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Churchill’s
Swans, and his Painter’s Plan for the Afterlife
by
Robert Moss
Winston Churchill's doctor wrote about "the inner world of
make-believe in which Winston found reality" [1] It may well be that the
power of “make-believe” helped to win the war against Hitler.
In an interesting essay on Winston Churchill, well-known British
psychologist Anthony Storr suggests that "magical thinking" - so often
denounced as "infantile" - can pay off on a world-historical scale. In
Storr’s view, “it is probable that England owed her survival in 1940 to this
inner world of make-believe. The kind of inspiration with which Churchill
sustained the nation is not based on judgment, but on an irrational
conviction independent of factual reality. Only a man convinced that he had
an heroic mission, who believed that, in spite of all the evidence to the
contrary, he could yet triumph, and who could identify himself with a
nation's destiny could have conveyed his inspiration to others." [2]]
Storr adds that “We do not know, and we shall never know, the details of
Churchill’s world of make-believe.” Maybe so.
But when I was living in England I became friends with an extraordinary man
who was one of Churchill’s bodyguards during the darkest days of World War
II, and he told me some very curious things. Nobody would be surprised to
know that one of my friend’s assignments was to make sure the trunk of the
Prime Minister's car was always stuffed with vast quantities of champagne
and cognac and whisky and fine cigars.
More intriguing is that Churchill also required his bodyguard to ensure his
absolute uninterrupted privacy when he would go out in the middle of the
night to commune with the swans on the river at Chequers, the country home
of the British Prime Minister. Churchill appeared to draw amazing strength
and vision from his night visitations with the swans. He was surely familiar
with the rich folklore of the British Isles in which swans are magical birds
that provide wings for journeys across time and into other dimensions. In
the old Celtic stories, as in the wildly shamanic tale of the love-god
Aengus’s quest for the swan maiden above the lake known as the Dragon’s
Mouth [3], humans and Otherworld beings alike often take the forms of swans.
Where did Churchill’s mind go journeying when he sat with the swans by the
dark river?
I have dreamed of Churchill – as he might have been in his heyday as a war
leader, and as he might be since – and I have little doubt that he has been
able to apply his power of make-believe to his transitions on the Other
Side.
After leaving office, he discovered the joy and the therapeutic
gifts of painting. He reveled in bright colors and declared this forthright
intention for an artistic career in the afterlife:
“When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my
first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject.
But then I shall require a still gayer palette than I get here below. I
expect orange and vermilion will be the darkest, dullest colors upon it, and
beyond them there will be a whole range of wonderful new colors which will
delight the celestial eye.” [4]
It is evident that this great and passionate "make-believer" did
not need to watch "What Dreams May Come" to know that if we are only
willing to grow our visions with the full force of our passion, we can "make
up" a world, here or somewhere else.
Notes
-
Lord
Moran, Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1940-1965. London:
Constable, 1966, 778.
-
Anthony Storr,
Churchill's Black Dog, Kafka’s Mice and Other Phenomena of the Human
Mind. New
York: Ballantine Books, 1988, 27.
-
Robert Moss, The
Dreamer’s Book of the Dead. Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 2005,
18-21.
-
Winston S. Churchill,
Painting as a Pastime. Harmondsworth, England, 1964, 29.
|
Published in London in 1948, this is Churchill's
marvelous essay celebrating his favorite hobby, with 18 of his paintings
reproduced in color. A delightful little book, endlessly re-issued in a
variety of English and American editions. |
