I'm writing a book with a working title 'modern climber in search of a soul'. It's a reaction to the culture shift in the activity from esoteric pastime to sanitised product. When I say book it's really a set of short statements and observations with a photo next to each page.
Last year I read a fair few Colin Wilson essays, I think he's great, such an eccentric and totally doing his own thing. I think he might have been right about the energy vampires.....
He talks a fair bit about peak experience, and it reminded me of the heady days of Gritstone Headpointing and how it relates to Graham Greene's game off Russian Roulette, head pointing being quite a debased hit. This is the page below
The Koan of Peak Experience
In the 1980’s and 90’s designer danger became fashionable at the cutting edge of the British climbing scene. Climbers frequently refer to transcending the ordinary when placing themselves in positions of extreme duress. Initially novel experiences may devolve into the ordinary and require increasingly challenging situations to find.
Abraham Maslow described a transcendent state of mind he called the ‘Peak Experience’. An altered state of consciousness difficult to articulate, mystical, aesthetic and often profound. In talking about Peak Experience Colin Wilson refers to a 16yr old Graham Greene’s search for relief from boredom in a game of Russian Roulette he played with his brothers revolver. Here he achieved something both divine and debased.
‘I put the muzzle of the revolver into my right ear and pulled the trigger. There was a minute click, and looking down at the chamber I could see that the charge had moved into the firing position. I was out by one. I remember an extraordinary sense of jubilation, as if a carnival lights had been switched on in a dark drab street. My heart knocked in its cage, and life contained an infinite number of possibilities…’
‘Then it was a sodden unfrequented lane. The revolver would be whipped behind my back, the chamber twisted, the muzzle quickly and surreptitiously inserted in my ear beneath the black winter trees, the trigger pulled.
Slowly the effect of the drug wore off—I lost the sense of jubilation, I began to receive from the experience only the crude kick of excitement. It was the difference between love and lust.’
