The Book is a Ghost: Thoughts and Paroxysms for Going Beyond

Citation preview

roger gilbert-lecomte

the book is a ghost thoughts and paroxysms for going beyond

selected and translated by michael tweed

solar▲luxuriance

introduction

PART 1: ESSAYS the evolution of the human mind the value of art the alchemy of the eye from the metamorphoses of poetry lizard, crack

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3 13 17 29 35

PART 2: NOTES & FRAGMENTS the work’s effectiveness 47 language, aesthetics 48 acts of deprivation metaphysics of absence terror on earth return of the flame enlightenment ecstasy the senses of being notes for psychology of states psychology notes on science miscellaneous notes humankind’s third birth the dialectical force of the mind creators and producers refusal to obey the problem of expression vocabulary double hermeticism the meaning of creation the problem of total expression within duration problem and parabola

50 51 52 59 60 61 62 63 65 67 68 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 79 80 82

introduction

  “To be forever prey to the wind”   Roger Gilbert-Lecomte was born dead, and it was with great effort that breathing was induced in his lifeless little body. Upon resurrection his death accompanied him, and thus his life unfolded as a relentless via negativa. Throughout his thirty-six years he endeavored, without the least compromise, in a godless kenosis, emptying himself not willfully but effortlessly, naturally, in accord with death-in-life, which is to say that by abandoning himself he abandoned both being and nonbeing.   As a teenager, he and his close-friend René Daumal formed a small group, The Simplists, and then the influential Grand Jeu (Great Game). Together with their cohorts they sought a life unfettered by the confines of both body and mind. In their attempt to progressively sink from the waking state to dream to deep sleep and beyond to a state free of both life and death, they experimented with automatic writing, extra-retinal vision, various yogic practices, and drugs such as carbon tetrachloride, ether, opium and morphine. As dangerous as some of these experiments were, Gilbert-Lecomte felt that physical death paled in comparison to the ever-present threat of psychic death that pervaded modern society.   While Daumal understood the various states they experienced as modes of consciousness; unable to dissociate them from his own subjectivity, Gilbert-Lecomte sought a singular fundamental experience of death-in-life. Later, in a short text entitled A Fundamental Experience, in which he attempted to put the ineffable down in words, Daumal wrote, “But a third friend experienced exactly the same reality that I had encountered, and we only needed to exchange a look to know we had seen the same thing. It was Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, with whom I was to edit the review, Le Grand Jeu; its tone of profound conviction was nothing more than the reflection of the certainty we shared. And the book is a ghost

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I am convinced that this experience determined the direction his life would take as it did mine, even if somewhat differently.”i Nonetheless the reality is that by the time they were 20, both of them were addicted.   Though courted by the surrealists they rebuffed their famous elders’ advances, being of the opinion that the surrealists, much to André Breton’s chagrin, were little more than dilettantes and mere literati. For though fine poets, writers and artists in their own right, the members of the Grand Jeu were dedicated to a more complete revolution, beyond both art and desire. A revolutioninvolution in which the natural state of the body no different from the mind, the mind no different from the body is reclaimed, and any so-called extra-sensory experiences which might arise were not artistic fodder but signs, heralds of the possibilities that lie beyond the common acceptance of the limits imposed by life and society. Such a wager could only ever be short-lived however and in 1932 the group broke up.   While Daumal was eventually able to summon the inner determination required to shake his drug habit, none of GilbertLecomte’s attempts at detoxication were successful. In 1933 he was arrested on drug charges, and then hospitalized. Nonetheless, later that year he published a remarkable collection of poetry, Life Love Death Void and Wind, for which Antonin Artaud wrote a glowing review.   The following year, under pressure from his girlfriend Daumal broke off all contact, as he explained in a letter to Jean Paulhan: “The relationship was broken off by me when I at last saw that its hidden objective and visible results were to mutually justify us in our respective weaknesses, to exempt each of his responsibilities in the other’s eyes, and to make it easier for both of us to avoid looking at reality.”ii i. A Fundamental Experience, translated by Roger Shattuck (Hanuman Books, 1987), pp. 52-53. ii. Black Mirror: The Selected Poems of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, translated by David Rattray (Station Hill, 1991), pg. 102. vi

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  Though he still helped his friend Arthur Adamov with various texts and translations, Gilbert-Lecomte became increasingly dominated by his addiction. He moved from place to place, was arrested numerous times for dealing, and did whatever was necessary to secure a fix. A second collection of poetry, Black Mirror, was published in 1938, but eventually all but a handful of people would abandon him. Tragically, in 1942 his girlfriend, whom he had wanted to marry, was deported to Auschwitz and never heard from again.   Seeing him destitute, Madame Firmat, the owner of a small working-class bar that Gilbert-Lecomte frequented, took pity on him and provided a warm room in the back where he could stay.   On November 22, 1943 his good friend Pierre Minet received a note pleading for help, in which Gilbert-Lecomte had written: “I’m rotting away, paralysed with abscesses…” The fact was that he had contracted tetanus from injecting a needle into his thigh through his dirty pant leg. His torments grew as the disease ravaged his body and two days before Christmas he was admitted to hospital. There, on New Year’s eve he died, unattended.   When she was gathering the meager belongings that GilbertLecomte had left behind, Mme. Firmat found a briefcase that she put into the care of Arthur Adamov. Inside was Gilbert-Lecomte’s literary legacy, for he had simply tossed all that he had written into this briefcase without any concern for order. Jumbled together were notes for lectures, drafts of essays, notebooks and scraps of paper on which were scribbled thoughts and poems, most often undated. *   For Gilbert-Lecomte it never was a question of escaping the anguish and suffering of life through any artificial paradise whether induced by drugs, or any artistic or spiritual endeavour. Rather he felt that “through the play of changing states and the applying of attention to limits, one can experimentally escape the duration of the flow of the will-to-live until becoming eternal.”   Thus, the small selection of writings presented in the following the book is a ghost

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pages was guided by something Gilbert-Lecomte himself wrote in a brief essay entitled The Power of Renunciation, which he included in the first issue of Le Grand Jeu: “Thousands of years of experience have taught man that there is no rational solution to the problem posed by life. One escapes the horror of living only through a faith, an intuition, an ancient instinct that one must rediscover deep within oneself. Plumb the abyss within you. If you feel nothing, too bad; for we have found within ourselves the path, the direction of which we have attempted to indicate within these pages.” —Michael Tweed

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Drawing by Gilbert-Lecomte for Joseph Sima, February 18, 1931

note on the translation

  This translation has retained Gilbert-Lecomte’s often highly idiosyncratic punctuation and is primarily based on the original French texts as found in his Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 1; (Gallimard, 1974). However, reference has also been made to variants of some of the texts as found in the following:   Gilbert-Lecomte, Roger; Testament, Gallimard, 1955   Maxwell, H.J.; Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Accarias/l’Originel, 1996   Virmaux, Alain and Odette, Le Grand Jeu et le cinéma, Paris expérimental, 1996   Where possible I have included available publishing information for the essays, however I was unable to discover any for “The Evolution of the Human Mind” (Le devenir de l’esprit humain) or “The Value of Art” (Valeur de l’art), which leads me to believe that these had not been published during his lifetime. Note too that this selection purposely does not include any of the essays that Gilbert-Lecomte published in the journal that he edited, Le Grand Jeu, as translations of those texts can be found in the indispensable collection Theory of the Great Game (Atlas Press, 2015). acknowledgements

  Although translating is in the main a solitary task, a translation is rarely completed without the aid and support of others, in this case two people came to my rescue on more than one occasion: Min Roman and Roxana Ghita, I cannot thank them enough, not only for their support on this project but also on so many others over the years. Also a big shout out to Alastair Brotchie and his cohorts at the wonderful Atlas Press, who have so kindly shared their enthusiasm for Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and Le Grand Jeu, and whose small acts of generosity are akin to hearing from someone who found the message in a bottle that one had cast into the sea as a child. the book is a ghost

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Not writing much, I promised myself to write only the essential.

Part 1: Essays

the evolution of the human mind

I The following text is far from a complete and definitive statement. It does, however, contain the totality of my thought. Throughout my life, I have only presented anew, as many times as possible, the same work. A man who views himself as a creator on the plane of thought, possesses, from birth, a mysterious intuition that he is obliged to communicate to his contemporaries. Only, human solitude blocks the way to any communication. The thinker can dream of a perfect language in which his intuition could be expressed by a single word; but this language is lost, twice lost, on the one hand because of the distance that always separates an idea from its human expression, due to the parallel imperfection of thought and speech, since the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and on the other hand, due to the impossibility of making an idea pass whole from one human consciousness to another.   Thus, I side with the attempt at expression that plagues my entire life. Precisely, I will try to illuminate, with every light possible, this untranslatable revelation that I bear deep within my inner darkness. No doubt I will die before making myself understood, but that lucid despair does not resign me to pessimism. Patiently, I will speak to everyone on every level. I will express the complete intuition by every possible means, on all levels of human activity. A pure metaphysical treatise, a poem (I believe that poetry is not just the song of a rutting male, but also a mode of knowledge), a pamphlet, a moral treatise, an ethnographic work on physiological experiences—all will be part of the same oeuvre. the book is a ghost

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  In other words, instead of expressing my thought according to the rational custom of linear progression, I will express it, so to speak, by a cyclic progression. Instead of starting from the beginning and ending at the conclusion, I will never leave the center except to carry out concentric or excentric developments.   This method imposes itself on me, due less to the nature of my subject, than to the fundamental moral guidelines of my life. In fact, linear progression signifies the work of a Benedictine, retreat, solitude, an ivory tower, documentation: in short, such a mode of expression is contrary to life in every sense of the word. Cyclic progression on the other hand follows the very rhythm of life.1 II The subject of the work that I am undertaking here is the evolution of the human mind, my careful study of which leads me to conclude that all religions are dead. The result of the present volume is that whoever understands it will in all sincerity no longer be able to convert to Catholicism.   The death of religions, predicted so many times, has not happened yet. Although they appear historically on the decline, they still successfully resist every attack.   I dare say that I am the first person to oppose the religious mind on its own ground. In fact, Spinoza, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Renan have by turns attacked, in the name of reason, an 1. Thus I believe that human thought ceases to be creative in the absolute sense from the age of four; in all cases, all fecundity dries up before one turns twenty. Man passes the rest of his life developing, exploiting, drawing conclusions from his childhood. The adolescent enemy of literature fully expresses his thought according to the cyclic fashion of the time in two lyrical pages that he will then endlessly repeat throughout his life. 4

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edifice that it was enough to call “suprarational” to be set aside in the wings. Moreover, in those debates, I tend to side with the Church against its detractors. Voltaire’s pathetic irony, Nietzsche’s individualistic madness, Renan speaking in the name of an impossible deism: so many confessions of powerlessness. The other blows borne by the Church have hardly been any more effective. The materialist philosophies have always existed without causing the Church any harm; as for Science, progress and Darwinism, after having shaken the foundations, due to the clumsiness of the defenders, the Neo-Catholics, their blows have now been parried.   Anti-individualist as I am, I believe myself to be the anonymous transcriber of an intuition that is ripening in the totality of human thought.   It is a question of a general overturning of moral and intellectual values, of a new synthesis of the human mind, which must be built on the ruins of actual thought, both scientific and religious.   Only today do we have weapons to fight religion: namely not the exegesis or history of religions, but familiarity with all the sacred books of all religions,2 essential material for 2. It can never be said enough that the most symptomatic and perhaps decisive event of our time is the in-depth understanding of the religious act, through primitive ethnography and religious history. It is now a question of seeing the double aspect— beneficial and harmful—of this state of affairs.   On the one hand, the rediscovery of sacred books allows man to extricate, for the first time, the common essence from every particular form of the sacred and thus to see the religious fact in all its purity.   But on the other hand, by succeeding in destroying all those forms this rediscovery runs the risk of giving rise to mere abstraction. Anyway, this problem touches upon the main neuralgic point of this time of disembodiment, and I regret that R. G.-L., who, like me, was aware of it, did not reveal his thought here. [Arthur Adamov] the book is a ghost

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the study of the evolution of the human mind based upon primitive viability, psychoanalysis and lastly the dialectical method. This method alone allows us to not wander off into fruitless scholastic debates (does God exist or not, true or false) but to study the religious act that religious experience itself gives rise to and that religions nourish. III It would be useful to make a quick sketch of the attitude of the human mind when confronting the great metaphysical problems over the centuries.   Before studying the primitive mind, it is necessary to first understand the contemporary mind, so as to be convinced about its relativity.   What does the average European think? It is often said to be what thinkers thought 100 years ago.   A valid reply in regard to the sciences, but when it comes to philosophy the most contradictory multiplicity reigns just like it did a century ago (idealism and materialism, empiricism and dogmatism, spiritualism and realism, positivism and criticism, associationism and epiphenomenalism, rationalism and mysticism, neo-Thomism and empirocriticism—all the isms throughout all of creation).   The common European, a mixture of these elements, has created a variety of such isms that are quite difficult to define, because for him consistency is not a concern.   However, he is always individualistic, always, he feeds the proud illusion of his personal autonomy, the continuity of his consciousness.   The moral consequence of this is that he believes that he is free and responsible. His attitude about his soul is clear: 6

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one either “believes” or not. If he calls himself a materialist, he will claim that the soul is blood or phosphorus. If an idealist, he will deny the body. In either case he will be loath to accept that corporeal phenomena can act on the soul, on responsibility, or vice-versa. His thought will always remain horribly dualistic.   Above all he has blind faith in the evidence that sometimes happily destroys any sophisms or false psychological complications, but which most often is stupidly opposed to the most fruitful hypotheses of the scientific or metaphysical mind.3 He has a taste of the scientific mind; but almost never attains it because of his strange inability to engage in any objective thought. He unconsciously assumes finality. By definition, he summons material reality, but, in an extremely revealing move, cannot help immediately talking about madness as soon as the reality of the external world comes into play. Needless to say, apart from a few superstitions, he doesn’t attach any importance to dreams.   In other words, before the crucial ideas of metaphysics, the European, when not seeking the advice of a master whom he no longer understands, relies on a master that he doesn’t yet understand: science.   In the past century the idea of progress reigned, a childish scientist belief that claimed the universe is ultimately reducible to reason, as mind describing matter and its dynamic laws.   Now, an equally childish trend asserts itself: denying 3. For the forms of this evidence are truths that pass as universal without being proven, any relative opinions that the mind of the common man equates, through laziness, to eternal axioms. Common sense, both useless and harmful, is in fact the most dangerous enemy of the evolution of the mind, the argument of the blind masses that crushes the solitary thinker. the book is a ghost

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the value of science. Sometimes, due to a Bergsonian intoxication, it is declared that science proves the existence of God. At least the relativity of scientific truth is recognized. This progress is due, I think, to the bewilderment caused by the increasing incomprehensibility of theoretical science.   All that remains of religion are a few leftovers: the hysteria of Catholic miracles, Anglo-Saxon spiritism, etc. We are witnessing the total disappearance of all true religious experience. The religious idea is no longer considered except on the lowest level: the moral plane. IV I can now consider the role of the Catholic Church provided that I make clear that the Church and the religious mind4 no longer have anything in common.   For Europe, Catholicism is everything: it has given Europe its soul, civilization, unity, and morality. The strength of this religion lies in the centralization of its power and the extraordinary political skills of the popes throughout the centuries. Whereas from the strictly theological perspective, we have seen the accumulation of heresy upon heresy— from post-Essene Christic and Johannite messianism, to the amazing thought of Paul and the Alexandrian doctrine in which, thanks to the Kabalah and Pythagoras, syncretic Gnosis became the queen of religions, only to quickly devolve into the sad bastard dogma it is now: metaphysical poverty, moral baseness, bellicose intolerance, external ritual, stupid blind faith—from the political perspective, 4. From its origin, the religious mind always gives rise, on the one hand, to an antisocial being, sorcerer, magician, alchemist, who can form a secret society; on the other hand, to a social clergy that, faced with a temporal king, sometimes dominates him and sometimes is dominated by him. 8

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however, its authority never stopped growing.   So, for the twentieth century mind whose culture is on the one hand scientific, and on the other hand, religious, Catholicism is the only religion possible because it responds to a very deep and universal preference (which I am one of the rare individuals to not share) for a large organization under a single authority.   As strange as it may seem, no other religion gives such an impression of truth (the number of those who have believed in time and space). On the other hand, the idea of order and authority on the material plane seduces all those who are sensible supporters of conservative politics.   The idea of moral order attracts some of the finest and most sensible minds, but worn out by vague anxieties and beliefs, unworthy of their freedom, they feel, under penalty of vertigo, the need for discipline.   Needless to say, in all of the above, every trace of religion has been lost. V It is now necessary to lay the very foundation of my work, to describe the exact functions of a primitive’s mind (that of one of our ancestors) and determine when the religious act first appears in this mind, what place it assumes, what it becomes, etc.   The simple assumption of this basic necessity raises serious questions, the first being less the impossibility of knowing the primitive soul, than that of comparing the picture that I will paint with any signpost that allows one to distinguish between true and false.  [...] the book is a ghost

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  A serious scholar would not describe the primitive soul.   I could describe it according to my own whims, but I won’t. I will describe it according to the ancient legends and mysterious traditions that speak of it. To any criticism from those of scientific bent, I counter that obviously for them my answer is provided by the imagination. But I cannot help laughing in spite of myself at the innocence of these scholars so ignorant of fantasy that they believe that one cannot imagine absolutely anything whatsoever. As for me, I know that often, though we think we are imagining something, we can in fact only imagine a single thing: reality.   So, I will describe the primitives as they are reproduced by legends, mythologies, incantations and occult traditions.   Consider my method: if I had to describe a primitive’s attire based on texts, I would be neither more nor less than a historian capable of some minor errors, but as I propose to understand the actual process of their minds, and as the legends that I rely on were written for them by their own fellow beings, these texts are the true testimony of primitive minds describing the functions of the primitive mind itself.   Therefore my method avoids any possibility of error. Why has no one thought of using it in preference to the stupid historical method which for lack of imagination lends to art, the principles of a pure science?   I will clearly restate the process of my thinking:   My subject is the primitive mind—not based on history but on primitive legends, the actual speech of the primitive mind.   Furthermore, since my book does not display a purely philosophical form, I am sure that it will be thrown into the creek. Because of this working method, I will be treated as an occultist or theosophist. 10

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  Yet the paramount importance of this book resides in using just such a method. I make no claim to dethrone the scientific method and replace it with the dialectical method. But I do claim that the dialectical method, despised, unknown, not used before me, will, in the future, become as important as the scientific method.   By nature, it mainly applies to the religious act. In order to use it, one only needs to assume a primitive mind: hence I accept various legends from here and there about the awakening of human intelligence! The Pre-Adamic Master takes the one-eyed beast, rips the hair from its thighs, circumcises it, totemizes it by connecting it to an animal, a plant, a stone, the eye disappears, two eyes emerge etc… Although this legend is perhaps unlikely it cannot not be true, because all cultures have told a version of it. The initiation is there. Moreover, thanks to this key, the explanation is revealed in all the obscure passages of all mythologies, of all legends, of all times. What is the scientific mind thinking, when it has held this key for years yet does not want to use it due to its improbability?   My thoughts will proceed exactly like that. Wherever a rational account is missing, I will accept the primitive legend.   For a scholar, no progress can be made by explaining an act with an even more obscure legend. I however hold the opposite point of view, because even if I do not understand the legend, by relating the act to the legend, I will have made some progress by having thought like a primitive.   The dialectical method must rehabilitate all the irrational remains that might be useful to science.   Please understand me clearly. I demand an in-depth examination of all the ancient things that have been rejected by scholars; and I simply suggest that when a problem the book is a ghost

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arises, and one is faced with several possible solutions, choose the one proposed in the past.

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the value of art

for Léon Pierre-Quint

  Once written a piece of literature does not necessarily require the infernal torture of the printer and the prostitution of the bookseller-procurer. The most important thing is that it be completed by its author and consequently read at least once by him. If he has other means of making money, the best thing he could do would be to throw it in the fire. For his work exists, in an immortal and universal way for all humanity throughout the centuries. In fact a somewhat attentive observation of the mechanism of memory quickly demonstrates that any given being integrally remembers all that it has perceived in the course of its existences, for its perceptions are so vast and so innumerable. It is true that this integral memory, in most cases, remains unconscious throughout one’s entire terrestrial life, only a few scraps and fragments every now and then are suddenly revived in the tiny field of consciousness by a series of unknown relations. But we want to imagine the myth of the unconscious: humanity is an archipelago. Each of the islands composing it is a man or rather a human consciousness unavoidably separated from all others by an oceanic space of the unknowable that one will never be able to cross since the comparison to an archipelago assumes one’s immobility. Man imprisoned in his consciousness, completely surrounded by the sea must remain fatally solitary. But if we change our point of view and make vertical cuts in the archipelago, we immediately realize that each island is only the highest peak of a mountain submerged forever under the sea. These mountains form chains. Several islands are part of the same mountain of the same chain of the the book is a ghost

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same geological fold. At the very least every island of every archipelago, according to their variable altitudes, all lead by their lower extremity, the mountain’s base, to the grandmother earth.   So therefore a solitary island is not a whole, does not form something complete unto itself. It is only the tiny visible part of an immense invisible whole. Everything belongs to this whole. Similarly human consciousness is only an appearance. Its limits, its memory-based individuality are only an illusion of limit caused by the oceanic surface of sensible appearances. Far below, deep in the depths, its unconscious is connected to the whole of the divine globe (spheroid, recalling the ovoid and the tetrahedron like the earth) and through it as intermediary to every other human consciousness of all times and all places. And this myth is not merely an intellectual perspective. Its full scope, its exactitude is quite difficult to verify; unless we reduce it to a more particular part of the human soul. Let’s take for example instinct which philosophers generally have difficulty explaining. What myth could justify by analogy, symbolically, the instinct common to all individuals of a given group (the monadic group soul)? Quite simply it is the image of the madrepore of the arborescent colony of beings that are still undifferentiated and literally attached to their genealogical tree.   Indeed the work of art in the unconscious of its author will necessarily rejoin the unconscious, in other words the deep reality of all humanity.   Those crippled by universal approval generally want to discover the criteria of the relative value of an artwork, according to its greater or lesser universality in time and space qualitatively and quantitatively. If they were willing to 14

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briefly plunge into their own depths they would understand that, like all things, all artworks are absolutely universal since they are an integral part of the whole. So it is absolutely useless to proclaim an artwork more or less great and to know if more readers have incorporated it in themselves by the path of their consciousness. For though everything is universal when it is a question of the immense, deep, submerged part of our impoverished individualities, from another angle everything is particular when it is a question of our poor little submerged solitary consciousnesses. So to briefly ally ourselves with the language of reason we say that the only concern that we should have before a given artwork is that of its value in relation to us and us alone. It is useless to vainly try to erect rampart-footbridges between our islands. Since the beginning of the world love—I speak of human love—has never succeeded in this enterprise, do you honestly believe that a critic, even if sympathetic, can do what love could not?   So we still need to discover the proper criteria for assessing the value of an artistic creation in relation to ourselves and to each one of us in particular. To this question I reply by replacing the tautological and inept formula of “Art for Art’s sake” by this new formula: “Art for everything’s sake.”   Obviously this maxim is terse, but perhaps it is a bit obscure in its terseness, don’t you think, dear reader?   Have no fear, my tutelary hand of Guardian of the hidden Science will not abandon you on the threshold of mystery.   Art is not a goal, it cannot be a goal for only one goal exists: the return to primordial unity. Art will be one means among others­­—for some people—for reaching this goal. Put yourself, for a moment, in the state of exhaustion, emotion and nostalgic sadness of an exile. Good. Now recall the book is a ghost

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the intense nostalgia that surrounds all near-perfect beauty. What are tears of admiration? The love of beauty can lead the uninitiated soul to such despair! Once more enter into yourselves and tell me if the exile’s memory and the love of beauty don’t have the same hue, are not rigorously of the same nature? Ah, I know, I could never provide any proof to support this assertion, I only appeal to your profound intuition and your good faith in the inquiry.   A beautiful painting, a beautiful poem is sad like a beautiful memory that you are unable to relive. This is because earthly beauties are only the hazy images, the wayward reflections of another beauty. This other beauty you sense or recall. Besides when one leaves the terrestrial plane recalling and foretelling are the same thing, for the temporal conditions of past and future are only the illusions of our distorting senses. The important thing is the postulate of this beauty in transcendent reality.   I will not make you see this other beauty of another world as absolute and infinite. You will experience it without fully understanding. Your emotions won’t rock with the slightest wave. One must know one’s limits. My ambition is not so grand. I would only like to give you a foretaste of unity. I would simply like to take you back a little before your birth or lead you a little after your death. Once again in the starstudded plains of the beyond it’s all the same.   Prudently, slowly, gradually, I would like to give you a glimpse of the most vibrant image of the purest beauty, irresistibly seduce you, make you aware of true love, enroll you in the beautiful caravan sobbing towards the original memory.

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the alchemy of the eye: cinema, form of the mind5

  Cinema does not exist: it shall be born or die. Now it is only a shadow in the limbs of the possible, a rag among the scattered accessories of the petticoat of the human mind. To come into existence it must find its place, its moment, its necessity in the future. It has not found its role yet and cannot obtain one within the actual form of our society: it has arrived prematurely in a world too old.   I am not a film “technician” but a “technician” of the essential, I would like to say essentially of the human mind. From this point of view cinema constitutes an example of the strange imperfection of man’s powers. Applied science made an immense discovery then proved incapable of discovering the applications of its discovery – its specific object. Out of ignorance science has forced film to serve ridiculous ends. Like a child who invents dynamite and then eats it.   Unable to find cinema’s raison d’être, until now man has not been able to gauge the importance of his invention.   To look into the obstacles opposing the existence of cinema is precisely to put contemporary society, the modern mind and Western civilization on trial.   Cinema is exemplary when faced with the vanity of intellectuals who still believe themselves to be independent. This latest form of expression is, more markedly than any

5. Written in 1932, published in Les Cahiers Jaunes, no. 4 (1933), spécial “Cinéma 33”. [tr.]

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other, subject to the oppression of our social state.   Absolute dictatorship of capital: of onerous production, but an immediate source of profits, cinema is merely an industry (regime of competition and corporations) and as such the sole criteria used to judge it is the “benefits” that it can procure.   With nationalism come quotas and protectionism. With the hypocrisy of liberalism comes censure (and, to top it all, approved by most directors). With the imbecility of individualism come the affected acting of actors, the megalomania of directors and the total absence of unity in their investigations. With the democratic spirit comes submission to the myth of the public, the excuse of all reactionary routines. Finally with imperialism come the lovely roles of the thug to knock the masses senseless, the disseminator of patriotic propaganda and the agent provocateur for the next war.   Slave to the economic regime, cinema, like any other of the mind’s modes of expression, finds itself needing to make a sweet choice: freedom or death.   “Is cinema an art?” It is quite obvious that this frequent and sinister question would have to be answered unequivocally in the affirmative, but only if cinema were to be miraculously and suddenly freed from all the material constraints that weigh upon it. But again doomed to die, helpless it would be handed over to the individual fantasies of people who have never understood that an actual artistic expression can only be justified if it responds to a specific need of the moment that it alone is able to satisfy. Handed over to the capitalist conception of art, cinema merely becomes a disinterested (meaning useless) form of play, and destined to serve as a distraction (after dinner) to elevate the mind 18

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(and consequently facilitate digestion) through the sense of beauty (?). And so cinema would share the same sad lot as poetry, painting and music.   More generally every intellectual attitude implied by our culture, our civilization, our beliefs and traditions is absolutely opposed to the existence of cinema (for example: the ravages of traditional psychology in most films). Clearly cinema has nothing to do in this slave galley.   Since its invention until the present time all cinematic production has come to naught and reached a dead-end. The only purpose for all this activity would seem to be to perfect and put the finishing touches on an instrument destined for some future use. Deprived of meaning and purpose in the actual state of our present society, inevitably cinema will precede and embody the very essence of the social landscape of the future.   All economic and social upheaval, every coming revolution will only realize, sooner or later, the synthesis of valid trends that our bygone era watches develop with regret. From this parallel revolution of human values in all domains a new culture must be born, another civilization based on a different system of knowledge.   Not having the space to demonstrate, I can only state that to the Marxist determinism of social evolution towards a communist state without class, family or religion corresponds an evolution of thought: to the degree that the dialectic mind will defeat mechanistic reason, the present scientific-religious phase will be succeeded by a phase of (non-idealist and non-materialistic) monistic thought. Anti-individualism and dialectical determinism will create a morality without responsibility, a new idea of man. The evolution of the human mind must achieve the synthesis the book is a ghost

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of discursive reason and primitive participatory thinking.6 It is a good idea to first proceed with a dialectical reduction from the religious act to magical sociology and from the marvelous (i.e. “supernatural”) to the very nature of the human mind.   Now, in this last investigation which is the very one that occupies us, cinema, due to its potential, has been forced to play a broad role.   By setting aside the discoveries, possible in the near future, of colour film and of film in space (film-in-relief is a psychological error) which do not yet exist, we actually have at our disposal silent film on the one hand and talkies on the other: in other words mobile relations of forms, of surfaces of light and shadow and sound.   Furthermore, if the eye of the camera does not see lines in nature, we nevertheless have mobile relationships of lines and sounds thanks to animated films.   Cinegraphic vision is obtained by means of a succession of images that recreate movement with the illusion of life. For, in the most general sense, life is a rhythm, a succession, an alternation, a continual palpitation of being and nonbeing, of presence and absence, a pure breath in which the existence of inhalation follows the void of exhalation.   The vision of film is a rhythm, in other words a movement connected to absence; it constitutes the first condition that allows us to envisage the possible future of dialectical cinema, of cinema as a form of the mind. 6. “Primitive participatory thinking” is a reference to the thought of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, particularly his notion of “mystical participation”, which according to Carl Jung, “denotes a peculiar kind of psychological connection with objects, and consists in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity.” [tr.] 20

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  The evolution of mind-forms, the movement natural to the mind, according to Hegel, is endowed with an indefinite perfectibility and can at the extreme aspire to an absolute solution because “the dialectic of nature is the same as that of our mind.” The tree grows by syllogisms: the germination of the world is a growing plant. The idea only develops by encountering itself in its negation like the Seed that Hegel defined thus: through the mediatory idea of exteriority, the basic fabric of eternal cosmic becoming, the idea denies being itself in order to affirm itself in the form of nature.   Here is the sole but immense raison d’être of cinema: being the mediator between mind and nature, it can express in movement and perceptible forms the evolving of the forms of the mind. If one day man decides on this goal, cinema can become a means of expression of which the “invention” will be almost as important as those of language and writing, specifically plastic language.   Thus cinema, as a means of research and experiences, will have become a mode of knowledge, an actual form of the mind. * * *   It is not only speculations on the nature of cinema that can give rise to these conclusions, but also the mere watching of the films which are, these days, presented to the public.   It is necessary to note: why is cinema subjected to only the most insignificant and idiotic activities of the human mind like the novel or operetta? Why not instead choose as its aim the highest expressions of the mind, such as poetry and metaphysics in the particular sense that I use these the book is a ghost

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two terms?   The answer is obvious: every intelligent attempt is rendered impossible by the economic constraints of our society.   But to the sole, entirely theoretical possibility of such a use of cinema the following objection is frequently raised: the camera’s cow eye sees and registers images in a crude and mechanical way, without choosing between them or capturing the qualities that the mind’s perception grants them.   It is advisable to particularly note that this reproach is not addressed to cinema proper but to photography. Nor does it apply to animated films. Photography is arbitrarily opposed to the “art of painting” with its harmonies and its pitiful spirit of decoration. In fact, this objection can only be usefully directed against the use of cinema for artistic and naturalistic ends that are of no real interest.   The truth is that the filmmaker must choose his images not in nature, but in a studio among the most diverse test shots, for it is obvious that the result of a shot, any shot, remains unpredictable.   Moreover, in film, the photography of an object as it is should only play a very limited role. In this role, the vision of the camera, to which the human eye has become familiar for a long time now, only serves to symbolize the impersonal, social, objective aspect of things in opposition to the subjective vision of the filmmaker. According to an alternating rhythm, the object appears as it is seen through the lens, then as it is perceived by the human consciousness through the fog of states that transform it, the veil of tears or the synthetic light of inspiration, fear or charm.   Traditional psychology has been able to draw a few 22

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effects from film: the faculty of attention illustrated by the shot’s angle and close-ups—the associations of ideas by the dissolve—memory by superimposing images.   But only the psychology of states will be able to make use of all the possibilities of the cinema destined for the visual representation of moving forms of the mind.   The eye of the camera can become the mind’s eye. For the movement of film reproduces the movement of the mind in relation to the movement of life, due to its variations of speed until then unknown to the senses and which allow consciousness to discover new rhythms.   Due to time lapse: the germination of a plant; the growth of a beard.   Due to slow motion: the movements of a dream; a flying man; the flight of angels; the gestures of ghosts.   Due to the relativity of sizes on the screen: a dice or a cork adventitiously replaces the pyramids; a ball of cotton becomes a cloud in the sky.   Due to the deformations and plays in space: the Himalayas in the bezel of a ring; a train circles a human head, the stagecoaches of the Far West and the swell of the sea on a sleeper’s pillow; a drama playing itself out in a black fingernail.   Due to the relativity of time and space on the screen allowing the juxtaposition of all images.   Also the eye of the camera can become the eye of the nightmare, the gaze of a sorcerer, the key to metamorphosis and grasping the lyrical act in its instantaneous becoming, the poetic metamorphosis in its essence: by means of a meticulous but simple technique (out-of-focus, dissolve and superimpositions), it can reproduce the mysterious paranoic transmutation that causes the mind to submit the book is a ghost

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to the objects, upon suddenly discovering their secret hallucinatory horror; all the too lucid visions of delirium; the curtain that becomes a ghost; the crocodile that is drawn in the shape of a tree, becomes real, moves, then is reabsorbed back into the pattern of the wood, and remains a tree; the eye of the cloud, the sky’s faces in the branches, the tormented screaming wildlife of the wind.   Lastly, when photography is unable to capture certain mental images, across a very broad domain, then the role of animated film arises (alone or mixed with cinegraphic images). Perhaps even more than a humoristic value this mode of expression possesses a poetic value. It contains all the possibilities of moving lines and sounds.   The acoustic possibilities of cinema will appear when one has decided to investigate the specific role of sound subordinated to the unfurling of images: a great luminous cry, the modulations of the iridescence of water.   One cannot form an opinion on film sound as long as a cinematic diction itself is yet to be discovered.   Musical adaptations can only result in horribly artistic results. But, freed of music and language, cinema could bring together rhythms of movements and sounds (particularly those of primitive percussion instruments) capable of physiologically provoking collective states of exaltation, trances, etc. * * *   The true role of the filmmaker should be, by means of these various techniques, to adapt one’s entire mental life to the screen. From this point of view, mind-forms are of two kinds: on the one hand those that can be rendered directly 24

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perceptible as a visual and acoustic appearance, on the other hand, those that cannot.   In the first category belong, above all, phosphenes and dreams. In this case the filmmaker must compare the images that he draws from deep within himself with the various images that he projects onto the screen until the experience gives him the intuition of a closely approximate coincidence.   In the essay Experimental Metaphysics7 we have dealt with certain extreme concepts, certain ecstatic intuitions that stand out in very particular states of consciousness and that are always indissolubly bound to the frenetic rhythm of the murmur of the blood and to the synchronous dance of geometric and colored phosphenes. It would be of the greatest interest to know whether such states can be experimentally provoked by external projection, on a screen, in a dark hall, through a rhythm of visual images and sound. Such a spectacle, basically equivalent to the magic ceremonies of primitive tribes, would allow experimental access to variations in states of consciousness.8   The projection of images from dreams or deliriums onto the screen—outside of the services that it could provide Freudian psychoanalysis—could play an important role in the understanding of the primordial myths of humankind. Due to such objectified images being subjected to the criteria of the collective disturbance that they would 7. By Réné Daumal in Le Grand Jeu, no. 4. An English translation is available in The Theory of the Great Game (Atlas Press, 2015). [tr.] 8. This isn’t only a question in regard to the genesis of the cinépoem or cinemagic. Above all it is an intervention that puts into play all the moral action of the twentieth century. Logically, it will no doubt be necessary for the Soviet sun to dawn on that day. Experimentally, I ask and I wait for Western Patronage to grant the means to realize this. the book is a ghost

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provoke, it might be possible to return to the depths of the mind, its very source. It could be a means of research for the demonstration of the universality of the world of dreams, legends and mythologies. It could be a dream thrown into the subterranean abysses of man to reach the unknown gulf of geneses, to fathom the deep place where monsters and marvels lurk, matrix of African or Polynesian masks, Chinese dragons, the demonic apparitions that haunted the Middle Ages, werewolves and vampires. In this way one could bring into the light of day the caverns of dazzling magic and the temples of sordid religions.   Certain processes, certain moving forms of the mind cannot be directly reduced to visual or acoustic images. In such cases the filmmaker could however objectify them on the screen thanks to their Swedenborgian correspondences, or, according to phenomenological language, thanks to other images belonging to the same affective category. Here one must understand “affective category” in the sense of: principle of unity for the mind in different representations that affect it in the same manner; a generality that is not conceptual but felt; coloration, tonality common to certain representations that the subject immediately grasps as belonging to all those of the same category. Such a symbolism is characteristic of primitive thought, but also of all poetic thought: everything is connected to everything else according to a network of mysterious forces of which man is, though usually unaware of it, a center of emission and reception. The knowledge of totemism (man bonds to the clan, the animal, the vegetable, the mineral) depends on such experiences.   Do these too brief indications give one a glimpse of what cinema could become if applied to the knowledge of man’s 26

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abysses: dialectical cinema; the cinema, a form of the mind?   Note: The only films that allow one not to regret the birth of film are: scientific documentaries on:   1) The phenomena of crystallizations; the growth of crystal;   2) The germination of a plant;   3) The metamorphoses of insects.   As well as the Soviet films intended for social and political propaganda. If these films in their domains are valuable, is it not because they escape the material and spiritual obstacles that I mentioned and because they include the elements of what the cinema that I foresee should include?

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from the metamorphoses of poetry9

  To return to the strict domain of poetry, I believe that the degradation of certain of its elements over time, its perpetual erosion is the direct consequence of the actual form of the occidental mind.   For the emotional shock that engenders the lyrical state to be produced between the work and the reader, the poet is forced to employ stunning images, and these images become ineffective as soon as they are familiar enough to enter the public domain.   For example, the poet resorts to images belonging to the life of dream and consequently pertaining to the profound disturbance that the dream state engenders or to the deep subconscious memories of childhood and its bizarre lines of thought since that is where the profound life of the spirit has taken refuge. For the poet of yore all metaphor had an equal and permanent value, since all primitive life bathes in this animistic and magical atmosphere peculiar to the lyrical state, whereas common sense grants more value to the images of the external world than to those of dream— instead of the equivalence of all images—precluding our faculty for transmutation.10   Furthermore, for himself and for the same reasons, so as to provoke within himself the receptive state of inspiration, the poet must resort to unaccustomed mechanisms of thought, put into play unknown automatisms, investigate his freedom in an undirected activity of the mind, contemplate 9. This is an excerpt from a talk that Gilbert-Lecomte gave at the Sorbonne on December 8, 1932. [tr.] 10. In childhood, for example, the world of dreams is not differentiated from the waking world, there is a unity and continuity where[as] an adult sees occasional confusions and interferences, an awake child sees apparitions. the book is a ghost

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the involuntary unexpected result of words which, free of their meaning, make love.   Such is the order of investigations that characterize this quite vast mode of activity that I call poetry—though somewhat restrictive in this sense for I am neglecting most works in verse—immense in that I am not limiting it to lyrical expression, nor even to the written expression of human thought, but rather what I mean by this term is a mode of knowledge that is opposed to discursive reason.   Instead of considering poetry as merely one art among others, or even limiting it to all the various arts, we should consider it in life too: poetry as a specific state of consciousness engendered by an emotional shock whose nature is difficult to analyze, as the transmission of this state, and as the systematic study of the processes that make this transmission possible.   I couldn’t put it better than Paul Éluard did in his definition that is so obvious that no one had ever dreamt of formulating it and consequently most probably forgot to think of it: “The poet is far more one who inspires than one who is inspired.”   It is a good idea to then identify the active forms of poetry including written and plastic expression, artwork or even expression in action—a few of the actions which are eminently capable of being defined as poetic. As well as the passive form, namely the lyrical state engendered by a poetic expression or act in a receptive consciousness.   Here we are already led to make use of the word “inspiration”, which according to the dictionary means: action of making air enter the lungs, also a state of the soul directly under the influence of a supernatural power, creative enthusiasm. 30

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  Looking at each of the terms in this definition “making air enter the lungs” makes me think of the oft-repeated etymological meaning of the word poet, namely “creator”.   Like the kabbalistic idea, the Hindu idea of creation basically develops not according to the absurd schema “to make something by molding nothingness” which means absolutely nothing, as nothingness is an unthinkable concept, but on the contrary to conceive the creator prior to creation like an infinite and eternal fullness which must withdraw into itself to create space and the worlds that it contains, i.e. Zimzum11 (the reason that every second of life throbs with being and nothingness).   And for the Hindus the breath of Brahma according to its rhythm, echoed by the tides and blood, alternately projects the worlds and draws them back to his breast.   Inspiration for the poet is not to be possessed by supernatural forces but a state of vacuity, of receptivity that opens his consciousness to the subtle, mysterious influence of things. To see an object poetically is to become the object. To change into it. Metamorphosis is the key to the poetic state.   In his mode of thought the poet, like primitive man participating in the nature of the universe surrounding him, appeals to affective categories that explain totemism, as well as all poetic metaphor.   The poetic shock is born from the metaphor created by bringing together two terms that are as far apart as possible. But a conflagration is born from this encounter because it allows an unification according to profound laws 11. A Hebrew term meaning “contraction”, according to the Kabbalist Isaac Luria zimzum refers to the self-imposed withdrawal of a part of God to enable the creation of the universe. [tr.] the book is a ghost

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that belong as much to nature as to the mind.   “Affective category” should not be understood in the Kantian or Aristotelian sense of the term “category”, but as a principle of unity for the mind in different representations that affect it in the same way.   It is a question of a generality that is no longer conceptual but felt, in which the general element is found not in a constant characteristic, an object of intellectual perception, but in coloration, the tonality common to certain representations that the subject immediately grasps as belonging to everything.   The union of consciousness and its object gives birth to the sole possibility of a true knowledge—even if the object was the whole of the cosmos—for according to Hegel the dialectic of nature is the same as that of our mind.   The tree grows by syllogisms.   The idea only develops by encountering its negation.   Hence the Seed: through the intermediary idea of exteriority woven from the eternal cosmic evolution the idea denies being itself in order to prove itself in the form of nature.   It’s ultimately a question of mystical knowledge, for if the noumena cannot enter the individual limits of human consciousness such as it is, consciousness can however become vaster, the mind can be the unknown which can only be known in this way.   By turns, one hears of contemporary poetry’s decline and, on the contrary, of its renaissance.   Being given the causes that are usually presented to justify these two opinions, I’m not sure which side to take.   Those who speak of poetry’s decline are generally reactionary minds who want to systematically deny the 32

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importance of the research and experiences carried out in this domain, not only for the past fifty years, but especially since the war.   As for those who speak of a renaissance, I would side with their opinion as long as they recognize what is valuable in the efforts that have been made, regardless of the intensity of the poetic life in its own domain. However I believe that it is impossible to ignore that, with each passing day, poetry plays a less important, more limited role in our intellectual life.   And I am alluding here, on the one hand, to the long decline that follows its course throughout the development of our civilization and culture due to their own nature, the speed of which increases and all the more so these days.   Such a phenomena is no more reducible to the good or bad orientation of a literary activity, than to its greater or lesser vitality. Beyond any social and economic causes it touches the very heart of the entire evolution of the mind.   Nonetheless I still don’t believe that it must end with the death of poetry in a more or less distant future. On the contrary, it stands to reason that we will reach the junction of a great cycle of human thought, that we are living the very antithesis, which is more complete with each passing day, of the poetic mind; yet already the synthesis develops to the point at which it must be born anew.   And yet, what heralds poetry’s renaissance should not be seen as a mere return to the past—once again giving rise to a primitive mentality in man—but as a new combination of all magical and discursive knowledge leading to an original concept of what it means to be human.   Without a doubt the sense of poetic wonder belongs first and foremost to children and savages. the book is a ghost

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  One must recognize that it is in such states of human consciousness that the poetic act appears in all its purity, in all its integrity.   The poet is then a sorcerer, poetry a talisman, a legitimate art form, a way to deeply affect one’s sensibility, to penetrate man’s interior by breaking down the constraints imposed by individuality.

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lizard, crack12

  I would like to write a pamphlet called “La Lézarde.”13 “Une lézarde”—a crack? You do know what a crack is, don’t you? Remember that unforgettable story by Edgar Allan Poe: “The Fall of the House of Usher.”   In the sides of an old edifice, a crack is a line with mysterious twists and turns, a fateful sign: for centuries this edifice has been eroding from within, deep down to its foundation. This monument of pride, erected in the heart of deserts plagued with pestilential swamps, has long resisted and opposed the rages of thunder, the ravages of the great winds gathered in the caverns of the zodiac, the four corners of space. Then, late one night, suddenly, in the silence, the thin black line splits into a fissure, in the blink of an eye widens into a crevice, in a flash zigzags the length of the retaining wall. Now it is too late.   The human eye barely catches a glimpse of the sign’s transformation, and it all comes tumbling down: one’s eardrum bursts and the echo of the tumult and fracas resounds long after the disappearance of any secular pride that once stood there. All that remains is the horizontal shroud of the desert.   The eye has been sleeping for centuries. It didn’t wake 12. Published in the celebrated literary magazine Mercure de France in 1939, this was the last essay written by Gilbert-Lecomte. In the posthumous selection entitled Testament, Arthur Adamov chose this particular text to represent Gilbert-Lecomte’s essays as he felt it “summarizes his thought better than the others, and in a simple unadorned style.” [tr.] 13. Here Gilbert-Lecomte plays on the feminine noun in the original French title, “La Lézarde” which is a crack; however in French the masculine noun “lézard” is a lizard, which leads Gilbert-Lecomte to riff on a creative interpretation of “lézarde” as both a crack and a female lizard. [tr.] the book is a ghost

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up in time. There’s nothing left to do. It’s all ruins and death.  “Une lézarde”? Do you know what a lézarde is?   Perhaps it is also simply a female lizard. For the Ancient Ones, the savages (they are no more primitive than you or I, quite to the contrary), lizards and mice are one of man’s souls. The man of flesh, as well as the animals that he resembles, advance slowly, they go laboriously down the path of their desires; they lose time going from here to there. On the other hand consider the lizard, the frog, the mouse, certain insects: they are here and, suddenly, they are there. With a leap, maybe, but one never seen or barely glimpsed. From the utter stillness of stone to the imperceptible extreme of speed. Like Zeno’s arrow, at each moment, lizard and crack can be seen sitting perfectly still, and yet never in the same place.   Where is the human spirit headed? Who knows?   But I do know that it is living its darkest, most catastrophic hour.   Wherever I look, all that I see are cracks, the tight lips of which suddenly part so that the gaping black mouth can swallow everything up for good.   Humanity’s skull is cracked.   Its heart is cracked.   Its wretched guts twist – iliac passion14 – teeming with lizards and frogs.   What blindness, what torpor, what sleep smothers everyone?   What seal of molten iron pressed directly on their lips prevents them from screaming out of the great fear, the ancient anguish when confronted by the giant gaping crack 14. Colic due to an obstruction of the bowels; also known as ileus. [tr.] 36

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criss-crossing from pediment to base, all the so-called monuments of their civilization: cultural buildings, temples of justice, churches, political pagodas, ethics, aesthetics, economics, mysticism, from the Stock Exchange to the Institute, from the Sorbonne to the Senate, from the Louvre to Sacré-Coeur, from the Chamber of Deputies to the public urinals?   Where is the human spirit headed, the total spirit of all humankind? But today, where is everyone headed, from the day of their birth to the night of their death? They have no idea; they are asleep. If they weren’t asleep, they couldn’t bear to live for the blink of a clear eye.   We live in dark times. Never, in all of History, has there been a blacker night. What is at issue is the History of human thought, reflected in the mind of artists.   Just as, in the maternal womb, the human embryo reproduces in nine months the entire evolution of animal life (ontogenesis reflecting philogenesis, like the microcosm the macrocosm), likewise, from the beginning of childhood to the end of adolescence, the child marked with the sign of the spirit relives analogically the ancient drama of becoming totally human. The approach of adulthood, celebrated in ancestral tribes through the various mysteries of initiation into the second birth, is now greeted by the most ineluctable of curses: “Death or living sleep, kill yourself or, if you are too cowardly, castrate your mind, stop thinking, enslave your entire being to social automatisms (in days gone by we would be satisfied with circumcising your penis...!)”   And, the height of disgrace, in this sinister time in which separation and evils fill almost everyone, all those who are earthbound, all those whose role on earth is to produce babies and work, still asleep, numb, without rebelling. the book is a ghost

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  Woe to those who are born creators, visionaries.   A sincere man, woman or child—if they are at all aware of the fate of the human spirit—can they truly accept the rancid, moldy, old teachings that others want to inculcate in them, the erroneous, outdated, rotten, unconnected, baseless, aimless knowledge that they are force fed?   No, it hasn’t always gone well! It’s all worse than ever now. Nothing proceeds from Diversity to Oneness anymore. All primordial sense of Unity has been lost. Reduced to dead rituals, to the utility of moral precepts, religions have even forgotten the mystic passions that they once employed to their own material ends.   A few acute psychological remarks is all that modern philosophy amounts to. Any contemporary thinker who claimed to expose a complete philosophical system (from theogony to logics) would be buried beneath an avalanche of ridicule, especially if he added that he is ready to sacrifice his life to the truth of his synthesis. (Once upon a time, a certain Giordano Bruno...)   History: an incredible story of political turpitude. A history professor must ignore all Hindu or Chinese civilization but must know the date of the slightest diplomatic manoeuver that occurred in Europe during the last century.   Since the invention of the printing press and the spread of primary education, all literature has been reduced to the level of a poseur or prostitute, with very rare but great exceptions. Yet discussing those exceptions is all that matters.   And lastly, science: somewhat silly, but basically honest. The only activity of the mind that has progressed morally since the end of the last century (the anthropocentricism of scientism giving way to bona fide scientific objectivity). 38

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Unfortunately, in these times of disaster and separation science proceeds, without any basis or goal, in vain abstraction. The work accomplished in its strict field is valid except for the fact that it is based evermore on unpredictable and outrageous hypotheses. What can a human being conscious of this torrent of absurdities do? An old law states that the antidote can always be found next to the poison.   So anyone who is stifled by such a situation, anyone who cannot bear such a life, who is tormented, who moans in dissatisfaction, who gnaws on their fists, whose gut is twisted in knots, must carry the remedy, a little remedy, deep within themselves.   Whoever is truly aware of evil also bears the antidote to evil: in this case, the human being who remains awake to the horror of the world in which he lives, and thus who must be a creator.   Roughly, a creator is a doctor, a particular being through whom the future of the Spirit of his time is filtered. He is a human valve: from his mouth bursts the revelation of the total human spirit, while the world is dying from an overly long silence.   He is, among modern man, among scarce human consciousness, the one who has retained the gift of primitive consciousness, of the primitive life of the protoplasm: the one who knows the meaning of Unity, the one who founds the inherent antinomies in each era, the one whose mind has the sense of Unity as its heart, and his body the sense of love.   But, alas! Looked at more closely, ridiculously the spirit of each era filters through an obsolete and inadequate vocabulary via all those who are chosen by it. They are the book is a ghost

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few, very few. And yet, most of them are incomplete. One can’t find one Rimbaud per millenium! The birth of a genuine creator requires an extraordinary and extremely rare conjunction of nature, race, heredity, temperament, and physiological characteristics, not including the morbid contribution, the pathological disturbances that are almost always necessary in our damned era, to open the lightning crack through which the universal soul will slowly filter into the sleeping privileged consciousness.   So, in your opinion am I succumbing to mythology? I say not! But the question should be asked. If man wants to account for the era that he is living in, he requires one postulate and only one: the universality of human consciousness. That is, the historical human mind, sum of all individual consciousnesses, possesses a unity, a personality, an essential difference, neither more nor less demonstrable than that of each individual consciousness. Thus the laws governing the evolution of the human mind, according to the vast mirrors bearing countless reflections of the great analogy, are those of the microcosm (individual human consciousness) as well as those of the macrocosm (biological processes, laws of nature).   In truth, for me it’s not at all a question of a postulate, nor, strictly speaking, of an axiom, even less of a provable theorem. It’s a question... it’s a question of the region of the mind that is yet to be explored if you will, at the final hour, to save humanity from the inevitability of its complete and utter demise.   Against the grain of all vocabularies so far accepted, I call this activity of the mind: “poetry” (we are far from the art of making verse). Yet this “poetry” will save the world or else the world will perish. 40

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  Let’s go back to our example: mentally review all the representations of the evolution of the universal human mind elaborated by individual consciousnesses over the past few centuries: from the most simplistic – the simple straight ascendant of an undetermined and unilinear progress—up to the frightening cycle of eternal return, while passing through the ellipse and the spiral, and don’t forget the law of oscillations between two opposite poles—the pendulum of the evolution oscillating from negative affirmation to affirmative negation—as well as the possibility of evolution appearing on one plane while accompanied by its reflection, involution, on a parallel but opposite plane. Add the biological law of sudden variations succeeding long lethargies, during which the power of the coming upheaval accumulates in the stillness. Also note the law of return of vast imbricated cycles, weaving into shorter rhythms. And above all, don’t leave out the law, the great ternary law of rhythm: the point of equilibrium between the systole and diastole of the heart, the inhalation and exhalation of the lungs, the ebb and flow of the ocean, the phases of the moon, the female menstrual cycle, day and night, the course of the stars.   All these laws are true. True according to the poverty of the human mind in which the truest truths are the most contradictory. Possessed by an “other” spirit, it is the poet’s task to grasp the sudden dazzling synthesis.   The secret of the Word: the dialectics of the human mind is the same as that of nature (and consequently, of the evolution of the universal human mind).   Or better, in order to try its hand at abstract speculations (our worst crime... I don’t have time to explain), language, which is utilitarian by nature when it abandons its immediate the book is a ghost

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object—practical life—finds dialectics to be its most useful crutch.   A crutch that is a bridge between logical thinking and magical thinking. A bridge between past and future. A hump bridge. In the middle, the present is found. From there, certain rhythms of the human mind can be seen, provided that they are neither too big nor too small, neither too far away nor too close; of course, from there, it is impossible to distinguish both the origin of humanity and the near future. But, between them, the evolution stretching across centuries is visible.   To the three ages of Humanity—according to Auguste Comte who believed in a unilinear progress, arbitrarily crowned by the positivist era—one only need oppose the dialectical evolution of all the vital processes of nature or thinking (from the simple growth of a plant to the ancient trinitarian theogenies).   In the history of the human mind: to the thinking of so-called primitive times, to thinking that is magical, prelogical, mystical or participatory (intuitive man bathes unconsciously in nature: thesis) is opposed the thought of modern times: regression of the magical mind imprisoned in the arts and especially in religions, unexpected development of the discursive thought that gives rise to objective science and its great discoveries (antithesis: man opposed to nature, whence involution of the thinking-in-union, evolution of the knowledge opposing subject and object).   That is the celebrated Progress, idol of the 19th century. Simply forgetting that all positive evolution is counterbalanced by an inversely parallel regression. Hence the great modern angst.   This universal, but nameless, angst is an appeal from 42

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the depths of the human being to a redeeming RevelationRevolution. The human mind suffers its death throes while waiting for the imminent catastrophe, for the greatest upheaval in history. This is the death vigil, the bloody sweat before the great death of the second phase of human thought, the destruction of all its institutions and the miraculous birth, out of its ruins, of the third phase: that of human synthesis.   Centuries of specialization, of absolute royalty granted to discursive reasoning, at the cost of all of man’s obscure inner powers, demand to be violently overthrown.   Nowadays, all that exists in the mind reveals the need for a return to the interior of everything.15   But make no mistake: the past is dead and gone; all those who despise the future, all those who look towards the religious and theocratic past, are deluded, they stop only halfway to consciousness.   If all the old institutions, riddled with cracks as they are, have not already collapsed into dust, it’s because the new synthesis, the one that will engulf them in the fury of its immemorial “already perceived” light has not yet taken birth.   It’s a question of giving the rational and scientific culture of contemporary man the basis, the foundation, the roots, his ancient soul of yesteryear, his bush soul with its dialectical monism, destroyer of all the antinomies (mindmatter, dream-reality, etc.), its sense of the symbols and analogies, the rituals and universal myths that connect man to the earth and the earth to heaven.   This is the great role of those I call poets, artists, and 15. From Romanticism to Freud. the book is a ghost

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prophets.16 Alone at the forefront of the human spirit, they struggle “at the borders of the boundless and the future.”17

16. Edgar Poe, Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Jarry, Apollinaire and the surrealists, as well as the actual poets of the avant-garde. 17. I am not deluding myself about the, to be honest, too schematic, falsely dogmatic, somewhat simplistic character of such an account as this: it is the price of any brief statement on such a serious subject. The lack of space, in the absence of genius, is the culprit. I don’t believe in short catchy paradoxes: ideas only have value due to the clarity of the presentation of their particular applications.   The best and only rule of style is to achieve the greatest evocation by the simplest means: to say as much and as well as one can in few words. Yet it’s a good idea not to start at the creation of the world when one only has a few lines available. Hence, dear readers, my apologies. 44

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Camille Hortensia, drawn at the request of René Clément, December 1925

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Part 2: Notes & Fragments

the work’s effectiveness

To conquer the blind mind of the individual and the darkness of a separate dungeon. To conquer the paralysis of prejudices, routines, rust, habit, deformation due to error, sclerosis of specialties. To conquer sleep, lethargy, numbness. To conquer rage, maniacal automatism maintained by exploiters of the ancestral trigger preceding taboo. To conquer the deforming ankylosis, the degrading deforming, demoralizing, atrophying, debasing ankylosis, the habit of understanding while asleep due to the habitual reference points of automatic classifications which have eliminated the possibility of a lucid effort to open (fear of unmasking) consciousness to the new idea and then see it objectively.

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language, aesthetics

  The gentlest and most ferocious ancestral race: the descendants of Indra-Brahma, the shepherd Krishna— famed for the devastating violence of his feelings and the profound glow of the abyss of his thought, called in his language the magical radiance: “Glamor.” I hear the echo of the death knell, I hear the echo of love. What name is more beautiful than Glamor, knell of love, love and despair, despair of love, death song, love song. *   I have never been able to believe that/in chance, that unthinkable concept, that bastard of impotency [could have ever been at the origin of anything].   It seems impossible to me that, primarily in the same language, but also, in two different languages, no matter how far apart in time and space, two words, with completely different meanings, can be uttered with the same sound without any mystical bond connecting them. I understand however that it is a question of nothing less than raising the pun well above syllogism, of deifying it.   Through symbol and consubstantiality the primitive soul excludes chance. *   “Poetry is a touching metaphysics.” (René Ghil) *   Two kinds of poetry: words that give rise to delirium and words sought out to describe, the first time, one of the First Images that are the basis of being.   Man has no idea how to express himself. Only external utility guides his language. * 48

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  I am absolutely certain that an expression adequate to the utmost limits of my thought would inevitably bring about an immediate and universal adherence. *   The great enemy outside: the paralyzing habit, the deadly laziness of consciousness.   The inner obstacle: the long journey of expression always circling towards perfection. To strum all the strings.   In the end, search for pure expression (example: the Tao). *   Abstract word: threadbare disfigured residue (often preceded by the negative), of the concrete unsuitable for metaphysics, only suitable for myth, symbol. *   The use of certain disparaged words (for example “ideal”) is henceforth impossible […] Useful to study form. *   Poetry, mode of knowledge, has for unique cause and sole justification, the struggle against amnesia.   A shocking object, the state that creates it, infallibly bears the unique characteristic of paramnesia.   Paramnesic emotion is the sole key to the mysterious connections that unite aesthetic sentiment (lyrical act) to amorous emotion.

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act of deprivation (tension)

Written as dictated by an imperious necessity. First and urgent duty. Terrifying panic at the heart of everything. “Intelligence is the abduction of life” “Consciousness is the stable function of distress”   Suffering—naught but suffering—at the heart of all living beings, attesting to life (the only evidence that is undeniable, universal, inseparable). Anguish, the first and oldest human feeling, is the very function of consciousness. The ultimate vision attained by the human mind at its peak, in a rare moment of utmost lucidity, leaves the mind dazed and without any other reaction than frozen stupor in face of the absurd evidence of the scandal of being, and of being limited lacking knowledge of oneself. The existence of consciousness is frightening and insoluble. In face of this anguish so essential to man, in its naked expression, all other thoughts are vain. However I am determined. Where does this anguish come from? From a notion of the eternal, immobile, absolute. How do I know of the existence of what I can neither know, nor realize? Though I might not know where consciousness is headed, I can know from whence it comes, memory being its privilege. What is the basis of knowledge? Why do the operations of the mind coincide with external phenomena?   But for consciousness to know both its grandeur and its limits, what is required is a unity of substance in everything, essential identity, homology of structure (morphology), similitude of rhythms, parallelism of evolutions. 50

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metaphysics of absence

  Homeopathic dilution represents a specific absence.   A problem both cosmic and biological: how can the absence of a substance be more effective for a living organism than the actual substance itself?   Concrete absence. Why shouldn’t each entity (cold, absence of heat) have a fixed quantity of absence in which the qualitative sense of what it was would still persist? (in fact its ghost).   Life in order to exist requires absence more than reality.   Life occurs between two nonexistences: past and future.   Rhythm: movement bound to absence.   Life is the rhythm of quality and quantity. Energy is the force of matter as it disappears—sign of absence.   Life is a fragile hybrid throbbing, at each instant, between being and nothingness.   Man: the power of his life is supported by all the latent absences of various ancestors of whom he is not the image.   Purity of the nonexistent future.   Even if everyone were to suddenly vanish from space and time, the mere fact of their Absence would suffice to cause all of humanity to remain identical to what it was.

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notes for terror on earth or vision by the epiphysis

  Vision by the epiphysis. We are living in dark days, darker and darker, ever faster Day by Day. The Universe cast in darkness. For eons, astronomical phases spanning millions of years, when did the flash of the mind tear open a fraction of a second in the night’s chaos? It’s a difficult task for the wise men who maintain the world by thinking it, bearers of a thousand thunders.   Is there a lost secret in Atlantis?   The stranger visits the body, the desert of the diaphragm illuminated by a sun alternately blue and red of the heart, the recluses and rails of muscles ...   God, inparticulate matter, consistency of eternity.   Venous collectors where the white larvae devour one another with the red monsters.   Everywhere a horizontality extends and admits the perpendicular of the spirit, being suffers crucifixion.   On the curve of the ocean, on the floating line of the gaze where the honor of leaving droppings falls upon the bird of tempests which sleeps without feet and slashes open its veins on the sharp peaks of the air, far from gulls and cormorants.   [At the pole]   In the desert where the statue of Memnon sings with the first rays of the sun, skulls full of slaves, cacti, sphinxes.   In the land of the great Phantom-Reindeer. *

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 Phosphenes18: action on waters of the will, the conception of images, perpetual amnesia. *   I want to realize the dimensionless space separating the seeing point of my eye from the screen of the eyelid.   A dream never lasts more than a few seconds.   The vibratory waves of the sun. *   A book whose pages unfold. The arithmetic of unity. *   Rediscover childhood memories: the little monkey who raps on windows streaked with rain, little lords and ladies in the ash of an extinguished hearth, mummified babies and the caravel on the African beach. *   The purple solar palace of the heart, the hydraulic harps, the dry water, the red Monsters, the underground passages. *   The tree in man: leaf hands   The skeleton and its instructions   Morphology: types similar through race, time, space: man-bird, lion, bull   The espalier of fruit trees, of veins, arteries and nerves— the support of flesh trellisea—warp and woof * 18. According to the OED: “A subjective sensation of light produced by mechanical stimulation of the retina (as by pressure on the eyeball) or by electrical stimulation of various parts of the visual pathway.” [tr.] the book is a ghost

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  The cage of the thorax where the red eagle wings of the lungs rhythmically beat *    Echoes, murmurs, magical bursts    From life to death passing through the skin.   Primitive music.   Drum—Resonance—sounds.    Flute made from a hollow human bone: dagger:    the bones (the blood) of death grants death.    The horn of hollow horn.    The water that supports the body. Vase, mystic nave.   From the body (passing through the horn) to the shell external skeleton of grandfathers and conch, sounding horn, lung.      The waters and the hollow their thirst from below      Low and high, high and low.   Utility of inversion.   Water’s tendency to flow downwards – its invincible force       And even the stream of water       The curve of the fall      There—all the water’s force   Search the supreme peak from below   The central summit inside of everything.   The hollow, inverse goal of the void, drawn to the bottom obsessed by the hole   Representation of the human body according to the bones and waters   The architect of the body founded on the bones.   The alchemist of the body founded on the waters.   Rhymes, assonances and alliterations.   “Return to the origin of language and sound” You will 54

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know that sound and meaning are indissolubly bound, even when forgetting   Utility of inversion: the two-faced head on playing cards   Inverting high and low low and high   To the vertical axis of the body’s symmetry, add according to osteology and histology, the horizontal axis level with the navel—solar zenith—black.      Legs are merely backward arms        And yet ... look closely   As for the inverted summit:       The two eyes are the testicles      The mouth: the anus      The nose obviously the penis       The brain, the prostate with the bladder’s bag   The spinal column two-way path from sex to mind (phosphorus), and vice-versa   It’s always fruitful to see the high in the low and the low in the high, essential approach of pre-human thought.   Eternal man, haggard absent from nature.   The only way to be clairvoyant: asphyxia and congestion (yoga, drowning, narcosis).   I believe in tragedy—in the desperate will of the hyperbole that wants—yes, wants—to reach its asymptote but doesn’t make it.   Human words, that is to say old cries of desire or fear screamed by the unfortunate before the shadows and lights that conceal the world from them.   In the mental desert there is no conquered country. The act of conquest having ceased, the conquered thing is, the book is a ghost

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immediately and fatally, once again lost. Perpetual return and repetition, hence rhythm.   And all the rest is an enormous farce whose blood shrieks and laughs, the blood which plays dirty tricks and carries so many crystals of suffering.   Between me and nothingness there were no longer any forces except this last desperate appearance.   I burn, I am consumed. Slow combustion similar to that of the flame, amorous or not.   You make me dance, I mean you make me laugh.   The inside of the red mask, and the blood’s condensation, that which sticks to the face.   The thin film that limits things became as thin as possible and began to vibrate.   I bear a monotonous truth that I must illuminate with every possible fire.   To compare two objects as remote as possible—bring them together.   Concrete unity of two terms.   To break concrete opposition.   Friction of two objects—supreme unity of fire—iron and water in the blood.   Earth and water, the humid night of the Mother’s breast.   Air and fire, the promised land in which the Father believes. * 56

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  To dream of a spiritual water, perfectly transparent to the very bottom of the abyss, infinitely more liquid, clear and fluid, all white, so liquid that a swimmer couldn’t float on its surface, but would gently sink—boundless pleasure of the spiritual and fatal water in the stomach, in the lungs— breathable water, water of death.

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Drawing from a letter to René Daumal, October 7, 1925

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return of the flame

  Are we no longer part of death, inside of death? (the decapitated head that enchanted my childhood). But I know the irreducible. Homo sapiens cannot know homo sapiens, although we poor lonely men might know the dog, its instinct, that ghostly cloud in the shape of a dog that connects all dogs and through which all dogs communicate.   The line of the present, you claim enters the dark stretches of the past and future. Normally perhaps. But I who am not normal I only see from close up, holes of mystery...   Each of man’s acts disrupts several stretches of centuries within him.   I have only ever loved heads and genitalia—human strength—in the shape of a phosphorescent top.   The irreducible forgotten others: convicts, common law, madmen, hospitals, children. Nothing denies childhood.   Stupidity of those who, referring to the high, claim that the low is an outrage, referring to the low, that the high is an outrage. The mystical force is in both. Antaeus of flesh.   The ecstatic and intrauterine divinization. Stupor of “prenatal consultations”.   Men preoccupied with the beyond. Yet the future made from our acts. Time, linear projection abolished in the eternal. What interests me is what is on this side, the lost memory, the admirable effort. And I feel that, for all primitives, the problem is no different.   To experience the mind’s ecstasy within the confines of time and space. The sidereal body.

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enlightenment

The race to enlightenment To play with death the perpetual game at the borders life death: struggle against amnesia. To snatch enlightenment Finally everything gathers into a single point which we feel we can get closer and closer to even though there is no chance of ever reaching it.

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ecstasy

   As ecstasy is not stupefaction, meaning a deep unconscious state pushed to the highest point of nirvanic joy, but on the contrary a paroxysm, a peak of such consciousness and of such momentum, that in a blinding flash, they are capable of rejoining the universal consciousness in an instant that would be a mathematical point.   The memory of this alone could grant omniscience and prescience the immediate intuition of all that is visible and of all that is invisible, of all that is above and of all that is below.

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the senses of being

      At the absolute limit of identity   Stone is a man (enters into the category)   The blood is the soul (to a certain degree, in a certain manner container and content)   The book is a ghost (is only disparaging or the opposite)   This key was fairy metaphor   The temptation of pessimism (more intelligent than charitable)

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notes for psychology of states — experimental metaphysics

  Eternity in life.   Moment. Five seconds – notion of eternal harmony.   “This phenomena is neither terrestrial nor celestial, but something that man in his terrestrial envelope cannot bear. One must physically transform or die. It’s a clear and indisputable feeling.”   Hence speculation about the post-human. The resurrected person no longer generates.   Psychology of states.   Through the play of changing states and the applying of attention to extremes, one can experimentally escape the duration of the flow of the will-to-live until becoming eternal.   Mohammed’s jug: it empties and the prophet flies through the sky on horseback. *   In support of experimental metaphysics, of the ultimate idea glimpsed through the variety of personalities, which are the morbid states.   All knowledge of the sacred sciences is based on physiological disorders. Over the empiricist, the experimental idealist has the sole authentic superiority: that of experience: dream. Vertigo. *   A person is a bundle of states.   A state is a spiritual localization characterizing a manner of being, the attributes of a specific bearing, a particular form of the manifestation of energy. * the book is a ghost

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  Death and resurrection.   The perspective of the psychology of extreme states (always preceded by lethargy).   Death is a progressively deeper and more definitive sleep but it is possible to halt its onset by exerting a powerful effort of will on the disengaging astral body and by recalling life with a fervor. *   By freeing reason from abstract speculation, the birth of experimental science has transformed its knowledge into power.   By freeing vision of its artistic expression, the birth of concrete thought (experimental metaphysics) will transform its knowledge into power.

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psychology

The nature of living consciousness   To question everything at all times.   The illusion of continuity, the current of consciousness.   Cause of errors: personality, autonomy, free will, responsibility, dignity.   “They believe that life is successive whereas it is a perpetual rupture.   that to live is always to continue when actually it is to put an end to this ridiculousness.” *   Human personality—in all its realized potential— constitutes an eternal center of gravity, an eternity within oneself, an absolute hearth of infinite radiancy.   The mirror’s reflection: human consciousness is in no way successive, continuous, complete, immediate.   The human personality is the geometric place of multiple parallel consciousnesses—an infinity of spaces parallel to our own—watertight bulkheads, except for a few cracks in order to intuit simultaneous dramas, which occur on an infinite variety of planes; their reflections, their echoes—fragmentary, fleeting, separate—being the actual discontinuity of consciousness. *   Ambivalence and interference: sole act resulting from the intersecting of a conscious will and an unconscious desire. *

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  Out of laziness man thinks that intuition is immediate, as opposed to the perfectible operations of rational thought.   Intuition demands preparation […] obscure, unknowable, because rationally unthinkable, nevertheless capable of awareness. That is the issue. *   “There are moments of great fright for example when one hears a man cry out in a voice that is not his own and that previously one had never suspected him capable of.”

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notes on science

  I confess to slowly renouncing my old mental attitude that led me to view the gains of modern knowledge as null and void. Negation of the exact or natural sciences and of all speculation, negation of all progress. I value only the notion of progress, yet on the express condition of dialectically opposing it with an equal belief in the notion of regression which was the first deified motive of my entire thought process. *   Denying spontaneous generation, Pasteur discovered the microbial origin of certain contagions and, by doing so, forgot the state of the contaminable field. Similarly, modern man can no longer think dialectically, double and inverse. *   Yet I felt as far as possible from any external surface of the body, the haunted space of those chasms of sky hollowing the absences of the human statue.

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miscellaneous notes

  All is within all.   1) The cosmic totality is not chaos. The unity of its life has a direction, a polarized evolution. It marches on, it is an animated being, an animal.   2) The cosmic totality has a unity, it is a living organism.   Everything contributes to everything. Separate appearances all grow from the same root, and each of its parts is a crystal that totally reproduces it. Analogical thinking. State of receptivity in open communication with life.   Hence symbolic, mystical, mythical thought, participatory thinking. *   Total recovery of man’s psychic life by a dizzying descent into oneself, the systematic illumination of hidden places, the progressive obscuration of others, perpetual wandering throughout the forbidden zone. *   Mythical truth. Everything is true: all symbols in all religions.   Mystical substitution. Law of love: the innocent alone must pay for the guilty. *   Absurd proof.   1) I could say that… but I am not of that opinion.   2) Not only do I claim that my left hand is a right foot, but also that I would like and am ready to die (by eating the barrel of a gun), in order to back up this assertion that is my life.   Death: living justification of the absurd proof. * 68

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  The vehement defense of the absurd is the stroke of a valve that opens man’s buried mind, enslaved for centuries by the false principles of identity and contradiction. *   I consider Life and Death, as limit-states of polarizations of human life, and I experimentally observe that one being is superior to another to the degree that its state approaches, further participates in, death.

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Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Self Portrait

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humankind’s third birth

  Systematic expression.   Cyclic evolution.   The entire history of humankind is only the slow creation of the still incomplete man.   The breath of creation continues to fill the nostrils of the red clay statue with spirit, not yet fully emerged, finished, separated, drawn out, differentiated from its matrix of chaos, from its original material, from its raw block.   Need for synthesis (morals, sciences).   Sense of the eternal.   At root the mind is a unity.

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the dialectical force of the mind

The Movement natural to the Mind   The unlimited perfectibility or the possibility of an actual solution due to the fact that the dialectic of nature is the same as that of our brain.   “The tree grows by syllogism.”   “Thought being given, Death is hence given!”   “Eliminate thought, there will still remain substances that could, at most, be eternal, but which would not be immortal; for death starts only at the point where thought stops and disappears. Death is created by the Mind, just as life emerges from the mind.”   Mind, basis and end of the Universe.   The Seed: By the intermediary idea of exteriority, net of the cosmic eternal becoming, the Idea denies itself in order to prove itself to itself in the form of nature.   The Idea believes only in discovering itself within its negation.   The germination of the world: “a growing plant” (Hegel). The necessary truth   The philosophical system that I set forth can be defined as the monotonous affirmation of unity through the reflections of phenomenal multiplicity.   Intellectual activity is engaged in a single operation: an endless chain of negations refuting themselves.

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creators and producers

  People can be classified according to their social role.   1) A vast majority of producers, among many arms one finds only a few heads who can give orders, direct, organize, foresee, dream, and realize.   2) A minority of creators who are split into: mimes, who stir the collective emotion, harmonize action, motivate, galvanize courage,   and creators who renew expressions and reinvigorate them, thus assuming the role of the revolutionary conscience of evolution. *   Creator: an individual shaped by social, physiological and psychic conditions in such a way that a change in the human vision of the world, a transformation of knowledge, a new interpretation might be realized.   The eternal essence of the creator is the essence of unity. His fecundity results from applying this sense to the reduction of the antinomies of that period in time: fleshspirit, good-evil, concrete-abstract, plurality-unity of matter, Darwinism, mysticism, etc. *   Social mechanism of the mind’s evolution.   Only a few creators, very specialized, realize the staggering benefits that producers only become aware of fifty years later. *   Note on the creator’s type: type uniting the characteristics of the intellectual with those of the mime.

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refusal to obey

  There are those who love obeying and commanding: order, fossilization, hierarchy, ossification, refusal to reason, sectarian reaction.   And there are those who don’t want to command and despise obeying: understanding, apology for everything, freedom, discipline required of each. (Requires proof).   The primitive (etymological) meaning of “work” is suffering, pain; thus this deceit that the exploiters impose upon the exploited, that infamous superstition: the love of work is inseparable from Christian garbage: the masochism of suffering, expiatory, salutary, pre-purgatory, the valley of tears.

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the problem of expression

Expression’s development   1. What I have to say   2. What should it be called?   3. How I express it   A) My work will be initially conceived as an essential report sub specie aeternitatis, specifying by its very nature the most universal, the central mystery, the initial source of energy, the armature of its spiritual construction and the keys that allow its application to all concrete consequences free of any error.   B) But such a report must be the result of a complete intuition contemplated and translated a priori, as well as of the effort of abstraction, of the quintessence, allowing one to draw forth a posteriori the form of the purest expression (specifically according to our vow of simultaneously applying the various methods of knowledge).   The initial report will thus be reduced to the listing of the catalogue of the entire oeuvre, without any hope of decanting language.   Furthermore, the report, according, as far as possible, to the concrete of the actuality and of all the consequences and applications in the various domains of human activity (critique, thought, science, morals, justice, social events, education, religion).

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vocabulary

  Due to the necessity of expressing myself as fast as possible, I sacrifice my whip of integrity.   I accept the false postulates of definitions that separate beyond absurd limits. I give up achieving in the first try the universal expression in a perfect language (an attempt perhaps tainted by a singular pride: Mallarmé19) by doing this between the departure and the goal, one loses valuable evidence of the process.   Breton was wrong to not write (the discourse on the small amount of reality, 1925).   A project does not ripen in the head, it becomes something else.   But fatally the choice of expression forbids me the work of Western philosophers who are almost totally negligible, due to the fact that being mere metaphysicians they fail to raise the question of expression, of language, and have neglected the essential dynamism of thought, i.e. the Word, whereas the Poets have intuitively investigated the magical expression that treated discursive thought and savage (mystical) intuition the same.

19. Instead of seeking to give “a purer meaning to the words of the tribe” (verse: formal crystal of ideas out of a fear of amnesia) I seek to make myself understand (cause of the scandal of all sleep). 76

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double hermeticism

  A work accused of hermeticism, an indecipherable work, always makes for exhausting reading, whether worth the effort or not.   Odiously illegitimate if the reader’s effort must respond to the creator’s laziness—subjectivism—or worse still must submit to it—automaton style—mechanics that only slaves love (the lovers of beautiful language).   Clearly legitimate if its greatest new concision grasps a little more truth and thus draws the impersonal idea of the human expression of truth a tiny bit closer.   More than legitimate, necessary like a God, if this operation creates a magical form (incantation) that is universally overwhelming (outside of oneself).   N.B. Danger of the subjective-impossible criteria beyond the human. The means of creating; active awareness of states.

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Cuic-Cuic creating the 4th dimension (from a letter to Roger Vailland, November 11, 1925)

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the meaning of creation

  1) Like all living things, which tend to persevere in their being (attitude of self-love or of conservation which seen from the inverse is the fear of nothingness) the meaning of creation is fleeing from death, i.e. from oblivion, as finite being is memory against amnesia and the need for the expression of finite thought only exists at the cost of the form that develops it in the time that it snatches from the virtual limbo which is akin to its ghost (the imperious prefiguration, impetus of its gesture)—creation of the word.   (To give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe)     2) The need of creation is the need to communicate, to reunite, the need to make one understand, to persuade, to gain support, universal approval; it is the criteria of objective evidence. The causal order being the intolerable nature of the error, the quartering of antinomy, the scandal of the absurd, the relentless attraction of the new Proof, the meaning of the truth proper to the life which evolves.

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the problem of total expression within duration

  Starting from a singular, total revelation.   Its matter (weave and rhythm).   The new rational mechanisms, the new mental processes, the unedited perspectives, the logical invention, the lyrical investigation, which must result from the essential effort to create the appropriate asymptote (Mantras, union, incantation, the synthesis of poetry and metaphysics), the new expression, specific style.   To consider in itself, then in its bearing, in its consequences, in their various ramifications, in their organic universe   on the one hand, lyrical expression or synthesis (a work must be theogony, cosmogony, etc…)   on the other hand, the attempt at intellectual expression.   Specific method: the contemporary agonizing sum of the World of Images and energies (sensible and spiritual) should reveal itself to the creative act of the critical mind (hyperlucidity and conscious universality but also automatic result of the application of the sense of unity that through reversibility reflects the spiritual totality as a double in the form of the image). The hyperconscious creator, universally critical, systematic and dogmatic, but subject to this prime-ultimate-dogma: “dogmaclasm,”20 overwhelming, overturning, reducing, emptying, integrating, destroying, transforming everything outside […]   Every exploration on the intellectual plane will include a description of the current state, an analysis denouncing the contradictions that it conceals, any attempt at their 20. See the essay “Mise au point ou casse-dogme” co-written by RGL and Daumal, and published in Le Grand Jeu vol.2 (translated as “Clarification or Dogmaclasm” in Theory of the Great Game, Atlas Press, 2015). [tr.] 80

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synthetic reduction rejoins or approximates, more or less, the concrete, depending on whether the synthesis is conceivable at present or appeals to the future by the possible intuitive illumination of the ultimate state itself (universalization of the being).

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problem and parabola

  A man is given, and the flickering lookouts of his senses fix themselves upon a sensible world—an extension of himself.   Containing within himself all that lies beyond he is contained in the closed vessel of the horizon.   Content containing = what’s going on? Our actual way out: knowledge. But this knowledge is discursive. Thus rigorously the man who thinks rationally is like a prisoner who, to escape the dungeon in which he is imprisoned, is content to carefully measure the length, width, height, surface and volume that will then provide him the amusement of being further abstractly divided into a certain number of other measurements according to the decimal system, while never desiring, even for a single moment, to find a way out.   So one of two things: he thinks that it is impossible to find the way out. He certainly won’t find it by establishing relationships between the various parts of his prison cell.   If he opts for the impossibility all he has to do is take advantage of his solitude to sing children’s songs and act like a clown.   If he decides it’s possible he must discover a way out.   But, in reality, there is no possibility or impossibility, there is certainty (obvious to a certain depth)—A man who lives with the idea of escaping must mathematically escape the surveillance of the guards who in fact are not fixated on preventing him from escaping. A struggle of key points of greater or lesser absolute value and that’s all.   But to be able to escape one must imagine the escapee.

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  A rational being, seeking to experience a limited space, and thus uninterested, presupposes that he has never seen, at any moment of his life, the possibility of a way out I say that is a lie!   The end of the world—even if individual rather than universal—is no less inevitable.

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Roger Gilbert-Lecomte’s last letter to Pierre Minet before his death

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte’s Death Certificate

biographies roger gilbert-lecomte (1907-1943)

was the founder, with René Daumal, of the influential French literary movement Le Grand Jeu and editor of the magazine by the same name. is an artist and writer living a quiet existence in the country.

michael tweed

roger gilbert-lecomte

the book is a ghost thoughts and paroxysms for going beyond SL039 March-May, 2015 Text © Roger Gilbert-Lecomte Translation © Michael Tweed, 2015 Published by Solar▲Luxuriance San Francisco, CA http://solarluxuriance.com Design & Layout by M Kitchell