I spend a lot of my time rediscovering things. It’s a nifty, almost unconscious trick. All it necessitates is wandering through a landscape, engaging with reality and picking up on sensory cues.
Whether it’s a certain food I once loved, or the scent of an old girlfriend, my mind is ceaselessly uncovering something it was once intimately acquainted with. Sometimes I think there isn’t enough room in my mind for things I can remember, so old memories pass out my ears like smoke. . .
Just the other day, walking into an Oakland news stand on a whim, I saw a copy of Parabola magazine and I rediscovered Rene Daumal, the French mystic philosopher, poet and writer.
One night, long ago, I read Daumal’s masterpiece Mt. Analogue and, dumbstruck by its beauty, I walked from midnight to five a.m. until I was locked out of the building I was living in, so I had to scale the balcony using a variety of finesse and perilous clumsiness. Having no formal training in building climbing, I still nonetheless succeeded and I proclaimed that the evening had been some kind of mystical experience.
We don’t write much about mysticism, religion or the whole gamut of philosophical speculation here at The Rumpus. I’m not sure why that is exactly, except that so much of religious discourse can veer into oppressive dogma and delusions of grandeur. Religion can so easily destroy culture, poison politics and imprison freedom that it’s a wonder we even bring it up at all.
So, I’m willing to bet Parabola is a magazine that many of our Rumpus readers haven’t read.
However, I bet that Rene Daumal is a writer that many Rumpus readers would respond to in as an exhilarating way as I did as an effete college boy who drank way too many espressos.
In the Fall issue of Parabola there is a generous selection of Daumal’s letters, as well as an appreciation and a long, newly-translated poem of his, Memorabilia that includes such gorgeous lines as:
“Remember the gorgeous mirage of concepts, and of poignant words, a/palace of mirrors constructed in the cellar; and remember the man who/came to you, who broke everything, who took you up with rough hands,/tore you from your dreams and sat you down among the thorns of broad/daylight; and remember that you don’t know how to remember.”
I you love Alejandro Jodorowsky’s uber-weird, alchemical “monsterpiece”, The Holy Mountain, you would probably appreciate Mt. Analogue which was the film’s primary inspiration.
The novel, like the movie, is concerned with a religious quest that is also a philosophical quest and it hinges on the existence of an implausible mountain that is not on any map but it still exists in “reality.”For Daumal, I believe, the religious instinct was foremost a human instinct for freedom and liberation. It had less to do with morality, and more to do with ethics. Literature became for Daumal both a human and spiritual pastime.
Daumal was equally versed in Surrealist poetry, psychoactive substances and comparative religion. He was self-taught in Sanskrit and had immersed himself into all forms of Eastern mysticism. He was a devoted student of the Russian guru Gurdjieff. He was filled with tireless curiosity and fulfilled to the letter his own credo as a writer: “To write is for me a very grave exercise, full of risk: to say what I know, not more, not less.”
Daumal, unfortunately, died young and didn’t quite finish the manuscript of Mt. Analogue, although, like another famously “unfinished” masterpiece 2666, it feels complete in every sense of the word.
I encourage everyone to discover Rene Daumal and Parabola magazine.
