A Mythical Personality

By Jake Horsley

“See where you are? Look around. This is what it’s like. Can you stand seeing it? Touching it, smelling it? ….Disgust is what one would feel if one were alive. Instead of that, one knows that it’s artificial, the structure of reality itself.”

—Paul Bowles

Reading Bowles’ letters has been quite affecting. I mean that his “spirit,” or more correctly his consciousness, seems to have infiltrated my own and I am aware not only of his voice somehow being echoed in my writing but of the contrasts and the parallels between us, as individuals. The main parallel of course is the traveling, and coming to Mexico (where Bowles spent 4 years) has helped underline this parallel, and intensify the already strong sense of affinity which I have with him (whether he ever felt it himself I will never know). On the other hand, the above quotation emphasizes the extreme contrast in our actual outlooks. Although I have always had and will presumably always have a strong sense of agreement regarding his own “philosophy of decay,” it is very clear now that I have been steadily moving away from this perspective, even while Bowles went deeper into it.

Paul Bowles may be the truest and most lucid nihilist who ever lived; he didn’t just talk about it, he embodied the nihilist perspective (he rarely spoke of it, in fact, and certainly not in his books, even though he describes them as being intended “to show the impossibility, even the undesirability, of happiness”). Instead, he lived it. Not merely that he was a recluse, but that his whole life seemed directed towards the negation and eventual eradication of self; and not (I suspect) in the “spiritual” sense of dying to be born again, but merely for its own sake, because possible, or perhaps more to the point, because “impossible.” Judging by my own encounters with Bowles, he did not succeed, nor did he ever expect to or intend to, seeing as to do so would effectively entail enlightenment, release from the decay-perspective, and an acceptance of the philosophy of love and of the Spirit. Of this Bowles was fully aware but, like Lucifer, compelled by his nature to reject, or perhaps to flee. Bowles withdrew further and further from life—and into death—as he grew older, ceasing to write and even to read in the end. Last time I saw him, he had a TV, video, and stack of movies in his bedroom, where presumably he spent most of his time. Yet his acute and searching mind went on working, begging the question: how did it work, exactly, once there was no longer anything it considered worth seeking? What did Paul Bowles think about? None but the gods can say, seeing as he never would, and now cannot.

“I think that having spent my life trying to hide everything from everyone, I’ve ended up by no longer being able to find many things myself. Seriously.”

What kind of man was Paul Bowles? A stranger character the world of literature has never known, I’d wager, and “unknown” is the word, all right. Of course, this accounts for a great deal of the fascination which he holds for me: a man of mystery, albeit in the most negative or “enforced” sense of the word. After all, a true man of mystery is not recognizable as such, in that his mystery is not up-front but concealed by an aura or façade of normality. He should never appear to be evasive or coy, much less secretive, but on the contrary to be as open and sociable as your average person. The difference is that the man of mystery is not predisposed to be open but has only learnt to be that way, in order to function in the world and still retain his integrity, his mystery. And it is only when “the world at large,” as such, or society’s members, manage to persuade him—indirectly of course, unaware of what they are doing—to lower his façade ever so slightly and allow them access to his “true character” (another façade, but a much deeper and older one), that they begin to realize they are in the presence of mystery.

This accentuates the contrast between my own path and that of Bowles: his path moved steadily away from life, into death, while mine is (I trust) the reverse, away from isolation towards union, however tentative. Yet the essential mystery of the man, the writer—who knew instinctively that he HAD no actual existence beyond the expression of the Imaginal (the realm beyond death)—remains the same. It is the mystery of the entity or individual not merely content but compelled, perhaps even condemned (as in Bowles’ case?), to remain a cipher, an absence, a hole in space and time, a window onto the world through which the Abyss—be it that of death or Eternity—coldly, darkly, beckons to the living. In both cases—that of someone who takes refuge in mystery and becomes a recluse, and one who assembles or spins a veil with which to mask his non-existence—the primary task is the same: to protect the world at large—the world of ego—from the terrifying presence of the abstract.

The “man of mystery” needs to be removed from society and from ego-structures or thought forms (all decay-based) in order to retain his purity; but he does not need to be protected. On the other hand, the smallest glimpse of the abstract or Imaginal is sufficient to wipe clean the structures of the ego world forever, to drive it insane, to drag its shadow-existence screaming into the light. This is the “revelation,” the apocalypse, and it is what Paul Bowles, like every true man of mystery, agent of the Imaginal, or abstract being, embodies, over and above all other ideas. Once the veil of identity is removed, even just partially or momentarily, it can never again be replaced. The veil serves not merely to cover the emptiness beyond it, but to mask its existence entirely. Once we have glimpsed the emptiness, however, and know that it is there, the veil no longer serves any protective purpose. It has taken on a new and terrifying meaning: that of initiation or death. Something of this idea seems to be suggested by the way the Grim Reaper always appears hooded, though beyond that I have little to say, having already said more than enough. But let me just add that, more than any other writer since Edgar Allan Poe (whose tales Bowles’ devoured as a small boy), Paul Bowles appears to enjoy the role of human emissary of doom, exactly as the Grim Reaper of fairy tales once did. In his own words:

“Too much importance is given the writer and not enough to his work. What difference does it make who he is and what he feels, since he’s merely a machine for the transmission of ideas. In reality he doesn’t exist—he’s a cipher, a blank. A spy sent into life by the forces of death. His main objective is to get the information across the border, back into death. Then he can be given a mythical personality.”

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