SOURCE: "Reflections on the 'Inhumanity' of Gurdjieff," in Gurdjieff: An Approach to His Ideas, translated by Steve Cox, Arkana, 1973, pp. 1-31.

[In the following essay, Waldberg examines Gurdjieff's major works.]

REFLECTIONS ON THE 'INHUMANITY' OF GURDJIEFF

The name of Gurdjieff almost always arouses suspicion or hostility. The man is usually described as a kind of werewolf or cynical tyrant, demanding much from others and little from himself, making use of his disciples for mysterious ends, seeking powers rather than virtue, and with an absolute contempt for the whole of humanity.

As for his teaching, it is supposed to be impenetrable, arid and deadening, because it contains a ruthless, 'objectively impartial' critique of human life. Because that critique is ferociously funny; because it is radical, and nothing which constitutes the human treasure escapes it; because in an allegedly Christian civilization Gurdjieff condemns the sophism whereby inconsistency is forgiven in the name of mercy; because he reminds us, as do all the great masters, of primary truths, and tells us that a Christian 'is not a man who calls himself a Christian or whom others call a Christian—Christian is one who lives in accordance with Christ's precepts'; because the way he proposes, which is the way of consciousness, appears arrogant to the ordinary eye, and because he is blamed for not giving love its place.

So Gurdjieff is seen as an 'inhuman' figure, demonstrating what he calls 'the Terror of the Situation', and offering a 'dry' path to his disciples. Whereas the humane master is supposed to be understanding and compassionate, gentle and benevolent.

But it must be emphasized that ordinary language is quite mistaken when it associates the notions of benevolence or compassion with the notion of sweetness. Gurdjieff is less isolated than is commonly believed when he rejects common paths, received ideas, and morality in the ordinary sense of the word; when he rails against men; and when, in order to work on men's minds effectively, he employs humour and bad taste, the 'way of blame'. No matter what has been said about him, benevolence, compassion and—above all—goodness are qualities which he developed in himself to the highest degree, while never allowing them to be associated with any useless and harmful gentleness.

It is in the apparently brutal relationship with a disciple that these qualities are manifested. For to love the disciple means not to console but to heal him. And the more serious the disease, the more violent the cure. Sometimes, in fact, amputation is necessary. 'If thy right eye offend thee,' said Christ, 'pluck it out, and cast it from thee.'

But Gurdjieff is not only a doctor, or a surgeon. He also points men towards paths to wisdom and happiness. Painful paths, often arduous, barren paths in the eyes of those whose 'personality' (that rigid monster) lacks the necessary flexibility to overcome obstacles; but they are also straighter ways, for those whose hearts are not yet hardened, for those 'common men' who have not systematically 'wiseacred', but have listened humbly and attentively to the 'inner voice'. For apart from the rugged path of the School, there exists the way of life, of 'popular' wisdom whose importance Gurdjieff always stressed. Thus in the first chapter of Beelzebub's Tales he writes: 'I [am] a follower in general not only of the theoretical—as contemporary people have become—but also of the practical sayings of popular wisdom which have become fixed by the centuries.'

This special way is the way of the obyvatel. 'Obyvatel is a strange word in the Russian language,' Gurdjieff said. 'It is used in the sense of "inhabitant", without any particular shade. At the same time it is used to express contempt or derision—"obyvatel"—as though there could be nothing worse. But those who speak in this way do not understand that the obyvatel is the healthy kernel of life.'

It is also along the way of the obyvatel that the traveller encounters the legendary Persian master Mullah Nassr Eddin (Nasrudin), whom Gurdjieff constantly mentions in his books, ascribing to him most popular aphorisms and the most baffling and the wisest of his commentaries.

There exists in the Islamic world a legend of Mullah Nassr Eddin, a body of anecdotes whose hero is a master of paradox. For the Mullah is both the wisest of initiates and, apparently, the most stupid of yokels. Whether the Mullah really existed does not matter. He is the hero of hundreds of good stories which are also superb fables, some of which can rival the best of the many Zen stories collected by D. T. Suzuki in his Essays.

Several of these stories appear, with shrewd commentaries by Idries Shah, in his book The Sufis. The following is among the most typical:

The Mullah was thinking aloud.

'How do I know whether I am dead or alive?'

'Don't be such a fool,' his wife said; 'if you were dead your limbs would be cold.'

Shortly afterwards Nasrudin was in the forest cutting wood. It was midwinter. Suddenly he realized that his hands and feet were cold.

'I am undoubtedly dead,' he thought; 'so I must stop working, because corpses do not work.'

And, because corpses do not walk about, he lay down on the grass.

Soon a pack of wolves appeared and started to attack Nasrudin's donkey, which was tethered to a tree.

'Yes, carry on, take advantage of a dead man,' said Nasrudin from his prone position; 'but if I had been alive I would not have allowed you to take liberties with my donkey.'

In Beelzebub's Tales, as well as in Meetings With Remarkable Men, Mullah Nassr Eddin is constantly intervening, either to pronounce one of those 'true and scathing' sentences from his inexhaustible store, or to comment in a few words on a situation which Gurdjieff sees as characteristic of the inconsistency of human beings.

Mullah Nassr Eddin makes his appearance in order to remind us of the limits of the intellect; unless the whole being is involved, experience is in vain, and knowledge evanescent. The Mullah reaches his ends by apparently improbable means. He is the master of the way of blame, where the initiator takes on the role of the fool, the idiot, or the madman. But predicaments, however tricky they may be, always turn to his advantage.

Another master of the way of blame was Christ. Now we live in a society which is dominated, consciously or unconsciously, by the image of 'gentle Jesus'. When Gurdjieff affirms that we are suffering from 'the crystallization of the consequences of the properties of the maleficent organ Kundabuffer', an organ which causes us to perceive reality upside-down, I can think of no better justification of this admirable myth than the expression 'gentle Jesus' applied to the man who said: 'Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. Nobody would dream of calling Christ inhuman.

Gurdjieff is often reproached for the way he rebuffed the curious and refused to answer any of their questions. But this same 'gentle Jesus' said: 'Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.'

Something else needs pointing out here, and that is that we find Gurdjieff all the harder to swallow because he addresses us in our own language, tells us in our own language: Become aware of your own nothingness. If he had been a Zen master, for instance, we would find him infinitely easier to accept. Yet anyone who has read Suzuki's Essays in Zen Buddhism knows how much violence may enter into the relations between master and disciple at the very core of Zen. But Zen is fashionable. Hence it is acceptable for a master to call his disciple a 'rice-bag', or take a stick to him, or slap him: it's exotic. Or else, worse still, Zen is watered down as Christianity has been watered down. The only thing that matters in Zen is the bliss of satori. The incredible efforts made by disciples to attain it are forgotten. In the end we come to confuse this or that rare emotion with true satori.

Gurdjieff, knowing the way people's minds work, protected himself against such abuses. He piled up the obstacles, highlighted the difficulties, demanded much of those who wanted to follow him. He spewed out the lukewarm, and for this they never forgave him.

NOTES ON BEELZEBUB'S TALES

One of the obstacles encountered by the student of Gurdjieff's teaching is created by the very style of writing that he uses both in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson and in Meetings With Remarkable Men. Yet these works are not at all alike. One is extraordinarily complex and hard to approach; the other is written more simply, almost in a strictly narrative style. But what they both have in common is that Gurdjieff introduces fantastic elements: in the former, extraterrestrial myths and fictions; in the latter, improbably marvellous events, such as the crossing of the Gobi desert on stilts.

The two books were written in Russian. But what is most remarkable is that the translations made of them both in English and in French have such quality that they stand up as exemplary literary creations in both languages. (There are also German translations of these works, but I shall leave it to German speakers to point out their quality.) How is it that these texts never give a hint of translation? It is because they were undertaken by Gurdjieff's very own disciples, and under his direction; they are the work of a group which was not in the least pressed for time, and whose sole concern was to communicate to the reader the special quality of a style unmatched, to my knowledge, in this century.

It has often been said that the style of Beelzebub's Tales is awkward. That is because we are not accustomed to it, because it runs counter to all the fashions and all the researches outside of which the iron rule holds that there is no possible salvation for a writer.

The essayist Jorge Luis Borges, well known for his paradoxes and fertile and individual ideas, in an essay entitled 'On the superstitious ethic of the reader' written in 1930 and reprinted in French in the collection Discussion (Paris, Gallimard, 1966), also stressed what he called 'the indigent condition of our literature, its inability to attract', which underlie what he considers to be a 'superstition about style':

Those who are affected by this superstition understand by style not the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness of a page but the apparent successes of the writer—his comparisons, his harmony, the episodes of his punctuation and syntax. They are indifferent to personal conviction or emotion; they look for 'techniqueries' (the word is Unamuno's) which will tell them whether or not what is written has the right to please them.

Here we undoubtedly touch upon the most important problem in present-day literature. Form is no longer the servant of the idea (this statement is not to be taken as a profession of faith in classicism: in Lautréamont, for example, there is nothing gratuitous about the extreme 'baroquery' of the form). On the contrary, form exists, so to speak, in and for itself. And the author will reach the point of seeking to achieve nothing less than the dislocation of language, because he no longer has anything more to communicate than his own confusion, when it is not simply the arrogant affirmation of a pernicious capacity for constant so-called 'innovation'. What Mallarmé unquestionably suffered as a kind of martyrdom, the inability to write, which emerges in his work in the double dead-end of unintelligibility and affectation, most of today's writers experience through their own conformism, because it has become 'good taste' to hold forth incessantly about the celebrated 'incommunicability' of just about everything.

Hence the 'superstition about style' so roundly condemned by Borges when he says of writers,

They have heard it said that close repetition of certain syllables is cacophonous, and they will pretend to be put out by it in prose, even if in poetry it brings them a particular—and in my opinion equally pretended—pleasure. In other words they are looking not at the efficiency of the machinery but the arrangement of its parts. They are subordinating emotion to ethic, or rather to good form [my italics].

Writers nearly always look for the 'page of perfection', but, as Borges emphasizes,

The page of perfection, the page where not a word can be altered without damage, is the most precarious of all.… Conversely, the page which is destined for immortality can go through the furnace of errata, rough versions, careless readings and lack of understanding without losing its soul in the ordeal.

This is the case with the translations we have of the work of Gurdjieff, apart from the fact that they are quite untouched by the 'furnace of errata'. What Gurdjieff aims for is efficiency, which is why he has to create an utterly personal language able to convey both 'personal conviction' and 'emotion'.

The language of Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson has as yet received very little worthwhile attention. I believe that Charles Duits's as yet unpublished study—not an exhaustive study, but rather thoughts which someone might confide, with no literary intention, to his diary, or to a friend—is worth quoting at length:

The great qualities of the introduction to the Tales need not be emphasized. That introduction unarguably constitutes, in its own right, one of the most striking works of its era, and André Breton considered printing extracts from it in his Anthology of Black Humour.

But the main text of the book is, to say the least, not easy to approach. Since it so happens that I have been studying it for years, it seemed that the best means available to me for honouring Gurdjieff's memory was to make it easier for the reader to approach this apparently forbidding text, in so far as this is possible.

In fact it belongs, as the very title indicates, to one of the best-known of literary genres, the genre of Montesquieu's Lettres persanes and Voltaire's L'Ingénu. Beelzebub, a very kindly old man, has devoted the greater part of his existence to the inhabitants of the earth. He has tried his hardest to cure them of the terrible disease which afflicts them because of the "lack of foresight on the part of certain Most High, Most Very Saintly Cosmic Individuals". So we already see the "catch", because this being whose behaviour has obviously been nothing less than "angelic" is considered by human beings to be the devil in person. Thus, right from the start, we have a key: men see the world upside-down—that is their disease. They take Angels for Devils, and Devils for Angels.

Clearly, if the genre to which Beelzebub's Tales belongs is a classic one, its teaching—or at any rate one of the teachings expressed in it—is also thoroughly traditional. Beneath the humorous surface of the fable we again meet the doctrine of illusion, of Maya, of the famous "sleep" which all the masters speak off, a sleep which must be broken and, from which the sleeper must "awaken".

It will also be seen that Gurdjieff is seeking nothing less than to do something "new"—in which respect he certainly distinguishes himself from most professional writers. What is new—and prodigiously so—is the form: we have already seen enough to show that the content is ancient, classical and traditional.

Having said that, it must also be said that no matter how apparently strange, baroque and even preposterous is the form adopted by Gurdjieff to express this traditional thinking, it too belongs to a very old tradition, that of the Thousand and One Nights. It seems to me very important to underline this point, because it is indisputable that only a reader capable of taking a childish pleasure from listening to stories can appreciate such a work. The gravest problems are at issue, yet Beelzebub is addressing a child, his grandson Hassein, and he narrates the cosmic adventure in the oriental style, that is to say, according to a certain rhythm which has admittedly become quite foreign to the modern Western mind. It is obvious that Homer's listeners enjoyed hearing the same epithets and the same phrases repeated again and again. The same goes for the Sultan listening to Scheherazade, and certainly too for the troubadours' listeners as they learned, for the thousandth time, that Charlemagne had a "flowing beard".

Here we may be touching on what most deters the modern reader. What for a "childish" mind constitutes the charm and strength of the Tales—as of the Iliad, the Chanson de Roland and the Thousand and One Nights—namely the constant harping on the same images, the same expressions, and that tide-like ebb and flow—is just what the "intellectualized" reader finds hardest to take.

We have to make up our minds here: this is a "process", very different from current practice, and like any other process it has its pros and cons. The use of a "primitive technique" in the twentieth century is obviously a gamble. Most readers will undoubtedly be put off. But some may find something of the fairy tale in them, and also—why mince words?—an inspiration which will carry them along in the end, if they can get over their initial bias.

The process in question—as anyone soon realizes who has the patience to read a work like the Tales—in fact has a very special quality. Certainly a fearsome dragon stands on the threshold of such a book, a dragon which can only be called boredom. But whoever crosses the threshold discovers little by little that the repetitions and so on produce an altogether different effect. They take hold of the reader, create an "atmosphere"; he wants to go further, and like Hassein he asks for more.…

I have mentioned the Iliad and the Thousand and One Nights; in many ways the Tales are also reminiscent of Rabelais, who, like Gurdjieff, takes his time and presents the modern reader with what is at first a hard surface to penetrate, but eventually gains a lasting hold on him. One returns to these books again and again, reading a page, or a chapter, stopping and then starting again, so that their quintessence penetrates without being noticed.

I have dwelt on the Gurdjieffian process at some length, because it seems to me that what matters most is to prepare the possible reader. Misunderstanding is inevitable if you try to read the Tales as you read a novel. There is another way of reading, and therefore another way of considering literature (Joyce also tried to retrieve it in Ulysses, and above all in Finnegans Wake). A work which has no beginning and no end, which speaks of "all and everything", refuses to make any haste at all, and imposes its own pace on the reader.

Having said this, we can now tackle the modern and even ultra-modern aspect of the book, Gurdjieff's great comic innovation, an invention which to my mind makes him one of the literary geniuses of the century, and from which he draws an infinite variety of effects whose humour is sometimes disquieting. The entire book is written in a pseudo-scientific jargon whose cumulative effect—but with Gurdjieff all the effects are cumulative—is in my opinion utterly irresistible.

In some respects the Tales are nothing other than a marvellously extended satire on modern science, or to be more precise, on the scientific mind. Certainly Gurdjieff sees the extraordinary vanity of scholars as one of the most perfect illustrations of universal folly. This vanity goes hand in hand with pedantry, and is principally manifested in the continual use of a Greco-Latin jargon which enables the pundits to conceal the ordinariness of what they are saying, exactly like Molière's doctors, and to impose on everyone's credulity. Thus "saliakooríapa" is used for "water", "teskooano" for telescope, etc. I must add straight away that this jargon also has another totally serious purpose: there is in Gurdjieff a "verbal cabbala" which calls for an extremely meticulous and careful examination. But what concerns us here is to see how, with the help of this very simple means, Gurdjieff achieves an effect of absolute disorientation. Beelzebub talks to his grandson Hassein, and of course he talks in his grandson's language. They live on a planet unknown to the men of earth, called Karatas. So that in order to make himself understood by human beings Beelzebub has to translate certain of the words he uses. He gravely teaches Hassein the earth-men's word for "saliakooríapa", "teskooano", etc. The reader quickly reaches the point of considering the earth words from the viewpoint of the inhabitants of Karatas, and seriously follows such remarks as:

'And thus the three-brained beings breeding on the planet Earth call the greatest period of the flow of time "century," and this "century" of theirs consists of a hundred "years."

'A "year" has twelve "months."

'A "month" has an average of thirty "days," that is, diurnities.

'Further, they divide their diurnity into twenty-four "hours" and an "hour" into sixty "minutes."

'And a "minute" they divide into sixty "seconds."'

… only to suddenly be brought up short and then to roar with laughter. For actually he has just learned … nothing whatsoever.

And yet he has after all learned something, for he has begun to consider mankind from outside, and from much further outside than when he slipped into the skin of Montesquieu's Persians or Voltaire's Ingénu. It is our whole language, and hence our whole world, which loses its familiarity, and no longer just various manners, customs, laws and conventions. Like Montesquieu, and like Voltaire, Gurdjieff interposes a distance between the reader and mankind. But here the process is radicalized to the utmost. It is not our society which is made foreign, but the whole Earth, its history and geography, the most common and ordinary things. One is quite surprised to learn that human beings also practise "Elmooarno" (make love) and at the end of their lives undergo "Rascooarno" (die).

Thus the book is presented in the form of a comic ethnology—which takes the wind out of many sails. Just as ethnologists enjoy larding their writings with words borrowed from the peoples they study, so Gurdjieff manages to thoroughly "exoticize" us, so that our lives and our most everyday activities display their underlying structure. Life could be different: things are not simply "as they are".

And of course other fields are involved, as well as ethnology. Through this infinitely simple and infinitely effective process, Gurdjieff perfidiously incites us to ask questions: first, of course, to question the authority of science. But also—and even more disconcerting—to question the very reality of its findings. Everything is affected—physics, chemistry, biology. For it goes without saying that Gurdjieff is not satisfied only to substitute words of his own devising for those we use in everyday life. Generalizing the process, he replaces our entire science with another, and our "laws of nature"—as we call them—with a whole other system, described, of course, in a pompous, rébarbative language. Never mind the value of this system for the moment. The important thing here is once again the disorienting and "diabolic" effect, for in "explaining" all phenomena by laws unknown to Earth science, Gurdjieff insinuates a fundamental doubt. Is Einstein right? But what is there in Einstein which is not in the law of Triamazikamno or of Heptaparaparshinokh? Perhaps we do obtain some results, but not because we know the laws, rather because we have glimpsed certain aspects of much more general laws which we do not know. To tell the truth, here one tends to forget that the Tales are, after all, a work of fiction. Thoroughly bewildered, we are ready to admit that the sun gives neither heat nor light, that the moon is a nascent planet, not a dead one, and so on. Without realizing it we reach the point of taking Gurdjieff at his word, so that we have to make a certain effort to wake up, to understand the game we have just been taken in by, and also to see that in life we are perhaps taken in by just such a game.

I hasten to add that Gurdjieff's "laws" are definitely not as fantastic as one might think, and that his cosmology may be less absurd than it seems. For the moment, though, this is not what matters: the important thing is to see the process through which Gurdjieff, so to speak, disabuses his reader, forces him to question what he never questions and—last but not least—makes him grasp at first hand what it is that produces that dismal mechanization of thought which lies at the root of so many of our troubles.'

GURDJIEFF AND 'WORD PROSTITUTION'

Gurdjieff went at some length into his literary project, and into the means chosen to implement it, in the first chapter of Beelzebub's Tales and the introduction to Meetings With Remarkable Men.

First, he writes because he is compelled to do so. No one cared less for 'fame' than Gurdjieff, and for some time his writings were available only to the members of the groups he guided. He insists that his work is not essentially 'literary' in the usual sense of the word. Writing is above all a religious act, as the first paragraph of the Tales makes eminently clear;

Among other convictions formed in my common presence during my responsible, peculiarly composed life, there is one such also—an indubitable conviction—that always and everywhere on the earth, among people of every degree of development of understanding and of every form of manifestation of the factors which engender in their individuality all kinds of ideals, there is acquired the tendency, when beginning anything new, unfailingly to pronounce aloud or, if not aloud, at least mentally, that definite utterance understandable to every even quite illiterate person, which in different epochs has been formulated variously and in our day is formulated in the following words: 'In the name of the Father and of the Son and in the name of the Holy Ghost. Amen.'

That is why I now, also, setting forth on this venture quite new for me, namely, authorship, begin by pronouncing this utterance and moreover pronounce it not only aloud, but even very distinctly and with a full, as the ancient Toulousites defined it, 'wholly-manifested-intonation.'

Gurdjieff's intention is nothing less than to reach the reader in his deepest being, and in all the regions of his being, mental, emotional and corporeal. In this respect Gurdjieff's books stand utterly distinct from the works of someone like Ouspensky, remarkable as they are, whose scope is necessarily reduced by their overly intellectual character.

Gurdjieff has been much talked about but very little read, and when read, rarely appreciated. The fact is that he is an anomaly. His work cannot be compared with anything else written in this century, nor classified in any precise genre. Hence the disaffection of those head-hunters of the mind, the critics: finding themselves unable to reduce what is so vast that they cannot even grasp it, they ignore or despise it—this is proved, I think, by those critical commonplaces to the effect that Balzac wrote badly, and Victor Hugo was stupid. Nowadays one hears that Gurdjieff was dangerous, dishonest. People steered clear of him, and after his death they steer clear of his work, which is simultaneously fiction, epic poem, satire and autobiography—as well as constituting a world-view unknown to those who claim that thinking is their calling. The perfection of Gurdjieff's work has seldom been recognized.

Yet as far back as 1956 a writer like Manuel Rainoird was praising 'his literary mastery, so clearly displayed (the genres he calls into play leave our elegant efforts far behind)'. Rainoird adds:

I feel the strong necessity, once having read Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man—if I say 'read' it is for want of a better word, for the work is much more than that suggests, like an infinitely testing trial, a substance both assimilable and unassimilable by every organ—to pronounce in the midst of my stunned astonishment the words 'great' and 'new'. But as I also run my eye through the library of contemporary fiction, I realize that here there is no possible term of comparison, and that when it comes to 'great' and 'new' there is no book to approach it—what work of philosophy, science, legend or history? And yet it is our history which is in question, yours and mine, universal and personal.

The greatness lies in the undertaking, the total novelty in the tone, mat particular tone (as Rimbaud's dawns are 'particular') which makes a major work, and which has never been heard or conveyed by those whom Gurdjieff calls 'ordinary patented-writers'.

The Tales begin with a reiterated profession of faith:

In any case I again repeat—in order that you should well remember it, but not as you are in the habit of remembering other things and on the basis of which are accustomed to keeping your word of honor to others or to yourself—that no matter what language I shall use, always and in everything, I shall avoid what I have called the 'bon ton literary language.'

'Bon ton' was undoubtedly what he ridiculed the most; and education, as we understand it, was what he saw as the most grievous problem of all. Literature seemed to him to be one of the noblest of disciplines, sorrily reduced in this century to what he harshly describes as 'the development of "word prostitution".' Read the introduction to Meetings With Remarkable Men, with its merciless speech by the elderly cultured Persian. Anyone who has prided himself on his skill with the pen, and anybody who dips complacently into the stagnant water of contemporary prose and cadences—when these amount to nothing more than futile yet injurious linguistic manipulations—if there is a jot of honesty left in him, will not be able to read that speech without being overwhelmed by die power of those basic truths which are the common province of the masters, and which in their apparent triteness we tend to bypass, to our own detriment, when instead we should pay them the closest attention.

The journalism whose faults are condemned by the genius of Balzac in Illusions perdues rots language and rots thought. With trivial games on the one hand, and continual lying on the other, the spirit becomes irretrievably corrupted:

'According to my conviction, which has finally become as firm as a rock—and anyone thinking more or less impartially will come to the same conclusion—it is chiefly owing to this journalistic literature that any man who tries to develop by the means available in contemporary civilization acquires a thinking faculty adequate, at the very most, for "the first invention of Edison", and in respect of emotionality develops in himself, as Mullah Nassr Eddin would say, "the fineness of feeling of a cow".'

Consequently, one can only turn to those ancient methods some of which Charles Duits elicits in the essay quoted above, if one wishes not only to communicate essential information to the reader but also to act, as Gurdjieff sets out to act, on the reader's entire being.

The dramatic question which today faces the writer who cares about truth, namely how can sublime words still be uttered without being misunderstood, Gurdjieff settles in an exemplary manner. Just as the sacred wonder of the heroes of tragedy metamorphoses into the mere raising of a blasé eyebrow, so, day after day, the holy words love, hope and freedom are watered down; these words, among others, have been tainted and weakened every time they have fallen from the mouths of fanatics and tyrants. How is the original strength of these words to be restored? Gurdjieff either translates them into the language of Karatas or else uses the same unchanging method to clarify their meaning: when he means the vague idea he will say 'love', in inverted commas, and when he means the idea in its fullest sense he will say 'sacred being-impulse of genuine Love'. And this insistence on repeating the words of Karatas, and on solemnly defining ideas, is to my mind one of the strengths of his language, even though it has often been felt as unnecessary emphasis.

What should the reader of the Tales guard against, above all? To find that out, all it takes is to read through the familiar expressions which are put between inverted commas in the first pages of the book: the fatal ability to put off anything we wish to do 'till tomorrow', all the 'wealth' people have, the 'professional writers', and their 'instructive-articles', 'patented-writers', 'bon ton literary language' and so on. But the inverted commas may also highlight some just expression used by Beelzebub and his kind: 'active being-mentation', for example, or 'higher being-bodies' or 'being-Partkdolg-duty'.

Thus there is nothing fortuitous in Gurdjieff's style. The Tales are a book of initiation, with numerous facets. Again I am obliged to turn to a writer who will illuminate certain aspects of the diverse body of Gurdjieff's work better than I can:

So here is a book which cannot be read as we read our books—which simultaneously attracts and repels us. A book of a stature and inspiration which, although it entirely contains us, bag and baggage, is manifestly far above our heads! It is as if, caught up in that inspiration, engulfed in it and exhorted along the way to behave as something other than children, we were being urged to want what is wanted without our participation. It is like the implacable guard who chivvies and rouses the passengers before the train reaches some frontier, out of sheer kind-heartedness (since he is not involved), so that they will be ready and things will go smoothly.

Here man is seen from above, as he had never previously been seen. This vision from a very great distance—Beelzebub the narrator is the inhabitant of worlds like our own, only far removed, and as an envoy from above he has sometimes had occasion to make flights to the planet Earth—this overview on the scale of our Great Universe engulfs any reader and bathes him in an extraordinarily clear light, so that far from blurring the details, the hidden springs of the human mechanism, it has the effect of revealing them all the more. The more the view embraces, the better it explains by analogy the function and meaning of the creature made in the image of God. Here, distance has a twofold and quite astonishing effect. The greater the height to which Beelzebub goes, the more the confusion of our usual jumble of ideas is dispelled. What emerges is the opposite—we see in high relief what was previously screened and misunderstood. The high has illuminated the low. Infinite spaces have ceased to frighten us. They no longer appear in the void of a bleak futility, produced by the musings of the top mathematician in the open examinations; instead, now that they are peopled—revealing themselves in their tangible aspect as emanations of the affliction of Our deeply-Loving and infinitely patient eternal Creator—they become living, transmitting matter, creative of a new language, matter of which Beelzebub is a more and more conscious emanation, through his merits and his efforts.

Now in spite of this grandeur Beelzebub still remains a kind of standard or model, all other things being equal. His personality is attractive. Deprived of his horns, Beelzebub, devil though he is, has not been exempt from the process of expiation. This was his exile in the solar system Ors, to which our own planet belongs—exile for errors made in his youth, and which greatly resemble our familiar sins, with the corollary they imply, the forgetting of man's cosmic functions in the universe, and the concomitant unhappy effects which are impartially noted by Beelzebub, who would like to see them rooted out from inside the three-centred beings of the planet Earth.

What do we know of the meaning of our life on Earth? If G. I. Gurdjieff works within a literary form so that this question may some day occur to us, under certain conditions, he does it like no one else. All commentaries past, present and future, even In Search of the Miraculous, are mere pools compared with his ocean. If Gurdjieff tackles his task in one manner only, he has available an arsenal of ways to arouse our interest. Although it is impossible to follow the usual practice of giving a glimpse of what is named or described, it would be an act of charity at least to point out to the dear public, fond of philosophico-literary tracts, that we are actually dealing here with the disconcerting question: 'Who are we, where are we going?', but strongly flavoured, according to a recipe it will not find familiar, with an accompaniment of cymbals and the use of other sonorous and percussive instruments. In this recipe, iced water and itching powder are also involved.

But let me repeat that the reader is not simply defeated. He is reading the kind of roman-fleuve which, in the long run, will sweep him along with it. The work of demolishing received ideas is not undertaken with the aim of imposing a knowledge which we have not drawn in through our own roots, or which, taken literally, and without genuine links with the inner world, would tend to generate grave misapprehensions. With our minds under such fiendish attack, we give way to the following mental gymnastics: we defend ourselves, we surrender. And if we surrender it is because somewhere around the plexus a warmth may develop—like the air filling in our lungs—by virtue of the representations which have been aroused, as if all at once there had been correspondences established between the superb obscurities of this book and unknown areas of ourselves. In simpler terms, let us recall that certain writings, such as the Song of Solomon, or the Gospel According to St John, were designed to rouse our emotions. The Tales are of this nature. There is nothing in them for rigid minds.

This uncommonly accurate account comes from the article quoted at the beginning of this chapter, by the writer Manuel Rainoird.

As that other spiritual master, Georges Saint-Bonnet, would have said, a plague on all 'verbal felicities'. Writing only has meaning when it describes genuine—'being', as Gurdjieff would say—experience, and the writer is the repository of a teaching worthy of the name. 'The favourite error of present-day literature is emphasis,' said Borges. 'Definitive words, words postulating the wisdoms of soothsayers or angels, or the resolves of a more than human firmness—"unique, never, always, altogether, perfection, complete"—are common currency with every writer. They do not think that saying a thing too much is just as clumsy a thing for a writer to do as not saying it at all, that generalization and intensification due to negligence are signs of poverty, and that the reader feels this. Their thoughtlessness is the cause of a depreciation of language.'

Gurdjieff is formidably well armed against any such depreciation. The methods he develops to counter it may be surprising, but they are particularly effective. I feel that it is by success on such a scale that genius is measured. As for his thinking, its originality, at least in this century, and its remarkable cohesion are proof enough of its importance. Add to this that his speech is a speech of life, and that once it is taken really seriously it has the power to break down the solid walls of unawareness and indifference, and you have measure enough of its range, when you consider that ours is essentially a day of error and delusion.