What the Heck Was Happening with Gunkel's "Parapsychic" Phase?

Someday I would like to write a book called Analogies for Patrick Gunkel. This book, if ever written, will certainly be a book Gunkel would have appreciated.

In this book, I would endeavor to draw character portraits of various historical figures and use descriptions of these individuals to help pinpoint or highlight Patrick Gunkel’s remarkable uniqueness.

By characterizing both convergences and divergences, I would hope the reader comes away from the book with a dozen fascinating character portraits in their head along with a much greater knowledge of Gunkel himself.

Anyway, one analogy I would end up offering in such a book, perhaps one of the strongest analogies, would be to the British writer and intellectual Colin Wilson (1931 - 2013). Wilson was a generation removed from Gunkel, born 16 years before him. And yet there were at least half a dozen major parallels between the two men—along with a few big differences.

People don’t much remember Wilson today, but in 1956, at the age of 25, he made a huge splash with his debut intellectual book The Outsider and his attempt to start a philosophical movement he called “new existentialism.”

A child prodigy, Wilson pretended to be gay to get out of service in the British Royal Air Force, turned down a job in the British civil service, and passed tests to study chemistry in a graduate program but subsequently dropped out.

As young man, Wilson decided that his ambition was to become an intellectual and follow his own specific intellectual interests—just as Patrick Gunkel was determined to do.

Wilson famously wrote his debut book in his early 20s while camping out on Hampstead Health, London, in a sleeping bag, and then bicycling to the British Museum’s reading room so he could begin to write as soon as it opened.

Wilson’s specific literary approach typically involved memorizing information about historical figures and events, then synthesizing that information in a vivid style in pursuit of a specific theme with many lively cognitive flips and cartwheels along the way.

Like many prodigies with a touch of autism, however, Wilson writes almost in circles or spirals. He is adept at perceiving his topics in brilliant and accessible language from a multitude of angles, but the sense of progress ultimately turns out to be a bit illusory as one approaches the end of each book.

In fact, this is one reason why Wilson’s reputation crashed after The Outsider was published—many people, including critics, misunderstood what Wilson was trying to do. And Wilson himself was not very clear on that point, either. Thousands of high-society Brits read Wilson’s debut book and then developed parlor games trying to guess who among their social group was an “outsider” without realizing that Wilson was writing about a symbolic archetype rather than offering a psychological profile of certain kinds of people.

Anyway, my whole point in writing this is that Wilson’s line of intellectual pursuit ultimately lead him into the arms of parapsychology, and from this grip Wilson never recovered.

Wilson was a notoriously prolific writer, churning out dozens of short stories, nonfiction books, science fiction novels about space vampires, historical fiction about serial killers, and a number of other unusual works.

His 1971 book “The Occult” is considered a significant piece of synthesis regarding its central topic, and yet the straight reportage of almost every occult event as though it had factually happened without any skeptical commentary seems extremely naive.

Like Gunkel, Wilson wanted to lay the groundwork for “a science of the future.”

Remarkably, however, Wilson saw this “science” as rooted in something that seems straight out of a comic book or pulp fiction magazine—what he called the “development of Faculty X.”

Studying the similarities—and this huge divergence—between these two child prodigies, Gunkel on the one hand and Wilson on the other, is on my list of things to do if I can ever figure out how to become a full-time Gunkel writer.

But there is plenty else out there to discover, such as what may have been happening during Gunkel’s own investigation of the paranormal—and how Gunkel reached his own conclusions, which sent him on a totally different intellectual path than Wilson.

In 1978, Patrick Gunkel was living in Cambridge, England. How he got there and what he was doing there is yet one more mysterious episode in Gunkel’s life, and I will certainly relate what I know about this period at some point.

It is from this perch in England where, like a matryoshka doll, one mystery is opened to reveal another mystery inside: I am referring here to documentary evidence in the form of an editorial to the Cambridge Evening News where Gunkel mentions that he went through a “paraspychic phase" in his youth.

The April 6, 1978, editorial simply entitled “Research” in the Cambridge Evening News, sees Gunkel criticizing the paper’s coverage of something called “The Second International Conference of Psychical Research.”

In leveling his critique, Gunkel revealed an important personal detail that is not known from other sources—namely, that for two summers, “as a precocious adolescent,” he hung out around the “Foundation for Research in Parapsychology” (a short-lived organization in Austin, Texas) as a guest.¹

According to his editorial, this flirtation with parapsychology had the effect of acquainting Gunkel with “human gullibility, self-deception, mythopoesis, the profitability of humbug, the manipulatability and imitability of science, and the credibility of pathological liars.”

Gunkel goes on to criticize parapsychology for “the absolute absence of a genuinely psychical datum… and the actual irrelevance to parapsychologists of any such datum.”

His conclusion is that funding such research is a waste of time, and that humanity would be better served by focusing on “explaining and mastering the brain, giving thought to a machine, raising the standard of living and enhancing the quality of life and perfecting human health, and exploring and comprehending the universe.”

This editorial is very significant, in my opinion.

It offers evidence that Gunkel’s “zany futurism” was nevertheless tempered by an interest in scientific data.

As compelling as the old psychic trope of attempting to “see into the future” by simply mental or magical means may have seemed to Gunkel, while still a teenager he intentionally chose a more defensible approach and attached himself to the futurist Herman Kahn, who used more rigorous methods.

Nevertheless, Gunkel had his own way of accessing these activities.

He was, at bottom, and despite all his gadfly and crackpot interests, a logical and evidence-based person. Therefore, all of the questions and curiosities that might go along with such research were positioned at a metaphysical level, where the philosophy of a Socrates or a Bishop Berkley would have challenged any certain knowledge.

Yes, Gunkel always seemed to be saying, we think we understand our reality—but how can we be sure?

In the below undated chart, which exists only in John A. Wheeler’s files to my knowledge, Gunkel provided a number of heuristics to help explain “Why There May Be Phenomena We Don’t Even Suspect On Earth.”

Among the given reasons, Gunkel speculated that the phenomena might be:

1) I cannot help but wonder whether Gunkel himself was in some way responsible for the short-lived existence of this organization. Several years later, Gunkel attempted to insert himself into the operations of the Institute for the Future in Middletown, Connecticut; shortly thereafter, the Institution was broken up and reformed in California. In 1987, Gunkel moved to Austin, Texas; that same year, physicist and long-time Gunkel correspondent John A. Wheeler retired from the U.T. Austin. Coincidence?