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RETURN OF THE MIND PARASITES

I FIRST CAME ACROSS The Mind Parasites some time in late 1977, when I was a young New Waver, living in Los Angeles, making a living leading my own ‘power pop’ group, The Know. For the last few years I had been reading a great deal of, well, shall we say, unusual literature: Aleister Crowley, H.P. Lovecraft, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: practically anything I could find on magic, the occult, mysticism and higher states of consciousness. Part of the inspiration for my fascination (or, as my girlfriend at the time considered it, obsession) with the peculiar canon of books the study of which has since become a lifelong occupation, came from one of the members of the band I had just left. Before breaking out on my own, I had been the bassist with the New York group Blondie. But after writing a couple of hit songs for them, and conquering New York, San Francisco, London and other cities, I decided it was time to start my own group. Aside from a few gold records, one of the things I walked away from Blondie with was an interest in the occult. The guitarist—the lead singer’s boyfriend—was deep into horror films, voodoo, black magic, Satanism, and other kitschy aspects of magic and the supernatural. Although I regarded all that (except for the horror films) with several grains of salt, and had never been interested in the occult before, I did find some of the books in his library interesting. One in particular caught my eye; its torn cover and soiled pages suggested it had already been through the counter-cultural wringer a couple of times, and when I slipped it off the shelf one afternoon, I expected nothing more than a good read. Little did I suspect that it would change my life. The book was Colin Wilson’s The Occult, and after a week transfixed behind its pages in my dilapidated room on the Bowery, I emerged a different person.

By the time I moved to Los Angeles a year or so later, I was a dedicated Wilson reader, and since those early days I’ve had the great pleasure of visiting him in his home in Cornwall several times, and of writing about his work (see, for example, my book A Secret History of Consciousness (2003)). Back then I scoured second-hand bookshops for his work, paying high prices for out-of-print copies, and devoured the UK paperback imports that Papa Bach, a legendary but now long-defunct bookshop in Santa Monica, used to stock. Los Angeles in those days was a book fiend’s delight, and if you were, like myself, ravenous for works on magic, the occult, the paranormal, higher consciousness and esotericism, then you could hardly have asked for a better place to live.

Although by the late ‘70s the ethos of the love generation had been replaced by the aggressive nihilism of punk, the remnants of an earlier, more magical and mystical time remained. Great bookshops like Gilberts on Hollywood Boulevard and the Bodhi Tree (where, oddly enough, I later worked) specialized in books on Eastern and Western mysticism, the occult and the offbeat in general. But even the mainstream shops had healthy sections on the occult, and often the remainder tables were filled with cheap reprints of occult classics, books by people like A.E. Waite, Sax Rohmer, Algernon Blackwood. What we call the New Age hadn’t yet started—I mark the beginning of that with the publication of Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy in 1980—and the atmosphere was more one of exploration and intellectual adventure—as well as sheer fun—and not so much the, to my taste at least, pious sentimentality associated with so much of contemporary ‘spirituality’. There were Israel Regardie’s books on magic and The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Francis King’s books on Crowley, reprints of works about Gurdjieff and Ouspensky; there were Stan Gooch’s books on Neanderthal man, Lyall Watson’s work on the paranormal, Geoffrey Ashe’s books on Glastonbury and the Arthurian Legends. Even respected names from an older generation, like Arthur Koestler, were devoting important works to phenomena like telepathy and synchronicity and attacking entrenched positions in scientific reductionism. And, of course, there was Colin Wilson. Maybe it was me, but it seemed that almost everything worth reading then was coming over the pond (and across the Rockies) from England. I always had a ‘thing’ for England and English writers—maybe that explains why I’ve wound up living here—but I can’t recall any American writers at the time who were producing anything like the sort of stuff I, and a handful of other esoteric Anglophiles, were greedily absorbing. Come to think of it, I can’t think of many now, either.

There seemed to be a ‘movement’ of some kind among these writers, an association of minds all concerned with a shared idea: the possibility of a breakthrough, a mutation or transformation in human consciousness. The limits of the Cartesian/Newtonian mechanistic dispensation were clear. Hard-line Darwinians had reduced human beings to pretentious apes, and in various forms academic psychology had practically made it a dogma that we were all little more than stimulus-response marionettes. Philosophy and literature too, were little better off. Anglo-American philosophy argued that all the interesting questions, those about meaning and purpose, were nonsense; their European counterparts were mired in neo-Marxist rhetoric or submerged in unreadable post-structuralism prose. And practically all ‘serious’ literature was dedicated to the proposition that human life was meaningless or, if it had any meaning at all, it was social, political or personal. There was nothing transcendental, nothing beyond the necessity of satisfying our immediate animal and political needs. The only area in which any sense of excitement, optimism and vision still remained was in the taboo realm of popular culture, in science fiction, fantasy and weird fiction. After more than a quarter of a century, it strikes me that, aside from a few exceptions, the climate still hasn’t changed that much.

It would have been a dreary time indeed for anyone with any enthusiasm for knowledge, purpose and heightened experience, if it weren’t for these great books coming over from the UK. And of all the books I assimilated then at a rate I find difficult to match or to even come close to now, none had so great and immediate an impact on me as The Mind Parasites. On one of my regular forages for Wilson’s books (which involved enormously long walks and bus rides, as I hadn’t yet learned to drive, and being without a car in LA is a form of madness) I found an old US paperback edition. It was a Bantam, I think; sadly, I no longer have it, a result of having shipped my library across countries and oceans too many times. But that copy became the focus of a kind of ‘cult’. After I read it I loaned it to a friend, and after he read it, he did the same. Because we had enjoyed it so much, even people who had no interest in science fiction or ‘higher consciousness’ read it, and for a while it was a kind of joke to raise an eyebrow and, nodding knowingly, say “mind parasites, eh?,” whenever anything went wrong.

On my first reading I burned through it in a day or two, only breaking away for necessities like sleep and band practice. Then I read it again, more slowly and deliberately, taking time to copy out scores of passages, meditating on lines like “Human intelligence is a function of man’s evolutionary urge; the scientist and philosopher hunger for truth because they are tired of being merely human.” “The greatest human problem is that we are all tied to the present.” “Man is a continent, but his conscious mind is no larger than a back garden…man consists almost entirely of unrealized potentials.” “I cannot be contented to know that the endless realms of mind now lie open for man’s exploration; this does not seem enough.”

I could go on, but the problem with picking out stimulating one-liners like these is the same problem I encountered when I first began to copy out the many aphorisms that pop up in Wilson’s gripping narrative like sign posts on the way to the Absolute: when do you stop? I found back then that I could easily wind up simply copying the book itself. And now, having re-read it again nearly thirty years after my first encounter (and at this point I have no idea how many times I have re-read it), I still find the same problem. In many ways it strikes me that the narrative, as compulsive as any good thriller, is really an excuse to get to these hard gems of thought. Most readers know that Wilson wrote the book in response to a challenge by August Derleth, best known as the man responsible for saving the weird writer H.P. Lovecraft’s work from undeserved pulp oblivion. But although the interdimensional horrors that plague mankind are cut from Lovecraftian cloth, they are really only an excuse for Wilson’s protagonists to plunge into a dizzying exploration of their own minds. The real subject of the novel is human consciousness, and in many ways I emerged from my recent rereading with the feeling that the real ‘mind parasites’ are ourselves. We take our minds, our inner worlds, for granted, and do practically nothing to develop their real potential. That this potential exists, and that it is, if not limitless, at least far greater than any of us ever suspect, is the message that Wilson, in dozens of books, has been trying to get across to his readers for half a century. In The Mind Parasites he does this in an entirely new way; at least I can’t think of another book that brings together as disparate influences as Lovecraft, Husserl’s phenomenology, the history of consciousness and the Romantic movement under the same page-turning narrative roof. Or perhaps that is not entirely correct, as Wilson pulled the trick off again when he followed up The Mind Parasites with its sequel, The Philosopher’s Stone, which many consider his finest novel. I hope that this reissue of Wilson’s first existential-horror classic is successful enough for its publishers to consider bringing The Philosopher’s Stone back in print as well. And then there’s The Space Vampires…

Novel? Well, I guess that’s a matter of opinion. There isn’t the character development that we usually associate with novels. This book, along with all of Wilson’s fictions, is really a fable of ideas, philosophical investigations that use the form of the novel—with story, action, characters and dialogue—to embody an exploration of reality. The medium is not looked upon with much encouragement these days, but Plato employed it, as later did Borges, so it has a respected pedigree. Wilson once scandalized the English literary establishment by stating that H.G. Wells was probably the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, and that his late novels—which many consider rather poor examples of his genius—were the most important of the many he wrote. Perverse opinion for its own sake? No; Wilson rates Wells highly because Wells used the novel to attack reality, not merely to portray it accurately, or even to explain it (and God help us from the spate of books ‘explaining’ everything nowadays), but to dig into it, to break open its complacent surface and get to the fiery life beneath. The only other novelist that Wilson rated as highly was the Austrian Robert Musil, author of the unfinishable philosophical epic, The Man Without Qualities. Readers of The Mind Parasites may not share Wilson’s opinion on Wells, but they may feel, I think, that after reading this welcomed republication, that they have something like a literary pickaxe in their hands.

—GARY LACHMAN

January 2005, London