Simon’s Reviews > Le Contre-Ciel > Status Update

near the end Daumal begins going really hard on hammering home the impermanence and artificial illusory nature of the physical world, and our experience of it being a hallucination or a dream... total Buddhist/Gnostic territory

I remember all the Buddhist and Hindu influencesbut NOT the Gnosticism - references to the divine feminine is obviously meant to be the Aeon Sophia, the references to the demonic false god ruling over the physical world and the physical body being an illusory fleshy prison trapping the soul gives it away. The references to typical French bohemian life I now find more charming than distracting, unlike first reading.

now it feels almost like an anthology of thematically connected but stylistically very different poetry collections, when I read it now... interesting

I have gotten much more into Buddhist and Hindu philosophy + meditation practice since last time I read this poetry collection, so there are a lot of the themes I think I pick up better on and understand more nuances in this time

Around here it starts moving more into standard 20s/30s French surrealist poetry, as awkward as typing that sounds, certainly not quite the total mindfuck of the early chapters...

around here it switches to more conventional poetry which is full of ghosts, demons, abandoned temples and skulls lying in caves - no wonder the Belgian black/doom/sludge metal group Hemelbestormer takes its name and image/lyrics theme from the Dutch translation of this. there's also a lot of "sacred feminine" religiosity that probably seemed progressive in the 1930s but traditionalist today, while I'm at it

this is the kind of concentrated philosophical/religious/artistic theory-of-everything packed densely into poetry that seems totally loopy at first but is presented with complete honesty, something you don't get very often these days than other people than obscure authors published on small independent presses

remember when things like this could become a literary classic?