While it isn’t quite as romantique as my love for Naguib Mahfouz, René Daumal wrote poetry about life, death, existence and desire. Through his experiments with inhalants Daumal brought himself to the edge of death and back again, over and over, in hopes of glimpsing into the void of what might lay beyond this plane of existence. Shortly after the turn of the 19th century, modernity included nearly any means required to look into the metaphysical and the obscure, nothing stripped a poet of their credibility, all bets were on, and much of what was written got read.
In Daumal’s last letter to his wife he wrote:
I am dead because I lack desire,
I lack desire because i think I possess.
I think I possess because I do not try to give.
In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;
Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;
Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing:
Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become;
In desiring to become, you begin to live.
5 Comments
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CHILS!!!!!!!!!!
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that is a really interesting quote. i, not realizing or intending it, took my own trip to the void with nitrous oxide and lsd. all i found was a empty pleasure filled mind and all my unconscious fears hurling at me in a hellish nightmare.
not quite the heaven i was expecting to find. i thought some chemicals could take the place of hard work and self-exploration. impatient greed on my part.
but it seems daumal went pretty deep. did he die huffing? i felt it was a thin line and that if i wanted to not get up and just die that that was an option.
wierd i never heard of him.
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someone was talking about his life withme and some friends last wednesday night, and he was saying how he’d always felt that he was different, special somehow, and as a kid he imagined this difference as a bad thing.
drugs like lsd and mushrooms, speed and alcohol made him feel like he was smarter than everyone else, as if he had discovered a secret, or tapped into the root of another plane of existence. he went on to say that he concoted little worlds, and dreams, plans, and ideas and explored the secret understanding he felt he had opened up within himself.
years later, after a great deal of counceling and hard work on himself, my friend came to see that all children going through puberty believe, to one dgree or another, that they are completely misunderstood, special, unique, living in private dream worlds, which they then must negotiate and make sense of as it relates to the real world around them. this is a natural part of growing into an adult, with or without drugs.
it’s amazing how self centered we human beings can be. I am reassured by the thinking that this is both human, and completely natural as a phase of development. something to move beyond, something everyone goes through.
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yes. it definitly was a phase for me. looking back, i feel like lsd only enhances and projects what is already believed. it is not really a new world but a dynamic enhancement of what already exist in the mind. at the time of my lsd phase i was reading a lot of joseph campbell and hence i would “see” things in buddhist images or other mythologies that i had read previously.
it took a kick in the ass in the form of a breakdown for me to finally move past this self-centered activity. i always learn my lessons the hard way it seems. : )
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Here’s to a continued journery, and lots of learning.
* cllink *