René Daumal: Letters on the Search for Awakening (1930–1944)

A letter to 
Jeanne de Salzmann

                                                     Pelvoux, August 6, 1943

We received yesterday, Thursday, the transcript  of the 22nd and read it last night—and so more than ever I felt as if I was in “Paris” (I say “Paris” as others say Mecca). Your letter helps me very much. How necessary it is to hear oneself repeating, and repeating yet again, everything one thinks one knows!

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."

Albert Libertad (1876 -1908)

       The Joy of Life 

Wearied by the struggle of life, how many close their eyes, fold their arms, stop short, powerless and discouraged. How many, and they among the best, abandon life as unworthy of continuance. With the assistance of some fashionable theories, and of a prevalent neurasthenia, some men have come to regard death as the supreme liberation. To those who hold this view, society replies with the usual clichés. It speaks of the “moral” purpose of life; argues that one has no right to kill himself, that “moral” sorrows must be borne courageously, that a man has duties, that the suicide is a coward or an “egoist”, etc. etc. All of these phrases are religious in tone; and none of them are of genuine significance in rational discussion. What after all is suicide? Suicide is the final act in a series of actions that we all tend to carry out, which arise from our reaction against our environment, or from that environment’s reaction against us. Every day we commit suicide partially. I commit suicide when I consent to inhabit a dwelling where the sun never shines, a room where the ventilation is so inadequate that I feel like I am suffocated when I wake up. I commit suicide when I spend hours on work that absorbs an amount of energy which I am not able to recapture, or when I engage in activity which I know to be useless. I commit suicide whenever I enter into the barracks to obey men and laws that oppress me. I commit suicide whenever I grant the right to govern me for four years to another individual through the act of voting. I commit suicide when I ask a magistrate or a priest for permission to love. I commit suicide when I do not reclaim my liberty as a lover, as soon as the time of love is past. Complete suicide is nothing but the final act of total inability to react against the environment.

These acts, which I have called partial suicides, are no less truly suicidal. It is because I lack the strength to react against society, that I inhabit a place without sun and air, that I do not eat in accordance with my hunger or my taste, that I am a soldier or a voter, that I subject my love to laws or compulsion. Workers daily commit mental suicide by leaving the mind inactive, by not letting it live, as they kill within themselves their enjoyment of the arts of painting, sculpture, music, which offer some relief from the cacophony which surrounds them. There can be no question of right or duty, of cowardice or of courage in relation to suicide; it is purely a material problem, of power or lack of power. One hears it said, “Suicide is a human right when it constitutes a necessity ...” Or again, “one cannot take the right of life and death away from the proletariat.”

Right? Necessity?

Shall one debate his right to breathe poorly, i.e., to kill most of the health-giving molecules to the advantage of the unhealthy ones? His right not to eat in accordance with his hunger, i.e., to kill his stomach? His right to obey, i.e., to murder his will? His right to love the woman designated by the law or chosen by the desire of one period forever, i.e., to slay all. the desires of days to come? Or if we substitute the word “necessity” for the word “right” in these phrases, do we thereby make them the more logical? I do not intend to “condemn” these partial suicides more than definitive suicides; but it seems to me pathetically comical to describe as right or necessity this surrender of the weak before the strong — and a surrender made without having tried everything. Such expressions are merely excuses one clings to. All suicides are imbecilities, total suicide more than the others, since it is possible to bring oneself out of the partial forms.

It would seem that at the moment of the departure of the individual, all energy might be focused on a single point of reaction against the environment, even with a thousand to one chance of failure in the effort. This seems still more necessary and natural in view of the fact that one leaves those one loves behind. For this part of one’s self, this portion of the energy of which one consists, cannot one engage in a gigantic struggle, however unequal the combat, capable of shaking up the colossal Authority?

Many die, declaring themselves to be victims of society; do they not realize that, since the same cause produces the same effects, their comrades, those they love, could die as victims of the same state of things? Won’t a desire then come to them to transform their vital force into energy, into power, so as to burn the pile rather than to separate its elements?

Once one has overcome the fear of death, of the complete dissolution of the human form, one can engage in the struggle with that much more strength. Some will respond to us, “We have a horror of bloodshed. We do not wish to attack this society, made up of men who seem to us to be both unaware and irresponsible.” The first objection does not hold. Does the struggle only take a violent form? Is it not multiple, diverse? And all the individuals who understand its usefulness, can they not take part each according to his own temperament? The second is too inexact. Such words as “society”, “knowledge”, “responsibility” are too often repeated and too little explained.

The barrier that obstructs the road, the biting serpent, the tuberculosis microbe are unaware and without responsibility, yet we defend ourselves against them. Still more irresponsible (in the relative sense) are the cornfields which we reap, the ox that we kill, the beehive that we rob. Nevertheless we attack them all. I know nothing of “responsible” nor of “irresponsible”. I see the causes of my suffering, of the cramping of my personality; and my efforts are bent to suppress or to conquer them by every possible means.

According to my power of resistance I assimilate or I reject, I am assimilated or rejected. That is all. Even stranger objections are advanced, in a form neurotically scientific: “Study astronomy, and you will realize the negligible duration of human life as compared to the infinite ... Death, is a transformation and not termination.” For myself, being finite, I have no conception of the infinite; but I know that duration consists of centuries, centuries of years, years of days, days of hours, hours of minutes, etc. I know that time is made up of nothing but the accumulation of seconds, that great immensity formed from the in-finitely small. Short as our life may be, it has its dimensional importance from the point of view of the whole. Life, seen from my own point of view, with my own eyes, cannot be of little importance to me; and all seems to me to have had no purpose but to prepare for us — for myself and for that which surrounds me.

The stone which caresses the head when dropped from a meter above, will break it open if it falls twenty meters. Arrested on the way, seen from the point of view of the whole, it differs in no particular; but it lacks the energy which makes it a power. I disregard all that I cannot conceive, and look primarily to myself; and a dissolution or rather a non-absorption of strength that acts to my detriment occurs in either a partial or a definitive suicide. Death is the end of a human energy, as the dissociation of elements of a battery is the end of the electricity which it releases, as the dissolution of threads of a tissue is the end of that tissue’s strength. Death, as the end of my “I”, is more than a transformation.

There are those who say to one, “The goal of life is happiness,” and who profess to be unable to attain it. It seems to me simpler to say that life is life. Life is happiness. Happiness is life. All the acts of life are a joy to me. Breathing pure air, I know happiness; my lungs are expanded, an impression of power makes, me glow. The hour of work and that of rest afford me equal pleasure. The hour which brings the meal-time; the meal itself with its labor of mastication; the hour which follows with its interior activity — all give me joy of varying sorts. Shall I evoke the delicious attention of love, the sense of power in the sexual encounter, the succeeding hours of voluptuous relaxation? Shall I speak of the joy of the eyes, of hearing, of odor, of touching, of all the senses, of the delights of conversation and of thought? Life is a happiness .

Life has not a goal. It is. Why wish for a goal, a beginning, an end? Let us recapitulate. Whenever, hurled on the stones by an earthquake, avid for air, we bow our head against the rock, whenever seized by the regimentation of society as it is, avid for the ideal (to make this vague term exact: avid for the integral development of one’s self and one’s loved ones) we arrest our life we obey, not a necessity nor a right, but as obsession of force, of the obstacle. We do no voluntary act, as the partisans of death profess; we obey the power of the environment which crushes, and we depart precisely at the hour the weight is too heavy for our shoulders.

“Then,” they say, “we do not go except at our hour — and our hour is now.” Yes. But since, resigned, they envisage their defeat in advance; since they have not developed their tissues with a view to resistance; they have not made due effort to react against the regimentation of the environment. Unaware of their own beauty, of their own force, they add to the objectives of the obstacle all the subjective weight of their own acceptance.

Like those resigned to partial suicides, they surrender themselves to the great suicide. They are devoured by an environment avid for their flesh, eager to crush all energy that appears. Their error lies in the belief that the dissolution is by their own will, that they choose their hour, while actually they die crushed inevitably by the wickedness of some and by the of others. In a locality by the maleficient of typhus, of tuberculosis, I do not think of absenting myself to avoid the malady, rather, I proceed immediately to disseminate disinfectant’s, without any fear of killing millions of microbes.

In present society, made foul by the conventional defecations of property, of patriotism, of religion, of family, of ignorance, crushed by the power of government and the inertia of the governed; I wish not to disappear, but to throw upon the scene the light of truth, to provide a disinfectant, to it by any means at my command. Even with death approaching, I shall have still the desire to chair my body by means of phenol or acid, for the sake of humanity’s health. And if I am destroyed in this effort, I shall not be totally effaced. I shall have reacted against the environment, I shall have lived briefly but intensely; I shall perhaps have opened a breach for the passage of energies similar to my own. No, it is not life that is bad, but the conditions in which we live. Therefore we shall address ourselves not to life, but to these conditions: let us change them. One must live, one must desire to live still more abundantly. Let us accept not even the partial suicides.

Let us be eager to know all experiences, all happiness, all sensations. Let us not be resigned to any diminution of our “me”. Let us be champion of life. so that desires may arise out of our turpitude and weakness; let us assimilate the earth to our own concept of beauty. Thus may our wishes be united, magnificently; and at the last we shall know the Joy of Life in the absolute.

                                                                                                      Let us love life

René Daumal: You've always been wrong (1908 -1944)

        Spiritual Death

You have always been wrong. Like me, like everyone, you have let yourself glide on easy slopes which lead nowhere. Only in dreams has your mind traveled toward the truth. Set your thought today alongside the things that are holding out against you: your most beautiful theories fade away before the wall of appearances. This veil of colored forms, of sights, of sounds, of touch, so easily called illusory, is solid nevertheless. It is from here that you set out, but you took the wrong door. Or rather, you thought that you had set out, you fell asleep on the threshold, and dreamed your beliefs about the world and about the mind. Today I am waiting for you on the threshold. We will try to take our first steps together. I ask you first to look at what surrounds you at this moment, as simply as possible. See what presents itself to you. Above all, do not begin by questioning the reality of this world: in the name of what would you judge it? Do you know what absolute reality is?

Anyone who undertakes a voyage must set off from the place where he finds himself; he should not believe the voyage has been accomplished because he has an exact and detailed itinerary in his hand; the line he has traced on a map only makes sense if he can determine the point where he actually is. So, you, in the same way, seek yourself. I mean: awaken yourself, find yourself. The place where you find yourself is the true state of your consciousness, taken together with all that it contains. It is from here that you must set out. And all our speculations will never be more than the itinerary of a merely possible voyage.

All self-contained metaphysical systems resemble the fruitless pleasure of a man who spends his time reading guidebooks and itineraries, putting together routes on a map and believing he is traveling. Up to now, philosophers have seemed to do hardly anything else, or, if some of them have made actual voyages, none has known how to reveal them to us; and so, any philosophy, even if it was lived by its creator as an actual experience, remains a sterile game, of no use to men.

The attempt I am suggesting you make with me can be summed up in two words: stay awake. I have asked you first to awaken, to see what you are aware of now. You are aware of continual change. Besides, you have felt, in one way or another, a need to become something which you are not yet: but it is even possible that, not understanding me well, you say that you feel nothing of the sort. Even so, you can experience, if you accept passively the conditions being imposed on your consciousness, that you are asleep. Awakening is not a state; it is an act. And people are much more rarely awake than their words would have us believe.

The only immediate action which you can accomplish is to wake up, to become aware of yourself. Just take a look at what you believe you have done since this day began: it is perhaps the first time that you have really woken up, and it is only at that moment that you are aware of all that you have done like an automaton, without thought. For the most part, men never wake up except to the point of realizing that they have been asleep. Now, accept, if you wish, this existence of a sleepwalker. You can live the life of an idler, a laborer, a peasant, a merchant, a diplomat, an artist, a philosopher, without ever waking up, except from time to time, just enough to enjoy or to suffer the manner in which you sleep. It would perhaps even be more convenient not to wake up at all.

And since the reality of the spirit is action, in this sleep, in the absence of real action and lack of real thought, there is nothing. Truly, it is spiritual death.

But if you have chosen to be, then you have committed yourself to a rough road, climbing ceaselessly and demanding an effort at every moment. You wake up, and, at once, you must wake up again. You awake from your awakening, your first awakening appears like sleep to your deeper awakening. On this way of self-inquiry, consciousness is forever going into action. Where most other men only wake up, fall asleep, wake up, fall asleep, climb one step in consciousness only to fall back immediately, never rising above this zig-zagging line, you find yourself.

You find yourself again and again launched on an undefined route of always new awakenings, and as there is nothing better for a discerning consciousness, your pondering on this perpetual awakening towards the highest possible consciousness will constitute the science of sciences. I call it metaphysics, but, though it is the science of sciences, don’t forget that it will never be more than the itinerary planned beforehand — and only in outline — of a real journey. If you forget that, if you believe you have achieved awakening because you have established the conditions of your perpetual awakening beforehand, then, at that moment you fall asleep, you fall asleep into spiritual death.

François Rabelais (1494-1553)

The Rules 

   According to 

     which     

        the Thélèmites 

                          Lived

All their life was regulated not by laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their free will and pleasure. They rose from bed when they pleased, and drank, ate, worked, and slept when the fancy seized them. Nobody woke them; nobody compelled them to either eat or to drink, or to do anything else whatsoever. So it was that Gargantua had established it. In their rules there was only one clause:

DO WHAT YOU WILL!

because people who are free, well-born, well-bred, and easy in honest company have a natural spur and instinct which drives them to virtuous deeds and deflects them from vice; and this they called honour. When these same men are depressed and enslaved by vile constraint and subjection, they use this noble quality which once impelled them freely towards virtue, to throw off and break this yoke of slavery. For we always strive after things forbidden and covet what is denied us.

Making use of this liberty, they most laudably rivaled one another in all of them doing what they saw pleased one. If some man or woman said, "Let us drink," they all drank; if he or she said, "Let us play," they all played; if it was "Let us go and amuse ourselves in the fields," everyone went there. If it were for hawking or hunting, the ladies, mounted on fine mares, with their grand palfreys following, each carried on their daintily gloved wrists a sparrow-hawk, a lanneret, or a merlin, the men carrying the other birds.

So nobly were they instructed that there was not a man or woman among them who could not read, write, sing, play musical instruments, speak five or six languages, and compose in them both verse and prose. Never were seen such worthy knights, so valiant, so nimble both on foot and horse; knights more vigorous, more agile, handier with all weapons than they were. Never were seen ladies so good-looking, so dainty, less tiresome, more skilled with the finger and the needle, and in every free and honest womanly pursuit than they were . . . .

Now every method of teaching has been restored, and the study of languages has been revived: of Greek, without which it is disgraceful for a man to call himself a scholar, and of Hebrew, and Latin. The elegant and accurate art of printing, which is now in use, was invented in my time, by divine inspiration; as, by contrast, artillery was inspired by diabolical suggestion. The whole world is full of learned men, of very erudite tutors, and of most extensive libraries, and it is my opinion that neither in the time of Plato, of Cicero, nor of Papinian were there such faculties for study as one finds today. No one, in future, will risk appearing in public or in any company, who is not well polished in Minerva's workshop. I find robbers, hangmen, freebooters, and grooms nowadays more learned than the doctors and preachers were in my time.

Why, the very women and girls aspire to the glory and reach out for the celestial manna of sound learning. So much so that at my present age I have been compelled to learn Greek, which I had not despised like Cato, but which I had not the leisure to learn in my youth. Indeed I find great delight in reading the Morals of Plutarch, Plato's magnificent Dialogues, the Monuments of Pausanias , and the Antiquities of Athenaeus, while I wait for the hour when it will please God, my Creator, to call me and bid me leave this earth.

Therefore, my son, I beg you to devote your youth to the firm pursuit of your studies and to the attainment of virtue. You are in Paris. There you will find many praiseworthy examples to follow. You have Epistemon for your tutor, and he can give you living instruction by word of mouth. It is my earnest wish that you shall become a perfect master of languages. First of Greek, as Quintillian advises; secondly, of Latin; and then of Hebrew, on account of the Holy Scriptures; also of Chaldean and Arabic, for the same reasons; and I would have you model your Greek style on Plato's and your Latin on that of Cicero. Keep your memory well stocked with every tale from history, and here you will find help in the Cosmographies of the historians. Of the liberal arts, geometry, arithmetic, and music, I gave you some smattering when you were still small, at the age of five or six. Go on and learn the rest, also the rules of astronomy. But leave divinatory astrology and Lully's art alone, I beg of you, for they are frauds and vanities. Of Civil Law I would have you learn the best texts by heart, and relate them to the art of philosophy. And as for the knowledge of Nature's works, I should like you to give careful attention to that too; so that there may be no sea, river, or spring of which you do not know the fish. All the birds of the air, all the trees, shrubs, and bushes of the forest, all the herbs of the field, all the metals deep in the bowels of the earth, the precious stones of the whole East and the South -- let none of them be unknown to you.

Then scrupulously peruse the books of the Greek, Arabian, and Latin doctors once more, not omitting the Talmudists and Cabalists, and by frequent dissections gain a perfect knowledge of that other world which is man. At some hours of the day also, begin to examine the Holy Scriptures. First the New Testament and the Epistles of the Apostles in Greek; and  then the Old Testament in Hebrew. In short, let me find you a veritable abyss of knowledge. For, later, when you have grown into a man, you will have to leave this quiet and repose of study, to learn chivalry and warfare, to defend my house, and to help our friends in every emergency against the attacks of evildoers.

[Source: François Rabelais,

The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J. M. Cohen 
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955).]

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)

The Creative Act 

Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on the one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity. To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing. If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out. T.S. Eliot, in his essay on "Tradition and Individual Talent", writes: "The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material." Millions of artists create; only a few thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity. In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius: he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Artist History. I know that this statement will not meet with the approval of many artists who refuse this mediumistic role and insist on the validity of their awareness in the creative act – yet, art history has consistently decided upon the virtues of a work of art through considerations completely divorced from the rationalized explanations of the artist. If the artist, as a human being, full of the best intentions toward himself and the whole world, plays no role at all in the judgment of his own work, how can one describe the phenomenon which prompts the spectator to react critically to the work of art? In other words, how does this reaction come about?

Segment of the "Large Glass"

This phenomenon is comparable to a transference from the artist to the spectator in the form of an esthetic osmosis taking place through the inert matter, such as pigment, piano or marble. But before we go further, I want to clarify our understanding of the word 'art' - to be sure, without any attempt at a definition. What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

Therefore, when I refer to 'art coefficient', it will be understood that I refer not only to great art, but I am trying to describe the subjective mechanism which produces art in the raw state – à l'état brut – bad, good or indifferent. In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the esthetic plane. The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of. Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap, representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to realize and did realize, is the personal 'art coefficient' contained in the work. In other words, the personal 'art coefficient' is like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed. To avoid a misunderstanding, we must remember that this 'art coefficient' is a personal expression of art à l'état brut, that is, still in a raw state, which must be 'refined' as pure sugar from molasses by the spectator; the digit of this coefficient has no bearing whatsoever on his verdict. The creative act takes another aspect when the spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation: through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubtantiation has taken place, and the role of the spectator is to determine the weight of the work on the esthetic scale. All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists. 

Lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 19, 1961.

Published in: Art and Artists, 1, 4 (July 1966).

          

Hans Arp (1886–1966)

Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe. Art has collaborated in this false development. I find this concept of art which has sustained man’s vanity to be loathsome. I wanted to find another order, another value for man in nature. He should no longer be the measure of all things, nor should everything be compared with him, but, on the contrary, all things, and man as well, should be like nature, without measure. I wanted to create new appearances, to extract new forms from man.