Seeing big cats hidden behind ordinary screens

 

Munier showed the children a print of a photograph he had taken a year earlier.

In the foreground, a falcon the color of leather perched on a lichen-speckled boulder. Behind, slightly to the left, hidden by the curve of the rockface and invisible to the unsuspecting glance, the eyes of a snow leopard staring straight at the photographer. The animal’s head merged so completely with the rock that it took a moment for the eye to make it out. Munier had his lens focused on the falcon’s plumage, utterly unaware that the leopard was watching him. It was only when studying his prints two months later that he noticed its presence. The infallible naturalist had let himself be duped. When he first showed me the photo, I had seen only the bird and my friend had to point to the leopard before I noticed what my eye would never have detected unprompted, since it sought only to detect an immediate presence. Once seen, I was struck by the presence of the animal every time I saw the photograph. The indistinguishable had become the obvious. The image concealed a valuable lesson. In nature, we are constantly being watched. Our eyes, on the other hand, are drawn to what is simple, they confirm what we already know. A child, being less conditioned than an adult, catches the mysteries of backgrounds and of hidden presences.

Our little Tibetan friends were not taken in. The fingers instantly pointed to the leopard. “Sa’u!” they shrieked. Not because their life in the mountains had honed their vision, but because their child’s eyes were not drawn to certainty. They explored the peripheries of the real.

Definition of the artist’s gaze: seeing big cats hidden behind ordinary screens.

From: Tesson, Sylvain

Title: The art of patience: seeking the snow leopard in Tibet

Maze and labyrinth - a significant difference

 Labyrinth walking has figured in rituals and religions from Iceland to Sri Lanka, from Tunisia to Sumatra, from India to Brazil.

In common parlance the words maze and labyrinth tend to be interchangeable – however, there’s a significant difference. Whereas a maze contains multiple paths and dead ends, and therefore many opportunities for getting lost, the labyrinth contains just one path. By taking it you inevitably get to the center. In a maze you encounter high walls or hedges that conceal the path and the pattern. Labyrinths generally have no walls, no concealment. They’re marked out on the ground in two dimensions, in earth, sand, or tile. If you chose, you could walk straight across to the center, avoiding the marked path completely, although naturally this is frowned upon by serious labyrinth walkers. Walking around a maze is a form of puzzle solving – walking around a labyrinth is a spiritual exercise. The notion that there’s only one true path is of course attractive to believers. You cannot get lost in a true labyrinth.

Virginia Westbury, author of Labyrinths: Ancient Paths of Wisdom and Peace, asked the many labyrinth walkers she encountered what they thought labyrinths were ‘for’. The replies she got included ‘meditation, celebration, spiritual connection, talking to God, talking to spirits, self-exploration, healing, sensing ‘energy’ wisdom, worship, divination, inner peace, forgiveness, transformation and communicating with others’. Is there nothing a labyrinth can’t do?

There are Christian labyrinths inside the French cathedrals of Chartres, Reims, and Amiens. The one at Chartres is the oldest, dating from the early thirteenth century. These are pavement labyrinths, set into the cathedral floors, and the original symbolic intentions have largely been lost. It seems they may have been as much concerned with seasonal rituals as with prayer walking, but we do know that in the eighteenth century pilgrims would walk around these labyrinths on bended knee while praying, as a penance.

There are currently a number of prisons in the United States that have installed labyrinths in their exercise yards. A few years ago the authorities at Monterey County Jail in Salinas, California, spent three thousand dollars on a portable version, a purple labyrinth painted on canvas, ninety feet across. It was unrolled from time to time and prisoners walked its path.

Prisoners reported feeling calm and at peace having walked it, though Cynthia Montague, one of the jail’s chaplains, reckoned its chief function was metaphoric. The labyrinth walk was about getting and staying on track, returning to the narrow if not the straight. Montague said, ‘If you accidentally step off the path and go onto a different part of the path, you might find yourself heading back out. But you’re allowed to start over again and keep at it’.

The most famous of all labyrinth walkers must surely be Theseus, who walked into the labyrinth in Crete to slay the minotaur. In order to avoid getting lost he used Ariadne’s ball of golden thread to trace his steps. This means, of course, that he was actually in a maze rather than a true labyrinth.

Instead of a golden thread, Hansel and Gretel tried leaving a trail of bread crumbs to stop themselves from getting lost, although you could argue that they were not so much lost as abandoned by their father. And in fact they did perform considerable walking feats. The Grimms’ fairy tale has them dumped in the middle of the forest and then ‘walking all day and all night’ to get home.

From: Geoff Nicholson

The Lost Art of Walking

The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism

Ought one really to walk alone?

 Ought one really to walk alone? Nietzsche, Thoreau and Rousseau are not alone in thinking so. Being in company forces one to jostle, hamper, walk at the wrong speed for others. When walking it’s essential to find your own basic rhythm, and maintain it. The right basic rhythm is the one that suits you, so well that you don’t tire and can keep it up for ten hours. But it is highly specific and exact. So that when you are forced to adjust to someone else’s pace, to walk faster or slower than usual, the body follows badly.

However, complete solitude is not absolutely essential. You can be with up to three or four … with no more than that, you can still walk without talking. Everyone walks at  their own speed, slight gaps build up, and the leader can turn around from time to time, pause for a moment, call ‘Everything all right?’ in a detached, automatic, almost indifferent way. The reply might be a wave of the hand. Hands on hips, the others may await the slowest; then they will start again, and the order changes. The rhythms come and go, crossing one another. Going at your own pace doesn’t mean walking in an absolutely uniform, regular manner; the body is not a machine. It allows itself slight relaxations or moments of affirmative joy. So with up to three or four people, walking allows these moments of shared solitude. For solitude too can be shared, like bread and daylight.

With more than four companions, the party becomes a colony, an army on the march. Shouts, whistles, people go from one to another, wait for each other, form groups which soon become clans. Everyone boasts about their equipment. When it’s time to eat, they want you to ‘taste this’, they produce culinary treats, outbid each other … It’s hell. No longer simple or austere: a piece of society transplanted to the mountains. People start making comparisons. With five or more, it’s impossible to share solitude.

So it’s best to walk alone, except that one is never entirely alone. As Henry David Thoreau wrote: ‘I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.’ To be buried in Nature is perpetually distracting. Everything talks to you, greets you, demands your attention: trees, flowers, the colour of the roads. The sigh of the wind, the buzzing of insects, the babble of streams, the impact of your feet on the ground: a whole rustling murmur  that responds to your presence. Rain, too. A light and gentle rain is a steady accompaniment, a murmur you listen to, with its intonations, outbursts, pauses: the distinct plopping of drops splashing on stone, the long melodious weave of sheets of rain falling steadily.

It’s impossible to be alone when walking, with so many things under our gaze which are given to us through the inalienable grasp of contemplation. The intoxication of the promontory when, after a struggle, we have reached the rocky point and sat down, and when the prospect, the landscape is given to us at last. All those fields, houses, forests, paths, all ours, for us. We have mastered all that by our ascent, and it only remains to rejoice in that mastery.

*

Silences

Thoreau observed repeatedly that silence usually taught him more than the company of others.

Just as there are several solitudes, so there are several silences.

One always walks in silence. Once you have left streets, populated roads, public spaces (all that speed, jostling and clamour, the clatter of thousands of footsteps, the white noise of shouts and murmurs, snatches of words, the rumble and whir of engines), silence is retrieved, initially as a transparency. All is calm, expectant and at rest. You are out of the world’s chatter, its corridor echoes, its muttering. Walking: it hits you at first like an immense breathing in the ears. You feel the silence as if it were a great fresh wind blowing away clouds.

There’s the silence of woodland. Clumps and groves of trees form shifting, uncertain walls around us. We walk along existing paths, narrow winding strips of beaten earth. We quickly lose our sense of direction. That silence is tremulous, uneasy.

Then there’s the silence of tough summer afternoon walks across the flank of a mountain, stony paths, exposed to an uncompromising sun. Blinding, mineral, shattering silence. You hear nothing but the quiet crunch of stones underfoot. An implacable, definitive silence, like a transparent death. Sky of a perfectly detached blue. You advance with eyes down, reassuring yourself sometimes with a silent mumbling. Cloudless sky, limestone slabs filled with presence: silence nothing can sidestep. Silence fulfilled, vibrant immobility, tensed like a bow.

There’s the silence of early morning. For long routes in autumn you have to start very early. Outside everything is violet, the dim light slanting through red and gold leaves. It is an expectant silence. You walk softly among huge dark trees, still swathed in traces of blue night. You are almost afraid of awakening. Everything whispering quietly.

There’s the silence of walks through the snow, muffled footsteps under a white sky. All around you nothing moves. Things and even time itself are iced up, frozen solid in silent immobility. Everything is stopped, unified, thickly padded. A watching silence, white, fluffy, suspended as if in parentheses.

 Lastly, there’s the unique silence of night. If, owing to nightfall, when the lodging is still too far, you have chosen to sleep under the stars, taken trouble to find a good place, warmed yourself and eaten, you fall asleep quickly and easily. But then there always comes that moment of awakening, after several hours of slumber, still in the fastness of the night. The eyes open abruptly as if seized by the depth of the silence. Any shifting to ease your limbs, the rustle of your sleeping bag, assume enormous proportions. So what is it that woke you? The very sound of silence?

In a chapter entitled ‘A Night Among the Pines’, Stevenson mentions this sudden-awakening phenomenon, placing it around two in the morning and seeing it as affecting, at the same moment, all living beings asleep outside. He views it as a minor cosmic mystery: could it be a tremor of the earth running through our bodies? A moment of acceleration in the night? An invisible dew originating in the stars? At any rate it is a startling moment, in which the silence can be heard physically as music, or rather it is the moment when, lifting your head, you hear quite distinctly the music of the spheres.

What is called ‘silence’ in walking is, in the first place, the abolishment of chatter, of that permanent noise that blanks and fogs everything, invading the vast prairies of our consciousness like couch-grass. Chatter deafens: it turns everything into nonsense, intoxicates you, makes you lose your head. It is always there on all sides, overflowing, running everywhere, in all directions.

 But above all, silence is the dissipation of our language. Everything, in this world of work, leisure, activity, reproduction and consumption of things, everything has its function, its place, its utility, and a specific word that corresponds to it. Likewise our grammar reproduces our sequencings of action, our laborious grasp of things, our fuss and bustle. Always doing, producing, forever busying ourselves. Our language is tailored to the conventions of fabricated things, predictable gestures, normalized behaviours, received attitudes. Artifices adapted to one another: language is caught in the everyday construction of the world, participates in it, belongs to the same order of things as pictures and numbers and lists – order, injunction, synthesis, decision, report, code. Language is an instruction slip, a price list. In the silence of a walk, when you end up losing the use of words because by then you are doing nothing but walk (and here one should beware of those expedition guides who recode, detail, inform, punctuate the walk with names and explanations – the relief, the types of rock, the slopes, the names of plants and their virtues – to give the impression that everything visible has a name, that there is a grammar for everything that can be felt), in that silence you hear better, because you are finally hearing what has no vocation to be retranslated, recoded, reformatted.

‘Before speaking, a man should see.’

The only words remaining to the walker are barely mutterings, words he catches himself saying (‘Come on, come on, come on’, ‘That’s it, ‘Oh, all right’, ‘There it is, there it is’), words hung like garlands on the fleeting seconds, commonplace, words not to say anything but to punctuate the silence with a supplementary vibration, just to hear his own echo. 

From: A philosophy of walking by Frédéric Gros

Cayce and reincarnation

 While his reading background was surprisingly comprehensive, he evidently preferred works with a philosophical flavor, I was decidedly impressed. He was well informed regarding the subjects in which I was interested. Hazel and I were fascinated; the time was flying by.

And then the roof fell in.

Abruptly, and without warning, he swung into a ridiculous subject: reincarnation! For a few minutes I continued to listen; I wanted to make sure whether he could possibly be serious. He was. Reincarnation—oh no!

How could this intelligent-looking man, apparently normal in every other respect, be talking in earnest about a subject so preposterous!

Interrupting Weston, I reminded him that it was growing very late; it was time for Hazel and me to get back to town. I wasted no time in getting out of there, practically pulling Hazel with me.

All the way home I kept muttering words like… and he seemed so intelligent… just can’t tell by looking at someone… have to be more careful in the future….” Hazel paid no attention; she was fast asleep by the time we rolled into our driveway.

About a month later business brought Weston to Pueblo again, but I contrived to be “just too busy” to see him that day.

He very likely sensed that I was avoiding him. And simple deduction would have disclosed that the reason was his reincarnation rantings. He couldn’t have failed to observe that I had been intensely interested until he had slipped into the you-have-lived before-and-will-live-again theme.

I suppose it was because he was aware of my reason for dodging him that he sent me two books. I had heard of neither. One was called There Is a River, by Thomas Sugrue, and the other, Many Mansions, by Dr. Gina Cerminara. I noticed that both were concerned with a man named Edgar Cayce (pronounced Casey), who had died only a few years before (1945).

Although I didn’t know it then, picking up those books was a signal for the beginning of a new phase in my life. It was an act that ultimately forced me to dig into fields that I had always regarded as ridiculously out of bounds.

The books started off so sensibly and interestingly that, for a while at least, my attention was diverted from where they were leading me. Edgar Cayce’s story, as it began, was not so very different from thousands of others who had lived at the same time. He was born on a farm near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1877. Although he had little formal education—having gotten only as far as the ninth grade in a country school—there was one book he had mastered: the Bible. He reread the Bible every year.

He didn’t take to the farm, so while still in his teens, he moved to town and worked at various sales jobs from stationery to insurance. Up to this point, then, we still have a conventional pattern: A devout Christian farm boy goes to the city and struggles to earn his living at whatever job he can find. But here the Cayce story shifts abruptly.

A severe attack of laryngitis when Cayce was twenty-one finally resulted in the loss of his voice. All medication was ineffective; he just couldn’t talk. This depressing condition cut short his saleswork and kept him at home for several months, where he brooded over his apparently incurable ailment. Finally, however, he went to work as a photographer’s apprentice, a job that would not be so demanding on his voice.

Then one night a traveling hypnotist came to the town. He heard about Cayce’s condition and offered to attempt a cure through hypnosis. Cayce was willing, and while under hypnosis it was proved that he could speak perfectly. But as soon as he was awakened he reverted to the former condition and couldn’t talk. Again and again the hypnotist tried, not forgetting to employ the post-hypnotic suggestion that Cayce would be able to speak nor mally after he awakened, but to no avail. Cayce could talk while in a trance, not afterward.

The professional hypnotist moved on to his next engagement. The following day, however, a local resident, an amateur hypnotist named Al Layne, who had witnessed the whole affair, came to offer a suggestion: If Cayce could talk while under trance, then why not go into a trance once more and this time, if Cayce could still speak normally while in such a state, let him try to describe the nature of his affliction? Perhaps he could give some clue as to the root of the trouble, some indication or sensation that would identify the cause.

Because all other remedies had failed, Cayce was ready to try almost anything. He went into a trance, then was asked to explain his vocal difficulty, which he did. These were his words:

“Yes, we can see the body. In the normal physical state this body is unable to speak due to a partial paralysis of the inferior muscles of the vocal cord, produced by nerve strain. This is a psychological condition producing a physical effect. This may be removed by increasing the circulation to the affected parts by suggestion while in this unconscious condition.”

Layne made the suggestion outlined by Cayce—that is, he told the sleeping Cayce that circulation to the vocal cords would increase and the condition would thus be removed. Cayce’s chest and throat turned pink, finally scarlet. Several minutes later he said, “It’s all right now. The condition is removed. Make the suggestion that the circulation return to normal and that after that, the body awaken.”

Layne followed instructions. Cayce awakened; he spoke normally for the first time in many months.

Layne was delighted. Soon he came up with another idea. If Cayce could diagnose for himself, there was a bare possibility that he might be able to do the same thing for the young hypnotist, Layne, who had long suffered from stomach trouble. Agreeing to the experiment, Cayce again went under hypnosis; this time he diagnosed Layne’s ailments and told him what to do about it, recommending certain drugs, diet, and exercise.

Following these directions, Layne improved remarkably within a few weeks. He bubbled with excitement. Not only was he getting well, but he was certain that Cayce possessed a rare gift. When in a hypnotic trance Cayce spoke like a physician, using accurate physiological and medical terminology. In both these cases, furthermore, his prescriptions had included measures which, although overlooked in prior medical examinations, had been surprisingly successful.

Layne, therefore, was eager to determine whether they could help others who were suffering from poor health. Cayce, though, was not so easily persuaded. In the first place he knew nothing about medicine, had never read a single book on the subject. He couldn’t understand how this stuff could be pouring out of him. (Keep in mind that Cayce had total amnesia for the entire period of the trance; he had to be told what he had said after awakening.) Furthermore, success in his own case might have been accidental; and Layne’s improvement, he reasoned, might possibly be attributed to imagination. And since Cayce apparently had no control over what he said while in a trance, he might give directions that would be harmful rather than helpful.

But Layne’s exuberance would not be quashed. Playing upon Cayce’s natural desire to help others—young Cayce had always wanted to be a preacher and was thwarted by financial circumstances—Layne finally inveigled a promise to attempt a few experiments. Cayce wanted it firmly understood, however, that this would be an effort to help only those who requested, and genuinely needed, assistance.

He made it quite clear, furthermore, that he would accept no money or payment of any kind.

Thereupon were launched the approximately thirty thousand “health readings” of Edgar Cayce. This title was applied by Layne, who was now having all of Cayce’s trance utterances recorded verbatim. Very soon it had become plain that the strange faculty of the “sleeping doctor” was most uncanny, indeed.

Oddest of all was the fact that the person requesting the reading need not even be present. It was learned that it was possible to conduct readings at a distance provided Cayce was given the exact name of the person and his location at the time the reading was made. If a person, for instance, were living in an apartment in New York City, he could request a Cayce health reading by giving no more than his address, his name, and a statement that he would be in his apartment at, say, 2:00 P.M. on a certain date.

At the appointed time Cayce would loosen his tie, take off his shoes, and lie down on a couch. Having already learned to place himself in a trance, he would close his eyes and move his clasped hands, palms upward, over his forehead. Then, apparently receiving some subconscious flash, he would move his hands down and cross them over his solar plexus. After he had taken several deep breaths, his eyes would begin to flicker, indicating that he was slipping into a trance state. At this point Layne (or Mrs. Cayce or some other person) would read the following statement, which had been adopted as the standard opening:

“You will now have before you [individual’s name], who is located at [street, address, town, state]. You will go over this body carefully, examine it thoroughly, and tell me the conditions you find at the present time, giving the cause of existing conditions; also suggestions for the help and relief of this body. You will answer questions as I ask them.”

Within a few minutes Cayce would begin to speak. Ordinarily he would begin, “Yes, we have the body,” and he would continue describing the person, diagnosing the ailment, and recommending steps that should be taken for relief. When it is realized that the letter requesting the reading included none of the person’s symptoms, nor even a hint of any sort, this bizarre talent grows even more electrifying.

It is interesting to note that in the event the person asking for the reading was not at the designated location, Cayce would say, “We don’t find him. The body is not here.” At other times he would voluntarily give a detailed description of the room, often making such comments as, “Big dog in the corner… The body is just leaving now—going down in the elevator… We find the mother praying.”

Most important, however, was the fact that sick people were getting well after Cayce’s diagnoses; cures were effected, moreover, even with cases which had been regarded as incurable. A young girl in Alabama, for instance, had been committed to a mental institution as hopelessly demented. A later Cayce reading, however, disclosed the curious fact that an impacted wisdom tooth was impinging upon a nerve in the brain. The slumbering diagnostician suggested that the tooth be extracted. Subsequent dental surgery confirmed the reading, and the girl made a complete return to sanity.

One of the most famous and widely investigated cases was that of little Aime Dietrich of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. The child’s mind had failed to develop since an attack of grippe at the age of two; she was, furthermore, seized with convulsions every day by the time she was five. Numerous specialists had been consulted, and the last one had assured the anguished parents that the child was the victim of a rare brain disease which must invariably prove fatal.

Not completely reconciled to their tragedy, the parents turned to Edgar Cayce as a last resort. The humble, uneducated photographer’s apprentice was almost too timid to step in where famous physicians had failed. Nevertheless, he did respond to the Dietrich summons, and the outcome is well-documented history.

While in a trance Cayce said that just before the child’s grippe attack she had fallen from a carriage and that the grippe germs had settled in the injured area; this had caused all the trouble. He stated that a return to normality could be made through certain osteopathic adjustments.

The girl’s mother then remembered the fall from the carriage but she didn’t understand how this could possibly have any bearing on the case. In any event, the adjustments were made, and for the first time in three years the girl began to show signs of recovering. Later the father gave the following testimony before a notary public:

At this period our attention was called to Mr. Edgar Cayce, who was asked to diagnose her case. By autosuggestion he went into a sleep and diagnosed her case as one of congestion at the base of the brain, stating also minor details. He outlined to Dr. A. C. Layne how to proceed to cure her. Dr. Layne treated her accordingly every day for three weeks, using Mr. Cayce occasionally to follow up the treatments as results developed. Her mind began to clear up about the eighth day and within three months she was in perfect health, and is so to this day. The case can be verified by many of the best citizens of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. 

Subscribed and sworn before me this eighth day of October, 1910. (Signed) D. H. Dietrich, Gerrig Raidt, Notary Public, Hamilton County, Ohio. 

As the cases accumulated, many doctors became interested in the miracle man of Virginia Beach. Some began to use him for diagnosing their own most puzzling cases. One doctor in Delaware, who had utilized Cayce’s talents for years, attested that the diagnostic accuracy had been better than ninety per cent. A New York doctor agreed with this, and was even inclined to raise this figure.

It should not be inferred from this, however, that Cayce had a perfect batting average. He had his share of strike-outs. There were readings which failed to match the situation, diagnoses which did not seem to fit the case, instances of off-the-target performance. Overall, though, his record was phenomenal.

Remembering that the two books had been sent to me by Val Weston, I was wondering, as I started reading the first one, why he wanted me to know about the medical clairvoyance of Edgar Cayce. As I continued to read, however, Weston’s motive became obvious. It seems that Cayce finally focused his incredible ability upon another problem. And the latter clearly was the matter to which Weston was directing my attention.

It was in the third chapter of Many Mansions that I first read the absorbing account of how Edgar Cayce happened to plunge into reincarnation. Perhaps the best manner in which to share with the reader some of the impact that struck me at that time is to borrow from those same passages in Many Mansions. The book’s author, Dr. Gina Cerminara, entitles her third chapter “An Answer to the Riddles of Life,” which begins:

For twenty years of humanitarian activity, Edgar Cayce’s clairvoyance showed itself to be reliable in literally thousands of instances. One feels the need of reminding oneself of this fact when coming to the next development in his strange career.

At first his powers of perception had been directed inward, to the hidden places of the human body. Not until many years passed did it occur to anyone that these powers might also be directed outward, to the universe itself, to the relationship of man and the universe, and to the problems of human destiny. It happened in the following way.

Arthur Lammers, a well-to-do printer of Dayton, Ohio, had heard about Cayce through a business associate, and his interest was sufficiently roused for him to take a special trip down to Selma, Alabama, where Cayce was living at the time, to watch him work. Lammers had no health problem of his own, but he was convinced, after several days’ observation of readings, that Cayce’s clairvoyance was authentic. A well-informed, intellectually alert man, he began to think that a mind able to perceive realities unavailable to normal sight should be able to shed light on problems of more universal significance than the functioning of a sick man’s liver or the intricacies of his digestive tract. Which philosophic system, for example, came closest to the truth? What was the purpose, if any, of man’s existence? Was there any truth in the doctrine of immortality? If so, what happened to man after death? Could Cayce’s clairvoyance give answers to questions like these?

Cayce didn’t know. Abstract questions concerning ultimate matters had never crossed his mind. The religion he had been taught in church he accepted without question; speculation as to its truth in comparison with philosophy, science, or the teachings of other religions was foreign to his thinking. It was only because of his generous desire to help suffering people that he had continued to go into a sleep so unorthodox. Lammers was the first person who saw other possibilities in the faculty besides the curing of disease, and Cayce’s imagination was stirred. The readings had seldom failed to answer any question put to them; there seemed no reason why they should not answer Lammers’ questions.

Consequently Cayce accepted Lammers’ invitation to visit him in Dayton in order to determine what the readings had to say about these philosophical inquiries. It was decided, since Lammers had recently become curious as to whether there could be any truth in astrology, to ask the sleeping Cayce for Lammers’ horoscope.

The subsequent reading indicated that the answers to Lammers’ queries were not a matter of astrology; it was implied, for instance, that certain qualities and tendencies of Lammers had not been the result of a particular sign of the zodiac. Instead—and here comes the revelation that burst upon me with atomic force—these factors could be more specifically attributed, stated the reading, to a previous lifetime on earth, when “he was once a monk.”

Oh, oh! There it was again, I said to myself. When the persistent Weston perceived that I was unwilling to listen to his reincarnation rhapsody, he had attempted to implant his propaganda by sending me a book. Well, I wouldn’t be trapped. Muttering imprecations, I shoved the book aside. This stuff is not for me, I kept assuring myself.

To Hazel I raged against reincarnation, the book, and even Cayce himself. But Hazel scarcely looked up from her own reading; she merely remarked something to the effect that I would be getting back to the book again sooner or later and that I might as well pick it up now. I did.

Taking up where I had left off, I was glad to learn, at least, that Cayce had also found himself in consternation. He simply did not understand this reincarnation business. He was afraid at first that it might be anti-Christian. As to this part of the Cayce story, let’s refer again to Many Mansions:

Cayce’s inner turmoil is not difficult to understand. He had been brought up in an atmosphere of strict, orthodox Christianity, with no instruction in the teachings of the great world religions other than his own. At that time, therefore, he was unaware for the most part of the many profound points of similarity between his faith and other faiths, and had had no opportunity to appreciate the ethical and spiritual light which burns in lamps other than that of his own form of Christianity. He was particularly uninformed with regard to that cardinal teaching of Hinduism and Buddhism—reincarnation.

The Search for Bridey Murphy 

by Morey Bernstein 

The Art of Patience - Seeking the snow leopard ...

 Preface

I had met him one Easter day, at a screening of his film about the Abyssinian wolf. He had spoken to me about the elusiveness of animals and of the supreme virtue: patience. He had told me about his life as a wildlife photographer, and explained the technique of lying in wait. It was a delicate and rarefied art that involved hiding in the wild and waiting for an animal that could not be guaranteed to appear. There was a strong chance of coming away empty-handed. This acceptance of uncertainty seemed to me to be very noble—and by the same token anti-modern.

Could I, who loved to run like the wind over lowlands and highlands, manage to spend hours, silent and utterly still?

Lying among the nettles, I obeyed Munier’s precepts: not a movement, not a sound. I could breathe; this was the only vulgar reflex permitted. In cities, I had grown accustomed to prattling about anything and everything. The most difficult thing was saying nothing. Cigars were prohibited. “We’ll smoke later, down by the river,” Munier had said, “it will be night and fog!” The prospect of lighting a Havana on the banks of the Moselle made it easier to endure the position of prostrate watcher.

Life was exploding. The birds in the trees streaked the night sky, they did not shatter the magic of the place, did not disturb the order of things, they belonged to this world. This was beauty. A hundred meters away, the river flowed. Swarms of dragonflies hovered over the surface, predatory. On the western bank, a hobby falcon was diving. Its flight was hieratic, precise, deadly—a Stuka.

This was not the time to allow myself to be distracted: two adult badgers were emerging from the sett.

Until it grew dark, all was a mixture of grace, of drollery, of authority. Would the badgers give a signal? Four heads appeared, and the shadows darted from the tunnels. The twilight games had begun. We were posted ten meters away, and the animals were oblivious to our presence. The badger cubs tussled, scrabbled up the embankment, rolled into the ditch, nipped at each other’s necks and got a clout from an adult, determined to restore a semblance of order to the night circus. The black pelts daubed with three stripes of ivory would disappear into the undergrowth only to reappear further on. The animals were preparing to forage in the fields and on the riverbanks. They were warming up for the night ahead.

From time to time, one of the badgers would wander close to our hide, snuffling the ground with its long snout, then turning to face us. The dark bands set with coal-black eyes sketched out melancholy smears. They were still on the move; we could make out the powerful plantigrade paws turned inward. In the French clay, their claws left small bear-like tracks that a certain lumbering race of humans, in its wisdom, identified as the tracks of “vermin.”

It was the first time I had ever been so still, hoping for an encounter. I scarcely recognized myself. Until now, from the Yakutia to Seine-et-Oise, I had run, adhering to three principles:

The unexpected does not pay house calls, it must be sought out everywhere. 

Movement enhances inspiration. 

Boredom runs less swiftly than a man in a hurry. 

In short, I convinced myself that there was a link between distance and the importance of an event. I thought of stillness as a dress rehearsal for death. In deference to my mother, resting in the family tomb on the banks of the Seine, I roved about frenetically—the mountains on Saturday, the seaside on Sunday—without paying attention to what was going on around me. How do journeys spanning thousands of kilometers lead one day to lying in the tall grass with your chin propped on the edge of a ditch?

Next to me, Vincent Munier was taking photographs of the badgers. The mass of muscle beneath his camouflage clothes blended into the vegetation, but his profile was still visible in the half-light. His face, all sharp edges and long ridges, seemed to be sculpted for issuing orders; he had a nose that Asians mocked, a carved chin and soft eyes. A gentle giant.

He had talked to me about his childhood, his father taking him to a hide beneath a spruce tree to witness the flight of the king—the capercaillie; the father teaching the son the promise of silence; the son discovering the rewards of nights spent lying on the frozen ground; the father explaining that the appearance of an animal is the greatest gift life can give to those who love it; the son setting up his own hides, discovering the secrets of the world unaided, learning to frame a nighthawk taking wing; the father discovering the son’s artistic photographs. Munier, lying next to me, had been born in the mists of the Vosges. He had become the greatest wildlife photographer of his time. His peerless photographs of wolves, bears and cranes were sold in New York galleries.

“Tesson, I’m taking you to the forest to see badgers,” he had said to me, and I had accepted, because no one refuses an invitation from an artist in his studio. He did not know that Tesson meant “badger” in Old French. The word is still common in the vernacular of western France and Picardy. It originated as a deformation of the Greek taxis, from which we get the words “taxonomy,” the science of classifying animals, and “taxidermy,” the art of stuffing animals (since man likes to skin the things he has just named). On the topographical maps of France, there are tessonières, the name given to the bucolic sites of mass culls. For, in the countryside, the badger was despised and ruthlessly destroyed. It was accused of digging up the soil, of damaging hedges. It was smoked out, it was killed. Did the badger deserve the relentless fury of men? It was a secretive animal, creature of night and solitude. It favored an inconspicuous life, ruled over the shadows, did not suffer visitors. It knew tranquility was something to be defended. It left its sett at night and returned at dawn. How could man tolerate the existence of a totem to discretion, making a virtue of distance and an honor of silence? Zoologists described the badger as “monogamous and sedentary.” If etymology connected me to the animal, I did not conform to its nature.

•   •   •Night fell, the animals disappeared into the undergrowth, there was a general rustling. Munier must have noticed my joy. I considered these few hours as one of the best nights of my life. I had just encountered a clan of living creatures that was utterly sovereign. They did not struggle to escape their condition. We headed back to the road via the riverbank. In my pocket, the cigars were crushed.

“There’s an animal in Tibet that I’ve been tracking for six years,” said Munier. “It lives up in the high plateaus. You can spend a long time in a hide just to catch a glimpse of one. I’m going back this winter; come with me.”

“What is it?”

“The snow leopard,” he said.

“I thought it had disappeared,” I said.

“That’s what it wants you to think.”

*

In the distance beyond the pass, wolves howled at the setting sun.

“They’re singing,” Munier insisted. “There are at least eight of them.”

How could he possibly know? I could hear only a lone lament. Munier gave a howl. Ten minutes later, a wolf answered. So began what I think of as the most beautiful conversations between living creatures certain never to meet. “Why did we drift apart?” Munier was howling. “What do you want from me?” replied the wolf.

Munier would sing. A wolf would respond. Munier would fall silent, the wolf would start again. Then, suddenly, one of the wolves appeared on the highest pass. Munier sang a last lament and the wolf dashed down the slope heading in our direction. Having been weaned on medieval literature—the fables of the Beast of Gévaudan, the Arthurian cycle—I was not exactly thrilled to see a wolf hurtling toward us. I reassured myself by glancing at Munier, who looked about as worried as an Air France flight attendant in a pocket of turbulence.

“He’ll stop dead before he gets to us,” he whispered a moment before the wolf froze some fifty meters away.

It turned aside and padded in a wide circle, its muzzle turned toward us, unsettling the yaks. The herd moved further up the slopes, alarmed by the presence of the wolf. The tragedy of life in the herd: never a moment’s peace. The wolf disappeared; we scanned the valley, the yaks had now reached the crest, night was drawing in; we did not see the wolf again, it had melted away.

*

Munier told me about the first photograph he ever took, at the age of twelve: a roe deer in the Vosges. “Oh! nobility! Oh! true and simple beauty!” was the prayer offered by the young Ernest Renan as he surveyed the ruins of Athens. For Munier, that first encounter was his night spent on the Acropolis.

“That day, I shaped my destiny: to see animals. To wait for them.”

Since that night, he had spent more time crouching behind bushes than sitting at school desks. His father did not force him. He never passed his baccalauréat, and earned a living working on building sites until his work as a photographer was recognized.

Scientists were scornful. Munier approached nature as an artist. His work was of little interest to statisticians, the servants of the number. I had met my fair share of number crunchers. They ringed hummingbirds and disemboweled seagulls to take samples of bile. The numbers added up. Where was the poetry? Nowhere. Did their work contribute to the sum of knowledge? Not necessarily. Science masked its limitations behind petabytes of digital data. The process of tallying the world claimed to advance science. It was pretentious.

Munier, for his part, paid tribute only to beauty. He celebrated the grace of the wolf, the elegance of the crane, the perfection of the bear. His photographs belong to art, not to mathematics.

“Your detractors would rather model the digestive system of a tiger than own a Delacroix,” I told him. In the late nineteenth century, Eugène Labiche foresaw the absurdity of the age of science: “Statistics, Madame, is a modern positive science. It shines a light on the most impenetrable facts. Recently, for example, thanks to laborious research, we have managed to calculate the exact number of widows who crossed the Pont-Neuf in the year 1860.”

“A yak is a lord,” replied Munier. “What do I care whether he’s ruminated twelve times this morning!”

Munier constantly seemed to be nurturing a melancholy. He never raised his voice for fear of startling the snowfinches.

*

Mediocrity

Another morning spent on the dusty slopes. The sixth. This sand had once been a mountain that was molded by rivers. These stones held secrets that stretched back. The air throttled all movement. The sky was steel blue as an anvil. Frost lay like lace over the sand. A Tibetan gazelle stood, eating snow, with delicate movements.

Suddenly, a wild donkey—a kiang—appeared. The animal stopped, warily. Munier pressed an eye to the telescopic sight. It looked almost as though he were hunting. Neither Munier nor I have the heart of a killer. Why destroy an animal more powerful and better adapted than oneself? The hunter kills twice. He kills a living creature, and, in himself, he kills the spite he feels at being less powerful than the wolf, less agile than the antelope. Bang! the shot rings out. “At last,” says the hunter’s wife.

Pity the poor hunter; it is unfair to be pot-bellied when you are surrounded by creatures as taut as a drawn bow.

The wild donkey did not leave. Had we not seen it arrive, we could have mistaken it for a statue carved from sand.

We were looking down on the bed of the frozen river, some five kilometers from our camp, and I was talking about a letter I had received some years earlier from Monsieur de B—feathered hat and velvet tailcoat—the president of the French Federation of Huntsmen, in response to an article I had written lambasting hunters. In it, he accused me of being a moccasin-wearing urbanite with no sense of tragedy, someone who strolled through gardens, maudlin about field mice and terrified by the clack of a breechblock. A pansy, I guess. As I read the letter, having just arrived back from a trek in the mountains of Afghanistan, my first thought was that it was a pity that the word “hunter” lumped together men who eviscerated woolly mammoths with spears and a gentleman with a double chin who fired grapeshot at obese pheasants between the cognac and the camembert. Using the same word to define contradictory concepts does nothing to alleviate the suffering of the world.

From The Art of Patience - Seeking the snow leopard 

by Sylvian Tesson

Possession

 

Are there any cases at all which even suggest a ‘true’ possession? A case which is often cited as being at any rate a contender is that of Lurancy Vennum, the ‘Watseka Wonder’. This case is described in a very rare pamphlet by E. W. Stevens (152), the doctor who was in charge of this young lady. The pamphlet was abridged and excerpted by F. W. H. Myers, who also added details obtained by Richard Hodgson from interviews with some of the principal participants (110a, I, pp. 360–370). I shall draw upon the abridgment in my account of the case.

Lurancy Vennum was born on 16 April 1864, at a place about seven miles from Watseka, Illinois. Her family moved to Watseka on 1 April 1871. They took a house about two hundred yards from that of a Mr A. B. Roff and his family. The two families developed only a formal and distant acquaintance. About the autumn of 1871, the Vennum family moved away from the vicinity of the Roffs, and never again lived nearer to them than the ‘extreme opposite limits of the city’.

In July 1877, Lurancy began to have fits or trances. It was generally thought that she had become insane. Mr Roff, whose deceased daughter Mary Roff, had had periods of insanity, persuaded Mr Vennum to let him bring Dr E. W. Stevens to see her. Dr Stevens and Mr Roff visited Lurancy on 31 January 1878.

It appears that various deceased persons now purported to control Lurancy and to speak through her. After being hypnotized by Dr Stevens, she stated that one Mary Roff wished to come. Mr Roff said, ‘Yes, let her come, we’ll be glad to have her come.’ Next morning the girl began to claim to be Mary Roff, who had died, aged eighteen, in July 1865, when Lurancy was just over a year old.

About a week later, Mrs A. B. Roff, and her daughter, Mrs Minerva Alter, Mary’s sister, hearing of the remarkable change, went to see the girl. As they came in sight … Mary [i.e. Lurancy ‘controlled’ by Mary Roff] looking out of the window, exclaimed exultingly, ‘There comes my ma and sister Nervie!’ – the name by which Mary used to call Mrs Alter in girlhood. As they came into the house she caught them around their necks, wept and cried for joy, and seemed so happy to meet them. From this time on she seemed more homesick than before. At times she seemed almost frantic to go home.

On the 11th day of February, 1878, they sent the girl to Mr Roff’s, where she met her ‘pa and ma’, and each member of the family, with the most gratifying expressions of love and affection … On being asked how long she would stay, she said, ‘The angels will let me stay till some time in May’; and she made it her home there till May 21st, three months and ten days, a happy, contented daughter and sister in a borrowed body.

The girl now in her new home seemed perfectly happy and content, knowing every person and everything that Mary knew when in her original body, … recognizing and calling by name those who were friends and neighbours of the family from 1852 to 1865 … calling attention to scores, yes, hundreds of incidents that transpired during her natural life. During all the period of her sojourn at Mr Roff’s she had no knowledge of, and did not recognize, any of Mr Vennum’s family.

One evening, in the latter part of March, Mr Roff was sitting in the room waiting for tea, and reading the paper, ‘Mary’ being out in the yard. He asked Mrs Roff if she could find a certain velvet head-dress that Mary used to wear the last year before she died. If so to lay it on the stand and say nothing about it, to see if Mary would recognize it. Mrs Roff readily found and laid it on the stand. The girl soon came in, and immediately exclaimed as she approached the stand, ‘Oh, there is my head-dress I wore when my hair was short!’ She then asked, ‘Ma, where is my box of letters? Have you got them yet?’ Mrs Roff replied, ‘Yes, Mary, I have some of them.’ She at once got the box with many letters in it. As Mary began to examine them she said, ‘Oh, ma, here is a collar I tatted! Ma, why did you not show to me my letters and things before?’ The collar had been preserved among the relics of the lamented child as one of the beautiful things her fingers had wrought before Lurancy was born; and so Mary continually recognized every little thing and remembered every little incident of her girlhood.

… Mr Roff asked Mary if she remembered moving to Texas [in 1857] or anything about it. ‘Yes, pa, and I remember crossing Red River and of seeing a great many Indians, and I remember Mrs Reeder’s girls, who were in our company.’ And thus she from time to time made first mention of things that transpired thirteen to twenty-five years ago …

After a few brief reappearances, the Lurancy personality returned completely on 21 May 1878, and remained in control thereafter, apart from brief interventions from Mary when Lurancy visited the Roffs. Lurancy’s health remained good, and there was no return of the fits.

The simplest explanation of this very curious case is clearly that of impersonation, deliberate or hysterical. Lurancy, it might be suggested, though not living close to the Roffs, might have picked up gossip about them. After she went to live with them she would have had all sorts of opportunities of picking up trivial bits of information. We have no verbatim reports of her conversations with the Roffs, reports in which the hints, leading questions, etc., which probably helped her, could be detected, and from which the numerous mistakes which she probably made could be disinterred instead of left buried and forgotten. All this is very true, and perfectly arguable; yet I do not find it altogether convincing. When Hodgson visited Watseka in April 1890, he obtained from the witnesses (in this case Mary’s sister Minerva) such details as the following.

Lurancy, as Mary Roff, stayed at Mrs Alter’s home for some time, and almost every hour of the day some trifling incident of Mary Roffs life was recalled by Lurancy. One morning she said, ‘Right over there by the currant bushes is where cousin Allie greased the chicken’s eye.’ Allie was a cousin of Mary Roff, and lived in Peoria, 111. She visited the Roffs in the lifetime of Mary, with whom she played. This incident happened several years before the death of Mary Roff. Mrs Alter remembered it very well, and recalled their bringing the chicken into the house for treatment.

That does not sound the sort of fact likely to have been elicited by a leading question, or picked up in casual gossip, and it would take quite a lot of forgotten mistakes to counterbalance it.

If the case was not one of impersonation, how might we regard it (speaking still, and simply for the sake of argument, from a survivalistic viewpoint)? Was it an example of unusually sustained ‘overshadowing’, basically like other cases of mediumship or obsession, or was it a true case of ‘possession’? It is quite unlike most cases of mediumship in the length of time for which the apparent control lasted, in the completeness of the control over all aspects of mental and physical functioning, and in the sustained manifestation of what was apparently a whole and recognized personality. Yet there are indications – initial trances, and ostensible control by other deceased persons – that Lurancy was basically of the mediumistic type. Perhaps she had also tendencies towards secondary personality (if that is indeed a different thing). Some combination of these two ideas might suffice to explain the case without resort to the further hypothesis of possession.

Of course if one turns to the super-ESP hypothesis the usual obvious difficulties arise – the extent of the ESP involved and the rapidity with which it must be supposed to operate, together with the length of time for which it would have had to have been almost continuously sustained, and the motive for the charade. But before one rejects this hypothesis as altogether outrunning anything that we know about ESP one must recollect the obvious point that I have in effect made several times before, namely that the ‘overshadowing’ hypothesis itself postulates a form of telepathy – that between overshadower and overshadowed – which would appear to have some of these debatable characteristics.

Some people might be tempted to say that the case of Lurancy Vennum was all a long time ago; and perhaps it didn’t happen, and maybe it would be as well if that were so. There is however a very much more recent, and even more remarkable, case which presents certain analogous features, and which has been studied by persons who fully appreciate the standards of evidence which must be applied in investigating such cases. I refer to the case of Uttara Huddar, reported by Stevenson and Pasricha in the Journal of the ASPR for July 1980 (154b; cf. 154a). Uttara is an unmarried lady, born in 1941, and living in Nagpur, Maharashtra, India. She is a part-time lecturer in the Postgraduate Department of Public Administration at Nagpur University. Early in 1974, Uttara’s normal personality was quite suddenly replaced by a markedly different one, who called herself Sharada. Sharada remained in control for several weeks, and has reappeared since at least thirty times, for periods ranging from one day to seven weeks.

Sharada appeared ignorant not just of Uttara’s family and surroundings, but of all features of modern life post-dating the Industrial Revolution. She dressed, acted and spoke like a married Bengali woman, and spent much of her time in religious exercises. She claimed to be the daughter of a certain Brajanath Chattopadhaya, gave many names and other details of her relatives, and showed a knowledge of various obscure villages and temples in Bengal. Uttara states, and her relatives confirm, that she has never visited Bengal.

Most of the places mentioned by Sharada are in what is now West Bengal, some 500 miles from Nagpur. A town called Bansberia (north of Calcutta) figured prominently in Sharada’s statements. It transpired that a family named Chattopadhaya still lives there. The head of this family possesses a genealogy for the period 1810–30 when it seems from other clues that Sharada lived. This genealogy lists five of the men named by Sharada, in relationships to her corresponding to those which, as a daughter of Brajanath Chattopadhaya, she would have had to them. Unfortunately it lists only men, so it cannot directly confirm, or disconfirm Sharada’s existence. The relevant part of the genealogy was published in 1907 in a Bengali magazine circulating in the area of Bansberia.

Sharada claims to have ‘fainted’ after being bitten by a snake at the age of 22, and to have known nothing since then until she ‘awoke’ to her present intermittent existence.

The oddest aspect of the case remains to be mentioned. Sharada at first showed no knowledge of Marathi, which is Uttara’s native language (she has since learned a few phrases), but spoke fluent Bengali, a language with which Uttara denies all acquaintance. There is absolutely no question of Sharada’s competence in Bengali. Six different well-educated native speakers of Bengali who have conversed with her, sometimes for long periods, testify on this point. Pasricha has made a tape-recording of Sharada, and the authors also possess another tape-recording with partial transcript.

I have already commented on the importance of cases of responsive xenoglossy and on the difficulties which they present for the super-ESP hypothesis. It is accordingly of the first importance to inquire how far Uttara’s claim to have no previous acquaintance with Bengali can be substantiated. While still at school she had had a few lessons in reading the scripts of languages other than Marathi, and these included Bengali. But she was taught to pronounce the letters of the scripts with Marathi sounds rather than Bengali ones. Her father had a few friends from the Bengali community in Nagpur, but none of them ever spoke Bengali with him because he had no knowledge of it himself. Uttara’s parents and two of her sisters denied that she had ever had any opportunity to learn Bengali. A brother who had lived in Orissa, and had picked up some Bengali, stated that he had never used it in her presence.

Stevenson and Pasricha spent much time inquiring about and interviewing Bengali-speaking persons who might have communicated a knowledge of Bengali to Uttara. They were not successful.

By way of conclusion I can do no better than quote Stevenson and Pasricha’s own conclusions:

The marked alterations of personality in this case have some resemblance to mediumistic trances, but the differences are greater than the similarities. Mediumistic trances are almost always induced voluntarily, whereas [Uttara’s] personality changes occured quite involuntarily. Mediumistic trances usually last an hour or two at the most; Sharada remained ‘in control’ for days, sometimes for weeks.

The case also has some resemblance to cases of secondary personality, but the usual secondary personality claims to be more or less contemporary and collocal with the primary personality, whereas Sharada described a life in another part of her country and about 150 years earlier. Furthermore, the usual secondary personality has no paranormal powers, although there have been rare exceptions. Sharada’s ability to speak fluent Bengali constitutes, in our opinion, a paranormally acquired skill.

The case also resembles in some respects cases suggestive of reincarnation, but in such cases the subject usually begins to speak about the previous life he or she claims to remember between the ages of 2 and 5. Moreover, such a child’s ordinary personality is rarely suppressed completely (as was [Uttara’s]) during the narration of his or her claimed memories. (154a, p. 1592)

To this I can only add the following. If it is indeed true (as proposed in Chapter Seven) that the linguistic skills required for fluent responsive xenoglossy cannot be transmitted by telepathy, this case (that is, of course, if we accept the paranormal aspects of it) would appear to leave us with a choice only between ‘true’ possession and reincarnation; for both the super-ESP theory and the theory of ‘overshadowing’ (which also involves telepathy) would be ruled out.

From: Mediumship and Survival

A Century of Investigations

Alan Gauld

Letters from Gourgounel - preface

In his late manuscripts, Nietzsche speaks of the most crying need of our civilization: “temporary isolation . . . a kind of deepest concentration on oneself and self-recovery – not to avoid temptations, but obligations”. It is the desire to “get away from the tyranny of stimuli and influences which sentences us to spend our strength in reaction, and does not permit us any more to let it accumulate to the point of spontaneous activity”.

After four years at Glasgow University (with a break of isolation in between at Munich) I left Britain, where I felt I was bound to live more and more by reaction only, and went to Paris. But after two years in that city, I found reactivity again setting in, and removed a few miles out of it to the relative quietude of Meudon, where I lived in a house surrounded by a garden, and began to feel and live and express the kind of life I wanted.

It was there in Meudon that I heard of the Ardèche, part of what was then called “the French desert”, where houses were being abandoned by locals, the last remnants of the French peasantry, making for the big city. With the intention of acquiring such a house, before they all went to rack and ruin, I did some more translating, gave some more lessons in English, performed one or two other jobs in order to gather in some extra cash, and began to study the territory.
“In the month of May 1844, travelling from Nîmes to Le Puy”, wrote Michelet in his book The People of France, “I crossed the Ardèche, that harsh country, one of the hardest Nature has ever made.” It sounded like one of those “places” the old travellers and hermits were always looking for, a kind of Thebaid. That was exactly what I wanted.

One of the foremost nineteenth-century French poets, Stéphane Mallarmé, taught English at a college in the Ardèche. He said that the very name, “Ardèche”, summed up his life: l’art (art) and la dèche (slang for “poverty”). A more serious etymology might see in  the name: ardesco (I burn). But it’s maybe better to think in terms of the Celtic ard, meaning “height” (as in Ardrossan, where I’d gone to school). I liked to put the two notions together, arriving at “the burning heights”.
As to the name of the house I finally found, Gourgounel, that word gurgled, it spoke the language of deep sources.

In a poem written later I talked of the “twelve books” gathered at Gourgounel. It was a symbolic number, but roughly true. In addition to studies on the language, literature, culture and politics of Occitania (a principal reference, by the way, for renaissance policy in Scotland), I had Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, several volumes of Chinese and Japanese poetry, including the four haiku books composed by Blythe, a few sutras such as the Lankavatara, and the Ta Hio, which advises the meditant to “read the signs in the sky and follow the lines of the earth”.

Along with these oriental affinities, I had very much in mind Schopenhauer’s “natural monk”, the man who, feeling that his faculties reach beyond what is required for normal social life, prefers to relinquish family, profession, career, live apart, and concentrate on something more unique and universal.

If there was a great deal of contemplation at Gourgounel, there was also a lot of sheer physical existence, both in and around the house, in the chestnut wood, and on the paths of Mt Tanargue (“thunder mountain”) that rose on the horizon.

I went to Gourgounel for the first time in 1961, and the book’s first version was written in the summer of 1962 within the space of three weeks’ total exhilaration. When it was published at London in 1966, it was haled in the press as “a fascinating curiosity of literature”, standing outside “the mainstream (or muddy eddy) of contemporary classifications.” In France, where it came out in 1979, the book was seen both as an unusual literary gesture and as a socio-political stance.
It is certainly a book not easy to define in the terms of normal literary discourse. But there are at least analogies to it in world literature.

An eleventh century Chinese text by the scholar Lieu Tsong-yuan has this:

“South of the river Kuan there’s a stream flowing East. I decided to settle there for a while. I never learned its accepted name, so I had to give it one. Since I felt a bit crazy myself, I called it Crazy River. Society can make no profit out of Crazy River, but it reflects all the movements of nature. I tried to live with it and follow its way. That’s how I came to write this Crazy River Collection.”

Another old Chinese writer (sixteenth century), Yuan Hong-dao, of his book Clouds and Stones, has this to say: “This isn’t for minds that are low, limited, mean. It’s for those who want some space and freedom, something vast and luminous. The literature I love comes from the minds and hands of hermit monks and fervent travellers, not from those of literary vulgarians.”

And there are examples in the West as in the East. Speaking of Thoreau, the hermit of Walden Pond, who was out for an extravagant literature, “as wild as lichens”, Emerson said that he could have taken part in the construction of the United States, but that he’d preferred to “go and gather blueberries”. Thoreau wasn’t there at Walden just to gather blueberries. He was trying to get in touch with basics, to work out other developments from there. Witness his later essays on economics and civil liberty.

It was with a similar set of complex motivations I went to Gourgounel.

from the book The Collected Works of Kenneth White, Volume 1 Underground to Otherground