Tag: Outsider

Dreaming to Some Purpose: The Live and Times of Colin Wilson

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A crowdfunding page aiming to help finance the making of new Colin Wilson documentary has gone live, and I’m writing to pass this information on to all the Wilsonsians out there who know there is a need for a good documentary about the original Outsider. Colin has appeared in other videos, but none so far has been adequate or able to convey the range, depth, and complexity of his work, all the way from existentialism, the psychology of crime, to the paranormal and higher states of consciousness. This project aims to do just that.

There’s a variety of Wilsoniana offered as rewards for donors, ranging from some of Colin’s own possessions - his Swiss Army knife among them - signed copies of his books - and mine too (Beyond the Robot) and other perks. Please check out the promotional video and the other material at the site. Here’s the link: Dreaming to Some Purpose: The Life and Times of Colin Wilson.

In other news, the release date for my book on precognitive dreams and synchronicities, Time and the Dreaming Mind , has been pushed back to 2022. Blame coronomania. In the meantime, along with the talks I have lined up - the dates are given in the previous post - I have an article in the Sept-Oct issue of New Dawn #182 about how the Covid-19 lockdown in London helped me to understand some of CW’s basic ideas. In “Getting Beyond the Robot” I show how Colin’s notion of “the paradoxical nature of freedom” is at the heart of our moments of “wakening.”

I trust you are all well and keeping safe.

Religion and the Rebel Returns

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Aristeia Press’s new edition of Colin Wilson’s second book, Religion and the Rebel, to which I was honored to contribute an Introduction, will be coming out next month. This is good news for Wilson readers, young or old. I’ve often considered Religion and the Rebel Wilson’s ‘lost book’. Because of the critical about-face that followed The Outsider’s - Wilson’s first book - success, Religion and the Rebel was almost universally panned, its reception setting the stage for practically all the subsequent notice Wilson would receive from mainstream literary pundits. Yet the rejection of Wilson’s second born had more to do with his erroneous association with the Angry Young Men and the media hoopla about them, than with the book’s own merits. Of these there are many, and in Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson, I devote several pages to spelling them out. In essence Wilson asks if the Outsider can find a solution to his dilemma in religion. At one point Wilson himself considered entering a monastery, but in the end decided against it. Religion and the Rebel gives us an idea why.

Yet although Wilson was never as angry as he was expected to be, in Religion and the Rebel, he does let off some steam about modern civilization, which he saw as riddled with “cheapness and futility,” and on the face of which his evolutionary protagonist, the Outsider, appears as a kind of existential pimple, “lonely in the crowd of the second-rate.” This alienation could lead to “a maniac carrying a knife in a black bag, taking pride in appearing harmless and normal to other people,” or to “a saint or visionary, caring for nothing but one moment in which he seemed to understand the world, and see into the heart of nature and of God.” It could also lead, as it does in this book, to insightful examinations of figures like the Bohemian mystic Jacob Boehme, the mathematician and religious thinker Blaise Pascal, the ‘biologist of history’, Oswald Spengler, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who holds the distinction of being so weary of his thought-riddled nature, that he tried to put an end to philosophy, twice. But read for yourself.

The Outsider Goes On

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Here’s a brief report on some current Colin Wilson related activities:

I recently sent the text to my talk “Colin Wilson and the Angry Young Outsiders,” given at the British Museum last October as part of the Folk Horror Revival Event, to be included in a book of the proceedings of the day. I hope the editor will be able to include some of the photographs I used in my lecture, especially the one from the Life magazine photo-shoot re-enacting Wilson’s days sleeping on Hampstead Heath.

Speaking of proceedings, Cambridge Scholars has announced that it will be publishing the Proceedings of the First International Colin Wilson Conference on June 1 2017. The conference was held last year to commemorate the 60th anniversary of The Outsider’s publication. Colin Stanley, Wilson’s bibliographer and the editor in chief of Paupers’ Press - which specializes in Wilson studies - has edited an eclectic collection of Wilsonian essays on a wide range of topics and produced a handsome volume. My own contribution was a talk on Faculty X. It’s pricey. But pester your local university library into getting a copy.

On May 11 2017 I’ll be giving a talk on “Colin Wilson: The Outsider and Beyond” as part of the Brighton Festival. I’ll be focusing on the books that came after The Outsider, such as Religion and the Rebel and the others making up Wilson’s ‘Outsider Cycle’. This was his attempt to work out a new, positive existentialism, that could find a way out of the cul-de-sac old existentialists, like Heidegger, Sartre and Camus had found themselves in.

And finally, I am just now working on an Introduction to a new Paupers’ Press re-issue of Wilson’s rare collection of essays, Eagle and Earwig. Here Wilson applies his ‘existential criticism’ to writers like Ayn Rand, Robert Musil, David Lindsay - author of the marvelous A Voyage to Arcturus - and the sadly forgotten L. H. Myers, whose The Near and the Far is one of the best ‘novel of ideas’ written in the twentieth century. I’ve suggested to Colin Stanley that he should bring Eagle and Earwig out in a Paupers’ Press edition many times, and I am glad to see that he has taken my advice.

Go Beyond the Robot at Metapsychosis

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Jeremy Johnson at the new and fascinating website Metapsychosis has posted an excerpt from Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. Jeremy is a mover and shaker within the burgeoning alternative consciousness studies field - which is a clumsy way of saying that he writes intelligently and with insight about important thinkers such as Jean Gebser, William Irwin Thompson (who had some nice words about my book The Secret Teachers of the Western World), Teilhard de Chardin and others who see consciousness as something more than a steam given off by our hardworking brain cells. I’ve corresponded with Jeremy and found him to be an honest, engaging, and, not surprising, integral thinker. Here he shares my account of Colin Wilson’s introduction of “the robot” into his phenomenological vocabulary.