By Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac
Excerpt
In front of me, the sea. I contemplate the Horizon behind the horizon, where waves and ether marry. I’m a grain of sand in an ellipsis, a sun shard mingled with stardust haloing the still bare strand.
This is the absolute dawn.
The large azure bust stretches on the vast sea’s sapphire bed. The elusive embraces the unfathomable in a long silence reflecting the ineffable. The sleepy-eyed Day awakens, spreads its ray, illuminating everything. The horizontal and vertical merge and challenge the blowing winds from east to west, from north to south, joined in the plenitude of a union without oblivion.
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Everything here is an Elsewhere.
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I invoke the new dawn nestling in the aurora, aurora surrendering to the impetus of day, silently proclaiming the advent of the sun king. I invoke the glory of the scintillating monarch, escorted by the invisible, advancing on an invincible chariot whose light is the archer, and the infinite, its target.
I invoke the fiery eye opening between Heaven and Earth, in their center enthroned the way the heart reigns at the core of being. I invoke its visionary flame, without which all is only orphan shadows, haunted by the dark orb of ghostly skies.
I invoke its splendorous displays that swallow us in solitude – where nothing is lacking, where nothing is excluded – and echo the memory of a plenitude to be resurrected. I invoke the star from elsewhere bearing the blueprint for enlightenment and fire, and the light of the whole world within.
I invoke the music of the spheres engraved on the golden disc’s infinite grooves: I invoke the sun’s soul and its great, still unheard love cry.
I invoke the original lovers, Heaven and Earth, their bodies touching and merging until indivisible at the end of the horizon. I invoke the inexhaustible progenitor, the rod from beyond the grave whose embrace resurrects, its demiurgic waters bathing the naked body of this world.
I invoke Earth swallowing the heavenly seed, the tireless waves washing over her hips, Life plummeting from the Infinite like a meteor shower. I invoke the million wings lifting Earth, the flight offered to platitudes here below, the contagious fervor of high winds inhaling us in their Lung and propelling us in the immensity.
I invoke heaven’s seal that is Breath, indomitable Breath, Breath that pierces, purifies, resuscitates all it embraces in its elusive dance; and the fiery bush burning our finiteness, our servitudes and our dust, to reawaken in its heart, freed from space and time, their laws rendered powerless.
When all seems gone, the black night’s Truth remains in the time of celestial assimilations, the great luminaries contemplating one another, eyes closed. The invisible Seer remains, the one nameless Being transcending all images.
Memory and path remain: a spark through the thread of an oblique beam back to the Sun; a pilgrim retracing the sky’s fingerprints to their invisible source; a tightrope walker on razor’s edge between mirror and veil of inner being; a soul in exile scampering against the void and running into the arms of Love.
The echo of silence remains, arising in defiance of the night, so the promise of return can vibrate and resound in the heart of stateless souls who know they don’t belong here, nor elsewhere, and even less now.
- Excerpt from Beyond Elsewhere by Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac (White Pine Press), translated from the French by Hélène Cardona.
Devant moi la mer. Je contemple l'Horizon derrière l'horizon, où s'épousent l'onde et l'éther. Je suis un grain de sable en points de suspension, un fragment du soleil mêlé aux poussières d'étoiles qui nimbent la grève encore nue.
C'est l'aurore absolue.
L'azur au large buste s'étend sur le lit de saphirs que font les vastes mers. L'insaisissable étreint l'insondable dans un long silence mimant l’ineffable. Tout s'illumine sous les lourdes paupières du Jour qui s'éveille et répand son rayon. Unis, dans la plénitude d'une union sans oubli, de l'est à l'ouest, du nord au sud, l'horizontale et la verticale se confondent et défient le souffle des vents.
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Tout ici est un Ailleurs.
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J'invoque l'aube nouvelle qui s'offre aux bras de l'aurore, l'aurore qui s'abandonne aux élans du jour, proclamant en silence l'avènement de l'astre roi. J'invoque la gloire du monarque étincelant, escorté par l'invisible, qui avance sur un char invincible dont la lumière est l'archer, et l'infini, la cible.
J'invoque l'œil de feu qui s'ouvre entre Ciel et Terre, trônant en leur centre comme le cœur trône au centre de l'être. J'invoque sa flamme visionnaire, sans laquelle tout ne serait qu'ombres orphelines, hantées par l'orbe éteint de cieux fantômes.
J'invoque la splendeur de ses spectacles qui nous avalent dans une solitude où rien ne manque, où rien n'est exclu, et qui sont l'écho, le souvenir en nous ressuscité d'une plénitude à faire renaître. J'invoque l'astre venu d'ailleurs avec la formule de l'éveil et du feu, et toute la lumière du monde en son sein.
J'invoque la musique des sphères gravée sur le disque d'or aux sillons infinis : j'invoque l'âme du soleil et son grand cri d'amour encore inentendu.
J'invoque les amants des origines, le Ciel et la Terre, leurs corps qui se touchent jusqu'à l'indivision, tout au bout de l'horizon. J'invoque l'inépuisable géniteur, la verge d'outre-tombe dont l'étreinte ressuscite, les eaux démiurges qui baignent le corps nu de l'ici-bas.
J'invoque la Terre qui avale la semence céleste, les ondes inlassables qui ruissellent sur ses hanches, la Vie chutant de l'Infini comme une pluie d'étoiles filantes. J'invoque les millions d'ailes qui soulèvent la Terre, l'envol offert aux platitudes d'ici-bas, la ferveur contagieuse des grands vents qui nous aspirent dans leur Poumon et nous propulsent dans l'immense.
J'invoque le sceau du ciel qui est un Souffle, un Souffle indomptable, un Souffle qui traverse, purifie, ressuscite tout ce qu'il enlace au gré de sa danse insaisissable ; et le buisson ardent qui brûle nos finitudes, nos servitudes et nos poussières, pour nous faire renaître en son sein, affranchis de l'espace et du temps et de leurs lois impuissantes.
Lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien, il reste la Vérité de la nuit noire au temps des absorptions célestes, quand les grands luminaires se contemplent les yeux clos. Il reste l'invisible Voyant, l'être unique qui transcende toute image et qui n'a pas de nom.
Il reste la mémoire et le chemin : une étincelle qui parcourt le fil d'un oblique rayon de retour au Soleil ; un pèlerin qui remonte les empreintes du ciel vers leur source invisible ; un funambule qui avance sur le fil du rasoir reliant le miroir et le voile de son être profond ; une âme en exil qui détale à rebours du vide et qui accourt dans les bras de l'Amour.
Excerpt from Plus loin qu'ailleurs by Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac (Editions du Cygne).
The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
Our excessively materialistic world is in desperate need of poetry. What is poetry, really? Essentially, poetry is the art of seeing the Invisible in the visible and the Imperceptible in the objects of the senses. Some Western poets knew this intuitively. Arthur Rimbaud, in his famous letter from the seer: ‘I want to be a poet, and I'm working on making myself a seer’. Or Jean Cocteau in Opéra: ‘All my poetry is here: I transfer / The invisible (invisible to you)’. The true poet sees and shows beyond deceptive appearances, in an attempt to communicate what lies beyond language, ‘for poetry,’ observes Fray Louis de Léon, ‘is nothing other than a communication of the heavenly and divine breath’. Such a vision stands in stark contrast to the nihilistic blindness that governs our age (and our age certainly needs not to see more, or even to see better, but to radically change its vision).
Unhappily, our unauthentic age is sorely in need of authentic poets, in the sense that Vedic civilisation, in particular, understood it. In India today, all poets are referred to by the term ‘kavi’, which means ‘seer’ or ‘visionary’ in Sanskrit, but originally it referred to a category of Ṛṣis who enjoyed a special status. Who are the Ṛṣis? Western Indology books most often make them the authors of the Vedas (1). This is a misconception. If they really were the authors of the Vedas, tradition would call them ‘mantra-kartas’, those who ‘made’ the mantras of the Vedas, whereas it calls them ‘mantra-draṣṭas’, those who saw them. Need we point out that this is obviously no ordinary visual perception? Clearly, it is not the physical eye that is the instrument of perception here, but the eye of knowledge (Jñāna-cakṣuḥ), i.e. Consciousness (2). Indeed, it is Consciousness, which is one of the great Vedantic definitions of the Absolute (Brahman), that directs everything according to the Upaniṣads, those breathtakingly beautiful metaphysical texts symbolically located at the end of the Vedas because they constitute their fulfilment: it is the eye (netra) and the foundation (pratiṣṭhā) of all beings and all things (3).
Thus the Ṛṣi, the perfect kavi, is able to see what is invisible, the Reality veiled behind apparent reality, and to give it to other men to see. ‘Directly linked to the divine by an umbilical cord’ (5), he possesses direct knowledge of the cosmic order manifested in the regular course of the stars and the regular succession of seasons at the origin of the laws that govern the universe. He is the mediator between the eternal Word (Vāc) and human beings, because, as the Vedas say, his inner vision transcends the limits of space and time.
The entire vision of art and aesthetics in classical India is inspired by the ideal embodied by the Ṛṣi, the archetype of the accomplished sage and visionary poet who was able to tear away the veil of appearances, to ‘see’ the Real that sees us without being seen. Clearly, the ideal of the kavi that derives from this limits the pretenders to the status of poet! The Agni-Purāna does not lie to us: ‘The state of Man is difficult to attain in this world and knowledge then is very difficult to attain; The state of poet is difficult then to attain and creative power then is very difficult to attain.’ (4). This ideal is all the more difficult to achieve today, as it has perhaps always been, because there are few kavi-vara, true poets in whom there is a match between inner experience and the words of the poem.
This ideal is the opposite of the type of poetry that Carl Jung described as ‘neurotic’, which is in the majority in Western poetry, where the sublimation of the author's neuroses and adherence to a certain form of fascination for the darkest recesses of the human soul are at stake. It would be closer to the other type of poetry that Jung described as ‘visionary poetry’, that which, according to him, reaches the reality of the ‘objective psyche’. The essence of the work of art,’ Jung wrote, ’is not precisely constituted by the personal particularities that permeate it; the more there are, the less it is art. On the contrary, it is constituted by the fact that it rises far above the personal and that, coming from the mind and heart, it speaks to the mind and heart of humanity. Personal elements are a limitation, or even a vice, of art’. (6)
From this perspective, which is also precisely that of Indian poetics, confinement within the limits of individual subjectivity, so dear to the postmodern West, is an obstacle to the highest inspiration - that form of intuitive perception that brings knowledge to consciousness, which the great grammarian Bhartṛhari (455-510) made the pivot of his theory of knowledge. The more poetry escapes the limited categories of the poet's ego, the more inspired it is; the more inspired it is, the more it objectively ‘sees’ Reality as it is, the timeless substratum or immutable screen on which the images of the temporal spectacle scroll and disappear.
In a way, authentic poetry ‘displaces the self as far as possible’ (the limited and mortal self, that is, triply conditioned by space, time and causality), as Paul Celan foresaw in Le Méridien. Hence the remark by Professor Louis Renou, speaking of the religious poetry of ancient India: ‘It is true that sometimes particularities of language or substance unite the poems attributed to a particular author or family. But nowhere in this literature, which is subject to rigorous standards, do we find the immediate expression of a personality’. (7)
(1) Two major sources of sacred texts are recognised in Sanātana Dharma (‘Eternal Law’, the traditional name for Hinduism): the śrūti, and the smṛti. The śrūti (litter. ‘that which was heard’, from the root ‘ŚRU-’: ‘to hear’) is without beginning (anadi), i.e. eternal and therefore of non-human origin (apauruṣeya): the Vedic revelation, the four Vedas (root ‘VID-’: ‘science, knowledge’) of which the Upaniṣads are a part. The smṛti (root ‘SMṚ-’: ‘memory’) is of human origin (pauruṣeya): the sum of texts memorised and transmitted by tradition in accordance with the content of the revelation of the Vedas, which includes the famous Bhagavad-gītā
(2) Bhagavad-gītā XV, 10 and XIII, 34.
(3) Aitareya Upaniṣad III, i, 3.
(4) Agni-Purāna, Reading 336, st. 3 and 4. Quoted by Robert Linsen, in Les Cahiers du Sud, Marseille, June-July 1941 (special issue ‘Message actuel de l'Inde’).
(5) Rig-Veda, I, 39,9.
(6) Carl Jung, in Problèmes de l'âme moderne (‘Psychology and poetry’).
(7) La poésie religieuse de l'Inde antique, P.U.F, Paris, 1942, page 6.
What was the inspiration for your creative work?
A living experience of this traditional Sanskrit verse, establishing correspondences between the microcosm and the macrocosm, since one and the same Absolute permeates and animates them: yathā piṇḍe tathā brahmāṇḍe । yathā brāhmaṇḍe tathā piṇḍe॥ ‘As it is in the microcosm, so it is in the macrocosm. As it is in the macrocosm, so it is in the microcosm.’
Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation?
I'm pleased to believe that the poetic prose extract I've chosen to share here answers - indirectly, but rather clearly - your question! Let us just add this magnificent verse from the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (VII, vi, 1):
‘Meditation (dhyāna) is in truth greater than thought. The earth seems to meditate. The atmosphere seems to meditate. The sky seems to meditate. The waters seem to meditate. The mountains seem to meditate. Gods and men seem to meditate. Therefore those among men who attain greatness here, seem, in truth, to have acquired some of the fruit of meditation.’
