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Jeanne de Salzmann
Pelvoux, August 6, 1943
First I want to respond to your questions:
1) Has my remembering, my sensation of “I am,”
changed? It’s very difficult to respond altogether properly. In my ordinary
state, I see above all the negative side: I see myself more and more submerged
in a sea of identifications and, the more I work, the more I’m assaulted by all
the causes of distraction. My ability to remember myself does not, then, seem
to me to have changed very much. But that isn’t true. If I reflect—that is to
say, if I confront my ordinary state today with my memory of the best moments
of work—I see a slight change. I’ve had several moments, rare and brief, when
“I am” had a new taste—new, and at the same time it was like returning to
something very ancient and deeply concealed, something at the same time painful
and quiet—empty and null, and yet sure of itself, which separates itself from
the machine for a few moments and prevails over it. At that moment, my attitude
toward my body changes completely. I no longer consider it “mine,” as my
property over which I have every right, but rather as something confided to me
for certain uses, which can be taken from me from one moment to the next
without giving me any cause for protest. And at those moments, in fact I
wouldn’t protest. It may be this deep reaction in front of the thought of death
that gives me the best measure of the small progress I’ve been able to make in
the quality of my remembering. But not in duration. Just there, I feel, is the
great work that calls for continuity of effort and patience: “to sustain the
effort.”
I also see the distance already covered when I
compare the meaning of the word “being” some time ago and today. Some time ago,
“being” meant “to delight in oneself”: having reached a certain state, to stop
to enjoy it and admire oneself (and from there, what a fall!) Now, “being”
means rather to fulfill consciously one’s place and function, and that is why I
know that I am not; but I know this only when I say “I am.”
2) Concerning my “concentration of thought”—here,
too, if there is a change, it’s in the direction of a struggle that is larger,
sharper, more frequent; but if the enemy appears to me stronger and more
numerous, it may well be a sign that I have a little more force myself. The
fact is that during the exercises, or when I reflect, my thought is now cleanly
split in two: in those moments the active part no longer blends with the
mechanical part; and the latter I sometimes feel to be quite submissive, no
longer bothering me with its associations. But here again, the issue is to make
it last longer. As soon as the effort is let go, the flow of associations seems
to me much worse than before.
What is developing in these days is the taste and
need for struggle. An answer of Mr. Gurdjieff’s about the need to go against
the body in everything it likes or does not like has recently shown me this
more clearly. It’s certain that in my case I can’t apply this rule to the
letter (unfortunately, because in times past when I believed I could, it gave
me a great deal). But if, under the word “body,” I also include everything that
is most mechanical in my functions, an entire field of work opens up. With my
intellectual mechanism, in particular, I can apply the rule of thwarting it in
everything, of opposing myself to its tics, its manias, its clichés, etc.—in a
word, its laziness. It goes without saying that this makes my work as a writer
more difficult, but much more interesting and inwardly fruitful.
Yes, I do the exercises, and I shall try to do them
better and better, in the spirit you ask: “as a service” and “as one learns a
trade.” The work is more and more a work “on myself” rather than a work “for
myself.” The greatest satisfactions I now have in my work are the moments when
I observe that the “personal” element has become less strong. It’s difficult to
say, but I feel very clearly today that “I am” is just the contrary of “I, me, my."
