Frankly Speaking | By Frank Crocitto

AFFADAVIT OF AN OUTSIDER

 


   Things were so bad at the time that I was seeing double, and in the merciless desolation of three o’clock in the morning listening to the mail trucks and garbage trucks and the screel of an occasional cat in the alley, smoking alone on the fire-escape of a cockroach-ridden apartment in Greenwich Village, I dallied with the idea of “ending it.” But I didn’t. I wouldn’t take action, for I couldn’t trust my own judgment. So I kept smoking and dragging on with the rest of the things we do and place under the heading of living: eating and sleeping and brushing teeth and washing body, going upstairs and downstairs, in doors and out doors, scratching and yawning… 
The last time my eyes had double vision was when I had polio at twelve years old and they rushed me in a howling ambulance through the coal-black night to a hospital where I was supposed to die. I didn’t die then either. But I had the same feeling of futility.
Heavy with hopelessness I trudged through the hours of the days of my thirty-third year. I was supposed to have accomplished great things by that time; that’s what they had predicted for me at school. But I could not get my bearings. I didn’t know where I was supposed to be going so how could I get my bearings? Bearings to what destination? All my friends, and less than friends, all, to a man, had jobs and professions and directions. They were all moving on the swelling waves of success. Doctors, lawyers, actors, writers. They had all left me behind.
Reading, dreaming and watching movies was my only solace. For a little while I could forget the hopelessness that hemmed me in. But once I could no longer control the focus of my eyes I had no escape. Yet, though I say I had no hope I must have had some, a little grain maybe, like a salt grain or a grain of sand, because I kept on breathing and I kept on wishing that something would transpire and it would all change and I would fell alive again like I felt when I was a little boy commanding the waters of the bay, striding under the sun and building castles of delight out of the sand.
The analysis of my problem was not beyond me, nor was it so profound. I had simply lost all sense of meaning. Nothing mattered; nothing meant anything. Though I was living in “The Big Town,” “The City That Never Sleeps,” “The Big Apple” and all that rot, I could find nothing of value, nothing I could give my heart to, nothing I could throw my life’s energy into. There were cabs racing down the streets of New York. Where were these people rushing to? There were subway cars packed to the gills at rush hour. Where were they all going and what were they doing when they got there? 
   

Meaning ignites the will. All these people I was watching were doing what they were doing because they wanted to. Something had ignited their will. They could go on forever, or almost, doing what they were doing. They believed in it. There was something in it for them. It had meaning for them. But nothing had meaning for me. And so my will was dormant.
In a single glance I surveyed all that mankind was doing and what they hoped to attain by it. It was all emptiness, and foolishness, and self-deception and slavery. Yes, they were busy, and yes, their wills were ignited and they were all aflame with achievement but the meaning that was stirring them was illusory. Fame could not keep back the ravages of age nor the final rendezvous with death. Building houses and spawning families and amassing millions affected nothing. All and everything had to be relinquished at the door. Time was going to have its way with us. We acted as if we were going to be here forever, and that there was no death, and no great cosmos beyond our petty, narrow strivings.
I was an outsider. I felt it in my bones like the ache of growing pains. I was outside of the meaning that stirred the society around me into action. Moreover, I saw the meaning that they believed in and valued and were willing to throw their lives away on was a lie. And it was a lie that could only exist of we were all willing to ignore reality. It was a bubble of ignorance and vanity.
 
So what could I do? I saw the meaningless of what passed for meaning in everyday life. I knew I needed to find meaning if I was ever to make something of my life. Without meaning to arouse my will I was as good as dead. Where would I find this elusive meaning? I didn’t even have the fire to start searching for it. So I sat down. I sat in my chair by the window overlooking the fire escape, the grimy alley and its bashed and tumbled garbage cans. I stared ahead, my shoulders hunched, like someone waiting on a cold, wintry corner for a trolley that may or may not come.
Now, it so happened one Sunday morning as the shy and tentative spring was coaxing winter away, as I was sitting in my chair staring ahead, seeing double and bemoaning the fate that made me unable to read or go to the movies, an inspiration hit me and I turned on the radio. And there, all of a sudden, coming into my ears was a voice, a mellow, modulated, mellifluous voice intoning the King’s English and speaking, of all things, philosophy. But not philosophy as I had known it in college, fuzzy and non-committal, but clear and strong and full of promise.
Transfixed, I listened to each word like I did in the hearing tests they used to give us in elementary school. He was talking about my plight! He was talking about the need to know and understand the meaning of life! He had been working on the problem and he had found something, something of great importance!! The most important discovery since the Renaissance, he said. Sound had become light in my mind. There was the promise of life in that voice. Who is he, who is he, who is he???
Perhaps they wouldn’t announce his name at the end of the talk… 
The announcement at the end of the talk gave me a shock and a new direction. The announcer said it was Pacifica Radio (which seemed so poignant) and that the speaker with the beautiful English voice was Colin Wilson (which didn’t mean much to me) but that he had written a book, and it was called The Outsider. Revived, I raced off to a bookstore and on the way stopped at my friend Mike’s apartment. He read to a ninety-year old lady for a living and he liked to read aloud and it wasn’t hard to play on his sympathy about my encroaching blindness and persuade him to read The Outsider aloud.
What I learned as I listened to Mike read the book was that I was in good company. Most of the men I admired were outsiders. Jesus and Buddha and Lawrence of Arabia and William Blake and Van Gogh … The list goes on and on. None of them believed in the values of the societies they found themselves in. They struggled, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to find the truth, the real meaning of life. I was encouraged by the quality of the company and the heroism of their efforts.
You can’t be outside of something without being inside of something else. As we neared the latter part of the book I felt a new stirring in me. I felt like an outsider to the real, deeper meaning of life. Of course, I didn’t know exactly what it was but I was getting the scent of something like a spiritual hound-dog. I wanted to follow that scent. I was sure it would lead me to the real in the midst of the unreal.
A book is a dead thing and cannot satisfy a living hunger, even a brilliant book like The Outsider. So I needed to find something real, something living. All the outsiders of the book were individuals long dead. I needed to find a living, learning situation that was happening now, in New York. I needed to find a school.
And I wouldn’t have known where to turn next had not Colin Wilson mentioned—at the very end of the book—a practical method of realizing truth was currently being practiced, the legacy left by a great contemporary outsider and spiritual adventurer named Gurdjieff…