Sacred woods
Peter Conrad
The Wizard from Vienna Vincent Buranelli (Peter Owen £5.25) Mindpower Nona Coxhead (Heinemann £3.90) The Seeing Eye, The Seeing I Renee Haynes (Hutchinson £4.75) Experiments in Distant Influence L. L. Vasiliev (Wildwood House £6.95) In an earlier phase of our civilisation, the centre of moral science was the relation between body and soul. They importune the mediaeval saint and irritate the metaphysical wit; their dismembering conflict urges Marlowe's Faustus into the sky but simultaneously weighs him down. But once romanticism had made God abscond into Nature, and theology had dissolved into psychology, the central issue became, and remains, the relation between body and mind. Romanticism endowed mind with the attributes of soul, a natural piety and impulsive vernal goodness, but made it a less fugitive and numinous agency, insisting on its lucid progress towards self-contemplation. As the nineteenth century proceeds, Ego, erect and astute, colonises the primitive despotism of Id; life, as Shaw says, strives to attain the power of understanding itself. Mind is on the march.
But romanticism had also embedded the mind in the body. Intellect became a creature: its combinatorial antics, in Sterne and Coleridge, or its feats of association, in Wordsworth and Proust, are not manoeuvres of the machine but the exfoliations of an organism. The collusion between mind and body, between ratiocination and physical energy, is the subject of the four books treated here, which narrate the progress of the romantic mind from the abracadabra of the hypnotist Mesmer (Vincent Buranelli's Wizard from Vienna) to the electromagnetic Faraday chambers of the Soviet parapsychologist Vasiliev; from sympathetic magic to manipulative analysis; from spells and therapeutic twitchings to oscillograms of the brain's radio transmissions.
Although Mr Buranelli's biography of Mesmer is unscholarly, culturally deprived, and shabbily produced, his subject remains fascinating. Mesmer was a prophetic quack, with the fraud's petulance at a sceptical world. He was impeded by a false theory of animal magnetism, but armed with a valid method, that of the induced trance; and both the theory and the method have in triguing connections with romantic art. Mesmer's notion of universal fluids, cana lised by magnets which direct their healing power into diseased parts of the body, is a scientific transcription of those tutelary atmospheres and 'motions that impel'
which haunt romantic poetry. Just as Shelley translates Promethean fire into the unseen power of electricity. Mesmer treats physiological crises on the analogy of elemental events in a romantic landscape: the body's fluids have a tidal rhythm, and a magnet choreographs their motions rather as lunar gravitation directs the ebb and flow of water. The hypnotist, like the romantic poet, makes himself the medium for natural forces which operate through him, bypassing his will, and Mesmer found this pretence as self-disabling and as subtly corrupting as did Wordsworth and Coleridge. For the role of medium involves an abdication of creative responsibility, and if the poet surrenders himself to random intimations and inspirations, he renounces the power to control or arrest them. Inspiration revenged itself on the poets who had slighted it by simply deserting them, and Mesmer in 1784 suffered a failure of confidence similar to theirs: he feared that the fickle universal fluid had withdrawn its magnetising power from him.
In this way the pretence of involuntariness is disabling; in another way it is deforming. The medium begins by deferring to nature, but humility soons turns into arrogance. The medium becomes his own message: Wordsworth imagines the process of his mind's growth, rather than the conclusions or achievements of his intellect, to be an epic subject, and Mesmerism turns the hypnotist from the devout conductor of magnetic impulses into a magus (as if the impulses derive from, instead of merely passing through, him) and therefore into a charlatan.
Mesmer's restorative trances also have their poetic equivalent, in that state of drowsy numbness and prostration which the romantics prescribed for themselves, when the mind could become a stranger to itself and so welcome each start of association as a revelatory surprise. The trance turned an idea into an inspiration by transferring the credit for creative initiation from the artist to an agency outside him. De Quincey induced it by eating opium, Fuseli by gorging on raw pork and reading Gothic verse, Chatterton by forgery. Blake called it taking dictation from angels, and Coleridge defined it as the 'willing suspension of disbelief'.
The romantic trance is provisional: the artist can release himself by disingenuously admitting the person from Porlock or, like Keats, scaring away the nightingale. Later in the century it becomes involuntary and inescapable: the neurotic, like Dostoievsky's underfloor man, refuses a cure, treasuring his disease as a psychic distinction. Concurrently, the mind and the body cease to be complementary elements and become antagonists. Nona Coxhead's Mindpower describes the mind's punishment of the helpless body: people choose their diseases, she suggests, and the mind damages and consumes the natural health of the body just as, in an earlier time, the soul fretted and chafed against the shame of its con
finement in a body. The purpose of parapsychological research must now be to engineer an end to this war. As mediaeval religion stinted and chastened the body, so the renegade sciences of Miss Coxhead aim to evacuate the nagging mind, to enveloP it in the inane repose of the body. She recommends transcendental meditation because it sings the will to sleep, releasing the patient from the anguish of rational existence into a visionary dreariness. :1 foresee.' she says, 'a gentled world,' In which crime and stress have been abolished: 'if all people everywhere meditated, they would no longer feel greed, the lust for power, the justification to kill for anY reason forever.' Nor would they, one might add, feel any sense of personal identity, Or any need to do anything. Miss Coxhead 's yogi heaven is a tedious, socialised hell. A gentled world is an otiose world, in which vacuity passes for sanctity and the ache of boredom for the aliprehension of infinity.
Mesmer's sessions worked on the analogy of a theatrical performance. The hypnotist was costumed in a robe trimmed with gold lace; one foot wore a white silk stocking, the other was plunged in a bucket of water. Glass harmonicas provided magnetic music. His modern successors, like Vasiliev, have removed magic from the theatre to the laboratory. The marvel now depends on the ingenuity of the machine not the emanations of the magas' Miss Coxhead describes a fully-automated system contrived to record the panic. of eggs hurtling to their execution in boiling water: 'No person needed to be present. thus removing any possible interference from human consciousness'. BizarrelY pantheistic, Miss Coxhead has replaced the emotional obstructions which Mesther treated with a series of vegetable crises. eggs fainting in terror, plants protesting when their owner eats yoghurt, other hapless weeds submitting to lie-detector tests. The world is again a romantic serisorium, except that in place of' the resPon. sive romantic poet there is the impartial, inhuman recording pen of the polygraph..
Where Miss Coxhead envisages a 10.1° verse of sapient plants and agitated eggs, 11/ which the remaining humans aspire to the gentle insipidity of flora, Renee Haynes In The Seeing Eye, The Seeing I renders merism and telepathy ordinary and doilies' tic. Mystic intuition is democratised: !he disturbing romantic 'spots of time' decline into anecdotal vastations—Miss HaYlles coming over all queer in Lyme Regis, or interrupting her Oxford finals to scribble some lines of doggerel verse, or suggest that telepathic skills might benefit tile social hostess and the milkmaid. The seance is by now as cheering as a hot bedtilhe drink: the beverage would be Bovril, the brand-name of which telescopes, rvi!s,,s Haynes discloses, the name of a bull wit"_ Bulwer Lytton's word, vril, for the current,' of paranormal power which course througn the universe. Decrepit descendants di romanticism, we are all 'percipients' now.
Previous page
