Tastes Like Water

I’ve never been a big fan of René Daumal, despite his outsized influence on the Gurdjieff work and the undeniable appeal of his work Mount Analogue.

The man was a self-destructive drug addict. There is no doubt that creative and acute thought and insight can come from such states, but when they propagate themselves throughout the course of a life, absolute error creeps in. Those enamored by the genius of kaleidoscopic intelligence will always be hypnotized by it; and so of course error begins to look like genius. 

Dare I say it — think of Donald Trump. He is a certain type of addictive genius, a true hasnamuss in the most insidious and objectively factual sense of the word. He has hypnotized vast numbers of people; they are certain what he says is true. And we must always be on our guard against such men.

Is Daumal in the same class? Not even close. He is of a very different flavor. His deconstructive metaphysics, which reject all dogmas in favor of a transcendental nihilism, are far more intelligent and nuanced than Trump’s simplistic philosophy of destruction of everything in favor of the self. Daumal, along with others who I fear may have all too well both understood and at the same time misunderstood  Gurdjieff's work, proposes the destruction of the self in favor of everything; and this is close enough to the marrow of the bones of religious experience to create a tremendous attraction to his ideas, even to validate them, because many of them are drawn from a well filled with truth.

One forgets, in doing so, that wells do not always just contain truth. No well is absolutely pure; and almost anything can be put in them. Thus the water is affected, even if water is still water, looks like water,

tastes like water.

There is a certain paralyzing irony in the fact that Daumal’s work, in its rejection of dogma and, by implication, text itself, survives (like all its brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles) only as a text. In a certain sense, the kind of work that he writes about and inspires, the work that he himself aspired to, cannot be textualized. And no matter how hard those who wish to deconstruct all meaning in favor of a (perhaps, but perhaps not blissful) transcendental or metaphysical void try to do so, they always turn directly to the tools of meaning itself, to words, in the attempt.

Because there are no other tools. 

One is drawn to the question of whether the action of words is a cataphatic or apophatic entity. Interestingly enough, some of those who consider themselves the more sophisticated of the philosophers insist, more or less, that they are apophatic, even though this is functionally impossible. Apophatic philosophy itself is in and of itself a form of meaning that contradicts its own end. Put bluntly, the apophatic path has to abandon itself at the beginning in order to reach its own goal; and if we abandon, under the considered advice of its own impetus, the apophatic path, the only other three places we can go are the cataphatic path, limbo, or nowhere at all. 

This dilemma is rarely discussed. It leads us to the proposition that one should abandon everything to go nowhere; and if this isn’t the nihilistic apotheosis of meaning and wisdom, then nothing is.

I suppose some will argue I have misunderstood the propositions; and it’s entirely possible. When discussing the idea that each of us has a superpower some time ago, a friend asked me what I thought mine was. 

“Stupidity,” I answered myself, because my ongoing and lifelong experience of myself is that I am not really that smart. I say this simply because I measure my intelligence against what is needed in the world, and I always find it distinctly lacking.

His reply was that my superpower appeared to be an excess of modesty. 

I think it was a very clever retort, but I am anything but modest. My ego boasts from within in a relentless cacophony of self-congratulation, and I spend the better part of my day arguing with it.

Think well on yourself today, and live.

And goof around a bit.

Lee