FROM THE LIGHTHOUSE CONFERENCE

Here are two papers from our one day academic conference papers which explored readings of the small tale in which Beelzebub tells his Grandson Hassein about the Moon, in Chapter Three of Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson pp. 56-65.

Elizabeth Prest

The first paper is from Elizabeth Prest, a practiced poet and unpracticed photographer/ film-maker, currently working under the auspices of 'RAM' (Revolutionary Art Moving). Current projects: Elizabeth is working on the translation of 40 contemporary Iraqi poems with Aziz al-Naib, an Iraqi calligrapher living in London, and Anna Murison of SOAS' Poetry Translation Unit. Elizabeth is also working on various film projects, and on calling her wandering contemporaries to their senses with a pamphlet entitled 'Don't Go Travelling' (in production). Elizabeth has studied theology, literature and psychology.

She brought a visual response:

Open art work pdf-file; this is a complex image with many photographs and poems, it may take about four minutes to open, but it is worth the wait!

see below for Elizabeth's annotations to her artwork.

Response to a mad climate: adaptation, rejection, revolution.

Annotations to the A1 sheet ‘Adaptation, REJECTION, revolution’:
1.
The title
The title ‘Response to a MAD Climate’, a phrase from the given Gurdjieff passage, reflects the document as my response to G.’s ‘mad climate’, as I tried to follow and record it.
‘Adaptation, REJECTION, revolution’ was my gloss on the process I envisaged G.’s readers – and followers – going through: the process the mad text pushes the reader into.

2.
The monster
This scene forms the back cover of the folded sheet. The monster is in part a visual pun and the more accessible visual depicting of our grosser natures – & more gross depiction in the original, without the fig leaf box over the monster’s groin where a sword handle protrudes. The three questions refer to our ‘three brains’, and the whole scene satirises our aggressive, sexual and deifying natures, our acquisitive natures and the care taken to conceal these various drives behind a ‘sweet’ face of our own or social construction.

3.
Five columns of images, right to left
One column shows recent photographs of the moons of Saturn, from a current space mission. The next contains images from the European Space Agency’s ‘art month’ gallery. Then there are three columns, Adaptation – REJECTION – revolution, with images drawn from the daily photographs I take that I categorised according to the scene they were depicting and put words to. This sequence of image groups continues in the upper left hand of the document.

The ‘space programme images as art’ concept in particular amused me – an image seems to qualify for this category when it happens to resemble something terrestrial, a curious implicit definition of art. I rather think that like G.’s Beelzebub, the most interesting creative work does have a context and social purpose, or symbolic value.

4.
‘Tentative in space another still’
A short verse referring to a space walk I found journalistic copy for and quoted directly as ‘Align Yourself Publicly With Winners’.

The space programme elements of the document are consequences of thinking around Beelzebub, all of which takes place beyond this galaxy – and reflecting on the various meanings and values we ascribe to space exploration. The planet’s space programmes are well represented on the Internet, and the images are increasingly spectacular but the text increasingly banal / histrionic / belligerent.

5.
‘Be Skeptical, Advises Govt. Body…’
This quadrant of quotes is a word-version of the monster scene – a composite of amusing aspects of ourselves that G. himself – with his capacity to be perceptive about our drives and his sense of play – may have smiled at.

6.
aa – ar
Aphorisms / phrases / references that accumulated in my notebooks whilst I was self-observing to collect material for this sheet. Presenting these thoughts as baldly as they came seemed more honest than crafting something from them, as I was seeking to generate something more in the spirit of the Work than of Art.

7.
‘The final essay’.
After revolution – after the Work – what? I was thinking teleologically about G.’s Work, & what might have motivated people to undertake it being not the work itself but the idea of what one might become, what All & Everything might become. And this utopic vision, which is also implicit in much of the space literature, on the Web at least, seemed directly to relate to other socio-political revolutionary programmes – not for G. himself perhaps, but as an initial motivation for his acolytes.

8.
Three boxes of text
On the left side of the sheet, there are three boxes that read top to bottom go again through adaptation, rejection, and revolution.

9.
Two women hold a boat, & dancing.
& the text above the image (which is a found photograph, again from a website where individuals are invited to post portraits they find with no context) again parses out the original tripartite idea of becoming through dealing with the given madnesses.

Originally, the document was to be more the story of a girl dancing when she was asked / refusing to dance / dancing for herself – but I preferred the concise account to the long narrative I came up with. This idea of development is at the core of the value, for me, in G.’s programme of Work, through self-observation and self-awareness.

We may be ultimately return to doing what we began doing, but to have come to choose it is a more beautiful, more living way of doing.

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Click to hear what she said about this and about reading the Tales at the conference.

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The second paper here is from David Head MA MTh the Rector of six Norfolk parishes and co-author of the poetry collection Attending to the Fact – Staying with Dying.

He looks at how Gurdjieff uses language to disorientate the reader.

Gurdjieff’s language of disorientation

1
Starting point

This paper approaches the “moon” passage in Chapter 3 of All and Everything (pp 62.16 – 63.24 [page.line]) from the point of view of a poet with a minimal knowledge of both Gurdjieff as a person and Gurdjieff’s central concepts. It is predicated on the belief that Gurdjieff was satisfied with, took responsibility for, and directed the translation of his work; thus the language can truly be described as Gurdjieff’s.

2
Theme: “intentional disorientation”

The content of Gurdjieff’s writing is sui generis, and to an uninitiated person, bizarre. It therefore demands interpretation by the reader. This, however, is not easy.
What appears in even this short passage is Gurdjieff’s unhelpfulness, puzzle-forming, inconsistency and variability. That it is intentional becomes obvious. There is no safe ground, and this can not just be put down to the fact that the entire passage is direct speech in the mouth of Beelzebub. The inconsistencies and difficulties go beyond Beelzebub’s curious speech forms and emerge in the manner in which they are provided to the reader.

3
Beelzebub’s direct speech
Distancing the reader

The structure of the passage is that Hassein is having a conversation with his grandfather. The convention used is that the reader ‘overhears’ this conversation, gleaning wisdom, with Hassein, from the words of his grandfather. Yet the reader is reminded by “my dear boy” [62.17] that s/he is an eavesdropper; this phrase has been placed at the end of a paragraph, and flowing awkwardly, for emphasis. It is a jolt to remind readers of their secondary importance. “Of which I shall also tell you” [63.09], addressed to Hassein, operates in the same manner.

Also, by providing direct speech in the mouth of a character, the author can also distance himself from truth claims. Is his central character all-knowing, and does he always tell the truth if he knows it? Does he hold back or deceive?

Vocabulary:
a) Invented words

Gurdjieff invents both new words and new meanings to existing words. The reader is invited to be complicit with the author in pretending that the words have not been invented, that they have some objective existence in another language. Therefore we are told that ‘Kilpreno’ [62.20] in Beelzebub’s language is about an hour [note on p59]. This invented word is far enough from the English word for English readers of All and Everything to feel that there might be some reason for using it. But the invention of the word ‘Teskooano’ operates in precisely the opposite direction. It is close enough to the word ‘telescope’ to raise doubts in the reader’s mind. Added to which, the footnote says that ‘Teskooano’ means ‘telescope’. There is no need to use a different word. Why does Gurdjieff run the risk of looking uninventive? Is it that there is supposed to be some linguistic connection between the two indicated by the similarity of sounds, that the telescopes that we have are so called because the idea and terminology came from Beelzebub’s planet? How far can we lay claim to our inventions? And how many of our words that are being used in this passage truly belong to us? The reader feels unsettled.

b) Invented technical meanings of common words

While Beelzebub can use putatively foreign words for their virtual equivalents in our language, certain terms in English are obviously technical terms related to Gurdjieff’s cosmology; (“three-brained beings” [62.22], “first being-food” [63.19] ). These concepts have no meaning in common discourse. Other common words, however, seem to be placed in context but used in a technical sense, usually signalled to the reader by the device of inverted commas (“climate” [63.06], “mad” [63.06] ). The reader is therefore unsure about the technical meaning of most words, or the levels of significance within them. Beelzebub seems inconsistent in his use of his own language, and play with ours.

c) Bathos

In a passage which purports to be the result of Beelzebub’s scientific observations, there are two pieces of slang which alter the tone. Shortly after “the regulation of its climatic harmony was therefore not prearranged by the Higher Powers [63.04f]” we have “[the climate] could give points to…”[63.07]. The use in this passage also of the word “jiffy” [63.14] is bathetic, especially since the technical word “Kilprenos” [62.20] has been used earlier. “Jiffy” is a slang word, first recorded as such in the 18C, and has been slang ever since. Why does Beelzebub choose to use it here? it shocks the reader out of a sense of scientific exactitude, at precisely the moment that Beelzebub is about to embark on a complex sentence that seems to have special significance.

Concessive clauses

Beelzebub uses concessive clauses that make things less, rather than more, precise; indeed, they seem to work against themselves. “In exterior form [the beings of this planet] resemble what are called large ants” [62.27]. English does not have a common phrase “large ants”. When used, it means ants which the writer decides are larger than others; so it might be reasonable to say “they resemble what I would call large ants”, making their size a more significant issue than their anthood. To use the passive what are called is to imply a consensus of meaning which does not exist. There might be a consensus about the meaning of what are called ants, and large ones.

The force of this concessive clause is to make the reader ask: “Do they resemble large ants or not? Are there some particular large ants that he has in mind, that are a technical term? Is this just a point about the slipperiness and arbitrariness of all words? Who is it who calls them this?”

Another concessive clause that works similarly against itself is “so to say” [62.33]. This phrase normally makes the word qualified less precise. However, the word qualified, “tunnelled”, is not open to fractions of meaning. Tunnelling is an either/or activity, depending on worked progress through a solid mass. “So to say” has the effect, therefore, of implying some activity other than tunnelling. This raises doubt as to what actually was happening, or whether “so to say” is not to be applied in the usual way. It does not normally apply forward, but could refer to “the whole of their planet” as a forced result of its inappropriateness. Otherwise, the phrase has to be taken as confusingly redundant.

Explanatory leaps or logical contradictions?

“I once happened to notice that during two of our years they ‘tunnelled’…” [62.32]. This is impossible. If Beelzebub notices the passing of a measured period of time, he cannot do so only once. Noticing time passing needs two or more acts of perception, and noticing an activity happening “during” a period of time implies even more constant observation.

Also, this is supposed to be happening through a telescope; how is Beelzebub able to see from this distance how much of their planet is being tunnelled; to see beneath the planet’s surface?

This means that either Beelzebub is bringing in information relating to the event that he acquired at some other time, and making a huge leap in his explanation, or that in a minimal paragraph he is offering us two logical contradictions. Either way, the reader cannot be in secure possession of the facts.

Reader complicity

At the same time as distancing the reader, Beelzebub’s discourse makes self-consciously knowing references to Earth: “the most highly strung hysterical women existing on another of the planets of that same solar system” [63.07ff]. The reader is invited to share with Beelzebub, but not Hassein, an understanding of, and implied mockery of, what is meant.

Thus the reader is invited to makes leaps inside his own knowledge and perception; to anticipate, and make connections to his/her own experience outside the story which is the frame of these concepts.

Equally, the reader is invited to suspend current Terran cosmological knowledge; to join Beelzebub in his world view, and ponder whether this understanding of the moon is in fact possible. The reader doubts his/her own received knowledge, and accepts the reading as wither indicative of an unperceived reality, or a message in code to that part within which is still without knowledge.

4
Gurdjieff’s redactive voice

It would be possible to see the vagaries in Beelzebub’s diction as a simple code to be broken, were it not that Gurdjieff himself seems to be playing games with the reader. Inconsistencies are not confined to this passage, but are found throughout the whole chapter; thus the variability is not intended only to fit the subject of the moon. The reader is to be disoriented, to question all s/he reads.

Inverted commas

Inverted commas are used for technical terms, for foreign words, where a meaning is inexact, for nicknames. They imply a meaning or use that is out of the ordinary, and bring both a sense of distance and the need for scrutiny.

Gurdjieff, though, is variable in his use of these. In this passage, he is consistent in that words in his own language are in inverted commas, his hyphenated concepts (“three-brained beings”, “first being-food”) are without inverted commas, and the two-word concepts which need to have extra significance indicated (“planetary bodies” [62.23], “strong spirit” [62.24] ) have inverted commas.

His use of inverted commas with single words is puzzling. It cannot be that such words would be spoken with special emphasis to indicate their oddity; “Kilprenos” and “Teskooano” belong to Beelzebub’s common language with Hassein, and would not need a change of voice. Thus inverted commas are a sign for the silent reader only.

“[The planet] bearing the name Moon” [62.17] is a case in point. It becomes [63.10] “this ‘Moon’”, and then, outside the passage under consideration “the said Moon” [63.28], then “the Moon” [63.29]. This offers a puzzle; should the reader try to schematise this, by, say, suggesting that the four different epithets show a moon in the process of acquiring greater reality and solidity? Or should the reader see the inverted commas in the second event as implying even less solidity than for those without?

“Tunnelled” [62.33] is placed in inverted commas, and some of the comments on “so to say”, above, are relevant here. If “tunnelled” is in inverted commas, in what way is it not tunnelling?

“The ‘climate’ of this planet is ‘mad’” [63.06], but [63.23] “this ‘mad’ climate”. In what way has the climate become more like our understanding of climate in the intervening lines? Why is it only approximate to our concept first time, and act as its equivalent in the second?

Footnotes

There is variability in the footnotes. “ “Teskooano” means “telescope” ” [62.n] is three words. Gurdjieff uses thirty words on p56 to define Kilpreno, half of which are redundant, and many of which are tautologous. What is the significance of these opposing levels of prolixity?

5
Conclusion

Gurdjieff writes intriguingly, teasingly. His concepts, diction, and redaction are disorienting enough for this reader to begin to think that what Gurdjieff wrote must be investigated to find its real meaning, because the surface meaning is not only illogical and irregular, but also keeps being broken up by the author himself. Which is probably what Gurdjieff intended.

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