(1) I, consciously, don’t write my novels.
(2) Therefore a part of my unconscious does.
(3) Novels are composed of words.
(4) Taking all the water-soluble vitamins causes my neural firing to so improve generally that what had been below the threshold of consciousness was raised up to consciousness, anyhow at night.
(5) That portion, active and more highly potentiated than before, and unusually endowed with verbal skills, in particular written verbal skills, rattles away at me visibly as soon as I shut my eyes; it is, so to speak, writing a book while I’m asleep.
What the water-soluble vitamins did, then, was to make it possible for me to get in touch with myself, which when most people do that they get in touch with repressed material in the unconscious, usually their real feelings, all of it inchoate as the unconscious has to be in order to stay unconscious. But my unconscious has a predilection toward esoteric, exotic and archaic words—exact and precise ones at that. Much of the printed material I see in my dreams has elaborate annotation in scrawly blue pen or pencil in the margins. Someone has been copyediting it, cutting out unnecessary words. My book-writing unconscious has a concise style. As one would expect from over 23 years of professional work, cutting and pruning, looking up words in the dictionary. I have so to speak a real pro for an unconscious. It’s a fine style but it isn’t mine. I’d never write “a very poisonous poison,” or, as it expressed a vital thought in my sleep once by saying, “She will see the sea.” It makes an exact point with no regard for literary style, a higher method of expression with the intent to convey its meaning above all. Therefore it resorts to such strikingly enigmatic words as “syntonic,” if that is what it means; no other will do and it doesn’t seem to care whether I know the meaning of the word or not; if I don’t then I can just look it up. That’s my—the audience’s—problem. One thing about it: my wordsmith unconscious doesn’t talk down to me. On the contrary; I have to hustle every day to catch up with it.*
Partly this must come from the fact that it has available to it my complete and entire memory, every word, every thought, everything I ever saw, read, heard, knew. My conscious memory—my conscious vocabulary—is only the tip of the iceberg. And yet it seems highly structured; obsessed in fact by the theological disputations and dogmas and highly abstract and abstruse concepts and theories of Rome. As Robert Graves once said, “Theological dispute was the disease of that age,” meaning that everyone in the streets was obsessed by it and had to talk about it endlessly—as my unconscious does. My unconscious is fixated in the Roman period, and that strikes me as strange. How did it get there in the first place? And being there, why does it remain?
Once I myself was consciously deliberately interested in that period; I was in my early twenties, and read about it a lot, at the expense of being a rounded person. But my unconscious for all its obsessions with the theoretical material of that period is hard-headed and shrewd, and wants everything it comes up with applied in the most practical way. If it shows me the Golden Rectangle it does so in order to calm me with that ultimate esthetically balanced sight; it has a firm therapeutic purpose. There is a utilization of all its abstract material for genuine purposes, for me, by and large. It is a tutor to me as Aristotle was to Alexander, which makes me wonder why it is grooming and shaping me this way, tutoring me in the exact fashion employed by the Greeks. Philosophy for real ends, for final causes, as Aristotle would have put it: for something lying ahead and not as an idle pastime, an end in itself. The ennobling and elevating education is altering me and I would presume that when it is finished I, having become changed (to resort to the Ablative Absolute), will act upon the improved character which I’ve acquired—not on the knowledge direct, as if on enlarged memory banks, but upon the basis of my matured and elevated character. I know this whole process sees ahead because I have caught sight of its clear perception down the web of time, seen with it for a while; it knows what is ahead and acts accordingly. I’m sure it has a final purpose in mind, for which this is careful preparation. This recalls to me my notion that the Cumaean sibyl is behind it all; certainly she had or has a clear view of the future, of time; that is what a sibyl is.*
Following basic Greek thought it is improving my mind and body together, as a unity. Health is equated—correctly so—with vigor and the capacity to act. All its concepts, its viewpoints, are Greek. Symmetry, balanced, harmony. I sense Apollo in this, which is consistent, since the Cumaean sibyl was his oracle. Moderation, reasonability and balance are Apollo’s virtues, the clear-headed, the rational. Syntonos, or whatever. Pythagorean harmoniousness. A reconciling of all impulses and tendencies within, then turning to the outer world once that is achieved and becoming syntonic with it as well. I’m getting a classical education. Greek, a little Latin, knowledge of Sanskrit, theology and philosophy and the Ionian Greeks’ various views of the cosmos. Very unusual to get this here in Southern California. All very sane and steady. The most worthy, the highest virtues and values in the history of our civilization.
How did they happen to arise within me? For instance, it pointed out that my ananke—the compulsion or fate lying ahead of me—is a darkening, a gathering gloom, which is a good description of my underlying melancholia. Against which I pit my learned syntonos. Cultivation against innate predispositions: a basic struggle in life, and well elucidated by my unconscious. How did it know these two terms and was able to define them for me? I didn’t know. I never knew. This is material emanating from a wise viewpoint which I never possessed. This was not me, although it is becom ing me; or rather, to be more accurate, it is shaping me so that I am becoming it. Meeting its standards, its ideals. Which are Apollonian Greece’s from over two thousand years ago: from its Golden Age. Our Golden Age.
Now, this really does not rule out Jim Pike as my Athenian or Hellenistic tutor. Jim had, I’m certain, that kind of classical education. Greek, Latin, Roman theology and so forth. The disputations of St. Paul, St. John, the Logos Doctrine, what Augustine knew. Also, Jim was—is—shrewd; he’d apply, did apply in his life, all this classical education. He is the only person I ever knew, in fact, with such a background. If Jim were to become my tutor this I really think, all this that I’m being taught, that my attention is being drawn to, would be precisely what he would get me involved with. The reading list I’m getting is one he would give. This is Jim’s mind I’m getting, not so much his personality. Its directed—expertly directed—contents. It has me drink beer instead of wine because beer is more healthy for me and I should drink a little something to relax me; there’s an example. That’s directed tutoring. This is not an inert computer, whose keyboard I myself punch according to my own whim and volition.