Spotlight on ... Rene Daumal's 'Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing'

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René Daumal at age 15 experimenting with "paroptic vision" at the home 

of his teacher, René Maublanc, who took this photo.

'Man is head, chest and stomach. Each of these animals operates, more often than not, individually. I eat, I feel, I even, although rarely, think…. This jungle crawls and teems, is hungry, roars, gets angry, devours itself, and its cacophonic concert does not even stop even when you are asleep.' -- Rene Daumal

'When 36-year-old Rene Daumal died in Paris near the close of World War II, he left behind one blistering book of poetry, numerous essays on Hindu aesthetics and various Surrealist obsessions, and two weird and amazing allegories: the absurdist satire A Night of Serious Drinking, and the unfinished Mount Analogue, a masterwork of 20th-century spiritual literature. At their best, these writings crackle with an intense and empyrean glow, a hard glint of the Absolute that, coupled with their Pataphysical humor, has made Daumal something of a cult figure among Surrealist aficionados, literate seekers, and other post-Beat types. Nonetheless, he remains an undeservedly obscure figure.

'One reason for Daumal's marginal status is that, despite his intensely modernist deployment of inversion and revolt, he was at heart a profoundly spiritual man — a self-transcending ascetic who renounced even the trappings of renunciation. Though many avant-garde figures got into the mystic, from Kandinksy and Theosophy to Cage and Zen, Daumal took this trend to the limit. In his life and mind, we can trace the prophetic outlines of a genuine "mystical modernism," a mode of spiritual practice that is experiential, anti-religious, and counter-cultural -- even to the point of being counter-modern.

'Daumal's first claim to fame was the precociously weird group he formed with three teenage pals known as Le Grand Jeu. They wanted political, psychological, and metaphysical revolution, with pretentious rants and all ("No more free will! No more whim or fantasy! No more pretty things!"). Anticipating the 1960s, they dived into automatic handwriting, astral travel, sensory deprivation and drugs. Daumal's most notable experiments involved carbon tetrachloride, an impressively toxic dry-cleaning solvent that launched him into a near-death experience that eventually crystallized into his essay "Determining Memory," a play-by-play of druggy gnosis worthy of William James. The chemical also probably contributed to the TB that killed Daumal in 1944, though a lifetime of Gaulois probably didn't help things much.' -- Erik Davis, VLS

Photos from the Rene Daumal Centenary Celebration, Paris, March 2008

Rene Daumal's 'Poetry White, Poetry Black'
Le Grand Jeu (in French)

Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain (based on Daumal's Mount Analogue)

Buy Rene Daumal's Mount Analogue

Rene Daumal @ Gurdjieff International Review

Three poems by Rene Daumal

Rene Daumal's last letter to his wife

Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing is both bizarre and allegorical, detailing the discovery and ascent of a mountain, the Mount Analogue of the title, which can only be perceived by realising that one has travelled further in traversing it than one would by travelling in a straight line, and can only be viewed from a particular point when the sun's rays hit the earth at a certain angle. Daumal, often described as one of the most gifted literary figures in twentieth-century France, died before the novel was completed, providing an uncanny one-way quality to the journey. The book was the sources of Alejandro Jodorowsky's film The Holy Mountain.

A page from Mount Analogue

Excerpt:

You do not go into a foreign country to acquire something without a certain amount of money. For bartering with prospective “savages” and “natives,” explorers usually carry with them all sorts of junk and cheap goods—pocket knives, mirrors, knick-knacks from Paris, suspenders and stockings, trinkets, cretonne, bars of soap, eau-de-vie, old rifles, anodyne munitions, saccharin, képis, combos, tobacco, pipes, medals, and lots of cordage—not to speak of religious articles. As we might, in the course of the voyage and perhaps even in the interior of the continent, meet peoples belonging to ordinary humanity, we were provisioned with such merchandise as a means of exchange. But in our relations with the superior beings of Mount Analogue, what would constitute a trading currency? What did we possess that really had any value? What could we use to pay for the new knowledge we sought there? Were we going to beg? Or acquire on credit?

Each of us made a personal inventory, and each of us felt poorer from day to day, seeing nothing around us or in us that we could really call our own. In the end, we were just eight poor men and women, shorn of everything, watching the sun sink on the horizon.

~ • ~

A long wait for the unknown dampens the force of surprise. Here we are, settled for only three days in our little temporary house at Port-des-Singes, on the foothills of Mount Analogue, and everything is already familiar. . .

The place consisted of several attic rooms with the partitions knocked out to make a long low studio, lit and ventilated by a huge window at one end. Under the window were piled up the usual apparatus of a physio-chemical laboratory. Through the studio wound a pebble path, devious as the track of an ornery mule and bordered with shrubs and bushes in pots or in crates, cactus plants, small conifers, dwarf palms, and rhododendrons. Along the path, glued to the window panes or hung on the bushes or dangling from the ceiling, so that all free space was put to maximum use, hundreds of little placards were displayed. Each one carried a drawing, a photograph or an inscription, and the whole constituted a veritable encyclopedia of what we call 'human knowledge'.

A diagram of a plant cell... Mendeleiff's periodic table of the elements... the keys to chinese writing... a cross section of the human heart... Lorentz's transformation formulae... each planet and it's characteristics... fossil remains of the horse species in series.. Mayan heiroglyphics... economic and demographic statistics... musical phrases... samples of the principle plant and animals families... crystal specimens... the ground plan of the great pyramid... brain diagrams... phonetic charts of the sounds employed in all languages, maps, genealogies... everything in short which would fill the brain of a twentieth century Pico della Mirandola.

A man in mountain dress received us on a carpet. He spoke French perfectly, but with the occasional secret smile of someone who finds quite odd the expressions he must use in order to make himself understood. He was translating, to be sure—unhesitatingly and correctly, but obviously translating.

He questioned us one after the other. Each of his questions, although quite simple—Who were we? Why had we come? caught us off guard and shook us to the core. Who are you? Who am I? We could not answer him as we would a consular representative or a customs agent. Tell one’s name and profession? What good would that do? But who are you? And what are you? The words we pronounced—we had no others—were lifeless, repugnant, and grotesque, like cadavers. We knew henceforth that we could no longer pay the guides of Mount Analogue with words. Sogol courageously took it upon himself to give them a brief account of our voyage.

The man who welcomed us was indeed a guide. All authority in this country is exercised by the mountain guides, who form a distinct class, and in addition to their strict profession as guides they take turns assuming the administrative functions indispensable in the coastal and foothill villages. He gave us the necessary information about the country and about what we were expected to do.

~ • ~

The first stage would require a full day; there was a good trail, and we could use the large, agile donkeys native to the country. Later, everything would have to be carried on the backs of men. So we had to make arrangements for renting donkeys and hiring porters. The currency problem, which had so intensely preoccupied us, had been resolved, at least provisionally, upon our arrival. The guide who had received us had given us, as an advance, a sack of metal tokens that served here as a means of exchange for goods and services. As we had foreseen, none of our money had any value. Every new arrival or group of arrivals received this kind of advance to cover initial expenses, and one was committed to repay it during one’s stay on the continent of Mount Analogue. But how could it be repaid? There are several ways, and since this question of currency and repayment is at the basis of all human existence and of all social life in the colonies along the coast, I must go into some detail on the subject.

One finds here, very rarely in the low lying areas, more frequently as one goes farther up, a clear and extremely hard stone that is spherical and varies in size—a kind of crystal, but a curved crystal, something extraordinary and unknown on the rest of the planet. Among the French of Port-des-Singes, it is called peradam. Ivan Lapse remains puzzled by the formation and root meaning of this word. It may mean, according to him, “harder than diamond,” and it is; or “father of the diamond,” and they say that the diamond is in fact the product of the degeneration of the peradam by a sort of quartering of the circle or, more precisely, cubing of the sphere. Or again, the word may mean “Adam’s stone,” having some secret and profound connection to the original nature of man. The clarity of this stone is so great and its index of refraction so close to that of air that, despite the crystal’s great density, the unaccustomed eye hardly perceives it. But to anyone who seeks it with sincere desire and true need, it reveals itself by its sudden sparkle, like that of dewdrops. The peradam is the only substance, the only material object whose value is recognized by the guides of Mount Analogue. Therefore, it is the standard of all currency, as gold is for us.

Truthfully, the only loyal and entirely satisfactory way of paying one’s debt is to repay it in peradams. But the peradam is rare and difficult, even dangerous, to find and collect. Often one has to extract it from a fissure in the rock wall of a precipice, or pry it out from the icy edge of a crevasse. After efforts that sometimes last years, many people become discouraged and return to the coast, where they find easier ways to repay their debt. For this can simply be reimbursed in tokens, and these tokens can be earned by all the ordinary means. Some become farmers, other artisans, others stevedores and so forth. We do not speak unkindly of them, for they make it possible to buy supplies on the spot, to rent donkeys and hire porters.

“And what if someone does not manage to pay his debt?” Arthur Beaver had asked.

“When you raise chicks,” he was told, “you advance them the grain which, when they become hens, they will repay you in eggs. But when a young hen doesn’t lay when it matures, what becomes of it?”

And each of us had swallowed his saliva in silence.

~ • ~

The economic life in Port-des-Singes is quite simple, if lively, much like what it must have been in a small European town before industrialization; no thermodynamic or electric engine was admitted into the country, and indeed, any use of electricity was banned, which in a mountainous land rather surprised us. The use of explosives was also banned. The colony—mostly French, as I have said—has its churches, its city council, its police force. But all authority comes from above, that is, from the alpine guides whose delegates direct the administration and the municipal police. This authority is uncontested, for it is based on the possession of peradams. The people who have settled on the coast possess only tokens, which allow all purchases indispensable to the life of the body but confer no real power. Once again, let us not speak unkindly of these people who, discouraged by the difficulties of the ascent, have settled on the shore and the foothills, and make their small living there. Thanks to them, thanks to the initial effort they made to come this distance, their children at least do not have to make the voyage. They are born on the very shores of Mount Analogue, less subject to the nefarious influences of the degenerate cultures that flourish on our continents, in contact with the mountain men, and ready, if the desire takes them and their intelligence is awakened, to undertake the great journey from the place where their parents have given it up.

Four clips from Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain

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(1:03)


(1:56)


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