A Night of Serious Drinking

by Rene Daumal

  Suddenly Daumal pulls us out of the book’s long metaphor of bedlam, to examine man’s situation as if through a telescope. Gurdjieff had a very complex, un-Darwinian, unconventional concept of evolution that Daumal draws upon here. Gurdjieff felt that European thought was incorrect in perceiving man’s evolution as apart from nature or as a conquest of nature. Ouspensky quotes him as saying, “Humanity neither progresses nor evolves. What appears as progress or evolution is in fact, a partial modification which can be immediately counterbalanced by a corresponding modification in an opposite direction.”48 This should seem evident to any observer of our technical and industrial progress, which is counterbalanced by ever-increasing violence and barbarism in the world. Gurdjieff taught that, in order to evolve to a state higher than that of a thinking, feeling animal in the chain of organic life, we humans have to deliberately choose to oppose the forces of nature in a new way; not in the usual sense of abusing the ecology, but in the sense of overcoming the internal and external forces that would have us remain asleep. Man must voluntarily go against his penchants; he must swim upstream.

  The final summation of the book comes out of the mouth of Totochabo, who returns again. He presents a simple, poetic myth of “larval man.” Man is a caterpillar who will not take the necessary steps to evolve into a butterfly. Rather he clings to his caterpillar appetites, caterpillar passions, and caterpillar metaphysics. Totochabo says:

  But what could be more comforting than to discover that we are nothing? It’s only by turning ourselves inside out that we become something. Is it not a great comfort to the caterpillar to learn that she is a mere larva, that her time spent being a semi-crawling digestive tube will not last, and that after a period of confinement in the mortuary of her chrysalis she will be born again as a butterfly—not in a nonexistent paradise dreamed up by some caterpillary, consoling philosophy, but here in this very garden.49

  The transition from the surface world of a caterpillar to the three-dimensional world of a butterfly is clearly an allegory for the concept of man’s possible evolution. It is similar to Gurdjjeff’s image of man as a technically advanced airplane that always tries to maneuver on the ground and is unaware that it can fly. Totochabo gives two more beautiful analogies; he refers to an example of an actual tadpolelike creature in Mexico, the axolotl, that like man inexplicably remains in its embryonic state. As an experiment, some axolotles were injected with thyroid extract and they were seen to change into a species of salamander. Unfortunately, such outside intervention is not generally available to effect a metamorphosis in man. He has to want to give up his caterpillariness of his own volition.

  On the final pages, Totochabo discusses how we always see everything upside down (another Gurdjieffian concept). He considers for example how we reverse the concepts of love and hate, and submits as evidence, headlines such as:

  Tragedy of a Jealous Husband—“I loved her too much, so I killed her”

  Accused Woman Kills Lover with Hammer before Death-Leap into Well with Two Babies50

  We call these “crimes of passion,” or as Totochabo says, “the cause of such instances of stupid, pointless mutual destruction is what we call ‘love.”’ And at the other extreme, when we wish to express the idea of hatred, we use the symbol of “water and fire”; for us this is the idea of two irreconcilable enemies. But the one exists only through the other:

  Without fire, all the water in the world would be an inert lump of ice. Without water, fire would die for all eternity, since for all eternity it has consumed and scorched everything around it.51

  He points out how we are always observing the wonders of steam, the perfect balance between fire and water, yet we continue to say “as incompatible as fire and water, and we continue to call double suicides and murders of passion “love.”52 Thus, in the final moments of the book, Daumal has returned to the archetypal symbols of fire and water to elucidate his final message: like steam, we too can achieve the integration of our own duality.

  In closing he re-echoes the classic endings of Plato’s Symposium and Voltaire’s Candide. Instead of “Let us go and cultivate our garden,” his closing lines are “We all got up, for there were several pressing things to do. There were many things to be done toward the business of living.”53

  NOTES

  1 R. Daumal, “Letter from New York,” Argile, p. 33.

  2 Ibid., p. 32.

  3 Ibid., p. 33.

  4 R. Daumal, review of Rabelais’s Complete Works, in La Nouvelle Revue Française, p. 1031.

  5 Marcel Lobet, “L’Experience spirituelle de René Daumal.”

  6 R. Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking, pp. 22–23.

  7 Rabelais, Gargantua, p. 42.

  8 R. Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking, p. 19.

  9 Sahitya Darpana, in “To Approach the Hindu Poetic Art,” in R. Daumal, Rasa, p. 82.

  10 R. Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking, p. 9.

  11 Ibid., p. 48.

  12 Ibid., p. 45.

  13 Ibid., p. 46.

  14 Ibid., p. 49.

  15 R. Daumal, letter quoted in Accarias, Retour à Soi, p. 183.

  16 R. Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking, pp. 71–72.

  17 Ibid., p. 62.

  18 Gurdjieff, All and Everything, p. 504.

  19 R. Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking, p. 53.

  20 Ibid., p. 54.

  21 Ibid., p. 56.

  22 Ibid., p. 26.

  23 Ibid., p. 43.

  24 Ibid., p. 90.

  25 Ibid.

  26 Ibid.

  27 Ibid., p. 59.

  28 Ibid., p. 103.

  29 Ibid., p. 104.

  30 Ibid., pp. 5, 13.

  31 Ibid., p. 36.

  32 Ibid., p. 20.

  33 R. Daumal, “Bharata,” in Bharata, p. 51.

  34 R. Daumal letter, quoted in Helen Maxwell, “Regarding La Grande Beuverie,” in Accarias, Retour à Soi, p. 174.

  35 “The Holy War,” Parabola p. 12.

  36 R. Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking, p. 17.

  37 Ibid., p. 1.

  38 Charles Duit, “Notes Inédites”, quoted in Michael Waldberg, Gurdjieff: An Approach to His Ideas, p. 21.

  39 Ibid., p. 22.

  40 Ibid., p. 24.

  41 Gurdjieff, All and Everything, Introduction.

  42 Jean Richer, “Sur le sentier de la Montagne: René Daumal, conteur.” Hermès (Spring 1967): 91.

  43 R. Daumal, “Bharata,” in Bharata, p. 51.

  44 R. Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking, p. 20.

  45 Ibid., p. 107.

  46 Ibid.

  47 R. Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking p. 108.

  48 Gurdjieff, quoted in Ouspensky, In Search, p. 58.

  49 R. Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking, p. 109.

  50 Ibid., p. 111, 112.

  51 Ibid.

  52 Ibid.

  53 Ibid.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Notes

  Foreword

  PART I

  A labored dialogue on the power of words and the frailty of thought (1 to 19)

  PART II

  Delusions of paradise (1 to 42)

  The Fidgeters (7 to 9)

  The Fabricators of useless objects (10 to 22)

  The Clarificators (23 to 39)

  With the artificial gods (40 to 42)

  PART III

  The cold light of day (1 to 12)

  The fire, the sun, the awakening (1 to 5)

  The walking house (6 to 8)

  Of man as larva, and or love as an example (9 to 12)

  Index

  FOREWORD

  To be read before use

  I refuse to accept that a clear thought can ever be inexpressible. Appearances, however, are against me. For just as there is a level of pain at which the body ceases to feel because, should it become in-involved in its pain, should it groan but once, it would seemingly crumble and return to dust; and just as t
here is a peak at which pain takes to the air on its own wings—so there is a level of thought where words have no part to play. Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable. And yet things merely appear so. If human discourse is capable of expressing perfectly no more than a mean level of thought, it is because the mean of humankind thinks with this degree of intensity; it is to this level that it assents, it is to this measure of exactness that it agrees. If we fail to make ourselves understood clearly, we should not blame the tool we use.

  Clear discourse presupposes three conditions: a speaker who knows what he wishes to say, a listener in a state of wakefulness, and a language common to both. But it is not enough for a language to be clear in the way that an algebraic proposition is clear. It must also have a real, not simply a possible, content. Before this happens, the participants must have, as a fourth element, a common experience of the thing which is spoken of. This common experience is the gold reserve that confers an exchange value on the currency which words are; without this reserve of shared experiences, all our pronouncements are checks drawn on insufficient funds; algebra, in fact, is no more than a vast intellectual credit exercise, a counter-feiting operation which is legitimate because it is acknowledged: each individual knows that it has its object and meaning in something other than itself, namely arithmetic. But it is still not enough for language to have clarity and content, as when I say, “that day, it was raining” or “three plus two make five”; it must also have a goal and an imperative.

  Otherwise, from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble, and from babble to confusion. In this confused state of languages, men, even though they have a common experience, have no language with which to exchange its fruits. Then, when this confusion grows intolerable, universal languages are invented, clear and hollow, where words are but counterfeit coins no longer backed by the gold of authentic experience, languages which allow us from childhood to swell our heads with false knowledge. Between the confusion of Babel and these sterile esperantos, no choice is possible. It is these two forms of non-understanding, but more particularly the second, which I shall attempt to describe.

  PART I

  A labored dialogue on the power of words and the frailty of thought

  1

  It was late when we drank. We all thought it was high time to begin. What there had been before, no one could remember. We just said it was already late. To inquire where each of us came from, at what precise point on the globe we were, or if it were really a globe (and in any case it was not a point), and what day of the month of what year, was beyond our powers. You do not ask such questions when you are thirsty.

  When you are thirsty, you watch out for any opportunity to drink and merely pretend to take an interest in other things, which is why it is so difficult afterwards to convey exactly what you experienced. It is very tempting, when you talk about the events of the past, to impose clarity and order upon what had neither one nor the other. It is very tempting and very dangerous. That is how you become a philosopher before your time. I shall therefore try to relate what happened, what was said, and what was thought, as it happened. If this at first seems to you to be chaotic and hazy, take heart: subsequently things will be only too orderly, too clear. If the order and clarity of my tale will then have seemed insubstantial, be reassured: I shall end with words of comfort.

  2

  We were in thick smoke. The chimney was drawing badly, the green wood fire crackled snappishly, the candles released oily fumes into the air, and the clouds of tobacco smoke hung in bluish banks at face level. Whether we were ten or a thousand, no one knew. What is certain is that we were alone. Which reminds me, the loud voice coming from behind the firewood, as we called it in our tipplers’ tongue, had grown a little louder. Sure enough, it emerged from behind a stack of wood, or perhaps biscuit boxes, it was difficult to tell which for the smoke and our weariness; and it said:

  “When alone, the microbe (I was about to say man) clamors and whimpers for a twin soul to keep it company. If a twin soul comes along, they cannot bear being two and each flares frenziedly to become one with the object of its intestinal gnawings. It loses its senses: one wants to be two; two wants to be one. If the twin soul does not come along, it divides and says to itself, ‘hello old chap,’ throws itself into its arms, reunites itself messily and takes itself for something, if not somebody, special. But you have just one thing in common, loneliness; that is, all or nothing, it’s up to you.”

  It was agreed that this was well said, but no one bothered to see who was speaking. There was no thought but for drinking. Thus far, we had only drunk cups of a lousy rotgut which had made us very thirsty.

  3

  There was a moment when our ill-humor was at its height and, I seem to remember that a few of us, armed with all sorts of implements, got together to go off and clobber the big blokes snoring in the corners. An interminable period of time went by after which the big blokes returned humping kegs on their sore shoulders. When the kegs had been emptied, we were at last able to sit on them or beside them, but at least we were sitting, ready to drink and listen, for a public-speaking contest or some such diversion had been mooted. All this is rather hazy in my memory.

  Having no lead to follow, we were swept up by words, memories, manias, grudges, and solidarities. Having no goal to aim for, we wasted what little life there was in our thoughts on joining in with a pun, speaking ill of common acquaintances, avoiding unpleasant facts, riding hobbyhorses, pushing at open doors, making faces, and preening ourselves.

  The warmth and the reek of the thick tobacco smoke gave us an unquenchable thirst. We were constantly having to take turns to belabor the big blokes who by this time were fetching demijohns, casks, stone jars, and buckets, all of which were full of the sort of infusion you can guess at.

  In a corner, one chap who was a painter was explaining to another who was a photographer his plans to paint some beautiful apples, pulp them, distill them, and “that’ll make a marvelous calvados, old man,” he said. The photographer grumbled that “it sounded a bit idealistic,” but that did not stop him from draining his glass. The young Amédée Gocourt complained that there wasn’t enough to drink because, he said, the chocolate cakes he was stuffing himself with “had made his down pipe like velvet and clogged up his stomach.” Marcellin the anarchist moaned that “if we were to be left as scandalously as this to die of thirst, then really things were not much better than in the time of the popes,” but no one grasped the sense of his words.

  As for myself, I was sitting very uncomfortably on a bottle rack, which gave me the look of a man who is meditating profoundly, whereas, in fact, I was just dead to the world, the ceiling low, very low, on my head, the visor of my mind closed, trapping even the dregs of my moods.

  4

  I shall not introduce those who were present. It is not of them, nor their characters, nor their actions that I wish to speak. They were there like actors in a dream trying, sometimes genuinely, to wake up; all good comrades, each incorporating the others into his own fantasy world. All I wish to say at this point is that we were drunk and that we were thirsty. And we who were alone were many.

  It was Gonzague the Araucanian who had the wretched idea of calling for music. It was quite premeditated, of course, for everyone had noticed that he had brought a brand-new guitar with him. He did not wait to be asked twice before starting to play. It was horrible. The sounds he drew from the instrument were so wickedly out of key, so resolutely cracked, that the cauldrons began jigging around on the cement floor, the brass candlesticks started sliding across the stucco mantlepieces screeching with mirth, the pots and pans rocked their bellies against the peeling walls, the plaster got into our eyes and the spiders tumbled squeaking from the ceiling right into the soup, which made us thirsty and threw us into wild rages.

  Then the character behind the firewood showed the ti
p of one ear, then the tip of the other, then a nose, then a clean-shaven chin, then a beard, then a bald head, then a thatch of hair, for he was most changeable: a simple matter of prestidigitation and instant make-up. It was said that without this masquerade, no one would ever have noticed him for, they thought, “he looked exactly like everybody else.” It may be that just then he was got up like a woodchopper or a tree, with a goatee and elephant eyes, but I wouldn’t swear to it. Calmly, he said something like: “Granite, gravel. Gravel, granite. Grey, garnet. (A pause.) Aconite!”

  On the last syllable (I had already drunk enough for it to seem perfectly natural), the guitar exploded in Gonzague’s hands. One of the strings caught him on the upper lip. He allowed a few drops of blood to fall onto the back of his hand. Then he drained his glass. Then he jotted down in his notebook the rudiments of an extraordinary poem which would be plagiarized the following day and betrayed in every language by two hundred and twelve minor poets; from it sprang the same number of avant-garde artistic movements, twenty-seven historic brawls, three political revolutions on a Mexican farm, seven bloody wars on the Paropamisus, a famine in Gibraltar, a volcano in Gabon (which had never been heard of before), a dictator in Monaco, and not quite lasting glory for the half-baked.

  5

  When the Araucanian had taken a drink, there was a profound silence. Then an old lady cried out sharply:

  “None of your magic nonsense here, mind! We want explanations. Who broke the guitar? And how? And why?”

  “None of your scientific nonsense here,” Othello foaming at the mouth yelled in a voice like scrap iron. “None of your scientific nonsense, now! Just magic explanations!”

  “Let’s have a drink first,” the man behind the firewood intoned slowly. “Afterwards, I’ll put you to sleep with a more or less coherent disquisition on the cutting, pricking, bruising, crushing, smashing uses of human language and perhaps of the language of birds, but let’s have a drink first.”