How to Adjust To The Dark

It seems, on the face of things, absurd to think that I would write a review of my daughter's recently published book. The whole thing smacks of nepotism in too many ways to mention. But I'm doing this for an intelligible reason.

Although my daughter grew up around my lifelong interest in the Gurdjieff practice, she’s had relatively little direct contact with it over the years. Unlike many children of the work, she didn't attend work weekends with me or do what they call "children's work." She simply absorbed ideas, attitudes, and energies through osmosis.

Nonetheless, some striking and remarkable congruencies have emerged between her new book, “How To Adjust To The Dark," and ideas that are prevalent both in Gurdjieff's teaching and his writings.

"How To Adjust To The Dark" is an intelligent, literary coming of age novel, with prose and poetry reflecting off each other like mirrors in the midst of the perennially anxious collisions of adolescence and young adulthood. Although names have been changed, the book is largely autobiographical, and I lived through it with my daughter, although of course only as seen through the narrow and inevitably biased lens of my own person. 

I think it's fair to say that the central premise and argument of the book is created out of the tension between desire and non-desire: desire being the destructive force that drives anxiety, self-doubt, and a wish to find love that—in painful irony—ends up being unattainable simply because of the desire itself. 

These impressions are fleshed out in the real substance not of philosophical ponderings, but the tensions and catastrophes of ordinary life and relationships. The sex and the drugs blend with scholarship and angst; and yet throughout there’s a poise, a balance in which the observer manages, though on initially unsteady feet, to keep remembering to return to a center of gravity—a balance that continues to question, to measure, and to seek pragmatic accuracy instead of self-pity.

This particular question, of the balance between desire and non-desire, is present throughout the narrative. It blends with an increasing bias, over the trajectory of the book, towards Meister Eckhart’s Gleichgültigkeit—the premise that all of the elements in Being have equal validity and need to be taken into account collectively, in an atmosphere of detachment and acceptance. And the tension between desire and non-desire, along with the ensuing struggle, is of course a central idea in Gurdjieff’s works. 

From that perspective this particular book taps directly into the root of that question in a very gritty and personal way. There is absolutely nothing theoretical about the struggles of sexuality, identity, and essence, especially in a young woman. The book furthermore restores these questions into the hands of the feminine, the receptive, the one perpetually in danger from the aggression of the male element both in ordinary life and in inner being. 

Even more striking is the conclusion the author comes to at the very end of the book, which echoes a core statement by Gurdjieff in such an astonishing way that to give it away here would be a disservice. It is an Odyssey that ends approximately where his Magnum Opus begins; and no reader familiar with Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson will miss the inflection on the last page, which came wholly from the author’s experience, and not from any background in things Gurdjieff.

There is more than one way to skin a cat.

Hence my recommendation to readers.

warmly,

Lee