Seeing the Dragon

The next man I want to speak about, my predecessor, was certainly smitten with something.

Camossetto was from Marseilles. His parents had owned a dry-saltery there, and were quite well off. When they died, they left him no money, but a big house. He himself was a draper to his trade, but when the war broke out in ’39, he was sent to work as a mechanic on an aerodrome. The war and the work, however, got on his nerves, and he fell ill. Exempted from service, he was advised by a doctor to go and live in the country. This advice he decided to put into effect, and set about selling the big house he owned. But Camossetto was naïve, perhaps a little simple, perhaps just a little absent-minded. Anyway, the house was swindled out of his possession without his having got a penny for it. With what little money he still had, he moved up country through Provence, and arrived one day in 1941 or so in Largentière.

There he heard of a house for sale – it was Gourgounel – and for a nominal rent, because his case excited pity, he was allowed to occupy it until a real sale was effected. He occupied the house for seventeen years, his main concern being how to get hold of enough cash to buy it.

One of his most brilliant ideas for acquiring wealth was to marry a rich wife. So he advertised in the papers, saying he was a big strong handsome man with a prosperous farm in the Ardèche, and wished to marry a serious woman who would be willing to share his life . . . and the expenses of the farm. His advertisement provoked a response from as far away as the Belgian Congo, where, as my informant, old Calixte Habauzit, told me, “all the women have jewels and cars”. 

Camossetto and the Congo woman exchanged letters and photo-graphs, and increased in intimacy, until one day the woman actually arrived at Valgorge, not in a car, but off the bus. There, she inquired after Camossetto, and was met with raucous laughter. Camossetto, the people said, he’s a big fool who lives at Gourgounel, and they told her stories of the man, for he was already well known in the district for his appearance and his ways. The result was, the woman stayed overnight at the hotel in Valgorge and left again the following morning, presumably for the Belgian Congo, without ever having seen Camossetto, and without ever writing to him again. He never understood: no one ever told him the woman had been there. The people at Valgorge chuckled in secret.

Swindled out of his rich Congo woman, Camossetto – “moi, Alexandre Camossetto” – remained poor. For bread, he collected whins and split wood for the baker at La Boule. And if at any time there was an old decrepit goat for sale (usually to the slaughterhouse for melting down), Camossetto would buy it for food. He also had a little garden, and managed to eke out a living. Indeed, with time, he did fairly well. First, he was not averse to begging around the doors, and thereby amassed a great deal of stuff: old coats, old shoes, old furniture, which he would sell sub rosa for a few francs to people who didn’t want to beg, but who had a use for the coats, the shoes, and the sticks of furniture. This went on for only so long, till the donors got wise to him. But meanwhile he had found something else. In Marseilles he had been connected with an Adventist religious group and, having written to the headquarters of this sect in the United States of America, he found himself showered with supplies of canned foods, which explains the great quantity of containers I had to clear out of the house. He probably ended up the best-fed man in the whole canton of Valgorge. But it was money he wanted. He had visions of wealth and power. He finally took to magic to get it. Perhaps he had become a little nutty. One of my neighbours had this to say of him: “L’araignée dans sa tête a dû avoir une patte détraquée” (the spider in his head must have had a gammy leg). It was when I sorted out his books and papers (careful copies and first drafts of letters he had sent) that I was able to augment these scraps of information concerning him which I had gathered from people here and there.

The books ran from cheap booklets on Le Secret de la réussite, to pseudo-scientific texts on occultism (Cours oriental, by Professor Rimpotché Tawagompa), to more or less serious books on hypnotism  former inhabitants 123 and magnetism: Les Forces supérieures, Les Guérisons miraculeuses, Les Puissances surnaturelles, Transmission de la pensée, Les Secours spirituels, Voici la lumière, Au seuil de l’initiation. The original impulse, as became clearer still from the letters, was the desire for money. But this, allied to his obviously extreme credulity, led him up all the paths of spiritualism, and made him easy meat for any self-styled sage or spiritual adviser.

We find him, for example, writing to the Fakir Birman, asking for his three-monthly Astrological Calendar, so he will know his lucky days. The Fakir – “Dans l’ennui, venez à lui” (when in trouble, come to him) is the motto – writes him back. In a letter dated “Heure sidérale 8”, he gives Camossetto “the astrological position that pre-sides over your existence” (Mercury, in conjunction with the Virgin), ending up by declaring that he, Birman the Fakir, knows all the secrets of the rites of the sages of Ancient India, “whose representative I am in Europe”, and suggesting that he, Camossetto, procure a special “fluidic talisman” devised by the Fakir, which will guide him through life, and which will cost him ten francs.

Another letter to the Fakir Birman, who this time appears as the founder of the Indopsychic Foundation and “the guide of the elite of Parisian society”, asks whether he should take up commerce or bee-keeping and whether he should get married. Yet another asks for tips concerning the National Lottery.

From the Fakir Birman we move to Professor Balydson of Les Cendres sacrées de l’Orient (The Sacred Ashes of the Orient), with whom Camossetto is negotiating about a Chinese talisman with radioactive power. For this talisman to become Camossetto’s own most prized and sacred possession, Balydson needs a lock of his hair and twenty-five francs. Later, in a letter from the Professor delivering the goods, Camossetto is warned that “the results may not be immediate”, and advised never to become discouraged.

We next find our friend trying the “Institut Tahra Bey”. Specialized in the Occult and Psychic Sciences of the East, this institution offered graphological and psychometric studies to its adepts. Tahra Bey finally sends a talisman with the following recommendations: “Wrap it in a white cloth about ten o’clock on the evening of October 15th, and stitch the cloth with black thread. The medium will then be in contact with you.” It is easy to imagine Camossetto up there at Gourgounel, in that room piled up with tin cans, under the smoking oil-lamp, waiting for the medium . . . and then going to bed on that lousy mattress, another twenty francs down the drain.
In a series of letters to Tahra Bey, Camossetto tells his life story: how he had worked as draper in the Paris-Mode shop at Marseilles and had fallen in love with the girl in the glove department but hadn’t been able to score. She left the shop, but liked to walk in the Jardin Zoologique, so every Wednesday, Camossetto went to the Zoo to read the newspapers, hoping to meet her. But he was too shy, or maybe the occult forces were not in his favour. He found his morale getting lower than ever. He then approached marriage bureaux to try and find a wife, incurred “enormous expenses”, but no wife ever turned up. Then he got a job in films as a stand-in, but his big feet got in the way of one of the star actresses, so they gave him the heave-ho.

Next the war broke out. He worked for a while on the aerodrome, and then came up to into the hills, where he lived with “my goat and one hen, the only livesl ivestock I possess – with a cat.”

In February 1950 he terminated with this pathetic paragraph: “I am sorry to have written you so much but I am all alone in this abandoned farm and life is sometimes very sad especially at this season, and yet there are days when I am glad to be alone, isolated, in a way like the Initiate . . .”

They say he died of pneumonia because he claimed he could live without fires in winter.
***
Seeing the Dragon

It was back there in the fourteenth century. A student was travelling in South China in quest of the Tao. One day he came across an old man meditating in a mountain grotto. He greeted the old one who, without saying a word, offered him a bowl of tea and went on with his meditations. The student quietly sat down beside him. In the evening, they ate rice together, still without a word. In the middle of the night, the old man got up and went for a little stroll. The student did exactly the same. The next day passed in a similar way, and the six following.
On the seventh day, the old man broke the silence:

“Where do you come from?”
“The North.”
“What made you come here?”
“The desire to see a man of the Tao.”
“My face is quite ordinary.”
“I’ve already noticed that.”

Then the old man said that in all the thirty years he’d spent in his grotto, he’d never had such a pleasant and intelligent companion, and he accepted the student as disciple.

One night when the young man was out walking in the mountains, he felt a stroke of lightning pass right through him, and he heard thunder in his head. It was as though the mountain and the whole world and himself too had disappeared, and this sensation lasted “the time it takes for a stick of incense to burn down”.

After this experience, the young man felt transformed, strangely puriffed, glowing with an inner light. He went to see the old man about it. “It’s nothing at all”, said the old man. “Up here, it’ll happen to you so often you won’t even think about it.”

In the old forgotten books that speak of such things, this experience is called “seeing the dragon”.

The Collected Works of Kenneth White, Volume 1 Underground to Otherground
LETTERS FROM GOURGOUNEL