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Climbing Mount AnalogueBy Gary Lachman
Sometime in the year 1924 a precocious French poet named René Daumal had a mystical experience that became the determining event of his life.
Soaking a handkerchief in carbon tetrachloride— a powerful anesthetic he used for his beetle collection— the sixteen-year-old Daumal held it to his nostrils and inhaled. Instantly he felt himself “thrown brutally into another world,” a strange other dimension of geometric forms and incomprehensible sounds, in which his mind “traveled too fast to drag words along with it” (Daumal, Powers of the Word 164).
It was his first encounter with what he would later call “absurd evidence”— “proof” that another existence lies beyond the conscious mind. Obsessed with the mystery of death, René was determined to peek at “the great beyond.” When the anesthetizing effects of the fumes proved too great, René’s hand would drop from his face. He would then regain consciousness, his mind reeling— and his head aching— from its recent plunge into somewhere else.
René repeated his experiment many times, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, always with the same result: the conviction that he had briefly entered“another world,” one infinitely more real than our everyday reality. He may have taken his trip hundreds of times, and it is almost certain that his repeated use of carbon tetrachloride started the weakening of his lungs that led to his deathf rom tuberculosis in 1944 at the age of 36.
If all René Daumal did in his short life was to experiment with drugs and write poetry, he probably would not be remembered today, except by students of obscure French literature. But unlike so many other youthful travelers into “the beyond,” before his death Daumal managed to capture some of the insights gleamed from his dangerous interior journeys. Nowhere did Daumal come closer to communicating most clearly something of the strange “other” reality that he observed in his harmful adolescent experiments and dedicated his life to penetrating than in his last, unfinished novel, Mount Analogue (1952).
Symbolizing a “way to truth” that “cannot not exist,” Mount Analogue towers above the everyday world like a spiritual Everest. An ardent climber, by the time he tried to make this metaphysical ascent, Daumal had added a few items to his alpinist’s gear. Jettisoning the uncertain “heights” of drugs by 1939, when he first contemplated the novel, Daumal had been for many years a student of the teachings of the enigmatic Armenian G. I. Gurdjieff, communicated through Gurdjieff’s long time disciples Alexandre and Jeanne de Salzmann.
Mount Analogue
Subtitled A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, like all good parables, Mount Analogue resists final interpretation. A riveting adventure story, it is also a modern day Pilgrim’s Progress. The plot is simple. Led by the Professor of Mountaineering, Pierre Sogol (de Salzmann), eight adventurers board the yacht Impossible to discover the invisible but “absolutely real” Mount Analogue. Though it is hidden from ordinary eyes, Sogol pinpoints its location through a series of supra-logical deductions involving the curvature of space.
Convinced of the necessity of Mount Analogue’s existence, the crew eventually arrive, set up camp, and begin the ascent, along the way discovering the strange, nearly invisible crystals called “peradams.” These symbolize the rare and difficult truths discovered on the spiritual path, and reflect Daumal’s own lucid, limpid prose. There are insightful studies of the different voyagers— embodying Gurdjieff’s classification of types— a fascinating portrait of de Salzmann, and penetrating analyses of Western civilization.
Although the book’s fragmentary character is in keeping with Gurdjieff’s “work”— Ouspenksy’s own masterpiece In Search of the Miraculous was originally titled Fragments of an Unknown Teaching— the fact that Daumal did not live to complete it is a tragedy. And yet, when we look at Daumal’s brief but eventful life, it somehow seems fitting that this spiritual voyage of discovery would be cut short. There is no question of Daumal’s dedication to his goals or the integrity of his pursuit. But his approach to the higher regions took more perilous routes than were necessary.
Of his youthful drug experiences, Daumal (Powers of the Word 169) wrote that, if “in return for the acceptance of serious illness or disabilities, or of a very perceptible abbreviation of the physical life-span, we could acquire one certainty, it would not be too high a price to pay.” In scaling Mount Analogue, Daumal was as courageous as any terrestrial climber, yet there is a strain of spiritual and physical masochism in his credo. Others who followed Gurdjieff’s Spartan path were similarly neglectful of the flesh.
For Daumal, the idea that the absolute was some inaccessible region started early. That a teenage Daumal would make “crazy” attempts to reach “the beyond”is understandable, but that he should persist in later years suggests immaturity and an irresponsible attitude to his health. The fact that the heights of Mount Analogue are invisible, and the yacht his adventurers board is named Impossible, argues that even after Daumal had moved beyond his dubious experiments with drugs, he continued in the same mind. In choosing a mountain as the locale of his last, great effort, Daumal certainly had the rigors of Gurdjieff’s “work” in view. Sadly, it may have been precisely this punishing attitude to attaining the spiritual heights that helped bring about his tragic,untimely death.
Yet such considerations should not prevent us from appreciating his work.Since its rediscovery in the 1960s, Mount Analogue has remained one of the classics of “metaphysical adventure,” a spur to thousands of spiritual travelers, prodded out of their armchairs by its surprisingly restrained account of Daumal’s last conscious excursion into the unknown. Perhaps aware that he would soon be taking an even more mysterious voyage, Daumal made sure that he left as clear a trail as possible for those who followed.
Before his death, he left an outline of the novel’s remaining chapters. “At the end,” he said, “ I want to speak at length of one of the basic laws of Mount Analogue. To reach the summit, one must proceed from encampment to encampment. But before setting out for the next refuge, one must prepare those coming after to occupy the place one is leaving. Only after having prepared them, can one goon up” (Mount Analogue 104). The title of this last chapter was to be “And You,What Do You Seek?” For all his detours and wrong turnings, with Mount Analogue Daumal undoubtedly left a valuable way station for all who would comeafter him.
