A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (34 page)

Although the novel's fragmentary character is in keeping with Gurdjieff's "work" - Ouspensky's own masterpiece In Search of the Miraculous was originally titled Fragments of an Unknown Teaching - the fact that Daumal didn't live to finish it is a tragedy. But before his death he left an outline of the remaining chapters. "At the end," he said, "I want to speak 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 go on up.''34 The title of the last chapter was to be "And You, What Do You Seek?" Like Daumal's narrator faced with the questions of the mountain guide, his readers may have found this simple request difficult to fulfil.

O. V. de L. Milosz

The name Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz, like that of Villiers d'Isle-Adam, is not one frequently heard these days, although the efforts of his nephew, the Nobel Prize winning Czeslaw Milosz, to remedy this fact have been considerable. Milosz, like Villiers, although Polish and Lithuanian by ancestry, wrote some of the most eloquent French prose, and he also shared with Villiers two other characteristics. His writing is suffused with an hermetic and mystical doctrine reaching back to previous ages; and his family line began with the Serbian aristocracy of medieval times. Milosz set much store by this noble ancestry, as his adoption of the heraldic title de Lubicz attests; yet, unlike Villiers, this aristocratic lineage did not prevent him from coming to grips with the world, as his long and honoured diplomatic service to the Lithuanian government makes clear.35 Yet, like Villiers, one could say of Milosz that he existed in the flesh only out of sheer politeness. "One," he wrote, "can get used to everything: the important thing is to live as little as possible in what is called the world of reality. ,36 Milosz took this suggestion to heart, and for much of his life he spent his time in the imaginative realms of Goethe, Plato, Swedenborg and Dante, his masters on the road to illumination. He learned his lessons well, and on a cold winter night on 14 December, 1914, Milosz had a mystical experience which transfigured himself and his work. His close friend, Carlos Larronde, the theatrical producer, recalled speaking to Milosz soon after his enlightenment. Emerging from a week's long seclusion, Milosz opened the door to his small apartment and, greeting Larronde in the hallway said, "I have seen the spiritual sun."37 For some, Milosz's mystical writings are simply obscure, but sympathetic readers of his arcane and difficult esoteric works are prone to agree with this brief account of his experience.

O.V. de L. Milosz was born on 28 May 1877 on the vast family estate of Czereia, Lithuania. His father was a PolishLithuanian nobleman, his mother was Jewish, and his paternal grandmother Italian: along with his noble blood, Milosz had from the start the mix of races and ancestry that would lead his translator and editor Christopher Bamford to speak of him as "that almost impossible creature ... a fully realized Occidental, a true son and heir of the West ...s3s This crossroads of nationalities would emerge later in Milosz's fluency in several languages; by the age of twelve he spoke Polish, German and French perfectly, and to these was soon added English. (In later years he learned Hebrew and a Bible in that language was for a long time his bedside reading.) Along with fitting him for his future diplomatic service, this polyglot background prepared Milosz for the many translations he would make throughout his career, rendering Goethe, Byron, Shelley, Schiller, Mickiewicz, Pushkin, Lermontov and others into his adopted tongue. It also foreshadowed Milosz's fate as a national and spiritual wanderer, a destiny that, as the critic George Steiner remarked, is the defining characteristic of modern poets. Although at home in several tongues, finding a dwelling in a geographic place always proved a challenge to Milosz. This is one reason why, in later years, he adopted the calling of the Noble Traveller, an honorific given to Cagliostro, St.Germain, and other spiritual wanderers of the occult enlightenment whose "itineraries, though apparently haphazard, rigorously coincided with the adept's most secret aspirations and gifts ... 39

Milosz's childhood was unhappy; his father, wilful, anarchistic and atheist, suffered from a serious nervous disorder, and his mother's "materialistic and uncomprehending solicitude" sent the boy wandering alone through the vast parks of the family estate. Milosz later remarked that the affection he would have naturally had for his parents was siphoned off to others around him. He was particularly fond of his paternal grandparents, as well as his nurse Marie and his tutor Stanislas Doboszynski, who introduced him to Polish literature.

At the age of twelve, Milosz accompanied his parents to Paris, where his father was treated by the famous Dr. Charcot. A few months later, his parents returned to Warsaw, leaving Milosz behind as a student at the Lycee Janson de Sailly. Under the direction of Edouard Petit Milosz proved a brilliant student, but his education as a poet came from other hands. At thirteen Milosz was immersed in Lamartine, Baudelaire, Poe, as well as Goethe, Novalis, Holderlin, Byron, Shelley, Mickie- wicz and Slowacki. At eighteen Milosz was a regular at the Kalissaya, the first American bar in Paris, where he often shared a table with Oscar Wilde. On one occasion, Wilde is reported to have introduced Milosz to an acquaintance. Sitting at a table with George Moore, Ernest Lajeunesse, and the poet Moreas, Wilde saw Milosz come in and, turning to his friend said, "This is Moreas, the poet. And that is Milosz - poetry- itself

Milosz joined in the discussions about "pure poetry" at the Kalissaya and another literary haunt, the Napolitaine. But for all his neo-Romanticism, Milosz was dissatisfied with talk of art for art's sake. In a letter to his great friend Christian Gauss, Milosz spoke of being "horribly sad ... with a sadness that nothing can vanquish." "This life," he. wrote, "is horribly empty with its anxious loneliness surrounded by the idiots of the Napolitaine and the Kalissaya ..."41

A few months later, on 1 January 1901, Milosz made a suicide attempt. "On the first of January ... towards eleven o'clock in the evening - with perfect calm, a cigarette at my lips - the human soul is, after all, a strange thing - I shot myself in the region of the heart with a revolver," he later wrote Gauss.41 He bungled the job, but his doctors didn't believe he'd recover. Miraculously he did. The next year he was recalled to Lithuania, to take up his responsibilities upon his father's death. By this time he had written and published his first collection of poetry, The Poem of Decadences, a timely title that does little justice to the poems themselves. It was also by then that articles recognizing Milosz's genius began to appear.

Between 1904 and 1914 an independently wealthy Milosz wrote, published and travelled. In 1905, he witnessed the aborted Russian Revolution; that same year he sold off his family estate to a government company engaged in parcelling out land to the peasants. (He invested the profits in Tsarist bonds; although he would live on their interest for some years, with the Bolshevik revolution, the move would prove disastrous.) In 1906 The Seven Solitudes as well as the fantasy prose poem "The Very Simple Story of Mr. Trix-Trix, Clown," was published. Between that year and 1910, Milosz wandered through Germany, Russia, Poland, England (which, like Pessoa, he loved immensely), Italy, Spain and North Africa. Although this life of the Noble Traveller had its joys - spiritual as well as carnal - Milosz felt this time was sterile. A sense of this emerges in his erotic mystical novel Amorous Initiation, which depicts in lush, poetic prose the ascent of its narrator from a demeaning obsession with a Venetian cour-. tesan to the pure love of the absolute, a theme Milosz would return to over the years.42 Although Milosz is known to have had several affairs, some inspiration for the novel certainly came from the unrequited love he felt for Emmy Heine-Gelder, a distant relative of the poet Heinrich Heine. Thirteen years his junior, Emmy, "the only woman I loved," rejected Milosz and married instead a younger man. The experience affected Milosz profoundly, and for the rest of his life, the idea and nature of love, "the hard labour of the dream," would be his central poetic concern.

Another novel, The Zborowskis, was started in 1910, as well as the poems making up The Elements. In the next year Milosz wrote the first of his mystery plays, Miguel Manara, inspired by an article he read in Le Temps while sitting in the bar, Le Fouquet, in the Champs Elysees. After writing the first four acts, Milosz wrote to his friend, the sculptor Leon Vogt, that the work is of an "extraordinary beauty" and that now he could "die without regrets." More translations appeared, as well as another mystery play, Mephiboseth. 1913 saw a trip to Rome, as well as Milosz's introduction to the esoteric circle surrounding the journal L'Affranchi ("The Liberated"). Les Veilleurs ("The Watchers") included the alchemist and eccentric Egyptologist Rene Schwaller; a few years later, Milosz would bestow upon Schwaller his heraldic title of de Lubicz.43 It was also at this time that Milosz contracted xanthoma, a skin condition that made him speak of himself as "a leper."

1914 saw more translations and poems appear, but it was in December of that year that Milosz underwent the profound experience that would change both his life and his work. Exactly what took place on the night of 14 December 1914 is unclear. In writing of his relative's illumination, Czeslaw Milosz compares it to the more famous transfiguration of Blaise Pascal, who, "from half past ten in the evening until about half past twelve" on 23 November 1654, experienced "FIRE/God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God ofJacob" and felt "Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace."

To remind himself of what he experienced that night, Pascal wrote a note on a piece of paper which, after his death, was found sewn into his jacket. A decade after his experience, in 1924 Milosz published his first metaphysical work, the long hermetic prose poem Ars Magna, followed three years later in 1927 by The Arcana. At that point, Milosz abandoned writing poetry for a decade, returning to it only once, in 1936, to write his last poem, "Psalm of the Morning Star."

For many of Milosz's admirers, this transition from poet to metaphysician was a disaster. Milosz himself believed that everything he had written up till then was a mere preparation for the mystical vision it was his destiny to communicate. Although there is a distinct shift in voice from the more melancholy, slightly cynical late-Romanticism of his early work, and his later, hermetic tone, Czeslaw Milosz is correct in seeing in this development a continual growth, rather than a radical change of direction. In many ways, what Milosz in his hermetic works did is to bring the concern of the early Romantics in line with the latest discoveries of science. In Ars Magna and The Arcana we find a wedding of Einstein and Swedenborg.

The metaphysics of Ars Magna and The Arcana is difficult to explain, even to readers familiar with the mystical tradition to which it belongs; after reading the poems several times, I'm not sure I even understand it myself. Perhaps the simplest approach is to see Milosz as the inheritor of the Romantic struggle against the by-now triumphant materialist account of the universe. With Blake, Milosz saw in Newton's idea of an abstract, absolute space and time the source of the satanic mills that blackened the early 19th century skies. For Newton, space is simply infinite empty extension, with planets, stars and galaxies mere clumps of matter, floating in the void. The same is also true of time, which is another kind of extension. For Milosz, this vision of an infinite empty space and an eternal, neutral time, is the very vision of Hell; it is, as in Blake, the fallen world humanity entered having been jettisoned from Paradise. Such a void, in which humanity appears the merest speck, if at all, makes meaningless any sense of value, any notion of the good, true and beautiful; or, at best, it limits these to purely utilitarian terms. What Milosz found important in Einstein - and what led him to believe that through his work there emerged the possibility of healing the split between the inner human world and the outer mechanical one (again, another characteristic of Hell) - was his discovery that space and time were relative to the observer. This did away with Newton's abstract space, and, at least to Milosz, returned humanity to the centre of the universe, a theme common to the hermetic tradition. Milosz claimed that until his illumination, he had only a superficial acquaintance with hermetic literature. What is known is that after his experience, Milosz began a deep and thorough study of the entire corpus of esoteric writings, looking for confirmation of his vision.

He found it in many places, but most of all in Swedenborg. For Swedenborg, as for Blake, Goethe, Paracelsus and other hermetic thinkers, man is the central mystery of the world, and is not, as in the rationalist view, one chance creature among others in an accidental universe. For Swedenborg, the universe in fact is man, cosmic man, the Anthropos, Adam Kadmon of the kabbalists. For Milosz, Einstein, in his way - and of whose works at the time of his experience he had not the slightest idea - was only putting into contemporary mathematical language the insights known to hermeticists for centuries.

Yet all of this sounds fairly abstract when compared to Milosz's calm yet almost hallucinatory prose:

On the fourteenth of December, nineteen hundred and fourteen, at about eleven o'clock in the evening, in a state of perfect wakefulness, having said my prayer and meditated my daily verse from the Bible, I suddenly felt, without the slightest amazement, a completely unexpected change occurring in my whole body. At first I noticed that I was granted a power, until that day unknown, of soaring freely through space; and a moment later I found myself near the summit of a mighty mountain shrouded with bluish mists of indescribable fineness and sweetness. From this moment on, I was spared the effort of rising with my own movement. For the mountain, tearing its roots out of the earth, carried me rapidly towards unimaginable heights, towards nebulous regions silent and streaked by immense flashes of lightning.