Aldous Huxley from the Doors of Persuasion “I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer.” “Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon, of how the Lungarno used to look before the bridges were destroyed, of the Bayswater Road when the only buses were green and tiny and drawn by aged horses at three and a half miles an hour.” Isn’t it incredible how passionately evocative, and visually authentic he writes and yet how different his point is to what we think of as we talk about visual thinkers. A very dodgy term at the best of times. I’m not sure I really know what a visual thinker is. Imagine - for those of us who say we think visually – that there are those who don’t - we must strive to communicate differently with them? His journey inspires me and reminds me of how important it is for creative people to remember our responsibility to give respect to difference by understanding what it actually means. No difference at all. Huxley was certainly different in some sense – but to me a visual thinker of high order. He goes on. “But such images have little substance and absolutely no autonomous life of their own. They stand to real, perceived objects in the same relation as Homer's ghosts stood to the men of flesh and blood, who came to visit them in the shades. Only when I have a high temperature do my mental images come to independent life. To those in whom the faculty of visualization is strong my inner world must seem curiously drab, limited and uninteresting. This was the world - a poor thing but my own - which I expected to see transformed into something completely unlike itself.” His world doesn’t seem at all drab to me. He did go to some extreme lengths – pioneeringly so – to achieve a greater sense of acuity than most. His description of hallucinatory drugs has to be some of the most incredible and revelatory writing about visual thinking that I can imagine. His expression of it is insightful at every level of the usual definition and taxonomy of visual thinking. “The change which actually took place in that world was in no sense revolutionary. Half an hour after swallowing the drug I became aware of a slow dance of golden lights. A little later there were sumptuous red surfaces swelling and expanding from bright nodes of energy that vibrated with a continuously changing, patterned life. At another time the closing of my eyes revealed a complex of gray structures, within which pale bluish spheres kept emerging into intense solidity and, having emerged, would slide noiselessly upwards, out of sight.” My argument is that visual thinking is not about people drawing pictures because they can. By rote to reflect something. That’s just a form of stenography. It is about the thinking. Using your mind to grab ideas and forms however foggy, whether visual or verbally - that’s the energy. Pulling ideas and thoughts initially from wherever and whatever the sense and using the power of the mind to force them to far greater insights and ideas. The spontaneity and madness of it all is what is magical and inspiring and the results will take the breath away. It’s revelatory. “But at no time were there faces or forms of men or animals. I saw no landscapes, no enormous spaces, no magical growth and metamorphosis of buildings, nothing remotely like a drama or a parable. The other world to which mescalin admitted me was not the world of visions; it existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open. The great change was in the realm of objective fact. What had happened to my subjective universe was relatively unimportant.” I took my pill at eleven.
“An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers-a full-blown Belie of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. “At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation-the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.”
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