Meetings With Remarkable Men

by G. I. Gurdjieff

  ‘ “We stamp anything you wish on wood, leather and cloth.

  ‘ “The workshop takes orders for all kinds of alabaster and plaster models such as: statuettes, domestic and wild animals, fruits, etc., etc., and also makes plaster masks of the dead.

  ‘ “We execute orders for artificial flowers in bread, wax, velvet and coloured paper, for wreaths, bouquets, ladies’ hats and ushers’ buttonholes.

  ‘ “We write by hand, print, and decorate visiting cards, greeting and anniversary cards, and invitations.

  ‘ “We take orders for corsets and trusses and also make old ones into new.

  ‘ “We make ladies’ hats from the latest Paris models.

  ‘ “Etc., etc.”

  ‘As soon as we arrived in Ashkhabad I found lodgings and obtained permission from the police to print and distribute the advertisements. The next day I rented, in the centre of the town, premises for the workshop, consisting of a large room opening on to the street for the shop, and two small rooms at the back; in addition, there was a small yard and a kind of shed.

  ‘Having bought the most necessary tools and hastily set up a home-made Bunsen-battery and adapted some old wash-basins as vats for galvano-plastic work, I hung over the entrance a large sign with red letters on a white cloth, which said:

  AMERICAN TRAVELLING WORKSHOP

  HERE FOR A VERY SHORT TIME MAKES, ALTERS AND REPAIRS EVERYTHING

  ‘The next day, when the advertisements were ready, I pasted a great many of them on walls with the help of a street urchin and distributed the rest by hand. And then the fun began.

  ‘From the very first day, a whole procession of Ashkhabadians brought their things to be repaired.

  ‘Lord! What on earth did they not bring!

  ‘Much of what they brought I not only had never seen before but had never even heard of. Indeed, there were the most unlikely things, such as an apparatus for plucking out grey hairs, a machine for stoning cherries for jam, a grinder for grinding copper sulphate to sprinkle on the sweat zones of the body, a special iron for ironing wigs, and so forth.

  ‘In order to have a better picture of what went on there, you must be told, if only a little, about the local conditions.

  ‘This part of the Transcaspian region and the part of Turkestan adjoining it had begun to be populated by foreigners only a few decades previously, and the new towns had grown up mostly on the outskirts of the old ones. Consequently almost all the towns of this region were composed of two parts: the old, as it was called, Asiatic town, and alongside it the new, Russian town—each living its own independent life.

  ‘The population of these new towns consisted of Armenians, Jews, Georgians, Persians and others, but chiefly of Russians, most of whom were public officials or retired soldiers who had finished their terms of service in this region.

  ‘Thanks to the natural riches of the country and the honesty of a local population as yet unspoiled by contemporary civilization, these newcomers quickly began to grow rich, but, in the absence of any cultural influences on the part of the ignorant officials who had happened to become their governors, they remained just as uncultivated as they had been before they migrated there. And so, along with a flourishing commerce, which had brought them material wealth, there was nothing to develop any aspect of their intellectuality or their technical knowledge.

  ‘European civilization, which was rapidly spreading everywhere else, had scarcely touched the people of these places, and the little they learned about it through newspapers and magazines reached them in a completely distorted form, owing to the fantastic exaggerations of journalists, who in general—and particularly then in Russia—are quite incapable of even an approximate understanding of the real essence of what they are writing about.

  ‘These newly-rich people, according to the inherency of all upstarts, imitated everything “cultured” and “fashionable”—in the given case everything European. But, drawing all their information about this culture and fashion only from Russian papers and magazines compiled by persons themselves ignorant in these matters, they presented to an impartial observer a comical and at the same time sad caricature.

  ‘And so, in great material prosperity but without a single trace of even elementary culture, the inhabitants there were playing as children do at being civilized people.

  ‘Nowhere was fashion more closely followed, everyone feeling obliged to be up to date in everything. Moreover, they eagerly bought, or ordered by post from everywhere, all sorts of new inventions and everything considered appropriate to the life of “the cultured gentleman” —though of course only what they could find out about this from newspaper advertisements.

  ‘Knowing this weakness of theirs, all the foreign tradesmen, especially the Germans, unloaded a mass of useless merchandise on them, or goods which quickly got spoiled or worn out. The comedy went so far that you could even find among the objects advertised a special machine for lighting ordinary matches.

  ‘As most of the articles they sent for were either worthless to begin with or went to pieces almost at once, and as there was not a single repair shop in the locality, each family accumulated stacks of broken things.

  ‘There was still another reason why there turned out to be so many things for repair. At that epoch in the East, and particularly in Asiatic Russia, it was the custom never to part with anything once acquired, and never to sell it, even if it were no longer needed or had fallen apart. Moreover, even if one had wished to sell, there would have been no one to buy. And besides this, the practice was firmly entrenched of keeping things in remembrance of something or of someone.

  ‘So, in every house the attics and sheds were filled with an amazing accumulation of useless things, which were even handed down from father to son.

  ‘Consequently, when they learned that there was a workshop that repaired everything, they dragged to me devil knows what, in the hope of restoring and making use of things that had long lain useless, as, for example, grandfather’s armchair and grandmother’s spectacles, great-grandfather’s balalaika, great-grandmother’s watch, godfather’s gift of a dressing-case, the blanket under which the bishop slept when he had stayed with them, an Order of the Star presented to father by the Shah of Persia, and so forth and so on.

  ‘All these I repaired.

  ‘Not once did I refuse anything or return it without repairing it.

  ‘Even when I was offered too trifling a payment to justify the time spent on repairing some article or other, I nevertheless undertook to put it right if the thing was new to me, since in that case I was interested not in the money itself, but in the difficulty presented by a kind of work that was as yet unfamiliar to me.

  ‘In addition to spoiled and really useless things they brought me quantities of brand-new things, not damaged at all, which they were unable to use merely because they did not know how to make them work, owing to their ignorance and lack of any even elementary technical knowledge, in short, owing to their stupidity.

  ‘At that time the latest inventions, such as sewing-machines, bicycles, typewriters, etc., were spreading everywhere at a furious rate. All these things were enthusiastically ordered and bought, but then, owing, as I have already said, to the lack of even the simplest technical knowledge and in the absence of local workshops or specialists, as soon as the slightest thing went wrong with them, they were set aside as useless.

  ‘I shall give you a few characteristic examples of this ignorance and naiveté, which I admit I then made use of quite deliberately, without experiencing any remorse of conscience whatsoever.

  ‘I remember how one day a rich, fat Armenian, puffing and bathed in perspiration, accompanied by his daughter, dragged in a sewing-machine to be repaired, which he had bought for her trousseau when he was staying in Nijni Novgorod for the fair.

  ‘At first this sewing-machine was, as he said, a treasure. It simply could not be praised too highly—it sewed so cleanly and so quickly; but all of a sudden for no rhyme or reason, and muc
h to his vexation, it started going, as he expressed it, in reverse.

  ‘Looking over the machine, I found it in perfectly good order.

  ‘You may know that in certain sewing-machines, alongside the lever regulating the seam there is another lever for changing the direction of the feeder, and when this lever is shifted one changes the direction in which the material moves. Obviously someone had touched this lever unawares, and instead of the material being pushed forward, it was now being pulled backwards.

  ‘I saw at once that to put the machine right I had only to shift the lever into place, and I could have done this then and there. But seeing that I was dealing with a crafty old rogue and learning from the conversation that he was a merchant of caracul skins, I felt sure, well knowing such types, that to cram his own pockets he had tricked more than one Tekki or Bukharian—who are as credulous as children—and I therefore decided to pay him back in his own coin. So I went into a long-winded story about what was wrong with his sewing-machine and told him that several pinions would have to be changed for the machine to work properly again, at the same time cursing by everything under the sun the rascally manufacturers of the day.

  ‘In short, I skinned him for twelve roubles fifty kopeks, promising to put the machine right in three days; but, of course, he had scarcely reached the door when it was already put right, numbered and placed with the finished articles.

  ‘I remember well how, on another occasion, an officer entered the workshop and said to me in a tone of great importance:

  ‘ “Go to the office of the regional commandant and tell the clerk in charge that I order him”—by the way, Russian officers of that period never spoke to anyone except to give orders—“to show you the typewriters. When you have looked at them let me know what is wrong with them.”

  ‘And off he went as he had come.

  ‘His offhand, imperious tone astonished me and somehow infuriated me. So I decided to go there without fail, chiefly in order to find out what sort of a “bird” this officer was and perhaps also to find a way of putting one over on him, which I must admit, I always enjoyed doing, because, beneath an expression of naive innocence, I knew how to punish such insolent persons very venomously.

  ‘I went the same day to that office, announced myself to the head clerk and explained the reason of my visit. I discovered that it was the adjutant himself who had come to see me.

  ‘While I was examining the typewriters, of which there were three, the loquacious clerk, whom I had already made my friend thanks to a cigarette and a piquant anecdote of officer life, explained to me the following:

  ‘These machines, recently received from St. Petersburg, at first worked excellently; but soon one, then another, and then the third got out of order, all in the same way: the ribbon stopped unwinding. The adjutant, the quartermaster and others, all tried to put them in order, but, try as they might, no one succeeded, and for the last three days the office work had again to be written by hand.

  ‘While the clerk was telling me all this, I had examined the typewriters and already knew what the trouble was.

  ‘Some of you doubtless remember that, formerly, in certain makes of typewriters, the ribbon spools were unwound by the pressure of a spring placed in a special box in the lower part of the back of the machine, and were wound up by turning the box itself. As the ribbon moved slowly, the spring, being of considerable length, took quitea a long time to run down, but from time to time it had to be wound up again.

  ‘It was obvious that when the machines were delivered their springs had been fully wound up, and that, having run down in the course of time, they had only to be wound up again. But as there was no key or handle, it was difficult for people who had been given no instructions and lacked even the simplest technical notions, to discover how to rewind the spools.

  ‘Of course, I did not say anything of this to the clerks, but accepted their invitation to dine with them, and, having eaten some good government cabbage soup and kasha, I went straight home on my antediluvian bicycle and what remained of its tires.

  ‘That evening the adjutant came back to my workshop and in the same lofty tone asked: “Well, how about it? Have you found out yet why these brand new typewriters won’t work”’

  ‘Long before this, I had already become an old hand in the art of playing a role. So, assuming the expression called by real actors “respectful timidity and bashful deference”, and employing special and pompous terms borrowed from various Russian technical works, I began to extol the perfections of this make of typewriter in every respect but one, in which unfortunately a change, though complicated and difficult to bring about, was absolutely necessary. As for the work to be done, I estimated that the charge would be almost a quarter of the cost of the machines themselves.

  ‘The next day these perfectly good machines were solemnly brought to my workshop by almost a whole detachment of soldiers, headed by the adjutant.

  ‘I accepted them immediately, then announced in a very serious manner that in no case could the machines be ready in less than ten days. The vexed adjutant begged me to finish them sooner if possible, as the work in the office was almost at a standstill.

  ‘Finally, after much bargaining, I agreed to work at night and to deliver one machine in two days, but in return I begged him to be good enough to order his soldiers to bring the leavings of food from the mess for my three suckling pigs, which I had just bought and was keeping in my little yard.

  ‘Two days later one of these quite faultless machines was “ready” and I promised the others for the end of the week.

  ‘Besides the thanks and the eighteen roubles I received for repairing each machine, the soldiers brought food daily to my suckling pigs and took care of them themselves for the three months that I remained in Ashkhabad, during which time my suckling pigs turned into full-grown porkers.

  ‘Of course I explained to the clerks what had to be done when the springs ran down, but what my “repairing” had consisted of, they apparently never understood.

  ‘The same kind of thing was repeated many times in the town of Merv, where I transferred my workshop and went on with the same sort of work for two more months.

  ‘One day, the inspector of the local preparatory school there—I do not remember the name of the school—came to ask me to repair an electric machine for making experiments in physics.

  ‘This was an ordinary electrostatic machine which, on the turning of discs, emits sparks, and which, for some reason or other, every school then—and it seems also even now—considered it its duty to possess. With this machine, in their famous so-called physics lessons, the teachers would pompously and as though performing a sacred ritual make instructive experiments, which consisted merely in turning the discs of the machine and compelling the children, one by one, to touch the little metal knobs of the Leyden jars. The grimaces of pain appearing on the faces of the children on touching these knobs always provoked uproarious laughter, which these pedagogues considered as “greatly assisting the digestion of food”, and this was the usual finale of such a physics lesson.

  ‘This inspector had ordered one of these machines and had received it unassembled from the German firm of Siemens & Halske in St. Petersburg. Although he and the other teachers, his colleagues, had assembled it according to the instructions, yet, try as they might, they could not obtain any sparks from it, and finally the inspector was compelled to apply to my workshop.

  ‘I at once saw that everything was in good order except that the two discs composing the principal part of the machine were not quite correctly placed in relation to each other. It was simply necessary to loosen the nut on the axle and slightly shift one of the discs, and this I could have done in a minute. But I obliged this esteemed pedagogue, who taught others what he himself did not know, to come back to the workshop four times while I was, as it were, repairing his machine, and to pay me ten roubles seventy-five kopeks for supposedly charging the Leyden jars which needed no charging.

  �
��Such cases were of almost daily occurrence throughout the existence of this workshop of mine. Always meeting the poor half-way, I did not consider it a sin to profit by the stupidity of those who undeservedly, only by virtue of positions acquired by chance, had become the local intelligentsia, but who on the scale of real intelligence actually stood much lower than the general population under their authority.

  ‘But the most original and at the same time the most profitable affair turned out to be the corset business.

  ‘That season, in Paris, the fashion in corsets had sharply changed; after having worn very high corsets fashionable women suddenly had begun to wear quite low ones.

  ‘This new caprice of fashion soon became known in this region through the fashion magazines, but the corsets themselves were not yet on sale there, owing to the remoteness of these places; consequently many women began to bring me their old corsets to see if it was possible somehow to make them into fashionable ones.

  ‘And on account of this corset business, I found myself on “Easy Street”. This happened in the following way:

  ‘Once I needed some whalebone for a certain stout Jewess’s corset which I had to shorten and, incidentally, widen owing to the progressivelyincreasingwaist-lineof the owner. After long and fruitless search, the assistant in a shop which, like so many others, did not have whalebone in stock, advised me to buy a whole out-of-date corset, since doubtless the proprietor would sell it at almost the price of the whalebone.

  ‘I then went directly to the proprietor. But while I was bargaining with him, another plan ripened in my mind, and I bought from him not one corset, as I had intended, but all that he had in his shop—sixty-five old-fashioned corsets, at twenty kopeks apiece, instead of the usual price of four or five roubles. After which I hurried off to buy up corsets in all the other shops of Ashkhabad, paying even lower prices because everyone was glad to get rid of their stock of these quite useless articles.

  ‘I did not stop at this, but the next day sent off the father of the two boys I employed, an old Jew, with instructions to buy up old-fashioned corsets in all the towns along the Central Asiatic Railway, while I myself, with pliers and scissors, set about making fashionable corsets.