Mount Analogue

by Rene Daumal

  The phrase “it’s a classic” is much abused. Still there may be some appeal in the slant of the cap Overlook sets in publishing a list of books the editors at Overlook feel have continuing value, books usually dropped by other publishers because of “the realities of the marketplace.” Overlook’s Tusk Ivories aim to give these books a new life, recognizing that tastes, even in the area of so-called classics, are often time-bound and variable. The wheel comes around. Tusk Ivories begin with the hope that modest printings together with caring booksellers and reviewers will reestablish the books’ presence and engender new interest.

  As, almost certainly, American publishing has not been generous in offering readers books from the rest of the world, for the most part, Tusk Ivories will more than just a little represent fiction from European, Asian, and Latin American sources, but there will be of course some “lost” books from our own shores, too, books we think deserve new recognition and, with it, readers.

  Copyright

  This Tusk Ivories edition is first published in the United States in 2004 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  Woodstock & New York

  NEW YORK:

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  Text, afterword, copyright © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1981

  English translation © 2004 by Carol Cosman

  Introduction reprinted by permission, from René Daumal: The Life and Work of a Mystic Guide by Kathleen Ferrick Rosenblatt, The State University of New York Press © 1999, State University of New York. All rights registered.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-451-0

  Contents

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION BY Kathleen Ferrick Rosenblatt

  Chapter 1: In Which We Meet

  Chapter 2: In Which Suppositions are Made

  Chapter 3: In Which We Make the Crossing

  Chapter 4: In Which We Arrive and the Problem of Currency Becomes Specific

  Chapter 5:

  NOTE FROM THE FRENCH EDITION

  AFTERWORD BY Véra Daumel

  About Mount Analogue

  INTRODUCTION

  Mount Analogue

  Non-Euclidian Mountain Climbing

  Eternity

  He who binds himself to a joy

  Does the winged life destroy

  But he who kisses the joy as it flies

  Lives in eternity’s sun rise

  —WILLIAM BLAKE

  Mount Analogue is generally considered René Daumal’s masterpiece, for it combines his poetic gifts and philosophical accomplishments in a way that is both entertaining to read and profound to contemplate. It is a many-leveled symbolic allegory of man’s escape from the prison of his robotic, egoistic self. At the same time, it is well-grounded in scientific data and the facts of our physical existence.

  After conducting his readers on an adventure into the depths of human materialism and spiritual ignorance in his previous book A Night of Serious Drinking, Daumal turns our attention to the heights of self-knowledge. The catharsis of the contraction phase of Daumal’s life, as depicted in A Night of Serious Drinking, is followed by the phase of expansion and hope in Mount Analogue, a book dedicated to Alexandre de Salzmann. Looking away from the lower depths of the Counter-Heaven of Le Contre-Ciel, the peak of the holy mountain emerges out of the fog.

  In a letter he described his passage from the drinking bout to the mountain, a place where the caterpillar could transform itself into a butterfly:

  After having described a chaotic, larval, illusory world, I undertook to speak of another world more real and coherent. It is a long récit about a group of people who realized that they were in prison and who realized that they had to renounce this prison (the drama being that they [we] are attached to it).1

  The book is subtitled A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing. Jack Daumal relates that René first began serious mountain climbing in 1937. Jack was better trained professionally and was able to pass his knowledge on to his brother. He says that René was a natural in the mountains and a quick learner. They made many climbs together in the two years preceding the outbreak of World War II. In a 1987 interview that I conducted for Parabola magazine, Jack said that in 1939 to 1940, the doctors recommended mountain air for René but no more climbing due to his tuberculosis. That is when the idea of Mount Analogue crystallized. Now that he was stuck in the lower climes, he remembered his métier was that of a writer:

  If I couldn’t scale the mountains, I would sing of them from below. Then I began to think seriously with the heaviness and awkwardness with which one jostles one’s thought processes, when one has conquered one’s body by conquering rock and ice. I will not speak about the mountain but through the mountain. With this mountain as language, I would speak of another mountain which is the path uniting the earth and heaven. I will speak of it, not in order to resign myself but to exhort myself.2

  Daumal’s real-life passion for the mountains allowed him to transpose to the page the rasa of his own experience. This serves as an analogy expressing Daumal’s own experience of a seeker’s initiation into the “Path” (Dharma). A more specific interpretation is that it is an allegory for Daumal’s experience in the Gurdjieff Work. The leader of the group, Sogol, like Totochabo of A Night of Serious Drinking, is generally considered to be a character based on Alexandre de Salzmann or Gurdjieff himself.

  The narrator recalls an article he had written on “The Symbolic Significance of the Mountain,” and this gives Daumal the opportunity to discuss various interpretations of this symbol from the Old Testament, Egypt, Islam, Greece, and especially from India, drawing on Guénon’s study of symbolism of the mountain. The narrator recounts:

  The substance of my article was that in the mythic tradition, the Mountain is the connection between Earth and Sky. Its highest summit touches the sphere of eternity, and its base branches out in manifold foothills into the world of mortals. It is the path by which humanity can raise itself to the divine and the divine reveal itself to humanity.3

  Throughout the entire novel there will be an interpenetration of symbols and concrete reality. The Hindus were the first to describe this way of seeing the world. According to Jan Gonda, the author of Vedic Literature, Vedic authors were always convinced of the existence of a correlation between the visible and invisible world—ritual acts, natural phenomena, and phenomena of divine agency: “The hold that nature has over man comes from the unseen powers within it.”4 This explains the Vedic tendency to avoid unequivocalness for reasons of taboo. Ambiguities help to blend the two spheres together. Daumal’s text is imbued with this same parallelism between the visible and the invisible—the trek, the characters, and obstacles are all symbolic of the blending of the lower and the higher. Guénon had devoted an entire book, La Grande Triade (The Great Triad), to exploring this symbology. According to him, the base of the mountain, earth (passive perfection—prakriti), is a symbol for personality, designated by the personage Arjuna, the anxious warrior hero of the Mahabharata. The peak of the mountain connects with heaven (active perfection—purusha) and is a symbol for the evolved spirit, designated by the god Krishna, Arjuna’s counselor. This symbology is perfectly enacted in the course of Daumal’s story.

  Among the many references to myths, Daumal’s narrator recalls “t
hose obscure legends of the Vedas, in which the soma—the ‘nectar’ that is the ‘seed of immortality’”—is said to reside in its luminous and subtle form ‘within the mountain.’ Now, based on this symbolism, he proposes the physical existence of the ultimate mountain, which must be inaccessible to ordinary human approaches. While existing earthly mountains, even the mighty Himalayas, have been demystified by the profane, he finds the mythic mountains also inadequate because they have no geographical existence. He feels that Mount Meru of the Hindus, lacking real physical coordinates, “can no longer preserve its persuasive meaning as the path uniting Heaven and Earth.” Accordingly, he believes in the material existence of Mount Analogue: “its summit must be inaccessible but its base accessible to human beings as nature has made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically. The gateway to the invisible must be visible.”5

  With deliberate brushstrokes, Daumal sketches in the essential details of plot and character. One of France’s most eminent literary critics, André Rousseau, in a lengthy chapter, “L’Avènement de René Daumal” (“The Accession of René Daumal”) of his book Littérature du XXième siècle (Literature of the Twentieth Century), recalls René’s description of the effort involved in producing what he called la Chose-a-dire (“the Thing-to-say”). “The Thing-to-say appears then in the most intimate part of oneself, like an eternal certainty.”6 Rousseau felt that there was not a single line in Mount Analogue where la Chose-a-dire does not hit us. Immediately, the proposed mountain-climbing expedition becomes intertwined with a quest for knowledge. The narrator and his soon-to-be-teacher, Sogol, are kindred souls, discovering each other in a manner reminiscent of Breton’s “objective chance,” that is, finding a kindred soul in an anonymous way—in response to an article. Here we see the synchronicity that will occur many times throughout Mount Analogue, the randomness and hidden order that surrounds us. Their chance encounter is also reminiscent of Daumal’s lines in his essay “Nerval Le Nyctalope”: “I was thus being observed! I was not alone in the world! This world which I had thought was only my fantasy!”7 Contrast this with Sogol’s note to the narrator: “Monsieur, I have read your article on Mount Analogue. Until now I thought I was the only person convinced of its existence,” and the narrator’s surprise: “And here was someone taking me literally! And talking about lauching an expedition! A madman? A practical joker? But what about me?”8

  The teacher/seeker figure, Pierre Sogol, “with the tranquility of a caged panther,” is a character drawn larger than life, who combines “a vigorous maturity and childlike freshness”9 His thinking is described as being

  like a force as palpable as heat, light, or wind. This force seemed to be an exceptional faculty for seeing ideas as external facts and establishing new connections between what seemed to be utterly disparate ideas. [He would] treat human history as a problem in descriptive geometry … the properties of numbers as if he were dealing with zoological species … [and illustrate how] language derived its laws from celestial mechanics.10

  Sogol’s varied background recalls both de Salzmann and Gurdjieff, each of whom had many areas of expertise. The seeds of this character were sown back in 1934 when René was sent to collect de Salzmann’s material effects at the Hotel Jacob in Paris after his death in Switzerland on May 3, 1934. He described the experience in a letter to Véra:

  It was certainly sad to undo all these balls of string that he planned to unwind himself one day. And to find so many projects started. There were mostly books: algebra manuals, adventure novels, old history books, dictionaries, some perhaps of value, but I felt it useless to take them except for three or four. There remains: pieces of wood, paint supplies, an ax, plus his papers—sketches, studies, projects, plans, etc., and a magi marionnette.11

  When we meet the composite character Sogol, he is currently an inventor and teacher of mountaineering, accepting students only if they first scale his Parisian apartment building and enter through the window.

  The narrator accompanies Sogol through his laboratory, which he calls his “park.” They meander down a pebble path through plants and shrubs, among which are dangling hundreds of little signs, “the whole of which constituted a veritable encyclopedia of what we call human knowledge, a diagram of a plant cell … the keys to Chinese writing … musical phrases … maps, etc.” The narrator finally realizes the brilliant logic of this information path:

  All of us have a fairly extensive collection of such figures and inscriptions in our head; and we have the illusion that we are “thinking” the loftiest scientific and philosophical thoughts when, by chance, several of these cards are grouped in a way that is somewhat unusual but not excessively so … Here, all this material was visibly outside of us; we could not confuse it with ourselves. Like a garland strung from nails, we suspended our conversation from these little images, and each of us saw the mechanisms of the other’s mind and of his own with equal clarity.12

  Here, and many times throughout the book we see Daumal’s rejection of busy behavior, overintellectualizing, and his general preference for quality over quantity. This reflects Daumal’s study of Guénon (especially his book Quantity and Quality), and the Hindu preference for being rather than information gathering. In Buddhist literature, the material world is often referred to as the “10,000 beings.” Daumal loves to evoke this image by making long lists of things, both in his novels and in his poetry.

  Sogol and the narrator bare their souls for thirteen pages of the first chapter, entitled “The Meeting.” They each share their disinterest and apathy for “this monkey-cage frenzy which people so dramatically call life.”13 Sogol recounts that after having experienced almost every pleasure and disappointment, happiness, and suffering, he felt he had completed one cycle of existence. He joined a monastery where he applied himself to inventing instruments, which rather than making life easier, would rouse men out of their torpor. Two such examples were a pen for facile writers that spattered every five or ten minutes, and a tiny portable phonograph equipped with a hearing-aid-like earpiece that would cry out at the most unexpected moments: “Who do you think you are?”14 With hilarious inventiveness, Daumal applies Gurdjieff’s theory of “alarm clocks”—employing reminding factors and resistances, little tricks to wake ourselves up. It also harks back to the Lilliputians of Gulliver’s Travels who wore elaborate flappers to keep themselves roused. Finally, Sogol then relates that he left the monastery, continuing always to question this “grown-up” existence:

  Fearing that death I suffer every moment, the death of that voice which, out of the depths of my childhood, keeps asking, as your does: “Who am I?” … Whenever this voice does not speak—and it does not speak often—I am an empty carcass, a restless cadaver.’15

  The narrator relates similar existential anxieties from his own childhood, echoes of Daumal’s early experience:

  In the evenings in bed, with the light out, I tried to picture death, the “most nothing of all.” In imagination I suppressed all the circumstances of my life and I felt gripped in ever tighter circles of panic. There was no longer any “I.” What is it after all, “I”? … Then one night, a marvelous idea came to me: Instead of just submitting to this panic, I would try to observe it, to see where it is, what it is. I perceived then that it was connected to a contraction in my stomach, a little under my ribs, and also in my throat … I forced myself to unclench, to relax my stomach. The panic disappeared … when I tried again to think about death, instead of being gripped by the claws of panic I was filled by an entirely new feeling, whose name I did not know, something between mystery and hope.16

  By the fifteenth page, Daumal has posed the question three times: Who are you? Or Who am I? Together the two characters agree that there must be an answer to this question, there must exist, according to Sogol,

  men of a superior type, possessing the keys to all our mysteries. Somehow I could not regard this as a simple allegory, this idea of an invisible humanity within visible humanity. Experience has
proven, I told myself, that a man can reach truth neither directly nor alone; an intermediary must exist—still human in certain respects yet surpassing humanity in others.17

  This excerpt echoes Gurdjieff’s belief in an “Inner Circle of Humanity,” a group that maintains an inner sanctuary of esoteric knowledge and secretly mediates in human events. It also reflects Daumal’s personal experience in his early years of having failed on his own to find what he was seeking. He thus shares with us his own fortune to have found three of these intermediaries in the persons of the de Salzmanns and Gurdjieff. For him this allegorical tale is less farfetched than it might appear. Just as Sogol suggests, Daumal would not take Mount Analogue “simply as an allegory.”

  In chapter 2, entitled “Suppositions,” Sogol spends ten pages providing the scientific data, complete with diagrams, to explain the anomalous properties of Mount Analogue. Because of the invisible closed shell of curvature that surrounds the island, it remains protected from human detection, but not always, not everywhere, and not for everyone. At a certain moment and in a certain place, certain persons (those who know and have a real wish to do so) can enter. This phenomenon is a scientifically embellished metaphor for Gurdjieff’s explanation of how esoteric knowledge is not truly hidden but simply imperceptible to those who are not seeking it. “The Sun has the property of uncurving the space which surrounds the island. At sunrise and at sunset it must in some fashion make a hole in the shell, and through this hole we shall enter!”18 Sogol presents the potential of synchronicity; his logic convinces the group of interested candidates and they all declare themselves willing to make the unprecedented journey.