£2 95 net ISBN 0 7100 0674 8 Printed in Great Britain (TY) For copyright reasons, this book may not be sold or issued on loan or otherwise disposed of except in its original paper cover Who are you Monsieur Gurdjieff? Who are you Monsieur Gurdjieff? Rene Zuber Translated by Jenny Koralek With a Foreword by P. L. Travers Routledge & Kegan Paul LONDON, BOSTON AND HENLEY This translation first published in 1980 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd 39 Store Street, London WCIE 7DD, 9 Park Street, Boston, Mass. 02108, USA and Broadway House, Newtown Road, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon RG9 lEN Set in 10/12 Linotron 202 Sabon by Input Typesetting Ltd London and printed in Great Britain by Lowe & Brydone Ltd Thetford, Norfolk Translated from Qui etes-vous Monsieur Gurdjieff? French edition ® Rene Zuber 1977 English edition ® Jenny Koralek 1980 No part of this hook may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Zuber, Rene Who are you. Monsieur Gurdjieff? 1. Gurdjieff, George I. Title 197’.2 B4249.G84 80-40876 ISBN 0 7100 0674 8 Foreword The writer Rene Zuber was by nature a parabolist. It was this that enabled him to record for the ear that lies behind the ear what he himself had been able to perceive with the eye behind the eye. The subject of his book was also a parabolist, one who communicated what he so significantly had to tell not only through his many-levelled allegorical writings — All and Everything, Meetings with Re­ markable Men, etc. - but, most equivocal when most candid, by glance, gesture, story, axiom and the com- inunicative silence that is more articulate than w'ords. it was this bardic element in Gurdjieff, the palp­ able, earthy, diurnal man, that gave him his air of timclessness, of being a scion of legend rather than <)( history. Rumour, fable, anecdote accrued to him by natural law as burrs do to the pelt of a fox. Tell the story of his life and inevitably, in spite of names, il.Ufs and locality, it will not be biography but saga. Ill his own idiosyncratic terminology, it will be ‘an olluMwise’. Who are you, Mr Gurdjieff? Rene Zuber may well .isk! lint his book makes it clear that he is putting the i|iii'stion to himself equally with his subject, let- tiiif.’, It lead him not so much to an answer as to (iMihcr t|iiestions of lineage, genealogy, kith. Who arc you, Arthur, Taliesin, Prester John, Mullah Nassr FOREWORD Eddin, St George, A1 Khidr, Z’ul Qarnain - you timeless men who weave your way through time, tradition and myth? Gurdjieff, bright and dark himself, would have been familiar with these heroes in all their colours of the spectrum. Indeed, the last-mentioned, an Islamic honorific - ‘He of the Two Horns’ - assimilated to the historical Alexander the Great, was, in the teeth of the Koran (Surah XVIII.82), castigated in All and Everything as ‘that arch-vainglorious Greek’. Gurd­ jieff, who never said anything unintentionally, would have had a reason for this. Was it because, as men before and since have done, Alexander set out to conquer the visible world as hero? Or rather that he aimed still higher — to lay siege to the invisible and, without propitiating the tutelary deities, arrogate to himself the name of god? Steeped as he was in ancient lore, would not Gurd­ jieff, in that pejorative phrase, have been pointing to the enormity of such an enterprise and also to the headlong lapse from its mythological requirements - the attempt to steal the tripod of divination; the fish lost, through inattention, into the two convergent seas; the insensate cutting of the Gordian Knot? From time beyond time that famous sword-thrust has been hailed as the ultimate solution. Slice it through at a stroke - bravo! But any Old Wife will tell you, without perhaps knowing the why of it, that to cut a knot is unlucky. Gurdjieff would have known the why. Anyone who, as a child, has lain among the FOREWORD woodshavings in his father’s workshop and listened to the story of Gilgamesh will certainly have also learned that knots proverbially contain secrets - Solomon’s Knot; the Knot as one of the emblems of Buddha; Vishnu’s Knot; the Comascene Knot; True Lovers’ Knots; the Knots of May; the Knots that bring the sailor home. And secrets need to be unrav­ elled. Cut through them and the meaning is lost. By this reckoning, Alexander would undoubtedly have lost both the world and the meaning. Parabolically, then, it can be said that Gurdjieff’s teaching was itself a kind of unravelling, not so much a discovering as an uncovering of secret things. What had been wound had to be unwound. For those pup­ ils who were capable of following the thread, he unravelled something of what in him and, by reflec­ tion, in themselves, had been ravelled. Who am I? Why am I here.^ What is my purpose? His gnomic oracles, most full of guile when seemingly most in­ nocent, were expressly designed to wake men to this three-fold question; to sound, like Attar and Rumi before him, a stringent reveille to those who fail to ask it. His trumpet call still reverberates and its portent is still to be assessed. It can be said of him with certainty, however, that he did not cease from mental Hght, nor did his sword sleep in his hand. As to what he built of Jerusalem, this will be witnessed to, fal- libly - as all eternal principles are witnessed to - by the fallible children of time. FOREWORD Rene Zuber’s fresh, vivid, wholly unprejudiced testimony shows him to be a perceptive and veracious member of this tribe. P. L. Travers