A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (33 page)

The Simplists, as they called themselves, became inseparable, and along with reading decadent poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud, they also studied works on occultism and theosophy and carried out experiments in parapsychology and magic, some of which included the use of hashish and opium. In one experiment, Daumal walked alone for hours with his eyes closed, strangely avoiding obstacles in his path. Other experiments included astral travelling, shared dreams, precognition, attempts to open the third eye, and a form of second sight called "paroptic vision."

In these experiments, Daumal revealed an uncanny ability to determine the identity of objects with his eyes closed in a darkened room while wearing tight-fitting, blackened goggles. During these sessions Daumal would be hypnotized; he would then hold his hands near the objects, or place them on a specially covered box containing some item. Daumal could see the images on book covers and even sense colours by the temperature they gave off.

In 1925 Daumal entered the prestigious Lycee Henri IV in Paris, to prepare for examinations to enter the Ecole Normale Superieure. One of his professors was the philosopher Emile Chartier, better known under his pen-name Alain. Along with his work in mathematics, philosophy, science and medicine, Daumal studied Sanskrit, mastering the language in three years, composing a grammar and beginning several translations. He also read the works of the traditionalist Rene Guenon and wrote a series of essays on Indian aesthetics, posthumously published as Rasa (1982).

At the time of Daumal's studies in ancient traditions, however, Paris was a hotbed of modernism, and ho group was more vociferous than the surrealists, who shared with him a fascination with the occult and paranormal. In 1927, Daumal suffered a fall which led to a period of amnesia; this prevented him from taking his entrance examinations, so he began a course of free studies in philosophy at the Sorbonne. There he met the Czech painter Joseph Sima and the Siberian-born, naturalized American Vera Milanova, who later became his wife. With the poet Andre Rolland de Reneville and the other Simplists, the nineteen-year-old Daumal embarked on the short-lived literary review for which he is most remembered in France today, Le Grand Jeu (The Big Game).

The wild blend of Guenon, Alfred Jarry's Pataphysics, occultism and arcane scholarship in Le Grand Jeu posed a threat to surrealism. When the first issue appeared in 1928, surrealism had been around for a decade, but had lost momentum in endless squabbles over politics and egos. The Simplists, scarcely out of their teens, calling for a "Revolution of Reality returning to its source" and claiming to speak the same word as "uttered by the Vedic Rishis, the kabbalist Rabbis, the prophets, the mystics and the great heretics of all time and the true Poets," were bound to attract the older group's attention.25 Overtures were made to bring them into the fold, but Daumal firmly declined. Andre Breton, deep into Marxism, retaliated by openly criticizing Le Grand Jeu for its ideological failings. Daumal, unfazed, answered that Breton should beware of "eventually figuring in the study guides to literary history."

Daumal emerged from the skirmish intact, but both he and Le Grand Jeu were not in good shape. By 1929, his childhood friend Roger Gilbert-Lecomte had succumbed to the drug addiction that would eventually kill him. Daumal himself was barely scratching out an existence, living in poverty, losing his teeth, and feeling the ravages of his various experiments. If Daumal rejected Breton's solicitations, it was not from lack of need for a father figure. He was merely waiting to meet a more remarkable man.

On 30 November at the Cafe Figon on the Boulevard St. Germain- a man whom Joseph Sima recognized from a previous collaboration sat at a table drinking calvados and beer, and drawing odd Arabic and Oriental designs. Sima approached his acquaintance and introduced the famous artist Alexandre de Salzmann to his young friend Rene. De Salzmann, a world-renowned authority of theatre lighting and set design, engaged Daumal and the others in conversation. Then, after a few minutes, he proposed a test: he asked the group to hold their arms straight out at the side for as long as they could. Several minutes later only Daumal's remained in the air. De Salzmann smiled and said, "You interest me." Daumal had met his remarkable man.

Since 1918, Alexandre de Salzmann and his wife Jeanne had been students of the enigmatic Russian guru Gurdjieff. Born into an aristocratic family in Tiflis, Georgia, like Gurdjieff, de Salzmann had a colourful past, part of which included being kidnapped by brigands as a teenager. He claimed to have lost his teeth when falling from a mountain while in the service of a Russian Grand Duke. However, like Gurdjieff, de Salzmann enjoyed frequent leg-pulling and his many claims should be taken with a grain of salt. Yet he certainly shared one character trait with his master. de Salzmann was a remarkably versatile man, enthusiastic about everything. When Daumal first encountered him, he described de Salzmann as a "former dervish, former Benedictine, former professor of jiujitsu, healer and stage designer. ,2

After studies in Moscow, de Salzmann headed for Munich, where he became involved in the Art Nouveau movement, becoming friends with Rilke and Kandinsky and contribut= ing illustrations to important journals like Jugend and Sim- plicissimus. It was here that he met the composer Thomas de Hartmann, who would later introduce him to Gurdjieff. In 1911 he went to Hellerau, where he developed a new system of stage lighting; among others, the poet Paul Claudel was captivated by his work. It was also there that he met his wife Jeanne, a teacher of eurhythmics; after Gurdjieff s death in 1949, she became the central living exponent of "the work."

de Salzmann's relationship with Gurdjieff was ambiguous. At the time of de Salzmann's death from tuberculosis in 1933, Gurdjieff had apparently cut off his student of fifteen years, refusing to visit him as he lay dying in a hotel room. When the weak sickly man finally summoned the strength to confront Gurdjieff, his master all but ignored him. Whatever the esoteric meaning behind Gurdjiefl's behaviour, this incident must remain one of the darkest in the history of "the work."

When the twenty-one-year-old Daumal met de Salzmann, he had no doubt his moment of destiny had arrived. Gurdjieff had been in France since 1922, directing the activities at his famous prieure in Fontainebleau, where, ironically, another young writer, Katharine Mansfield, also died of tuberculosis. But by 1924, Gurdjieff had suffered a mysterious car accident and had lost interest in his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Instead he laboured at the monumental Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, gaining inspiration from copious amounts of black coffee and armagnac.

When Daumal met de Salzmann, the artist was making a living as an interior decorator and antique dealer. Still thirsting for the absolute, Daumal now drank greedily from one of its living wells. Rene and Vera spent endless nights talking with de Salzmann about Gurdjieff, and eventually de Salzmann appeared in fictional form in Daumal's two allegorical novels. La Grande Beuverie (1938), translated as A Night of Serious Drinking, was started during Daumal's brief stay in New York while working as a press agent for the Indian dan= cer Uday Shankar, and was a send up of the various artistic movements at large in Paris in the years between the wars. Although the novel, like Daumal's early experiments with carbon tetrachloride, is concerned with intoxicated states, Daumal's preface states his aesthetic and philosophical credo with admirable concision: "I refuse to accept," he writes, "that a clear thought can ever be inexpressible." Unlike most of the surrealist texts, Daumal's work is characterized by clarity and directness. While much of the automatic writing produced by Breton, Desnos and others is almost unreadable, Daumal's deceptively simple prose remains immediately accessible. This is especially true of his later, unfinished novel Mount Analogue (1952), in which de Salzmann appears as Professor Pierre Sogol.

After de Salzmann's death, Rene and Vera threw themselves into "the work" with a dedication that troubled their friends. In a house in Seves, a suburb of Paris, Jeanne de Salzmann set up a kind of mini-prieure, a communal home dedicated to Gurdjiefl's teachings. There, with the orientalist Philippe Lavastine and a few others, Rene and Vera pursued the difficult task of `waking up'. They struggled through Gurdjiefl's "movements," incredibly difficult physical exercises designed to tap unused energies and overcome "sleep," and investigated the effect of music on the human organism. Yet during this time Daumal's health deteriorated; his rotting teeth were pulled and he became deaf in his left ear. He kept his failing body and growing soul together by contributing to L'Encyclopedie Franfaise and through translations of Hemingway and D.T. Suzuki's Essays on Zen Buddhism.

In 1938 Daumal began to work with Gurdjieff directly, attending the famous dinners in Gurdjieffs tiny flat on the rue de Colonel Renards. This was a turning point in his life sadly parallelled by another: in the same year he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Daumal rejected treatment and refused to enter a sanatorium.27

In 1940 Germany invaded France. Vera was Jewish, and for his remaining years, Daumal eked out an increasingly precarious existence, constantly on the run from the Gestapo and the Vichy government. In 1941 tubercular arthritis developed in his left foot; two years later a synovial tumour erupted and the resulting infection caused him excruciating pain. Like his hero Rimbaud, for the last six months of his life Daumal was unable to walk. In the end malnourishment and a punishing habit of chain-smoking Gauloises killed him. In April 1944 Daumal died. An uncompleted sentence in the manuscript of Mount Analogue marks the point at which his quest for the absolute ended.

Subtitled A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, Mount Analogue resists final interpretation. A riveting marvel tale, it is also a modern day Pilgrim's Progress. Led by Professor Sogol, eight adventurers board the yacht Impossible to discover the invisible but "absolutely real" Mount Analogue, a symbol of spiritual pursuit. Though it is hidden from ordinary eyes, Sogol pinpoints its location through a series of supra-logical deductions involving the curvature of space.

Convinced of the necessity of Mount Analogue's existence, the crew eventually arrive. And although "long expectation of the unknown lessens the final effect of surprise," the group's first encounter with their destination was nevertheless extraordinary:

... while we waited tense in the bows with the sun behind us, a wind rose without any warning, or rather a powerful suction suddenly pulled us forward, space opened ahead of us, a bottomless emptiness, a horizontal abyss of air and water impossibly entwined. The boat creaked in all its timbers and was hurled forward unerringly along a rising slope as far as the centre of the abyss and was suddenly set adrift in a wide calm bay, in sight of land.""

A flotilla of boats manned by Europeans came out to meet them, and the leader led them to a white house where, in a bare room with a red tile floor, a man in mountain dress received them. He asked them some obvious questions which, unexpectedly, the group found very difficult to answer:

Each one of his questions - all of them very simple: Who were we? Why had we come? - caught us completely off our guard and seemed to probe our very insides. Who are you? Who am I? We could not answer him as we would a police official or a customs inspector. Give one's name and profession? What does that mean? But who are you? And what are you? The words we uttered - we had none better - were worthless, repugnant and grotesque as dead things.Z"

They soon discovered that all authority on Mount Analogue is in the hand of the mountain guides, and, by what seemed a miracle of coincidence, that they had landed on a spot, Port o' Monkeys, peopled by Frenchmen, like themselves. There were no natives on Mount Analogue; everyone there came from somewhere else. And although there wasn't "a single quadrumanous species in the region," their harbour nevertheless had its odd name. "I find it hard to describe my reaction," the narrator remarks, "but that name summoned up in my mind, rather disagreeably, all my heritage as a twentieth-century Occidental - something curious, imitative, shameless, agitated. Our port of arrival could not have been any other than Port o' Monkeys."s0

But perhaps the strangest discovery was the material the inhabitants used for money. Before arriving, the crew had been troubled about what they might use to barter with the natives. They knew that for bartering with "primitive" people, travellers bring along a supply of trinkets: penknives, mirrors, combs, pipes, souvenirs, and other assorted junk. But in trying to trade with "the superior beings of Mount Analogue" such items would be useless. What did they possess of real value? With what could they pay for the new knowledge they would receive? For some time before arriving, each member of the crew made a "personal inventory" and as the days passed, each felt himself poorer, for "no one saw anything around him or in him which really belonged to him.""

This problem was solved when the group was told of the peradam, strange, nearly invisible crystals that symbolize the rare and difficult truths found on the spiritual path, and which can also serve as an emblem of Daumal's equally lucid prose:

There is found here, rarely on the lower slopes and more frequently as one ascends, a clear and extremely hard stone, spherical and of variable size. It is a true crystal and - an extraordinary instance entirely unknown elsewhere on the planet - a curved crystal ... this stone is called peradam. It may mean . . . `harder than diamond', as is very much the case or else `father of diamond'. And some say that diamond is in reality the product of the disintegration of peradam by a sort of squaring of the circle or ... cubing of the sphere. Or else the word may mean `Adam's stone' and have had some secret and profound complicity with the original nature of man.32

One of the peradam's most remarkable characteristics is that its "index of refraction" is "so close to that of air." Only the trained eye can discover them, but "to any person who seeks it with sincerity and out of true need it reveals itself by a brilliant sparkle like that of a dewdrop."33 These nearly invisible stones - reminiscent of the lapis sought by the alchemists - are the only material things of any value on Mount Analogue.