Fundamental Experiment

by René Daumal, Roger Shattuck (Translator)

essay, tr Roger Shattuck

Genres: Literature, Philosophy

64 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1987

About the author

René Daumal was a French spiritual surrealist writer and poet. He was born in Boulzicourt, Ardennes, France.

In his late teens his avant-garde poetry was published in France's leading journals, and in his early twenties, although courted by André Breton co-founded, as a counter to Surrealism and Dada, a literary journal, Le Grand Jeu with three friends, collectively known as the Simplists, including poet Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. He is known best in the U.S. for two novels A Night of Serious Drinking and the allegorical novel Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing both based upon his friendship with Alexander de Salzmann, a pupil of G. I. Gurdjieff.

Daumal was self-taught in the Sanskrit language and translated some of the Tripitaka Buddhist canon into the French language, as well as translating the literature of the Japanese Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki into French.

He married Vera Milanova, the former wife of the poet Hendrik Kramer; after Daumal's death, she married the landscape architect Russell Page.

Daumal's sudden and premature death of tuberculosis on 21 May 1944 in Paris may have been hastened by youthful experiments with drugs and psychoactive chemicals, including carbon tetrachloride. He died leaving his novel Mount Analogue unfinished, having worked on it until the day of his death.

The motion picture The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky is based largely on Daumal's Mount Analogue.

William Walsh, an English poet, was a personal friend of Daumal and performed a radio presentation of Mount Analogue later in his life.

Reviews

[Quiver · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the asymptote approaching death, from the pen of a mathematically minded mystic.

I have said enough to make it clear that the certainty of which I speak is in equal degrees mathematical, experimental, and emotional: a mathematical certainty — or rather mathematico-logical as one can understand indirectly in the conceptual description I have just attempted and which can be abstractly stated as follows: the identity of the existence and of the non-existence of the finite in the infinite; an experimental certainty, not only because it is based on direct vision (That would be observation and not necessarily experimentation), not only because the experiment can be repeated at any time, but because I ceaselessly tested the certainty in my struggle to 'follow the movement' that rejected me, a struggle in which I could only repeat the little chant I had found as my sole response; an emotional certainty because in the whole affair — the core of the experiment lies here —it is I who am at stake: I saw my own nothingness face to face, or rather my perpetual annihilation, total but not absolute annihilation: a mathematician will understand me when I describe it as 'asymptote'.

[Tom Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

His account is remarkably similar to an experience I had on a recent flight to San Francisco in which I thought that I was dying.

A screen of luminous spots was to me an ever dissolving purple membrane; the invisible beneath the visible, in Novalis' words. There was a strange geometric pattern to my blindness; an underwriting or over-coding (who knows) of empty space.

I in no way felt this sense of annihilation that Daumal describes, rather, it was almost pleasant. A feeling of drifting into nothingness like Rousseau in his reveries; a simple change of state.

I am dead because I lack desire,
I lack desire because I think I possess.
I think I possess because
I do not try to give.
In trying to give, you see
that you have nothing;

Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;
Trying to give of yourself,
you see that you are nothing:
Seeing you are nothing, you desire to become;
In desiring to become, you begin to live.

[Mills College Library]

P Hanuman