Mount Analogue

by Rene Daumal

1. R. Daumal, letter to Renéville, Hermès 5 (1967): 93.

  2. R. Daumal, quoted in Rosenblatt, “Interior Resonances: A Conversation with Jack Daumal,” Parabola, p. 90.

  3. R. Daumal, Mount Analogue, p. 31. R. Daumal, Le Mont Analogue, p. 15. (In subsequent references, page numbers in parentheses will refer to the French version.)

  4. Jan Gonda, Vedic Literature, p. 43.

  5. R. Daumal, Mount Analogue, p. 32; (= p. 18).

  6. Andre Rousseau, “L’Avènenment de René Daumal,” Littérature du vingtième siècle, p. 67.

  7. R. Daumal, “Nerval the Nyctalope,” The Powers of the Word, p. 38.

  8. R. Daumal, Mount Analogue, p. 30, 32; (= pp. 14, 19).

  9. Ibid., p. 36; (= p. 27).

  10. Ibid., p. 36–7

  11. R. Daumal, Correspondance, Vol. 3, p. 57.

  12. R. Daumal, Mount Analogue, p. 36; (p. 34).

  13. Ibid., p 40; (= p. 39).

  14. Ibid., p. 39; (= p. 39).

  15. Ibid., p. 42; (= p. 40).

  16. Ibid., p. 41–2; (= p. 40).

  17. Ibid., p. 43; (= p. 40).

  18. Ibid., p. 56; (= p. 67).

  19. Ibid., p. 65; (= p. 84).

  20. Ibid., p. 78; (= p. 110).

  21. Ibid., p. 79; (= p. 112).

  22. Ibid., p. 79; (= p. 113).

  23. Ibid., p. 80; (= p. 114).

  24. Ibid., p. 87; (= p. 128–29).

  25. Ibid., p. 90; (= p. 134).

  26. Dante, The Divine Comedy 4, v. 27–29.

  27. Gospel of John 12:24.

  28. R. Daumal, Mount Analogue, p. 90; ( p. 135).

  29. Ibid., p. 81; (= p. 117).

  30. Ibid., p. 72; (= p. 128).

  31. Ibid., p. 73

  32. Ibid., p. 72

  33. Ibid., p. 73; (= p. 101).

  34. Ibid., pp. 74; (= p. 103).

  35. Ibid., p. 74

  36. Ibid., p. 85

  37. Ibid., p. 85

  38. R. Daumal, “Lettres de la Montagne,” Argile, p. 184.

  39. Ibid., p. 192.

  40. R. Daumal, Mount Analogue, p. 93; (= p. 141).

  41. Ibid., p. 95; (= p. 144).

  42. Ibid., p. 106; (= p. 163).

  43. Ibid., p.79; (= p. 113).

  44. Ibid., p. 114; ( p. 175).

  45. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, p. 222.

  46. R. Daumal, letter to Dessaignes, in Sigoda, René Daumal, p. 233.

  47. Véra Daumal, in Mount Analogue, additional notes, p. 118.

  CHAPTER 1

  In Which We Meet

  Something new in the author’s life—Symbolic mountains—A serious reader —Mountaineering in the Passage des Patriarches—Father Sogol—An internal park and an external brain—The art of getting acquainted— The man who turns ideas inside out—Confidences—A satanic monastery —How the devil for the day led an ingenious monk into temptation—The industrious Physics—Father Sogol’s malady—A story about flies —The fear of death—With a raging heart, a mind of steel—A mad project reduced to a simple problem of triangulation—A psychological law

  Everything I am about to tell began with a scrap of unfamiliar handwriting on an envelope. On it was written my name and the address of the Revue des Fossiles, to which I contributed and through which the letter had tracked me down, yet those penned lines conveyed a shifting mix of violence and sweetness. Behind the questions I was forming in my mind about the sender and the possible contents of the message, a vague but powerful presentiment evoked in me an image of “a pebble in the mill-pond.” And from deep inside me the confession rose like a bubble, that my life had become all too stagnant of late. When I opened the letter, I could not have told you whether it had the effect of a revitalizing breath of fresh air or a disagreeable miasma.

  In apparently one seamless movement, the same swift and flowing hand had written the following:

  Monsieur,

  I have read your article on Mount Analogue. Until now I thought I was the only person convinced of its existence. Today there are two of us, tomorrow there will be ten, perhaps more, and we can launch the expedition. We must make contact as soon as possible. Call me when you are free at one of the numbers below. I expect to hear from you.

  Pierre SOGOL,

  37, Passage des Patriarches, Paris

  (This was followed by five or six telephone numbers which I could call at different hours of the day.)

  I had almost forgotten the article to which my correspondent referred, which had appeared nearly three months before, in the May issue of Revue des Fossiles.

  Though flattered by this show of interest on the part of an unknown reader, I felt a certain discomfort at seeing a literary fantasy taken so seriously, almost tragically. Yes, it had intoxicated me at the time, but was now a rather distant, retreating memory.

  I reread the article. It was a somewhat hasty survey of the symbolic significance of the mountain in ancient mythologies. The different branches of the symbolic had been my favorite study for a long time—I naively believed that I understood something about the subject; furthermore, as a mountaineer I had a passionate love of the mountains. The convergence of these two very different kinds of interest in the same subject, mountains, had colored certain passages of my article with a definite lyricism. (Such conjunctions, incongruous as they may seem, play a large part in the genesis of what is commonly called poetry. I offer this remark as a suggestion to critics and aestheticians attempting to shed light on the depths of this mysterious language.)

  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. The patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament behold the Lord face to face on high places. We have Moses’s Mount Sinai and Mount Nebo, and in the New Testament the Mount of Olives and Golgotha. I even found this old symbol of the mountain in the scientific pyramidal constructions of Egypt and Chaldea. Moving on to the Aryans, I recalled those 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.” In India, the Himalayas are the abode of Shiva and his wife “the Daughter of the Mountain,” and of the “Mothers” of all worlds—just as in Greece the king of the gods held court on Mount Olympus. In fact, in Greek mythology I found the symbol completed by the story of the rebellion of the children of Earth who, with their terrestrial natures and terrestrial means, tried to scale Olympus and penetrate Heaven with their feet of clay. Was this not the same effort pursued by the builders of the Tower of Babel, who, without renouncing their varied personal ambitions, expected to reach the One Eternal Being? In China, it was the “Mountains of the Blessed,” and the ancient sages instructed their disciples on the edge of a precipice …

  After making this tour of the best known mythologies, I went on to general reflections on symbols, which I arranged in two classes: those subject only to the rule of “proportion,” and those subject, in addition, to the rule of “scale.” This distinction has often been made. I shall review it all the same. “Proportion” concerns relations between the dimensions of a structure, “scale” the relations between these dimensions and those of the human body. An equilateral triangle, symbol of the Trinity, has exactly the same value whatever its dimension; it has no “scale.” By contrast, take an exact model of a cathedral only a few inches in height. By its shape and proportions this object will always transmit the intellectual meaning of the structure, even if certain details must be examined through a magnifying glass. But it will no longer produce anything like the same emotion, or the same attitudes; it will no longer be “to scale.” And what defines the scale of the symbolic mountain par excellence—which I propose to call Mount Analogue—is its inaccessibility by ordinary human means. Now, Sina
i, Nebo, and even Olympus have long since become what mountaineers call cow pastures; and even the highest peaks of the Himalayas are no longer considered inaccessible today. All these summits have thus lost their analogical power. The symbol has had to take refuge in entirely mythical mountains, such as Mount Meru of the Hindus. But if Mount Meru—to take one example—is no longer situated geographically, it can no longer preserve its persuasive meaning as the path uniting Heaven and Earth; it can still signify the center or axis of our planetary system, but no longer the means for man to gain entry to it.

  “For a mountain to play the role of Mount Analogue,” I concluded, “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.”

  This is what I wrote. Taken literally, my article did, indeed, suggest that I believed in the existence, somewhere on the surface of the globe, of a mountain much higher than Mount Everest, which was, to any so-called sensible person, an absurdity. And here was someone taking me literally! And talking to me about “launching an expedition”! A madman? A joker? But what about me? As the author of this article, I was suddenly struck by the thought that my readers might have the right to ask me the same question. So, am I a madman or a joker? Or simply a scribbler?—Well, I can admit now, even while asking myself these rather disagreeable questions, that deep down, in spite of everything, I felt that some part of me firmly believed in the material reality of Mount Analogue.

  The next morning, I called one of the telephone numbers at the corresponding hour indicated in the letter. A feminine and impersonal voice assaulted me immediately, warning me that I had reached the “Eurhyne Laboratories” and asking me to whom I wished to speak. After several clicks, a man’s voice came to my rescue:

  “Ah! It’s you? You’re lucky the telephone doesn’t transmit odors! Are you free on Sunday? … Then come to my place around eleven o’clock; we’ll take a little walk in my park before lunch … What? Yes, of course, Passage des Patriarches, and then? … ah, the park? That’s my laboratory; I thought you were a mountaineer … Yes? Okay! We’re on, then? … See you Sunday!”

  So, he is not a madman. A madman would not have an important position with a perfume company. A practical joker, then? That warm and resolute voice was not the voice of a prankster.

  That was Thursday. Three days to wait, during which my colleagues found me very distracted.

  Sunday morning, dodging tomatoes, slipping on banana skins, brushing past sweating housewives, I made my way to the Passage des Patriarches. I passed through a front entrance, questioned the ‘soul of the corridors’—the concierge—and headed towards a door at the back of the courtyard. Before entering, I noticed a double rope hanging down from a small window on the sixth floor, along a bulging, crumbling wall. A pair of corduroy pants—as much as I could see in such detail at this distance—emerged from the window; they were tucked into stockings that, in turn, disappeared in flexible shoes. The person who culminated in this fashion managed, while holding on with one hand to the window ledge, managed to shift the two lengths of rope between his legs, then around his right thigh, then diagonally over his chest up to the left shoulder, then behind the collar of his short jacket, and finally down in front over his right shoulder, all this with one flick of the wrist; he grabbed the lines below with his right hand and the lines above with his left, pushed off from the wall with the bottom of his feet and, with torso erect and legs apart, he descended at the speed of one and a half meters per second, in that style that looks so good in photographs. He had hardly touched the ground when a second silhouette engaged in the same descent. Arriving at the spot where the old wall bulged, this new person was hit on the head by something like an old potato, which squashed on the pavement, while a voice trumpeted from above: “So you’ll get used to falling rocks!” He arrived below, however, not too disconcerted, but failed to end his “rappel de corde” with the gesture that justifies this name and consists of pulling on one of the lines to collect the rope. The two men went off separately and crossed the entryway under the eyes of the concierge, who watched them go by with a disgusted look. I went on my way, climbed the four flights of service stairs, and found this information posted near a window:

  Pierre SOGOL, mountaineering teacher. Lessons Thursdays and Sundays from 7-11 o’clock. Means of access: go out the window, take a ledge to the left, scale a chimney, steady yourself on a cornice, climb a slope of disintegrating schist, follow the ridge from north to south skirting around several gendarmes. And enter by the dormer window on the east side.

  I bowed willingly to these fantasies, although the stairs continued to the sixth floor. The “ledge” was a narrow edge of the wall, the “chimney” a dark recess that needed only to be shut by the construction of an adjacent building to be called a court, the “slope of schist” an old slate roof, and the “gendarmes” some mitered and helmeted chimneys. I entered through the dormer window and found myself standing before the man himself. Fairly tall, thin and vigorous, with a large black moustache and rather crinkly hair, he had the serenity of a caged panther lying in wait; he looked at me with calm, dark eyes and extended his hand.

  “You see what I must do to earn my daily bread,” he said to me. “I would have liked to welcome you to better quarters …”

  “I thought you worked at the perfume company.”

  “Not only. I also work for a manufacturer of household appliances, a gear company, a laboratory for insecticide products, and a photography business. In all of them I am involved in attempting inventions thought to be impossible. Until now I’ve managed, but since they say I can’t do anything but invent absurdities, they don’t pay me much. So, I give climbing lessons to wealthy young men who are tired of bridge and crossword puzzles. Make yourself comfortable and get acquainted with my garret.”

  It was in fact several attic rooms with the partitions knocked out to form a low-ceilinged workshop, lit and ventilated at one end by a vast glass window. Under the window was squeezed the typical materials of a physics-chemistry lab, and a pebble path wound through the studio, imitating the worst sort of mule track, lined with small trees and shrubs in pots or planters, grass plants, small conifers, dwarf palms, and rhododendrons. Along the path, stuck to the windows and hanging from the ceiling, so that free space was used to the maximum, hundreds of small placards were displayed. Each one bore a drawing, a photograph, or an inscription, and all of them together constituted a veritable encyclopedia of what we call “human knowledge.” A diagram of a plant cell, Mendelieff’s periodic table, the keys to Chinese writing, a cross section of the human heart, Lorentz’s formulas of transformation, every planet and its characteristics, a series of fossilized horses, Mayan hieroglyphs, economic and demographic statistics, musical phrases, representatives of the major plant and animal families, crystal samples, the plan of the Great Pyramid, encephalograms, logical formulas, charts of all the sounds employed in all languages, geographical maps, genealogies—everything, in short, that might fill the brain of a Pico della Mirandola of the twentieth century.

  Here and there stood jars, aquariums, and cages containing extravagant fauna. But my host did not let me linger to look at his holothurians, his calamary, his waterspiders, his termites, his anteaters, and his axolotls … He led me onto the path where the two of us could just stand shoulder to shoulder, and invited me to take a stroll around the laboratory. Thanks to a small cross draught and the odors of the dwarf conifers, one had the impression of climbing the hairpin turns of an endless mountain trail.

  “You understand,” Pierre Sogol said to me, “we have such grave matters to decide, with repercussions in all the smallest corners of our lives, yours and mine, that we can’t pull something out of nothing without at least getting to know each other. Today we can walk together, talk, eat, be quiet together. Later, I think we shall have opportunities to act together, to suffer together—and all of this is necessary
in order to ‘get acquainted,’ as they say.”

  Naturally, we talked about the mountains. He had explored all the highest known ranges on the planet, and I felt that with each of us at the end of a good rope we might that very day have launched on the maddest mountaineering adventures. Then the conversation jumped, slipped, and veered, and I understood the use he was making of those bits of cardboard that spread before us the knowledge of our century. 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 philosophic thoughts when, by chance, several of these cards are grouped in a way that is somewhat unusual but not excessively so. This can be the effect of air currents or simply by constant agitation, like the Brownian movement that agitates particles suspended in a liquid. 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.

  In this man’s way of thinking, and in his whole appearance, there was a singular mixture of vigorous maturity and childlike freshness. But above all, just as I was aware of his nervous and restless legs, I was aware of his thought 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 for establishing new connections between what seemed to be utterly disparate ideas. I heard him—I’d be prepared to say I even saw him—treat human history as a problem in descriptive geometry, then, a minute later, speak of the properties of numbers as if he were dealing with zoological species. The fusion and division of living cells became a particular case of logical reasoning, and language derived its laws from celestial mechanics.

  I could hardly reply to him, and soon felt dizzy. He perceived this, and then began to tell me about his past life.