Preface
I should write three prefaces rather than one. The first would speak of Didier Mouturat’s apprenticeship to an altogether surprising theater artist, Cyrille Dives, who created in Paris in the 1970s and early ‘80s a theater of masks with no direct debt to Japanese Noh, nonetheless akin. The apprenticeship under Dives’s guidance was all-encompassing, from the most basic of things—for example, walking on stage in such a way that a mask can find its own life—to an attitude of ceaseless search for more, for finer, for truer in the art of theater.
The second preface would address the subtle transformation of a theater apprenticeship into an encounter with oneself as both an unknowing slave of habit and as the bearer of astonishing freedom and creativity. “I am speaking of an intimate, progressive discovery,” Mouturat writes, “that we are not masters of our own way of being—that it is only the result of a system of reactions that tyrannize us…. This discovery opened the new and unexpected possibility that the practice of theater could become an instrument of self-knowledge.” That would be a worthwhile preface, capturing much that Mouturat wants us to understand and share, and certainly capturing Dives’s unspoken intention from the beginning of his association with Mouturat, then young and fresh from the wild Parisian student revolt of May 1968 with its street battles, brilliant slogans, and enjoyable chaos.
The third preface would address the qualities of Mouturat’s voice as author, which of course shapes all elements of the book. The end of apprenticeship—not necessarily mastery but deep confidence that one now belongs to a tradition and knows how to continue—is evident in the riches of that voice. A skilled narrator, Mouturat gives his readers a vivid account of ordeals and discoveries as an apprentice, still more intense in some respects when he became Dives’s right-hand man in creating and guiding a school dedicated to the new and largely untried theater of masks. “We were going to create an enterprise around the mask and, contrary to my expectations, there was no question of producing a play. Cyrille categorically refused. Of course that frustrated me, but I had to acknowledge the obvious: we were incapable of doing so. That would have been the quickest way to betray the search we were about to undertake.”
Two other elements of voice worth noticing from the outset: the maturity of Mouturat’s perspective as he looks back at the path traversed and the brief poetic statements, haiku of the inner life and the search for authentic being, which appear throughout the book between chapters. The fruits of the apprenticeship and later partnership, and all to which they unexpectedly led, are evident on every page. The book is compact, but long enough to place us as readers in a new and surprising context: the search for meaning, the search for oneself. It functions as a sample experience. One’s own search is unlikely to be identical to Mouturat’s in form, but in spirit there is much to be learned from him, and the learning is easy: he speaks as a friend.
The instigator of this narrative, Cyrille Dives, needs a few words here. A ferociously independent bohemian artist, willing to pay the price of recurrent poverty and little
public recognition to go his own way, he recalls both the composer Erik Satie and the playwright and novelist Alfred Jarry. He had that style—that eccentricity, that love of provocation and underlying seriousness. It is an old French tradition, probably rooted in the sixteenth-century author of genius, François Rabelais. A sculptor of masks, painter, and theatrical director, Dives created hand-painted, accordion-fold books telling allegorical tales with rich illustrations and calligraphy—it was one of the things he found interesting to do. Why ever did he go to so much trouble to craft a handful of singular objects that defy reproduction? That is an invalid question; it pits an artist acutely aware of his private purpose and way of life against worldly values that left him cold. Looking at the few handmade books and masks that now survive, one feels that one is looking at the work of a very special soul. Mouturat recalls: “Cyrille used to say about his own ambition: to be able to create in his life one minute of beauty.”
Though the path toward it was long, eventually there was a theater in Dives’s lifetime. Many of the illustrations in this book reflect preparations for it and actual productions. After Dives’s death in 1982, at nearly age 70, Mouturat continued his research and productions for several years and interested two actors with a natural affinity for masked performance. They are still active today. Mouturat went on to direct theaters in a number of French cities, at greatest length in Choisy-le-Roi, just south of Paris. As he makes clear, apprenticeship is never quite over. One remembers the vitality and majesty of the teacher, the direction he conveyed. Moving through different circumstances, encountering new challenges, the influence remains active.
I thank my wife Susan for her ingenious help as a translator. Didier Mouturat’s book in French is beautifully expressed. Our shared aim was a fully idiomatic English translation, so much so that the author might ask himself whether it all happened in New York or London—where it could happen again.
ROGER LIPSEY
Silence is always there,
You need only devote yourself to it …
May I learn
From silence
***
Self-Remembering in the Teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff
Every human being is the bearer of a fundamental question concerning his or her presence in the world. It often emerges in early childhood as a feeling of lack more than as a mental question, and then it is gradually covered over. Everything is arrayed in the world, above all in today’s world, to turn one away from it. The encounter with this question is an encounter with oneself. It can sometimes emerge again accidentally, owing to a shock, an emergency, fear, an unforeseen event: a situation felt instinctively as a threat to the customary framework. Preoccupied by everything that confers the illusion of conducting our lives, of being sole master onboard, our attention suddenly frees itself and makes room for a larger attention that can no longer be claimed as one’s own. This larger attention seems to encompass our presence. Abruptly one experiences oneself as its object.
This is an unanticipated encounter in oneself with an unknown presence which, strangely, seems always to have been there. The encounter may only be the result of a passing combination of inner and outer conditions not under our control, which create an inner attitude suddenly favorable to the possibility of being more really who we are. The taste is given us of the presence of a more conscious life suddenly revealed in the midst of our lives, and it becomes clear in a flash that this more conscious life seems to have been dominated until now by a wholly mechanical way of functioning.
The impression is strange, yet it has a familiar taste and astonishing simplicity, like a reunion with oneself. Yes, suddenly it could not be clearer that we have always been lost, that we didn’t know it, and that nothing in us was present to suffer this absence and to watch for the return of oneself. In the space of an instant, we are both overwhelmed and cured of a profound amnesia. Having lived until now in the illusory certitude of unquestioned awareness, we awake from a sleep of which we had no knowledge. We are speaking of a rebirth, the rediscovered reality of what one was as a child. Everything becomes new again, everything around one acquires uncommon vividness. No word has the power to do justice to this state. We are one with the state at that moment, and silence prevails. There is an immediate reunification of everything in oneself that moments before seemed permanently shattered and chaotic. Presence returns to itself and resumes the place that has always been waiting for it.
Nevertheless, this sudden impression of plenitude doesn’t last. Inevitably and rapidly it is swept away by all the commentaries of one’s personality, which from earliest years has been educated to explain everything, to understand everything on its own terms, to answer all questions, to penetrate all mysteries, to dominate all situations.
The opening does not last, and the impression one has received of it can be erased forever without a trace, as if it had been a mirage. Or it can imprint itself in depth to the point that it becomes the embryo of a sense of absence which never leaves one at peace and orients a lifelong search. For this to be so, the emergence of the essential question must be recognized—the question of the real meaning of our existence. To keep that question alive, we must try to resist everything that rises up in us to deny it, to resist the strong need we have to preserve at all cost the carefully nurtured conditions of our inner comfort.
Of course, we are subject to the tyranny of the mind, to its greed to understand everything and reach conclusions promptly so as to move on to other things. Yet what appeared does not seem to be of the same order. Intuition orients and inspires us to attempt to hold at bay, at least for a while, the habitual mechanism of analysis and intellectual speculation. We feel that what appeared deserves something else: a widening of the current perspective by which we apprehend the world and ourselves.
For the first time, perhaps, we are in question to the point that we experience questioning as a real state: “I am the question.” Sensing the importance and gravity of what is offered, one resists opening yet another mental workshop to seize and twist this way and that the question that has just come to light. The invitation is to become oneself the workshop, at the heart of which the question can act on us. Instinctively one recognizes the need to conform to an entirely new inner attitude: “to feel that one is worked”—as a material is worked by time and the elements.
This is the beginning of a journey that will have no end and no goal, other than to recover from incessant stumbling and missteps, and to recover again and again the fragile balance of an orientation that justifies our presence on earth. A new perspective opens, and with it a profound wish to correspond to it. Yet one cannot help but discover how far we are from that, the extent to which all aspiration for progress and success constitutes one of the main obstacles. Everything opposes it in our way of life, which remains trapped in a network of habits. Willingness is no help at all, and it quickly becomes apparent that genuine will is absent. One had the notion it was there, but experience gradually shows that it was only an illusion: the resultant of a subjective aspiration torn between what one likes and what one doesn’t like, most often leading away from the current actually capable of fulfilling our thirst for being.
Despite repeated efforts, we are defeated every time. Every time one can’t help but acknowledge a stinging defeat.
And yet …
Behind this acknowledgment of our unstable will, the taste of a mysterious perseverance is there, and of a wish for being which, from experience to experience, never stops gaining strength.
The endless acknowledgment of defeat has no taste of condemnation, no taste of misfortune. Isn’t the one who is defeated the very same who pretended to be master of the situation, who thought himself well suited to set things right, to meet any new demand? Isn’t he the tyrant who we are for ourselves, who can only reduce unfamiliar impressions to the narrow and reassuring limits of his world? He has power: to smother a deeper level of being.
Through failure after failure, an irrefutable reality imposes itself: we do not know ourselves. Who are we, and who in us presumes to pose this question and, even worse, to answer it? Who observes whom in the effort to understand? In light of the injunction to “know thyself,” how to experience the inaccessible unity, the reconciliation of the endless duality between “me” and “I,” for the sake of genuine knowledge? The first dreams of the second rather than uniting with it.
Again we are caught in the trap of habitual means of investigation. How to accept to lay down our arms, to open ourselves and at last make room for a new feeling that might awaken, the feeling of belonging to a reality of another order in which we are invited to participate, to which we can entrust ourselves. It is not remotely a question of blind faith: on the contrary, truth must always be “verified” by experience and makes itself known only through experience. Uncertainty will remain the most precious motive for vigilance and the best guard rail of an authentic search. “To believe” is a lazy thing; genuine faith is born only of active, incessant doubt.
To yield to what surpasses us is an immediate, silent, and actionless act, an act of presence without past or future, completely engaging. The thinking apparatus strives to lose itself a little less in the incessant chatter of associations and imagination, in order to come home silently to the body. The body, at last recognized and taken into account, in turn awakens and responds, as if in echo, through the sensation that animates it. And this marriage in the moment of mind and body gives birth to feeling of a new quality and rebirth to a rediscovered presence:
I, here, now.
This is a moment of self-remembering.
This inner exercise has the property of being incomprehensible by ordinary means and, attempting now to speak of it, I can’t presume to exclude myself from the crowd of dreamers.
Self-remembering is the cornerstone of the teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff. It bears no relation to any other method. He who has recognized the vital need to practice it in order to serve another life in himself, to strive to heal the evident fact that he is not who he is, will inevitably experience his solitude even if—to sustain the fire of a question that everything conspires to extinguish—he has no choice but to join fellow seekers pursuing the same aim. His elders may orient him but will not make the journey for him. Instructions, teachings, explanations, properly offered and properly received, will at best be able to correct missteps, but they will be of no help at all where the actual work is concerned. Transmission is possible only by contagion. If he has the privilege of being in the presence of a real master such as G. I. Gurdjieff, the seeker will recognize that the real master is one with the teaching, that he is its incarnation and can give nothing to those who are incapable of receiving. The master transmits an influence from beyond himself, it passes through him, and he strives to allow it to reach others in all its purity.
No guarantee is offered to those who enter the path of self-remembering. Whoever presumes to know and define it once for all presumes to know and define the mysterious energy of life itself. Nothing could more heavily compromise a real perception of its circulation.
This is the beginning of an unending struggle. The further one goes on this path, the more one encounters obstacles that oppose it. We are the plaything of forces we must learn to recognize through experience and know by taste. Perceived for a moment, they seem to let go, but they will return to assault us. I awaken to my absence, my dream, to the hypnotic state that dominates my entire life. For a moment I go against the current of what for a lifetime has immersed me in identification.
Here are lines from Henri Tracol about self-remembering:
I remember myself.
Who is this “I”? Who is “myself”?
Who?
Let us think of a rider on his horse, cantering along the side of a mountain. “I” is the rider, “myself” the horse; “I” this individual essence, this potential being, “myself” this power of functional manifestation.
But the vision fades all too quickly.
My horse, because of his faulty education and the mass of influences to which he has been subjected—and both of these aggravated by neglect—has become a monster of egoism. He has been badly broken in, obviously—for, lo and behold, if he is at this very moment perching on the shoulders of his rider and crushing him under his weight! Indeed, deprived of my mount, “I” am no longer a rider—not even a pedestrian, for “I,” by myself, cannot move.
Once again, I remember myself. Once again, order is established and the vision reappears. Now the “I” no longer dreams, for the rider is once more in the saddle. With his hand securely on the rein, his mount will have no chance of straying down the path that leads to the precipice. Wide awake, the rider keeps an eye on “myself,” the horse, and guides him unfalteringly along the ridge. The one keeping watch, the other carrying the watcher, they make a complete whole. Thus related, they will go far.
Today, more than 60 years after the death of G. I. Gurdjieff, despite the fraudulent and contradictory information spread everywhere about him and about his teaching, the secret remains well kept because the secret keeps itself. It remains secret also for those who seek with sincere need, and for those who try to grasp it for purposes of power or profit, it leads only to dreaming. The secret resides in the heart of Being and remains by nature inaccessible. Those who abuse the teaching, who presume to possess it, are either trapped in illusion or unscrupulous charlatans.
Throughout his life to his last breath, G. I. Gurdjieff remained a seeker. Knowledge is a living energy to which one may sometimes draw close thanks to well-oriented efforts, but it is not a set of conclusions that can be packaged and sold by the pound. Knowledge cannot be sold, it is shared directly, with as much profit for the teacher as for the student. Yet it remains elusive.
Who am I?
How not to be trapped by the limitations
Of the one who asks this question?
Didier Mouturat