Mount Analogue by René Daumal

 visible.”5With deliberate brushstrokes, Daumal sketches in the essential details of plot and character. One of France’s most eminent literary critics, André Rousseau, in a lengthy chapter, “L’Avènement de René Daumal” (“The Accession of René Daumal”) of his book Littérature du XXième siècle (Literature of the Twentieth Century), recalls René’s description of the effort involved in producing what he called la Chose-a-dire (“the Thing-to-say”). “The Thing-to-say appears then in the most intimate part of oneself, like an eternal certainty.”6 Rousseau felt that there was not a single line in Mount Analogue where la Chose-a-dire does not hit us. Immediately, the proposed mountain-climbing expedition becomes intertwined with a quest for knowledge. The narrator and his soon-to-be-teacher, Sogol, are kindred souls, discovering each other in a manner reminiscent of Breton’s “objective chance,” that is, finding a kindred soul in an anonymous way—in response to an article. Here we see the synchronicity that will occur many times throughout Mount Analogue, the randomness and hidden order that surrounds us. Their chance encounter is also reminiscent of Daumal’s lines in his essay “Nerval Le Nyctalope”: “I was thus being observed! I was not alone in the world! This world which I had thought was only my fantasy!”7 Contrast this with Sogol’s note to the narrator: “Monsieur, I have read your article on Mount Analogue. Until now I thought I was the only person convinced of its existence,” and the narrator’s surprise: “And here was someone taking me literally! And talking about lauching an expedition! A madman? A practical joker? But what about me?”8The teacher/seeker figure, Pierre Sogol, “with the tranquility of a caged panther,” is a character drawn larger than life, who combines “a vigorous maturity and childlike freshness”9 His thinking is described as being

like a force as palpable as heat, light, or wind. This force seemed to be an exceptional faculty for seeing ideas as external facts and establishing new connections between what seemed to be utterly disparate ideas. [He would] treat human history as a problem in descriptive geometry … the properties of numbers as if he were dealing with zoological species … [and illustrate how] language derived its laws from celestial mechanics.10Sogol’s varied background recalls both de Salzmann and Gurdjieff, each of whom had many areas of expertise. The seeds of this character were sown back in 1934 when René was sent to collect de Salzmann’s material effects at the Hotel Jacob in Paris after his death in Switzerland on May 3, 1934. He described the experience in a letter to Véra:

It was certainly sad to undo all these balls of string that he planned to unwind himself one day. And to find so many projects started. There were mostly books: algebra manuals, adventure novels, old history books, dictionaries, some perhaps of value, but I felt it useless to take them except for three or four. There remains: pieces of wood, paint supplies, an ax, plus his papers—sketches, studies, projects, plans, etc., and a magi marionnette.11When we meet the composite character Sogol, he is currently an inventor and teacher of mountaineering, accepting students only if they first scale his Parisian apartment building and enter through the window.

The narrator accompanies Sogol through his laboratory, which he calls his “park.” They meander down a pebble path through plants and shrubs, among which are dangling hundreds of little signs, “the whole of which constituted a veritable encyclopedia of what we call human knowledge, a diagram of a plant cell … the keys to Chinese writing … musical phrases … maps, etc.” The narrator finally realizes the brilliant logic of this information path:

All of us have a fairly extensive collection of such figures and inscriptions in our head; and we have the illusion that we are “thinking” the loftiest scientific and philosophical thoughts when, by chance, several of these cards are grouped in a way that is somewhat unusual but not excessively so … Here, all this material was visibly outside of us; we could not confuse it with ourselves. Like a garland strung from nails, we suspended our conversation from these little images, and each of us saw the mechanisms of the other’s mind and of his own with equal clarity.12

Here, and many times throughout the book we see Daumal’s rejection of busy behavior, overintellectualizing, and his general preference for quality over quantity. This reflects Daumal’s study of Guénon (especially his book Quantity and Quality), and the Hindu preference for being rather than information gathering. In Buddhist literature, the material world is often referred to as the “10,000 beings.” Daumal loves to evoke this image by making long lists of things, both in his novels and in his poetry.

Sogol and the narrator bare their souls for thirteen pages of the first chapter, entitled “The Meeting.” They each share their disinterest and apathy for “this monkey-cage frenzy which people so dramatically call life.”13 Sogol recounts that after having experienced almost every pleasure and disappointment, happiness, and suffering, he felt he had completed one cycle of existence. He joined a monastery where he applied himself to inventing instruments, which rather than making life easier, would rouse men out of their torpor. Two such examples were a pen for facile writers that spattered every five or ten minutes, and a tiny portable phonograph equipped with a hearing-aid-like earpiece that would cry out at the most unexpected moments: “Who do you think you are?”14 With hilarious inventiveness, Daumal applies Gurdjieff’s theory of “alarm clocks”—employing reminding factors and resistances, little tricks to wake ourselves up. It also harks back to the Lilliputians of Gulliver’s Travels who wore elaborate flappers to keep themselves roused. Finally, Sogol then relates that he left the monastery, continuing always to question this “grown-up” existence:

Fearing that death I suffer every moment, the death of that voice which, out of the depths of my childhood, keeps asking, as your does: “Who am I?” … Whenever this voice does not speak—and it does not speak often—I am an empty carcass, a restless cadaver.’15

The narrator relates similar existential anxieties from his own childhood, echoes of Daumal’s early experience:

In the evenings in bed, with the light out, I tried to picture death, the “most nothing of all.” In imagination I suppressed all the circumstances of my life and I felt gripped in ever tighter circles of panic. There was no longer any “I.” What is it after all, “I”? … Then one night, a marvelous idea came to me: Instead of just submitting to this panic, I would try to observe it, to see where it is, what it is. I perceived then that it was connected to a contraction in my stomach, a little under my ribs, and also in my throat … I forced myself to unclench, to relax my stomach. The panic disappeared … when I tried again to think about death, instead of being gripped by the claws of panic I was filled by an entirely new feeling, whose name I did not know, something between mystery and hope.16

By the fifteenth page, Daumal has posed the question three times: Who are you? Or Who am I? Together the two characters agree that there must be an answer to this question, there must exist, according to Sogol,

men of a superior type, possessing the keys to all our mysteries. Somehow I could not regard this as a simple allegory, this idea of an invisible humanity within visible humanity. Experience has proven, I told myself, that a man can reach truth neither directly nor alone; an intermediary must exist—still human in certain respects yet surpassing humanity in others.17

This excerpt echoes Gurdjieff’s belief in an “Inner Circle of Humanity,” a group that maintains an inner sanctuary of esoteric knowledge and secretly mediates in human events. It also reflects Daumal’s personal experience in his early years of having failed on his own to find what he was seeking. He thus shares with us his own fortune to have found three of these intermediaries in the persons of the de Salzmanns and Gurdjieff. For him this allegorical tale is less farfetched than it might appear. Just as Sogol suggests, Daumal would not take Mount Analogue “simply as an allegory.”

In chapter 2, entitled “Suppositions,” Sogol spends ten pages providing the scientific data, complete with diagrams, to explain the anomalous properties of Mount Analogue. Because of the invisible closed shell of curvature that surrounds the island, it remains protected from human detection, but not always, not everywhere, and not for everyone. At a certain moment and in a certain place, certain persons (those who know and have a real wish to do so) can enter. This phenomenon is a scientifically embellished metaphor for Gurdjieff’s explanation of how esoteric knowledge is not truly hidden but simply imperceptible to those who are not seeking it. “The Sun has the property of uncurving the space which surrounds the island. At sunrise and at sunset it must in some fashion make a hole in the shell, and through this hole we shall enter!”18 Sogol presents the potential of synchronicity; his logic convinces the group of interested candidates and they all declare themselves willing to make the unprecedented journey.

Daumal provides a biographical profile as well as an actual ink sketch of each crew member, possibly attempting to create each of the twelve archetypes of human beings, as delineated by Gurdjieff. The eight remaining crew members together seem to represent different aspects of a single being. Among them we find the American artist (Judith Pancake), the Russian linguist (Ivan Lipse, probably based on Lavastine), the Austrian brothers—scientist Hans and metaphysician Karl. Four others drop out, epitomizing the stumbling blocks on the path to enlightenment, One is caught up in the joyous dance of maya (illusion), another is trapped in the veil of self-pity, and the others are too full of worldly concerns to leave the dream they inhabit.

By chapter 3, Daumal puts this cast of characters to sea, realistically and metaphorically. “We were not at all cut out to be sailors. Some suffered from seasickness … The path of greatest desires often lies through the undesirable.”19 Finally, in chapter 4, by a kind of syncretism of logic and magic, the sailors manage to penetrate the impenetrable envelope of curved space by doing nothing except being ready. In the true spirit of nonaction, the spirit of the Bhagavad Gita, the sailors are pulled in by a higher force:

a wind rose out of nowhere, or rather a sudden powerful breath drew us forward, space opened before us, an endless void, a horizontal gulf of air and water impossibly coiled in circles. The ship creaked in all its timbers and was hurled up a slope into the center of the abyss, and suddenly we were rocking gently in a vast, calm bay surrounded by land!20They land, and are welcomed as though they had been expected. When they try to answer Daumal’s favorite question, “Who are you?” they realize that, with the guides (who are in an advanced state of evolution), “We knew henceforth that we could no longer pay the guides of Mount Analogue with words.”21 They gradually orient themselves, wondering why the port of arrival is called “Port O’ Monkeys.” The narrator muses, “this name evokes in me, not too pleasantly, my entire Western twentieth-century heritage—curious, mimicking, immodest, and agitated.”22 Looking out into the port, they view “Phoenician barques, triremes, galleys, caravels, schooners, two river-boats as well, and even an old mixed escort vessel from the last century.”23 The search for consciousness knows no barrier of time, culture, or age; all come as monkeys.

As they prepare to ascend the mountain, they get carried away with their research and analyses of the Asiatic origins of local myths, the peculiar optical conditions of the island’s atmosphere, and endless linguistic, sociological, and religious aspects. Suddenly they are roused by their guide from these preoccupations (“dreams” in Daumal’s words) and realize how their idle curiosity was holding them back from their primary goal.

We knew that nasty owl of intellectual cupidity all too well, and each of us had his own owl to nail to the door, not to mention a few chattering magpies, strutting turkeys, billing and cooing turtle doves, and geese, fat geese! But all those birds were so anchored, grafted so deeply to our flesh that we could not extract them without tearing our guts out. We had to live with them a long time yet, suffer them, know them well, until they fell from us like scabs in a skin condition, fell by themselves as the organism regained its health; it is harmful to pull them off prematurely.24Here again we see the same little creatures that we met in “The Holy War” and A Night of Serious Drinking—the same physical imagery of foibles and fretting “grafted to the flesh.” Only now, in Daumal’s maturity, he understands that they too play a role in the process of evolution. Each individual had to renounce his current activities to go off on the journey. Later they had to give up their alpinist gadgetry and exploratory instruments for simpler provisions, as they prepared themselves for the mountain ascent.

We began to call one another by our first names … this small change was not a simple effect of intimacy. For we were beginning to shed our old personalities. Just as we were leaving our encumbering equipment on the coast, we were also preparing to leave behind the artist, the inventor, the doctor, the scholar, the literary man. Beneath their old disguises, men and women were already peaking out.25

This concept of removing the trappings of one’s personality and penchants that Daumal alludes to from his earliest writings onward is a common theme to all great works about the spiritual quest. A Sufi tale relates how the little stream succeeds in crossing over the desert by evaporating and allowing itself to be carried by the wind (dying in order to be reborn). In The Divine Comedy, Dante uses a metaphor similar to Daumal’s: “One climbs to the summit of Bismantua with only one’s feet: but here one has to fly; I say, fly with light wings and the feathers of a great desire,”26 and, of course, in the Gospel, it is written: “Except a kernel of wheat die, it bringeth forth no fruit.”27Finally, Father Sogol declares that he gives up “my general’s helmet, which was a crown of thorns for the image I had of myself. In the untroubled depths of my memory of myself, a little child is awakening and makes the old man’s mask sob.”28 Father Sogol was trying to become sanskrita, “one who remakes himself,” one who has an interior being and measure for judging. Only then could the mysterious synchronicity occur: at that moment he discovers a “peradam,” the precious curved crystal hidden in the slopes of Mount Analogue “with an index of refraction so close to that of air despite the crystal’s great density, the unaccustomed eye barely perceives it.”29 The paradam was considered to be a miraculous material entity, a little bit of evidence that slips through from another dimension of reality. Only when Father Sogol humbled himself, could he detect the tiny peradam, the highest material reward of a seeker’s sincerity on Mount Analogue. Truly, this was the quintessential philosopher’s stone, representing the activation of true insight, the reconciling energy that can reconnect man’s two disparate natures. Pierre Sogol, whose very name meant Stone Word, could now touch the material evidence of his inner work.

If there is any doubt about the meaning behind Daumal’s allegory, he provides short variations to drive home his message. Woven into the narrative are two beautiful mythic tales, “The History of the Hollow Men and the Bitter Rose,” based on an old folktale of the Ardennes, and the “Myth of the Sphere and the Tetrahedron.” The first story is a poetic allegory about man’s place in the universe. “The hollow-men live in the rock, they move around inside it like nomadic cave dwellers. In the ice they wander like bubbles in the shape of men.” 30 The four pages that follow give free rein to his vast store of imagery, and express his inklings of another reality concurrent with our usual one. “Others say that every living man has his hollow-man in the mountains, just as the sword has its sheath, and the foot its footprint, and that they will be united in death.”31He draws upon Gurdjieff’s theory that the energy we expend, especially that of our thoughts and emotions, is always used, eaten up by something else in nature’s chain (the biggest consumer being our moon). “They eat only emptiness, such as the shape of corpses, they get drunk on empty words, on all the empty speech we utter.”32Then follows the drama of the twin brothers Mo and Ho and their battle with the Hollow Men in their search for the elusive Bitter Rose: “Whoever eats it discovers that whenever he is about to tell a lie, out loud or only to himself, his tongue begins to burn.”33 Finally Mo and Ho are forced to inhabit the same body and become a composite being, “Moho.” If they continue to evolve, they might even become a homo (a man). This transformation recalls the metamorphosis of the caterpillar in A Night of Serious Drinking. The tale of the Hollow Men is yet another vision quest—a story of a search for knowledge encapsulated in Daumal’s larger one, both in the tradition of the grail and the holy mountain.

Here, as throughout Mount Analogue, Daumal combines a lightness of poetic imagery with a weightiness of thought reminiscent of the poetry of the most Eastern of our Western literary ancestors, the Greeks. One line will be light as air, likening the Bitter Rose to a swarm of butterflies. Another has a weight as if it were carved in stone: “The hollow-men cannot enter our world, but they can come up to the surface of things. Beware of the surface of things.”34

In his imagery, Daumal achieves the Hindu ideal of suavité (liquidity) which Visvanatha likened to flowing liquid. The Vedic literary scholar, Jan Gonda, believes that the Hindus achieved this suavity through the use of concise, elliptical phraseology, and vocabulary that was nuanced, melodious, and dignified. Daumal’s imagery is not only liquid, but limpid—the quality of light passing through liquid. Visvanatha called limpidity the “evidence” produced by fire and water, the interaction of ardor and flow. Gonda also points out that Vedic writers often made graphic references to natural phenomenon, and showed a keen power of observation and pictorial expression. Likewise, Daumal presents a poetic, nuanced vision of the natural world. Now that he had achieved a certain security of having found a “path,” it seems that he was finally able to see the holy in earthly images as well, rather than often denouncing them as in his early poetry. It bespeaks of his sense of joy as he was preparing to leave the earth. He graphically details Mo’s movements:

Sometimes like a lizard and sometimes like a spider, he crawls up he high red rock walls, between the white snows and the blue-black sky. Swift little clouds envelop hime from time to time, then release him suddenly into the light. And there, just above him, he sees the Bitter-Rose, gleaming with colors that are beyond the seven colors of he rainbow.35The second myth is a prose poem that was also included in a 1954 collection of Daumal’s poetry entitled, “Black Poetry White Poetry.” It is another creation myth, similar to his earlier poem, “The Keys of a Big Game,” reflecting the Vedic myth of primordial man multiplying himself into all forms and species. As in the earlier poem, this growth is conceived in terms of contraction and expansion. “In the beginning, the Sphere and the Tetrahedron were united in a single unthinkable, unimaginable Form. Concentration and Expansion mysteriously united in a single Will.”36 Daumal describes the familiar theme of the One multiplying into the many that he had experienced in his drug-induced death experience:

The Sphere became primordial man who, wishing to realize separately all his desires and possibilities, broke into pieces in the shape of all animal species and the men of today. Man received the light of understanding. He wanted to see his light and enjoy it in multiple shapes. He was driven out by the force of the Unity.37

The form of Mount Analogue is a first-person narrative written in an understated, documentary style. It is the same style that we find in a dozen of his letters written to Véra, Jack, Jean Paulhan, Renéville, and others, while in the mountains during the years 1937 to 1943. Comprising thirty-two pages, these letters give lyrical, firsthand accounts of life in the mountains and include his experiences with the hardy mountain people. He describes his mountaineering training and how he would climb every other day, until walking on horizontal land seemed a little strange:

There is nothing quite like the mountains for teaching slowness and calmness; there are climbs which take an hour of absolute slowness: left foot, right hand, walking stick here, right foot, walking stick there, body weight left, left hand … and here nervousness would kill. Once on top, the body discovers its paradise, which is taking off one’s shoes and drinking a mouthful of wine mixed with snow gathered along the way.38

His description of the névé or glacier snow in Mount Analogue is lifted right out of his epistolary description to Rolland de Renéville where he lists ten different kinds, such as “wheat snow,” “diamond snow,” and “carpet snow.”39 One ten-page letter to his brother Jack is so replete with technical, montagnard jargon, that Daumal included thirty-six explanatory footnotes. Likewise, the detail of Mount Analogue reflects his expert knowledge of the subject, yet he never overburdens the novel with excess technical jargon that would intrude on the main poetic thrust.

The lightness and lyrical quality, reminiscent of Vedic poetry, is especially present in those mountain letters. It is clear that, in spite of his tubercular condition, Daumal was in his element several thousand feet up: his natural humor bubbles up everywhere to celebrate the mountainscape. These qualities emerge in Mount Analogue in a particular pattern: the beginning chapters are pervaded by a subtle humor, the middle chapters become more technical and scientific, and the final chapters achieve a joyful lyricism and exaltation. This progression gives a certain dramatic momentum to the voyage and climb.

The overall taste (rasa) of the book would fall into the Hindu category of “marvel,” as in A Night of Serious Drinking, for a sense of marvel and strangeness is intended, in a very matter-of-fact way, from the first page. Whenever a camera was used on Mount Analogue, nothing would appear on the developed film. Some of the flora of Port O’Monkeys include the incendiary lycoperdon, which would spontaneously ignite through intense fermentation, and the talking bush, whose fruit in the shape of resonant gourds could reproduce all the sounds of the human voice when rubbed by its own leaves. Yet the down-to-earth reporting makes the strange phenomena—such as herds of unicorns, seem absolutely plausible. The casual tone belies the weightiness of the ideas behind the bare facts of the allegory.

I munched a piece of biscuit. The donkey’s tail chased a cloud of flies into my face. My companions were also pensive. All the same, there was something mysterious in the ease with which we had reached the continent of Mount Analogue; and then, we seem to have been expected.40In this book Daumal presents, in a veiled manner, many aspects of the teacher-disciple relationship of the esoteric tradition and of the Gurdjieff Work in particular. One important concept is the linkage that exists between seekers. One can never advance farther up unless one prepares for those behind. In the narrative, the guides explain to Sogol’s band that each passing group must leave their encampment stocked with provisions for the next caravan. When the party sees the distant white smoke from the group ahead, they feel a mutual support: “For from now on the path linked our fate to theirs, even if we should never meet. Bernard knew nothing about them.”41 In the notes that he made for future additions to the novel, he talks further about the traces left by one seeker for another, warning the climber not to leave traces of false starts and mistakes. “Answer to your fellow men for the traces you leave behind.”42All seekers are linked through a hierarchy of evolved souls such as “the high mountain guides.” Everything happens through the unfolding of a divine plan. When they wonder how they came to land, “we came to understand later that this was not by chance, that the wind that had sucked us up and led us there was no natural and fortuitous wind but a deliberate blast.”43

In the last paragraph of the notes, the narrator lists the many factors that contributed to their successful entry: their calculations, their efforts, and their renunciation of bodily comforts. “So it seemed to us. But later we knew that if we had been able to reach the foot of Mount Analogue, it was because the invisible doors of this invisible country had been open to us by those who guard them.”44The interpenetration of the symbolic and the concrete—of fiction, fantasy, and the actuality of Daumal’s own experience of the Gurdjieff Work and even of mountain climbing—makes the novel a real manual for the aspiring seeker. It is an itinerary of Daumal’s many paths, showing how they all come together in one.

Thus Daumal uses fiction to present another crucial aspect of the teacher-disciple relationship. According to Ouspensky, “The first and most important feature of groups is the fact that groups are not constituted according to the wish and choice of their members. Groups are constituted by the teacher, who selects types which, from the point of view of his aims, can be useful to one another.”45 Yet the teacher does not clear the same single path for all disciples. Each person must find his own with the help of the teacher. In a letter to Ribemont Dessaignes, he wrote:

The first sentence of the Tao Tei King is: “a path that is a path already traced is not the Path.” I told you that I have encountered in my life a true teaching. One of the signs of its truth for me is that he never proposes a path already traced. No, at each step, the whole problem is posed. Nothing is resolved for me, once and for all.46

The novel remained unfinished with only meager notes to indicate the direction in which it might have gone. In the postface added by his wife, Véra, she discusses the preparation for the successive encampments: “It is very likely that René Daumal would have explained what he meant by this work of preparation. The fact is that in his own life he was working hard to prepare many minds for the difficult voyage toward Mount Analogue.”47The novel is truly a new embodiment of the Hindu concept of the mountain being the point where Heaven and Earth meet. In A Night of Serious Drinking, Daumal suggests “madness and death” as two escape exits, while the entire Mount Analogue constitutes the diary of an escape through the unnameable third exit alluded to in the previous novel. It is the log of someone on his way, a record left behind for others to read and follow. His proposed final chapter was to be entitled “And You, What Are You Seeking?”

Daumal indicates the preliminary stages of a true path as depicted in many traditions, a practical method for perfecting one’s life here on this planet. Thus Mount Analogue represents the culmination of Daumal’s expansion as a poet and perfectly reflects the esoteric teachings of Hinduism and Gurdjieff, both literary and philosophical. This final work is the consummation of all his years of honing his craft and his soul, surrendering his ego in order to ascend the holy mountain.

Mount Analogue by René Daumal