[From Time Stood Still by Paul Cohen-Portheim]

XVI A CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVE

IF you made a series of drawings of a place, a camp, for instance, from the usual angles, and then suddenly added an aerial view of it, the latter would certainly make the place look strikingly different, and anyone seeing it might not recognize it as the same place. Yet it would be the same place, and this example only illustrates the truth that things appear different according to the point of view taken. The application of this general truth to this book is this : that I have up till now described camp life as it appeared from one angle, and that in this chapter I propose to consider it from another, and that I feel this needs explaining. I have written of camp and camp life as it actually was, I have described it as objectively as I can-for there is no complete objectivity-and aimed at a picture of which those who have shared my experiences should say : 'Yes, that is what it was like,' and which could be accepted by the reader as the truth about the matter. That is what actually happened, that is how people lived, that is how the life affected them, and that is how they felt about it all, to the best of my knowledge. For that was my main object in writing this book at all to show people what internment means, and leave them to draw their conclusions. That is why by far the greater part of the book is written from that angle, which I will call the objective and the general.

But there is another which I cannot neglect altogether the subjective and the personal. [173]If every prisoner were to give an account of his experiences, its first and general part should corroborate mine, but the second would be entirely different in each single case. To put the matter simply, the second part is concerned only with how the camp and its life affected one particular person ;its subject is : what internment meant for me.

And here arises the danger of appearing contradictory, which I want to avoid. I have said what I consider the influence and results of internment life were according to my observations, and I have been objective in this; but the influence and results as rar as I am concerned were of quite a different nature. This may be taken as an added proof of objectivity, for I certainly do not generalize from my own experience, which on the contrary I take to be quite exceptional, and that is why I wish to emphasize the fact that it must not be considered as contradicting the general truth. An influenza epidemic may result in one patient feeling better than he did before he fell ill, but that should not be taken to mean that an epidemic is to be recommended as a cure. I regard internment as horrible and as the cause of endless misery end major or minor tragedies, but to me personally it has been of the greatest value and assistance in spite of its horrors. It is not even enough to say, as so many people end by saying, after having expressed their horror of their war experiences : 'And yet I would not have missed it for anything ' ; it is not enough, because I cannot conceive myself at all as I am now without that experience. I should not be I, I should be a different I.

The years of internment mean an inner evolution in my case, for which the camp provided but the setting, and the outer events and circumstances but the back­ground. That is what I mean by the simile of the view taken from above. [174]Seen from the air barbed wire fencing, for instance, would not look much of a feature or an obstacle ; and just so, from the point of view of my personal life in camp, all values are altered. Same things loom larger, others become insignificant, but the main point is that all outer things without exception become quite secondary. The outer possibilities were extremely limited and few, the inner were unlimited. During four years hardly anything happened, in the usual sense of the word, that I would have given much thought to under ordinary circumstances ; but the life of the mind and the spirit became intensified as it would not have become if normal conditions had continued, for here life became to me one of contemplation and of thought. I speak for myself only and do nor wish to generalize, but I would say that anyone inclined to thought and contemplation by nature must have found that tendency immensely strengthened by the enforced limitation of outer activity, or in more vulgar language : circum­stances forced one to fall back on one's self.

Certain psychologists have brought the terms extraversion and introversion into use, and they may serve to explain my meaning. An extravert is a person who finds mental nourishment in the outside world, in other humans, in objects or events. He acts on them and they react on him, and his energy is turned outwards. An introvert, instead of pouring his mental energy outwards, turns it inwards, and the outer world, other humans, or events affect him only as far as they contribute to his inner development. The former will therefore need activity and change and be dependent on his surroundings, while the latter will incline to look on these as irrelevant to his main preoccupation. Needless to say, pure types do not exist ; there is but a predominance of one tendency or the other, and when one gains the upper hand too com­pletely mental equilibrium gets disturbed and the borders of sanity are reached. [175]It stands to reason that most children of the world are strongly extraverted, that thinkers, philosophers, scientists, or strongly religious people tend to introversion, and that artists must combine both tendencies. Amongst artists, musicians are the wost introverted, painters and sculptors the most extraverted, and writers hold an intermediate position. Applied to races one may say - very roughly, of course - that Europeans, men of the white race, are preponderantly extravert (the typical Amerncan is almost a pure extravert) while introversion is an Asiatic characteristic, which is why the Russians are the most introverted people of the white race.

This is rather a fascinating subject to go into, but I must leave it, for I only entered into it in order to explain what what happened to me in camp was a change from extraversion to introversion. My pre-war life had strengthened what extravert tendencies there were in me, nay camp life awoke and strengthened all that was intro­vc:rt, and the longer I remained there the more powerful that introversion became and the more indifferent to my surroundings did I come to feel. To a very great extent the camp, its conditions and hardships, ceased to affect rne, and that is what I mean by a personal experience which has no general significance. Conditions were very trying, things were bad and getting worse, but they ceased to worry me, except when they interfered with what I was busy with. I was busy building up my own mind, gaining what the Germans call a Weltanschauung, that is, finding out what I thought of the world and of myself as related to it, Only I was not aware of all this at the time. There was no conscious effort, there never was a moment when I decided to devote my energies to the formation or enrichment of my personality, for that would have seemed very absurdly priggish to me. I am not a prig, I think, and I have a sense of the ridiculous which includes myself ; on the other hand, I am lazy and very much of a fatalist, that is why I would have been and still am quite incapable of a conscious effort to ` improve my mind.' [176]What happened was simply that there were no outer interests left after a time, no activities of any significance, and that conditions and circumstances were best ignored. So my energies were turned inward.

There is no definite moment to which I can point and say : that is when the change began. It was a gradual change, so gradual that I was unaware of it, and it was often interrupted. It began, I should say, during the first winter, but I became aware of it only after I had found that all the varying ways in which I had continued to exercise my art had come to an end, that allthat seemed void of significance to me, that painting, i.e., expression of emotion by means of pictorial representation, had become meaningless and that I had no desire for it, that something had died and something else taken its place. And that did not happen till three years later.

My chief interest before the war was art and all connected with it ; I had always read a good deal, but without any particular purpose or system ; I had all sorts of ideas on all sorts of subjects, but they were not co-ordinated in any way. Nor had I ever felt the need of any co-ordination except for fleeting moments ; there was no time, one's thoughts were ever taken off bq some­thing new, and when I concentrated, it was on my painting. Quite instinctively I made an effort to continue my work in camp ; was miserable when I found I could not work ; continued to look for new possibilities. I was, without realising it, living on my past, working up what was still left over from it, and getting farther away from it all the time. I also read a good deal, as nearly everybody did, but it was not reading which originally turned my thoughts into new channels. It was spiritism.

[177]I don't know where the impulse came from, but there were about seven or eight men, most of them friends of mine, who decided to try some experiments in spiritism. I had never been particularly interested in it, but I had an open mind on the matter, for I had always thought the so-called scientific attitude towards life quite stupidly limited, which I imagine every artist must feel if onlybecause it quite fails to solve his problems or to account their art. I had even less patience with the limitations of the materialist orthodoxy than with those of religious Orthodoxies, and it seemed to me that as truth had not yct been found anything might be true, and that as man, his senses and his intellect were very limited, it was very silly to deny the existence of things, beings, or worlds wutside his ken offhand. So why not try spiritism? It was at any rate something _ new and something to do. We decided to meet two or t hree times a week in a cubicle, shared by one of the rnen with two others, which had enough space, was comparatively quiet, and possessed the essential instru­went of investigation into spiritism : a round table, for we had decided on ` table-turning.' _ The practice is too well known to need description ; it is slow and laborious, and the results we obtained were tiitile and discouraging. The table was certainly moved, often violently, by some sort of magnetism developed which one could not confuse with muscular effort, but when it came to slowly spelling out the messages its rapping conveyed the results were disappointing. Either they were senseless or else they could be traced to direct thought-transference. I tried the experiment of sitting in a corner away from the table and thinking hard of a word previously written on a piece of paper. Very frequently the table rapped out that word and thus thought-transference was proved.[178] But though that was quite an interesting phenomenon, there seemed no par­ticular point in going on proving it, nor any possibility of studying its mechanism. We all got rather bored after a few months and gradually ceased the practice. A few weeks after this a curious incident happened. I was talking about our experiments with a man who thought them pure nonsense. He would not even admit that tables moved unless one helped them to, and pointed to a small square bamboo table standing near. Will you prove it by making this table move ? ' he asked. I explained to him that one always used wooden tables, round by preference, and that two people could hardly produce the necessary ` current.y That is why I did not think that the experiment could succeed, nor that its failure would prove anything whatsoever. But I saw no harm in trying. We had hardly sat down, with our hands touching, when the table got wildly agitated and started rapping out words in quick succession. The message, moreover, was quite clear. One fellow who had once or twice, but infrequently, taken part in our experiments, was to be told that his mother had died and that this message came from her. My friend at the table was astounded, but I was hardly less so. He was the man I have already alluded to, who developed religious mania later on, so he may quite possibly have been a strong medium without knowing it, dvhich would explain the surprising success of that improbable experiment. Of course, we were both longing to find out whether that message contained a truth, but that was not quite easy. I did not know the man it was addressed to well, and I did not ~~ant to upset him by a message, the truth of which he could not verify for weeks, for letters often took several weeps to reach us. I was friends, however, with an intimate friend of his, from whom I first ascertained whether the man's mother was alive, ~e said she was, leer son had heard from her and she was quite well. [179]But a few weeks later he told me that the news of her death had arrived and that it must have taken place about the time we made our experiment. Even in normal life this would have had its effect non me ; in Wakefield it definitely turned my thoughts toward (what is called) the supernatural. It was, to say the least, an extraordinary case of thought-transference. I~ urther than that I was not prepared to go, but that was strange enough. It did not lead me to any further experiments on the same lines, though I can hardly say why. Perhaps the reason is that I dislike the spiritists' conception of after-life, which I certainly do. I wanted ether ways of approach to the occult, to the problem I was faced with, of hove mind can act on matter, which is at the root of telepathy. What was matter, had it any peal existence, was there a universal mind, did mind continue after death, were there other worlds, and what was this world and what was I in it ? All these and many other related questions now began to aUsorb me. I had read some works on spiritism, amongst others Sir Oliver Lodge's Raymond, which had just appeared. His theor­ics about matter and mind seemed very plausible, though 1 could follow him no further. I determined to get as many works on occult phenomena as I could. obtain, for there was no possibility of studying open to me except reading. In that manner I became acquainted with theosophy, which aroused my enthusiasm. Fir here there was 'much more than an explanation of one pheno­menon or another ; here there was a coherent, inclusive, and rational explanation of the universe and all its happenings. I felt as if I saw the world for the first time, as if absolute truth had been revealed to me. I read most of the works of that most extraordinary woman, Mrs. Annie Besant, whom I still consider one of the greatest personalities of our times, though I have long ceased to believe in her teachings ; and they led me to the study of her predecessor, Helena Blavatsky. [180]Blavatsky's books are as fantastic as her life. A prophet to some, an impostor to others, and probably something of both, she was most certainly a genius. Her works, her cosmogonies are as superb as they are chaotic and obscure, and if she is an impostor and did not obtain her ` secret doctrine ' from the mystical sources she ascribed them to, she should be classed with William Blake as a mystic poet of unsurpassed power. But also, as I went on reading, I found more and more contradictory doc­trines and messages, all professing to continue the only true theosophical tradition, chief of which was the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, which has very many followers on the continent. He tries to combine more purely Christian tradition and beliefs with the Indian ones of the original theosophists, and their warfare is bitter indeed.

I had many discussions with three or four friends whom my enthusiasm had infected, and there were at least as many opinions as people. This could get me no farther, and so I decided to go back to where the theosophists had got their inspiration from : to the sacred books of India. I read and read. I got to know some of the most magni­ficent books humanity has produced, amongst which I count the Bhagaroad G~ta. One could perhaps deduce from them what the theosophists have deduced, but there were many different ways of explaining their doctrines, for they are as a tropical jungle and not like the rational and ordered theosophical system derived from them, just as innumerable other sects and movements have had their origin in them. I read Chinese mystics and confronted Lao-Tse with the anti-mystic Kon-fu-tse, I read Sufi poetry, I read what.one could get of the Cabbalists. I [181] I read European philosophers, of whom Schopenhauer and Bergson seemed most akin to and aware of Eastern wisdom ; I read many of the minor lights. They all seemed to me to agree on the essential truths of a Universe spiritual in character, animated by a Universal spirit, of which the material world our senses show us is but an image. But the more l read them, the more closer investigation, which must necessarily be carried out by material means, faded out of the reach of possibility. If there was truth, it was revealed in mystic contemplation, and the truth revealed to the Christian saint was of Christian inspiration and that of the Hindu remained Hindu, and in the end it came to what it had been before I set out on that voyage of dis­avvery : a question of belief, as soon as you transcended the narrow limits of human reason. These were things beyond the intellect, to be approached by contemplation, by meditation-and how was one to meditate or contem­~>late when it was impossible to be alone and undisturbed Icy noise and movement? But what was that part of one's spirit outside intellect t hat could be trained to a larger perception ? It was when ~~ondering this somewhat paradoxical problem-for how could one hope that one's intellect would understand faculties beyond it ?-that I came across the works of Freud, which my friend the medical student pressed upon m~. I began to read them with great reluctance, for they seemed like a sudden cold shower. This was the very opposite way of approach to the one I had taken. That world had been all spirit, this one was all sex. But, as I continued, I could not shut my eyes to the truths contained in Freud's teachings. I would have liked to, (or they seemed to destroy the conception of the Universe C had so laboriously arrived at, Uut I could not, for they confirmed too many of my own experiences, [182]Also they explained much of what had puzzled me in the confused c~mple:~ity of the teachings and lives of theosophists and mystics. Psychoanalysis was, in fact, the necessary corrective to mysticism, it was another half-truth. The one began up in the clouds and refused to descend to the ground ; the other began deep below ground and denied the skies, but yet I felt that they were not contradictory but complementary, in that both recognized the pre­ponderance of the irrational, of the instinctive, the: intuitive as the others called it, over the purely reasonable. Reason, intellect, normal consciousness, were but part of one's spiritual whole, and could only take in part of the Universe. Particularly the writings of Jung and the Zurich school satisfied me, for while starting on the premises of the Freudians they went beyond them, and while accepting the truth that all could be reduced, analysed back to the sexual, they were: more preoccupied with the sublimation, the building u~ of that spiritual material. While acknowledging the underground origins, they did not deny or ignore the skies. Thus the circle was closed after a manner. If I had not solved the riddles of the Universe, of human personality, and of matter and spirit, I felt that I had at least gained a point of vantage from which to consider them. If much remained mysterious and unknowable, it was no longer chaotic and confused. I was at that time re-reading Goethe's talks with Eckermann, a book which contains more wisdom than any other work of modern times, and I accepted Goethe's verdict : ~ 1l~Ian must recognize the frontiers of the unknowable and respect them,' just as I thought that when he talked of all his work as being no more than a symbol, and of the Universe as a parable, I found him confirming what all the sages of the East had said. [183]We must recognize that an immensity lies beyond our intellectual comprehension, and that what we can comprehend is but an image, but we are foolish if we attempt to make our reason do what it is not fit for. Or as Schopenhauer puts it paradoxi­cally : I am convinced of the truth of mysticism, but I distrust the experiences of all mystics.'

Any comments, errors or omissions gratefully received The Editor HTML© F Coakley , 2021