“It struck me that I was in the position of so many of my favorite characters in fiction: Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge, the young writer in Hamsun’s Hunger: alone in my room, feeling totally cut off from the rest of society,” Wilson writes Christmas Day 1954. “It was not a position I relished; I’d always been strongly attached to my home and family (I’m a typical Cancer) and missed being with them on holiday. Yet an inner compulsion had forced me into this position of isolation...I began writing about it in my journal, trying to pin it down.” He, of course, does not have the financial means to travel to Leicester, to see his family, his girlfriend is visiting her folks and he is writing, bemoaning, over tinned tomatoes and fried bacon in his flat. What became of this all too familiar scenario (there have been many holiday meals I have missed to work overtime or felt travel 3000 miles west ill-advised, was The Outsider, Wilson’s first nonfiction essay collection on societal duty and success through literary analysis of Sartre, Camus, Hesse, Nietzsche, Blake and others. Plainly, he attempts the exploration of purpose, who is at liberty to distinguish purpose and who is made to ultimately benefit.
The Outsider’s sense of futility becomes a loss of faith, and so as not to let this futility have the last word, he must fight every hour to commit to an ideal of truth or joy. There is a rhetoric for withdrawal, and even a very sensible explanation for the captivity one feels in an economy of empty signifiers.
Wilson welcomed the hesitant interpretations and made the so-called transgression of writing burdensome shames or fears his ultimate life force. He published long-winded tomes surveying the occult, the paranormal, and the “visionary,” informed by collaboration with psychologist Abraham Maslow, for the next several decades. Lawrence Ferlinghetti solicited Wilson to write an essay on the quest of the mystical as a devotion to poetry for publication with City Light Books.
Without knowing of him whatsoever, I purchased this notably slim text Poetry and Mysticism (1970) years ago at a church flea on the Upper West Side. I liked portable paperbacks and agreed with the mission statement: mystical experience and poetic inspiration can be pursued scientifically and learned as one learns a foreign language; beleaguered as you are, and rightfully so, try to open up, relax, absorb the simple mechanisms of pleasure. “This is a point of vital importance, and I must underline it,” he says. “When gloomy poets talk about ‘the human condition’ they are completely overlooking it... Psychologically speaking man is still a long way from this insight. All great art has this odd power of reaching past the jailer, and pressing the ‘off’ button. That is what poetry is about. It is a formula for inducing ‘holiday consciousness’ without the need for a holiday.” I wouldn’t go so far as to say he successfully fled frustration or toil, but he set to a literature for facing these circumstances, and what we inherited today, through this prose, is the ability to dictate where and how to carry on. I am tender on Wilson, I even think he could be good company for another holiday evening where upending disbelief is due, I even think tinned tomatoes could be seasoned.
-Katie Calderon