A review of I Am Stories, by Fran Shaw

I completed the book, "I Am Stories," and then spent a week contemplating it by allowing it to digest and not fiddling much with ideas about what I thought of it.

The book is a perfect book. A series of a memoirs about inner work with Michel de Salzmann, thinly veiled — I think more as an artistic device to separate us from associations, rather than an effort to conceal identities — with a patina of pseudonyms. Perhaps this device also makes it a more accessible to a general public, I'm not sure. It certainly plants its feet in a slightly more mythological piece of territory than any average day-to-day memoir would, and for this reason alone I think it was a good idea. It becomes an everyman's story—an everywoman’s story—and the journeyman’s character who inhabits each tale becomes a linchpin. Everyone arrives as an apprentice; everyone lacks understanding; the only place it can be discovered is by asking questions, and exploring them through and in relationship with the others. There's no other territory here. The gentle guiding hand of Le Clair, the clear one, is ever-present. Yet he becomes a prism, a reverse transparency through which the refracted and individually colored lights from a single ray are turn around, rejoin their point of origin, and are regenerated into a mirror of that same transparency which presents itself in the first place.

We might call this transparency understanding, because each character, in confronting the confusions of their own ego, is led by the act of relationship – just being together and making effort in an atmosphere of mutual interest and sincerity — to moments when everything drops away, when the inward nonsense clears up as if a thunderstorm were over. It turns out the thunderstorm was needed — perfect thunder; but now mindfulness enters in its own right — perfect mind. And for a moment, the journeyman inhabits and shares the craft, the transparency, and the clarity of the master.

Descriptions don't do this book justice. It's an experience that needs to be engaged in. I read it, in the beginning, with a light touch of skepticism, as is my typical approach to everything. I start life with the part of me that rejects everything in encounters saying, "that's BS." (I say that about myself more than anything else, but that's another matter.) In this case, the book quickly won me over, because Fran has a delightful and subtle touch to her prose which always, through means I am not entirely clear about, conveys a liberating lack of deadening weight and a loving sense of humor. Every foible we encounter in the book is our own foible; every doubt is our own doubt—but they don't become burdens to carry or knives to wound ourselves with. They are flaws in our love that can still be loved. And in the transformation that takes place as they are stripped down to their bone and revealed for the love that they actually are, rather than the torment we believe we suffer, a new idea arises.

I found myself crying during some of the stories in this book. I can’t even exactly say why. I just did. I am reminded of myself by it, perhaps; of how I forget, of how involved I am with myself, and how I have the potential and the opportunity to come back to something real.

There are few, if any, books about the Gurdjieff work of this quality, although Jane Madeline Gold’s “Down From Above, Up From Below," comes to mind. Both books are exquisitely and essentially human, free of technical jargon and obsessive focus on the confusing underbrush of Gurdjieff’s many cosmological theories. They differ in this: that Gold’s book is about a person, herself and her own experience; whereas I Am Stories is about people; all of us. The books need each other; each perspective is, I think, necessary, and they are oddly complementary, despite the considerable difference between them. I Am Stories is a book about community; and thank God for that. 

I doubt another book of this quality will emerge a second time from the bosom of the work’s results any time soon. 

It is a superior idiot of a book.

 with warm regards,

Lee