A spiritual (?) journey (Part 4)

Published in 1980 shortly before the death by suicide of its troubled author, James Webb, The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers is regarded by many as the definitive history of Gurdjieff and his disciples. It's an attempt to piece together a portrait of a figure whose early life in particular is cloaked in mystery and to explain the unusual method of self-development he promoted. It's long, sometimes rambling, often gripping, and always thought-provoking.

The cloak of mystery is nowhere thicker than at the point of Gurdjieff's birth. We know where he was born (Armenia), but the date is uncertain. It could have been as early as 1866 or as late as 1877. In 1912 he appeared in Moscow and began working as a spiritual teacher. The only written account of the years in between is Gurdjieff's own Meetings with Remarkable Men, which purports to be the true story of the author's travels in Asia, the Middle East and Africa in search of various esoteric teachings but which contains episodes that are clearly allegorical.

Webb's version of events prior to Gurdjieff's appearance in Moscow caused a stir due partly to his suggestion that Gurdjieff may have been working as a spy for the Tsarist government, a role that enabled him to travel widely, even as far as Tibet, where, Webb claims, he acted as an advisor to the Dalai Lama and helped to thwart the Younghusband expedition of 1903-04, an attempt by the British to gain a foothold in what was then considered an important buffer state on the border of India.

Whatever the actual destinations and reasons for his travels, it's clear that by the time he turned up in Moscow Gurdjieff had amassed a wealth of knowledge on a range of esoteric subjects. He began teaching what he called the Fourth Way, so named because in contrast to the three Eastern teachings (the way of the fakir, the way of the monk, and the way of the yogi), which focus on developing the body, mind and emotions separately, Gurdjieff's methods, which included music, dance, lectures and group work, were designed to work on all three at the same time. Also, unlike the Eastern teachings, Gurdjieff's methods enabled his followers to continue going about their normal lives while studying.


At the heart of Gurdjieff's teachings is the idea that most people spend their lives in a state closer to sleep than wakefulness. We live like automatons, reacting mechanically to external stimuli. He taught that it was possible through hard work to reach higher levels of consciousness, and that he had knowledge of the best methods for achieving this, knowledge which he'd gained through his contact with various esoteric traditions during his travels. According to Webb, these traditions included esoteric Christianity, Sufism, Cabala, and Tibetan Buddhism.

Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Gurdjieff found it impracticable to continue teaching in Moscow, so he devised and executed an elaborate plan to escape to the West. After being refused a British visa (it's been suggested that this was because the British authorities knew of his spying activities against them in Tibet), he set up a new school, the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, in Fontainebleau, France. Among his students was the writer Katherine Mansfield, who died at Fontainebleau in 1923. This caused quite a stir at the time, but as she was already dying of tuberculosis before she arrived, it seems unfair to apportion any blame to Gurdjieff. On the contrary, it seems she found happiness in the final months of her life in his company.

Gurdjieff continued to teach and write up until his death in 1949. Today his work is carried on by the Gurdjieff Foundation, which has branches in New York, London and Paris. In 1979, Meetings with Remarkable Men was made into a movie starring Terence Stamp. It's notable for the inclusion of several scenes showing the "movements", devised by Gurdjieff based on dances he'd observed among the "whirling" Dervishes and other Sufi orders during his travels in Asia and the Middle East (here's a short clip on YouTube showing a couple of them). In 1980, Keith Jarrett recorded Sacred Hymns, an album of music penned by Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann based on folk and religious music Gurdjieff had heard during the same travels.

(To be continued...)

Fellow travelers

One of the greatest contemporary proponents of walking (although he prefers the term "traveling on foot") is film director Werner Herzog. In the winter of 1974, after learning that his close friend, film historian Lotte Eisner, was seriously ill, Herzog embarked on an epic walk from Munich to her apartment in Paris. He believed his walking to be with her was the only way Eisner would survive the illness. He walked in a straight line, sleeping under bridges and in abandoned houses. "When you travel on foot with this intensity," Herzog later said of this journey, "it is not a matter of covering actual ground, rather it is a question of moving through your own inner landscapes."

It was with a walking-related quote from Herzog that I marked the end of the Nakasendo phase of this blog. The same book (Herzog on Herzog) from which I harvested that quote also contains the following response by Herzog to an interviewer's question.

"Actually, for some time now I have given some thought to opening a film school. But if I did start one up you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you had traveled alone on foot, let’s say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of about 5,000 kilometers… During your voyage you will learn more about filmmaking than if you were in a classroom."

Such is the esteem in which some members of the film community hold Herzog that at least two budding filmmakers have been inspired by this pronouncement to make epic journeys which they later turned into documentary films. "Long-distance Herzog stalker" Linas Phillips (Walking to Werner, 2006) walked from Seattle, Washington to Herzog's Los Angeles home in the hope of meeting his favourite director (who happened to be in Thailand filming Rescue Dawn at the time). Lee Kazimir (More Shoes, 2008) took the German director's advice quite literally, setting off from Madrid and walking across most of continental Europe on his way to Kiev.

Being an amateur filmmaker myself, I've occasionally considered taking my video camera along on my epic walks. But for the same reasons that I was initially reluctant to incorporate an art project into the Nakasendo walk in 2007, I've always rejected the idea. Not only would shooting video take up a lot of time, but also it would change the nature of my relationship with the environment and with the people I meet along the way. I will be taking a still camera again when I walk the Tokaido, but I believe the most appropriate way of recording such a journey is to write a diary. I think Herzog would agree. He kept a diary during his 1974 journey. It was later published under the title Of Walking in Ice and won its author a literary award.

Certainty no more

The February 19 appointment is for a consultation only. They won't give me a date for the actual surgery until after that.

And the verdict is...

It's been pretty warm here the last couple of days. On Sunday I was invited to a barbecue at my sister's house on the other side of town. I thought it'd be a good opportunity to test some of my new synthetic walking wear, so I slipped on my Silver Ridge Convertible Pants along with my Boar Butte Long Sleeve Shirt, also by Columbia and bought for half-price at a sale recently, slapped on my waterproof/breathable Outdoor Research Nimbus Sombrero, and set off on foot.

It reached 30 degrees on Sunday, probably hotter than anything I'll experience during my walk in Japan, but I felt pretty comfortable throughout the journey, which took me an hour and twenty minutes. The trousers were fine. The material in the shirt doesn’t feel quite as nice, and left me feeling a bit sticky under the armpits.

Yesterday I walked to the supermarket and back in my Mountain Tech Short Sleeve Tee. The material is noticeably softer than the material in the long sleeve shirt I wore on Sunday and seems to breathe better. In fact it feels just like cotton.

A spiritual (?) journey (Part 3)

Earlier I noted how Keith Jarrett's music moves me, how at times it fills me with a sense of wonder. This is something I rarely experience listening to other music. Other music may provoke an emotional response in me (it may make me feel sad or happy, for example) or leave me feeling contented, but these are responses on a different level.

Also, I find it difficult to relax while listening to Jarrett's music, not because it's discordant (on the contrary, most of it is extremely harmonious), but because it commands my attention. In other words, I often feel I have to stop what I'm doing and listen intently.

Keen to find out why Jarrett's music has this effect on me, I tracked down a copy of Inner Views, a book not widely available outside of Japan based on a lengthy interview with the pianist conducted in November 1988 by Japanese music journalist Kunihiko Yamashita.

In the interview, Jarrett describes how he realized quite early on in his career that he approached music differently from most of the other musicians around him. To him music was not just a form of entertainment; it was something far more serious.

Towards the end of the interview he says of his piano playing, "There are no emotions involved. So many people think it's an emotional thing in the way that emotions have colors like…happiness and anger and joy, but really as soon as an emotion is involved in a concert, I also lose the music."

He also recounts the following episode:

"One time someone came backstage and said, 'It was a nice concert, but the chairs were uncomfortable.' They were very uncomfortable, just little chairs. And I said, 'Oh, gee, I'm sorry. Should I do it again in a comfortable room for you?' But then I said, 'Did you ever learn anything when you were comfortable?' Who learns anything when they're comfortable?"

Throughout the book Jarrett speaks about his own music with a fervor that suggests he's on a mission. But if the point of the music is not to entertain or provoke an emotional response, and if he's not concerned with the comfort of his audience, then what is this mission?

The answer is hinted at in the following statement at the very beginning of the interview:

"I don't think of myself as a musician. When I hear myself play I realize it is not about music. It is about staying awake and continuing to perceive. Perception, awakeness and awareness."

Jarrett's ideas on the importance of what he describes as "perception, awakeness and awareness" owe much to the teachings of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian mystic who influenced many artists and writers in the early- to mid-20th century. Gurdjieff had some unusual ideas about music, and reading them reassured Jarrett that he was not alone in regarding music as something utterly serious.

"I knew my calling was music. But as to why that calling - why such a serious calling was in a world where the other people doing this didn’t feel serious…there was some discrepancy there. But this seriousness that surrounds music is what Gurdjieff explained. Not serious like the opposite of happy, but a profound, reasonable quality that emanated from music. Something that moved, truly could be a moving force."

I was convinced that if I wanted to know more about the effect Jarrett's music had on me, I needed to learn something about this Gurdjieff fellow. I went to the library and found a tatty old hardback entitled The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers, by James Webb. It turned out to be one of the most interesting books I've ever read.

(To be continued...)

Certainty

On Friday I received a letter from the Canterbury District Health Board advising me that an appointment has been booked for my nose surgery on 19 February.

Today I booked my flights to Japan. I'll arrive in Osaka on 18 May and leave Tokyo on 15 June.

That gives me 27 days to walk the Tokaido.

Synthesization

What would this blog be without the occasional post on my latest clothing and equipment purchases?

I've always been bit of a die hard when it comes to natural fabrics. Although I quickly cottoned on to the advantages of breathable synthetic fabrics like Gore-Tex for rainwear, when it comes to what I wear underneath, I've never felt inclined to ditch good old cotton. I put this down in part to a bad experience with some cheap Kathmandu travel pants that were meant to be breathable but left me feeling all sweaty when I wore them during a trip to Thailand or another of those hot and sticky Southeast Asian countries a few years back.

So when we walked the Nakasendo in 2007, while Erik took along a wardrobe consisting entirely of clothes made out of the latest breathable synthetic materials (I remember him telling me about an incident that occurred when he was "provisioning" in which a shop assistant told him he'd "die" if he wore anything else), I stuck fairly religiously to cotton underwear, t-shirts, trousers, and shirts. Needless to say I didn’t die. But I did envy Erik's ability to wash his clothes in the evening after a day's walking and have them dry and ready to wear again the next morning. I, on the other hand, had to wait either until we came across a hotel with coin laundry facilities so I could dry my washing in a dryer, or until we had a rest day so I could hand wash and dry things properly in my room.

I've been satisfied for some time that the latest breathable fabrics are in fact breathable. But there's another problem. I did take one synthetic top when we walked the Nakasendo, but I noticed it got rather smelly over the cause of a single day's walking even with a cotton t-shirt underneath, something I never experienced with cotton tops. However, this problem has now been solved with the introduction of "anti-microbial" clothing. So, to cut a long story short, the other day I popped into Columbia Sportswear Company's "flagship" New Zealand store on Colombo Street and splurged on some Silver Ridge Convertible Pants (Fossil) and a Mountain Tech Short Sleeve Tee (Night Train). I've yet to wear either on a walk, but I'll let you know how they perform when I do. I just hope my Night Train shirt doesn't clash with my Sunburst backpack.