by Rene Daumal
Daumal provides a biographical profile as well as an actual ink sketch of each crew member, possibly attempting to create each of the twelve archetypes of human beings, as delineated by Gurdjieff. The eight remaining crew members together seem to represent different aspects of a single being. Among them we find the American artist (Judith Pancake), the Russian linguist (Ivan Lipse, probably based on Lavastine), the Austrian brothers—scientist Hans and metaphysician Karl. Four others drop out, epitomizing the stumbling blocks on the path to enlightenment, One is caught up in the joyous dance of maya (illusion), another is trapped in the veil of self-pity, and the others are too full of worldly concerns to leave the dream they inhabit.
By chapter 3, Daumal puts this cast of characters to sea, realistically and metaphorically. “We were not at all cut out to be sailors. Some suffered from seasickness … The path of greatest desires often lies through the undesirable.”19 Finally, in chapter 4, by a kind of syncretism of logic and magic, the sailors manage to penetrate the impenetrable envelope of curved space by doing nothing except being ready. In the true spirit of nonaction, the spirit of the Bhagavad Gita, the sailors are pulled in by a higher force:
a wind rose out of nowhere, or rather a sudden powerful breath drew us forward, space opened before us, an endless void, a horizontal gulf of air and water impossibly coiled in circles. The ship creaked in all its timbers and was hurled up a slope into the center of the abyss, and suddenly we were rocking gently in a vast, calm bay surrounded by land!20
They land, and are welcomed as though they had been expected. When they try to answer Daumal’s favorite question, “Who are you?” they realize that, with the guides (who are in an advanced state of evolution), “We knew henceforth that we could no longer pay the guides of Mount Analogue with words.”21 They gradually orient themselves, wondering why the port of arrival is called “Port O’ Monkeys.” The narrator muses, “this name evokes in me, not too pleasantly, my entire Western twentieth-century heritage—curious, mimicking, immodest, and agitated.”22 Looking out into the port, they view “Phoenician barques, triremes, galleys, caravels, schooners, two river-boats as well, and even an old mixed escort vessel from the last century.”23 The search for consciousness knows no barrier of time, culture, or age; all come as monkeys.
As they prepare to ascend the mountain, they get carried away with their research and analyses of the Asiatic origins of local myths, the peculiar optical conditions of the island’s atmosphere, and endless linguistic, sociological, and religious aspects. Suddenly they are roused by their guide from these preoccupations (“dreams” in Daumal’s words) and realize how their idle curiosity was holding them back from their primary goal.
We knew that nasty owl of intellectual cupidity all too well, and each of us had his own owl to nail to the door, not to mention a few chattering magpies, strutting turkeys, billing and cooing turtle doves, and geese, fat geese! But all those birds were so anchored, grafted so deeply to our flesh that we could not extract them without tearing our guts out. We had to live with them a long time yet, suffer them, know them well, until they fell from us like scabs in a skin condition, fell by themselves as the organism regained its health; it is harmful to pull them off prematurely.24
Here again we see the same little creatures that we met in “The Holy War” and A Night of Serious Drinking—the same physical imagery of foibles and fretting “grafted to the flesh.” Only now, in Daumal’s maturity, he understands that they too play a role in the process of evolution. Each individual had to renounce his current activities to go off on the journey. Later they had to give up their alpinist gadgetry and exploratory instruments for simpler provisions, as they prepared themselves for the mountain ascent.
We began to call one another by our first names … this small change was not a simple effect of intimacy. For we were beginning to shed our old personalities. Just as we were leaving our encumbering equipment on the coast, we were also preparing to leave behind the artist, the inventor, the doctor, the scholar, the literary man. Beneath their old disguises, men and women were already peaking out.25
This concept of removing the trappings of one’s personality and penchants that Daumal alludes to from his earliest writings onward is a common theme to all great works about the spiritual quest. A Sufi tale relates how the little stream succeeds in crossing over the desert by evaporating and allowing itself to be carried by the wind (dying in order to be reborn). In The Divine Comedy, Dante uses a metaphor similar to Daumal’s: “One climbs to the summit of Bismantua with only one’s feet: but here one has to fly; I say, fly with light wings and the feathers of a great desire,”26 and, of course, in the Gospel, it is written: “Except a kernel of wheat die, it bringeth forth no fruit.”27
Finally, Father Sogol declares that he gives up “my general’s helmet, which was a crown of thorns for the image I had of myself. In the untroubled depths of my memory of myself, a little child is awakening and makes the old man’s mask sob.”28 Father Sogol was trying to become sanskrita, “one who remakes himself,” one who has an interior being and measure for judging. Only then could the mysterious synchronicity occur: at that moment he discovers a “peradam,” the precious curved crystal hidden in the slopes of Mount Analogue “with an index of refraction so close to that of air despite the crystal’s great density, the unaccustomed eye barely perceives it.”29 The paradam was considered to be a miraculous material entity, a little bit of evidence that slips through from another dimension of reality. Only when Father Sogol humbled himself, could he detect the tiny peradam, the highest material reward of a seeker’s sincerity on Mount Analogue. Truly, this was the quintessential philosopher’s stone, representing the activation of true insight, the reconciling energy that can reconnect man’s two disparate natures. Pierre Sogol, whose very name meant Stone Word, could now touch the material evidence of his inner work.
If there is any doubt about the meaning behind Daumal’s allegory, he provides short variations to drive home his message. Woven into the narrative are two beautiful mythic tales, “The History of the Hollow Men and the Bitter Rose,” based on an old folktale of the Ardennes, and the “Myth of the Sphere and the Tetrahedron.” The first story is a poetic allegory about man’s place in the universe. “The hollow-men live in the rock, they move around inside it like nomadic cave dwellers. In the ice they wander like bubbles in the shape of men.” 30 The four pages that follow give free rein to his vast store of imagery, and express his inklings of another reality concurrent with our usual one. “Others say that every living man has his hollow-man in the mountains, just as the sword has its sheath, and the foot its footprint, and that they will be united in death.”31
He draws upon Gurdjieff’s theory that the energy we expend, especially that of our thoughts and emotions, is always used, eaten up by something else in nature’s chain (the biggest consumer being our moon). “They eat only emptiness, such as the shape of corpses, they get drunk on empty words, on all the empty speech we utter.”32
Then follows the drama of the twin brothers Mo and Ho and their battle with the Hollow Men in their search for the elusive Bitter Rose: “Whoever eats it discovers that whenever he is about to tell a lie, out loud or only to himself, his tongue begins to burn.”33 Finally Mo and Ho are forced to inhabit the same body and become a composite being, “Moho.” If they continue to evolve, they might even become a homo (a man). This transformation recalls the metamorphosis of the caterpillar in A Night of Serious Drinking. The tale of the Hollow Men is yet another vision quest—a story of a search for knowledge encapsulated in Daumal’s larger one, both in the tradition of the grail and the holy mountain.
Here, as throughout Mount Analogue, Daumal combines a lightness of poetic imagery with a weightiness of thought reminiscent of the poetry of the most Eastern of our Western literary ancestors, the Greeks. One line will be light as air, likening the Bitter Rose to a swarm of butterflies. Another has a weight as if it were carved in stone: “The hollow-men cannot enter our
world, but they can come up to the surface of things. Beware of the surface of things.”34
In his imagery, Daumal achieves the Hindu ideal of suavité (liquidity) which Visvanatha likened to flowing liquid. The Vedic literary scholar, Jan Gonda, believes that the Hindus achieved this suavity through the use of concise, elliptical phraseology, and vocabulary that was nuanced, melodious, and dignified. Daumal’s imagery is not only liquid, but limpid—the quality of light passing through liquid. Visvanatha called limpidity the “evidence” produced by fire and water, the interaction of ardor and flow. Gonda also points out that Vedic writers often made graphic references to natural phenomenon, and showed a keen power of observation and pictorial expression. Likewise, Daumal presents a poetic, nuanced vision of the natural world. Now that he had achieved a certain security of having found a “path,” it seems that he was finally able to see the holy in earthly images as well, rather than often denouncing them as in his early poetry. It bespeaks of his sense of joy as he was preparing to leave the earth. He graphically details Mo’s movements:
Sometimes like a lizard and sometimes like a spider, he crawls up he high red rock walls, between the white snows and the blue-black sky. Swift little clouds envelop hime from time to time, then release him suddenly into the light. And there, just above him, he sees the Bitter-Rose, gleaming with colors that are beyond the seven colors of he rainbow.35
The second myth is a prose poem that was also included in a 1954 collection of Daumal’s poetry entitled, “Black Poetry White Poetry.” It is another creation myth, similar to his earlier poem, “The Keys of a Big Game,” reflecting the Vedic myth of primordial man multiplying himself into all forms and species. As in the earlier poem, this growth is conceived in terms of contraction and expansion. “In the beginning, the Sphere and the Tetrahedron were united in a single unthinkable, unimaginable Form. Concentration and Expansion mysteriously united in a single Will.”36 Daumal describes the familiar theme of the One multiplying into the many that he had experienced in his drug-induced death experience:
The Sphere became primordial man who, wishing to realize separately all his desires and possibilities, broke into pieces in the shape of all animal species and the men of today. Man received the light of understanding. He wanted to see his light and enjoy it in multiple shapes. He was driven out by the force of the Unity.37
The form of Mount Analogue is a first-person narrative written in an understated, documentary style. It is the same style that we find in a dozen of his letters written to Véra, Jack, Jean Paulhan, Renéville, and others, while in the mountains during the years 1937 to 1943. Comprising thirty-two pages, these letters give lyrical, firsthand accounts of life in the mountains and include his experiences with the hardy mountain people. He describes his mountaineering training and how he would climb every other day, until walking on horizontal land seemed a little strange:
There is nothing quite like the mountains for teaching slowness and calmness; there are climbs which take an hour of absolute slowness: left foot, right hand, walking stick here, right foot, walking stick there, body weight left, left hand … and here nervousness would kill. Once on top, the body discovers its paradise, which is taking off one’s shoes and drinking a mouthful of wine mixed with snow gathered along the way.38
His description of the névé or glacier snow in Mount Analogue is lifted right out of his epistolary description to Rolland de Renéville where he lists ten different kinds, such as “wheat snow,” “diamond snow,” and “carpet snow.”39 One ten-page letter to his brother Jack is so replete with technical, montagnard jargon, that Daumal included thirty-six explanatory footnotes. Likewise, the detail of Mount Analogue reflects his expert knowledge of the subject, yet he never overburdens the novel with excess technical jargon that would intrude on the main poetic thrust.
The lightness and lyrical quality, reminiscent of Vedic poetry, is especially present in those mountain letters. It is clear that, in spite of his tubercular condition, Daumal was in his element several thousand feet up: his natural humor bubbles up everywhere to celebrate the mountainscape. These qualities emerge in Mount Analogue in a particular pattern: the beginning chapters are pervaded by a subtle humor, the middle chapters become more technical and scientific, and the final chapters achieve a joyful lyricism and exaltation. This progression gives a certain dramatic momentum to the voyage and climb.
The overall taste (rasa) of the book would fall into the Hindu category of “marvel,” as in A Night of Serious Drinking, for a sense of marvel and strangeness is intended, in a very matter-of-fact way, from the first page. Whenever a camera was used on Mount Analogue, nothing would appear on the developed film. Some of the flora of Port O’Monkeys include the incendiary lycoperdon, which would spontaneously ignite through intense fermentation, and the talking bush, whose fruit in the shape of resonant gourds could reproduce all the sounds of the human voice when rubbed by its own leaves. Yet the down-to-earth reporting makes the strange phenomena—such as herds of unicorns, seem absolutely plausible. The casual tone belies the weightiness of the ideas behind the bare facts of the allegory.
I munched a piece of biscuit. The donkey’s tail chased a cloud of flies into my face. My companions were also pensive. All the same, there was something mysterious in the ease with which we had reached the continent of Mount Analogue; and then, we seem to have been expected.40
In this book Daumal presents, in a veiled manner, many aspects of the teacher-disciple relationship of the esoteric tradition and of the Gurdjieff Work in particular. One important concept is the linkage that exists between seekers. One can never advance farther up unless one prepares for those behind. In the narrative, the guides explain to Sogol’s band that each passing group must leave their encampment stocked with provisions for the next caravan. When the party sees the distant white smoke from the group ahead, they feel a mutual support: “For from now on the path linked our fate to theirs, even if we should never meet. Bernard knew nothing about them.”41 In the notes that he made for future additions to the novel, he talks further about the traces left by one seeker for another, warning the climber not to leave traces of false starts and mistakes. “Answer to your fellow men for the traces you leave behind.”42
All seekers are linked through a hierarchy of evolved souls such as “the high mountain guides.” Everything happens through the unfolding of a divine plan. When they wonder how they came to land, “we came to understand later that this was not by chance, that the wind that had sucked us up and led us there was no natural and fortuitous wind but a deliberate blast.”43
In the last paragraph of the notes, the narrator lists the many factors that contributed to their successful entry: their calculations, their efforts, and their renunciation of bodily comforts. “So it seemed to us. But later we knew that if we had been able to reach the foot of Mount Analogue, it was because the invisible doors of this invisible country had been open to us by those who guard them.”44
The interpenetration of the symbolic and the concrete—of fiction, fantasy, and the actuality of Daumal’s own experience of the Gurdjieff Work and even of mountain climbing—makes the novel a real manual for the aspiring seeker. It is an itinerary of Daumal’s many paths, showing how they all come together in one.
Thus Daumal uses fiction to present another crucial aspect of the teacher-disciple relationship. According to Ouspensky, “The first and most important feature of groups is the fact that groups are not constituted according to the wish and choice of their members. Groups are constituted by the teacher, who selects types which, from the point of view of his aims, can be useful to one another.”45 Yet the teacher does not clear the same single path for all disciples. Each person must find his own with the help of the teacher. In a letter to Ribemont Dessaignes, he wrote:
The first sentence of the Tao Tei King is: “a path that is a path already traced is not the Path.” I told you that I have encountered in my life a true teaching. One of the signs of its truth for me is that he
never proposes a path already traced. No, at each step, the whole problem is posed. Nothing is resolved for me, once and for all.46
The novel remained unfinished with only meager notes to indicate the direction in which it might have gone. In the postface added by his wife, Véra, she discusses the preparation for the successive encampments: “It is very likely that René Daumal would have explained what he meant by this work of preparation. The fact is that in his own life he was working hard to prepare many minds for the difficult voyage toward Mount Analogue.”47
The novel is truly a new embodiment of the Hindu concept of the mountain being the point where Heaven and Earth meet. In A Night of Serious Drinking, Daumal suggests “madness and death” as two escape exits, while the entire Mount Analogue constitutes the diary of an escape through the unnameable third exit alluded to in the previous novel. It is the log of someone on his way, a record left behind for others to read and follow. His proposed final chapter was to be entitled “And You, What Are You Seeking?”
Daumal indicates the preliminary stages of a true path as depicted in many traditions, a practical method for perfecting one’s life here on this planet. Thus Mount Analogue represents the culmination of Daumal’s expansion as a poet and perfectly reflects the esoteric teachings of Hinduism and Gurdjieff, both literary and philosophical. This final work is the consummation of all his years of honing his craft and his soul, surrendering his ego in order to ascend the holy mountain.
NOTES