to the earth. This empty space around us was our home just as much as that absurd little green globe that was two million miles behind us.
It was a little frightening. It felt like being a beggar who suddenly inherits a fortune. He looks at the rows of servants waiting for his orders; he contemplates all the things he could do with so much money; he looks at the vast estates that now belong to him... and his mind reels; he experiences a certain vertigo, a terror of freedom….
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The Mind Parasites has much to recommend it. As an example of the UK school of sci-fi sublime, it cannot approach Last and First Men or Childhood's End, but it's plot-thinness allows the reader to rush from peak to peak of its evolutionary-philosophical insights at speed.
Gilbert Austin and his initiates do not discover that they are the world's Secret Monarchs. They transform themselves, becoming utterly alien, more than human.
Jay
9 March 2020
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