In Search of Little Lea

An Introduction to Wayward Layman

Walk two minutes from my parents home in east Belfast and you’ll find yourself standing at the front gates of a house named Little Lea. Situated on an unremarkable bend in a road which does little else but bend - the leafy, picturesque Circular Road - the house is famous for being the childhood abode of one Clive Staples Lewis. You may have heard of him.

Long before Belfast became near synonymous with Westeros, and the apparatus of TV-Tourism descended on the former ship-building town, it bore, as if in secret, this much quieter legacy. For most of my early life I spied neither statue nor plinth which may have betrayed this secret. Although that picture has changed in recent years, I can’t recall one instance in childhood of anyone loitering reverently on the street, taking snaps, or rubbernecking over the dense foliage that envelopes Little Lea’s ample front garden. This seems all the stranger to me now, believing as I do that Lewis was something of a giant among 20th century writers, and seemingly gaining more relevance by the day.

The absence of much in the way of C. S. Lewis tourism in Belfast three decades ago, curious though it may be, is not what I’m here to discuss. Rather, as an introduction to this blog, I want to tell my story, and try to understand a vague but palpable sense of duty I feel gestating inside me. You see I had little to no interest in this great man, whom my father told me on many occasions had grown up just around the corner from me. As a child I never visited Narnia (I eschewed it for Middle Earth). As a young teenager hanging with some Christian kids at school I never discovered his popular apologetics. No part of my education could have clued me in to his expertise on Medieval literature. It seems fitting, almost fateful to me now, at 35, that Lewis has proved to be a tremendous influence on me; he has firmly taken a seat in my personal pantheon of intellectual avengers. This is partly the story of how that came to be. Partly, because we will leave Lewis here for now. My intellectual journey has been circuitous, to say the least.

Just over a decade ago, seeing as it was all the rage at the time, the universe saw fit to wallop me with an ‘awakening’. A lot of ink has been spilled over this divisive term, and I would loath to be misread as a would-be ‘enlightened one’; it will suffice to say that at some point in the summer of 2011, I realised, quite deeply, that I knew nothing. This strange event(?) took place as I was watching a video on YouTube. It was a trite sort of video, the likes of which are a dime-a-dozen, in which footage of assorted wonders of the natural world was synced to an audio recording of a lecture. The lecture was delivered by a philosopher named Alan Watts. You may have heard of him too.

I was thus introduced to the first of my avengers; Watts the trickster, the hype-man for what would follow, the iconoclast of my hand-me-down ‘belief system’. Until then, like any upstanding millenial, I had suckled contentedly at the teat of a popular culture which had seized any questions with a spiritual odour and tossed them into a landfill of non-issues. So readily and giddily did I imbibe this culture that at the age of 19, as a fresh faced art student, knowing even less than I did at 24, I proudly called myself an atheist. I may have always dressed the way I wanted, and had little time for fads and trends, but this particular fashion I did adopt with great vigour. I sought battle with any and all combatants, willing or otherwise. I forged friendships (which turned out to be very brittle) based on this solemn allegiance, and made my atheism the sole subject of my ‘art’, which, looking back, was uninspired, tasteless, sneering, and just plain bad. My thoughts were not my own.

For some reason, perhaps because I’d softened up a little over the years, or because the wheel of culture had revolved just enough, the soil was sufficiently fertile on that summer night for the words of Alan Watts to take root. I had never heard ‘spirituality’ explained so convincingly, with such common sense. The sheer novelty of it had me instantly hooked.

During the following few years, Watts was my ever-present companion. I listened to every lecture umpteen times. He served as the genesis of what ended up being a whirlwind tour of all things ‘esoteric’, and the comprehensive destruction of my materialist worldview. All of reality had now opened up to me in previously unimaginable (and largely frowned-upon) ways. It is no exaggeration to say that I spent every hour of my waking solitude trawling the web for food to satisfy my new hunger. It wasn't research, it lacked the singular rigour for that; it was everything-search. My previously hog-tied mind now lashed out in all directions. There was something in the air at the time; other figures from 20th century counter-culture were doing the rounds online. Terrence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Tim Leary; they all vowed for my attention, and I gave it to each, hours upon hours of it. I never tired of consuming new, bizarre ideas, and yet I kept my little project largely secret. Surely there were so few who would understand?

‘The weirdness’, I often called it. All the topics that tend to raise the eyebrows of the ‘scientifically minded’. Alternative histories, the occult, parapsychology, metaphysics, UFO’s, the science of near-death and out-of-body experiences; generally speaking, theories and speculations on the nature of consciousness itself. I had been a ‘lover of science’, but that was more as one who buys all the hot new paperbacks and thinks religion a mortal danger to our species. Now I felt a desire to explore the far fringes of science, and also to question it and learn of its’ limitations; philosophy of science a la Thomas Kuhn became a strong attractor. It may all have been a kind of explication of whatever those words were that Alan Watts spoke. There was rebellious wisdom in there that my young, hopelessly rational mind was trying to get to the bottom of. Of course I never did, but I continued to find new threads to pull on. I was slowly accumulating teachers, mentors, curating for myself an education that I’d never before received.

My autodidactic thirst drove me ever more outward and inward. It wasn’t long before I discovered Carl Jung and ‘depth psychology’. The infinite universe around me became suffused with the infinite within. I sought to understand myself (and perhaps my peers, too) in all my quirks, habits, shortcomings, strivings. In Jung I found a teacher who spoke to a depth that I somehow always had, but which had likely been obscured amidst the materialistic scenery I called home. I came to relish in the symbolic imagination he so brilliantly embodied. It was Jung’s sympathy for the symbolism of religions which eventually led me to another fascination which grips me to this day, and which would have been anathema to my 19 year old self; I started listening to Christians.

I was already welcoming the erosion of my atheist, reductionist world-view by thinkers of a more, shall we say, multi-dimensional pedigree, even if they were often a bit ‘new agey’; these clever Christians continued that trend, but their focus was all the more keen. C. S. Lewis burst into view, along with the likes of Roger Scruton and David Bentley Hart. What struck me instantly in Lewis was the the crystalline clarity of his thought, and the balance of humility and confidence he exuded (Bentley Hart often shirked the humility but I found him so compelling and amusing that I didn’t care). For someone whose intellectual god-kings had been Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, the sheer monstrousness of a mind like Bentley Hart’s, who made mincemeat of many of the former’s arguments, left me wondering how on earth the new atheists had such a huge impact on me and the culture around me. It seemed to me that they had been offering painfully easy answers to the most profound questions of existence, if indeed they addressed those questions at all.

Who are we? What are we doing here? Is there a God? How should we live? Is mind more fundamental than matter? What is the truth? Can we even know it? Have we lost sight of how profoundly astonishing it is to exist at all? These questions fall squarely within the province of religious thought. What’s more, answers to them, especially when rendered with the eloquence of a C. S. Lewis, often seemed to me eminently sensible. I began to interpret atheism and dogmatic materialism not merely as historical accidents, but as symptoms; those of an inevitable tragedy baked into the very trajectory of ‘western civilisation’. To speak of a Godless world was in many ways the same as speaking of a civilisation which had lost a spark, or a vitality which had once sustained it.

It was around this point in my journey that the world saw an explosion of online cultural punditry. People of all stripes and beliefs (some of course having done so for years previous) were beginning to post videos addressing questions like those mentioned above. How we should live, with all of its divisive political implications, seemed to have become the subject du jour. A Canadian psychology professor who I was already in awe of burst violently into broader awareness. He and other academics took to their newly found educational platform, and (along with every Tom, Dick and Harry) made it clear that something really was stirring in western culture. It was a time for strong words, a time for action. In parallel to my quiet interests in metaphysics, consciousness, and the paranormal, which took place ‘far from the maddening crowd’, I was swept along by a zeitgeist that skewed ever more toward the social, cultural and political; realms in which everyone had something to say. Realms, in a word, with higher stakes.

What was, for me, purely intellectual curiosity saw me begin to ‘keep company’ online with all sorts of people, none of whom were at all typical of my friend group at the time. Many of said group, being typically left-leaning arty types, were rubbed the wrong way by my poking and prodding around issues of politics; by my (never heavy handed) advocacy of other potential ways of seeing things. This dynamic, of course, is a tale as old as time, and its more extreme manifestations give rise to what is now referred to as 'cancel culture’ - a concept whose validity is still subject to fierce debate, and one which I’ll doubtless return to in future musings.

I should say, the political pundits of this world are not my kindred spirits; I listen to rhetoriticians of all kinds in the spirit of an amateur historian - in the hope of getting a lay of the land. I do however deeply respect diversity of opinion and am sickened by totalising impulses wherever I find them. While I acknowledge the need for cultural stick-in-the-muds to hold back encroaching tides of ideological madness, it is not in my temperament to be one; my mind, having grown out of post-modern soil, is still a bit ‘squishy’. While I do feel it hardening with time, as ideas become clearer and better ordered, I remain sympathetic to the maxim that one should have strong convictions, loosely held.

One conviction I will defend hasn’t changed much for a decade, but is all the more strongly buttressed, and fleshed out by my explorations; namely that reality is a whole lot deeper than we are typically led to believe. A conviction subsidiary to that one is that studying the history of human thought is an endlessly bountiful enterprise, and one that you might say is our duty to undertake. By this means we can pluck from obscurity those names and faces that we may have always been aware of, but rarely understood; we can contextualise them, incorporate their insight, see them as part of an epic story in which we ourselves are characters too. It is in this manner that a man long dead, with whom I share a coincidental geographical origin, became a real and meaningful presence in my life, along with so many others, most of whom have been dead for a lot longer than C. S. Lewis.

In his final lecture at Harvard in the late 1930’s, philosopher Alfred North Whitehead made the remark that when civilisations die, they die of boredom. This is a fitting, if understated description of the general state of affairs I see around me. Many people are dimly aware of a stagnation, a decadence or decay in our time, and many find a taproot of renewed vitality in socio-political movements of one sort or another. I salute these people when their cause seems noble, and will join in their rituals when the spirit moves me, but I remain, as a great many do, politically homeless. Sets of ideas which crystallise into movements tend often to lose crucial nuance along the way. The paradoxical character of reality described by the world’s mystical and religious traditions does not seem friendly to the formulation of clear political maxims. When confronted with simple or narrowly rational answers to the worlds problems, I often sense a tiny voice deep inside, struggling to be heard through the din; all it wants to say is Yes…but there is more to be said.

The world can obviously do without my two cents. But I cannot really do without giving them. I have consumed for long enough, and I must now give something back. I’ll end with help from the Gospel of Thomas; with a verse which speaks to me powerfully of my present need to add my voice to the conversation.

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

See you soon

WL