The Journal as Omniverse: Reading Mircea Eliade's journals

I am doing my assignments, Mircea.
   I met Mircea Eliade when I was leading an adventure in Active Dreaming in the Bucegi mountains of Romania last October. He died in 1986, but active dreamers know that the fact that someone no longer has a physical body is not a serious impediment to communication. I wrote about this encounter in a previous article, "Mircea Eliade and the Flow God."
   Inter alia, Eliade urged me to read all of his journals, and pay special attention to what he was recording and using while bringing through his fiction. I'm on it.
 

Few writers can have valued their journals as much, or made as copious use of them, as Mircea Eliade. He also devoured the journals of other writers, preferring those that were written in the least calculated way, essentially for the writer himself rather than for whatever he thought posterity might make of him, the journals containing the details of experiences in time – a street scene, a dream, a snatch of conversation, a thought on the wing.
    Much of Eliade’s published work streams straight from his journal pages, not only his autobiographical fiction but his works on philosophy, religion and shamanism as well. He fills page after page with quotes and excerpts and commentaries on his voluminous reading.
     I especially enjoy his journals from the first decade after World War II, a period when he was an exile from his native Romania, now under Communist rule, trying to find his way in the world. His pages are studded with dreams.

     We feel the weight of history and the sadness of the exile in a recurring dream that oppressed him. He finds himself in a familiar landscape, a lake district. He cannot remember how he came here. “I repossessed my entire life as a ‘past’ that had become present again.” This brings no happiness. He is overcome by grief for the loss of “a plenitude no longer known”..
    His spirits are lifted by a delightful, happy dream. He is among young children in a moonlit meadow when a cluster of stars start to fall. The stars fall around them like golden apples. They start eating them, though they are very hot. Eliade runs about, juggling a hot star in his hand, calling to the children, “Quick! Seize your opportunity! These falling stars bring us good luck!”
     Eliade finds, as I do frequently, that dreams set us reading assignments. He describes a dream that pushed him into an orgy of reading. In Paris, at the end of August, 1947, he dreams he has again become a complete “Balzacian”. “Toward morning I dreamed that I’d become a Balzac enthusiast again, and I was in the bookstore on the rue Bonaparte.” He starts reading and re-reading everything by Balzac he can lay hands on. Soon he is planning to write a book on Balzac. He recalls that he first read Le Père Goriot when he was ten, then became a “Balzacian” when he re-read it as a teen.
    A couple of days after his dream, he declares in his journal, “I believe that in the past two days I’ve read Balzac for more than thirty-two hours, driven by a fever that reminds me of my adolescence. I can’t do anything else. I can’t read any other book.” He visits Balzac’s house in Passy, looks at the river Seine from the garden, and at the trapdoor through which the writer fled into a tunnel under that garden when creditors came hunting him. The palace opposite that Balzac hoped to buy is now occupied by the Turkish legation. From Balzac's Les secrets de la princesse de Cadignan, he transcribes this: the writer d’Arthez kisses the hand of the princess, from the wrist to the nails, “avec une si délicate volupté, que la princesse inclina sa tête en augurant très bien de la littérature.” (he kissed her “with such a delicate voluptuousness that the princess bowed her head, auguring very well for literature.” 

    Eliade's journals become an omniverse. He records his decision to record anything and everything that catches his attention in one notebook, The Journal.
    He thought in 1947 that the book that would express his essential self would be a journal written in a nonlinear way. 

“I think sometimes about writing a book that will express me entirely. I’d withdraw for several weeks into an isolated place – an island, a cabin on a mountaintop (the ideal spot would be Tierra del Fuego!), without any books or manuscripts. With nature presenting no interest, I’d write a kind of journal, but without order or any kind.”     

He writes that for him a journal is not a confessional, and not primarily a means of knowing himself (though he thought that as an adolescent). It is a way to record “in the flux of the hours, certain images, situations and thoughts…by ‘freezing’ them, fragments of concrete time.” His journals record his steps in time and his efforts to step out of time, his recurring life theme.

     When he was laboring on his seminal work Shamanism in a little room in Paris in 1949, laid prostrate by heat in summer, holding a bottle of hot water in his lap to thaw his hands in winter, Eliade wrote in his journal, "It would please me if this book would be read by a few poets, dramatists, literary critics and painters. Perhaps some of them would profit more from the reading of it than would certain orientalists and historians of religion."
      We heard you, Mircea.

~

Quotations are from Mircea Eliade, Journal I, 1945-1955 trans Mac Linscott Ricketts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 

An afternoon with Balzac in Manhattan

I have a great affection for Honoré de Balzac, one of the most prolific writers in literary history. I was delighted to meet him again on Monday, in front of the great picture windows overlooking the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in midtown Manhattan.
    Balzac worked like a fiend. His books did not pour out of him all at once, but he gave them so much time and energy that they were obliged to come through. His daily pattern was to eat a light meal at 5;00 or 6:00 p.m., then sleep until midnight, when he would rise and immediately go to work. He wrote until dawn, fueled by countless cups of coffee. Once he was on a roll, he juts kept going. He thought nothing of writing for 15 hours at a stretch. He said that he sometimes worked for 48 hours with only three hours of rest somewhere in the middle.
     There was the more benign pressure of writing novels as serials that ran in the popular press. When you are under that kind of deadline, with the presses about to roll, you just have to deliver on time; you can’t wait on perfection. I remember this very well from my own days as a journalist.
     He was forever upping the pressure on himself to write. After he became a bestselling author, he squandered his money in ridiculous business ventures that left him broke. He fell for a scheme to process slagheaps left by the Romans in Sardinia. He blew away a lot more money trying to grow pineapples – unlikely to thrive in French weather – on a vast plantation in France.  
     His work habits and wild investments no doubt contributed to his early death. He died at 51, just five months after he married a woman who he first encountered in a letter signed "Anonymous", dispatched from Odessa, which criticized his novel La peau du chagrin but left him so intrigued that he tracked down the author and then courted her for fifteen years until her much older, rotten-rich husband was out of the way. That story would be worthy of a volume in his vast oeuvre, the Human Comedy.   
     Balzac is too little read in the Anglophone world today, but he has had many admirers, including Henry James and Freud, who chose  La peau de chagrin as his last read. The title has been translated as "The Magic Skin" or "The Wild Ass's Skin." It has a double meaning in French that escapes these clumsy translations. Chagrin (as in English) means sorrow or disappointment, often resulting from failure; it also means the rough, untanned hide from the rump of a horse or wild ass once often used for binding books. In English, this kind of leather is called "shagreen". 
     The hero of Balzac's tale, named Raphael, is a penurious scribbler who has decided to kill himself after losing his last money, when he stumbles into a curiosity shop that seems to contain the emblems of a whole world, like a kind of 3-dimensional Tarot deck. The owner shows Raphael a piece of shagreen with magic properties. The young writer can have this for nothing and the skin - covered with indistinct Eastern spells - will grant his every wish. But he would be well-advised not to use it.   
     The skeptical writer decides to give it a try. What does he have to lose? He's already bent on death. He rubs the skin and wishes for a revel worthy of a dissolute king. Instantly we are transported by Balzac's muscular prose into a scene of wild orgy and banqueting. The catch (and there has to be a catch in wishcraft involving lower powers) is that every time Raphael makes a wish, the skin shrinks and when it does so, he loses some of his own life-force.
      Eventually, having wished himself wealth and fame, he is desperately using his money to try to obtain a medical treatment that will reverse the process that is turning him into a shrunken, grotesque little old man. He tries to stop wishing, ordering his servants to provide him with everything he thinks he could desire at appointed times. The plan is overthrown in a scene with a beautiful woman for whom he feels passionate love. She flees from him, bent on killing herself to stop him destroying himself by wishing for her. Exactly the opposite is accomplished. As Raphael pursues her and flings himself on her, the last scrap of shagreen vanishes and he dies. 
       For all the fantastical elements in Balzac's story, anyone who has read him will know that its great success lies in what was more fantastic than fantasy in all his writing: his power of vividly realistic description. The reader is spared no detail of Raphael's decline into an ugly, shriveled wreck. It is impossible not to be moved by the picture of Freud, himself now a shriveled invalid, following this page by page. When he finished, he told his doctor, Max Schur, that it was the right book for him, because it was about "shrinkage and starvation", his lot. That same day, he gave his doctor the nod to give him huge doses of morphine that hastened his death.
     Balzac was a master in his literary depiction of the workings of passion and desire. He understood the fundamental unity of mind and matter, and that there is a law of spiritual gravitation as well as a law of physical gravitation. His view of reality — and his prodigious literary production — were driven by a vitalist belief in the power of will and imagination.
      His early novel Louis Lambert is a tale of the strange life of a young explorer in consciousness who is awakened by a precognitive dream to the fact that the world is much deeper than can be explained by reason and Newtonian physics. He comes to believe that man can become a creator by concentrating a whole reality — even an entire world — inside himself, re-visioning it, and then projecting the new image to fill his environment. But the protagonist comes unstuck and unhinged because he can’t ground his understanding in the physical world. 
      The Balzacian hero is a man of desire and imagination who must also ground his passions in the body, in healthy sex, in social engagement with the world — or else go mad.    Balzac's version of what becomes possible through exercising the passions of the soul is wonderful. Acts of mind, fueled by passion, abolish time and space. “To desire is immediately to be where one desires to be, instantaneously to be what one desires to be." Time is devoured by the moment; space is absorbed by the point. “For the man in such a state, distances and material objects do not exist, or are traversed by a life within us."  
     A person who carries a great desire is surrounded by a certain “atmosphere,” a “magnetic fluid” that moves in waves, like sound and light, and touches others. That person produces “a contagion of feelings.” Passion of this kind magnifies sensory abilities; we can see and hear and sense things vividly across distance.  Coincidences multiply around such a person, because things now happen through “sympathies which do not recognize the laws of space.”   

Thank you for this, and so much more, Honoré. I have dreamed of you several times. Once I dreamed I was walking with you, or like you, along a boulevard in Paris, happy to be alive and drinking the air after one of those long writing orgies. Dreams have pushed me to read several of your novels. I dreamed that, in an old curiosity shop, I found a copy of Les chouans. Waking, I rushed to my favorite used bookstore (dangerously close to my home) and found a copy of the Penguin translation in the stack of new arrivals. In another dream, I attended a performance based on a season in your life, when you managed to turn out page after page despite illness and fatigue. 
     And I must remember not to drink as much coffee as you did after midnight.

-

My comments on Balzac's novel Louis Lambert are adapted from my book The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power ofDreams, Coincidence and Imagination. Published by New World Library.

Chagrin: Freud's final reading

He always loved to read, and is steeped in literature, philosophy and archaeology. Now this last joy is to be taken from him.

    He has lost the city that was his home for 78 years, his clients, his power to write, even the love of his dog, who recoils from the stink of the rotting bone in his face. It is agony for him to eat and hard for him to speak. Even to smoke another of his beloved cigars - the source of the oral cancer that is killing him, but also his solace and (he has always insisted) the companions of his thought process - he sometimes has to hold his jaws open with a clothespeg. His devoted daughter helps him from time to time to remove the "monster", the huge metal prosthesis that has replaced a great chunk of his jaw and palate on the right side; it can take thirty minutes to re-insert it. They have found yet another malignant tumor inside his face and it is eating a hole through the flesh. It's too close to the eye and the brain for further surgery.

   In the world beyond the house in London where he knows he has come to die, a nightmare has spilled out of the darkest basements of the collective psyche and threatens to consume the world. For decades he has worked to diagnose the human craving for authority. He saw the logic of a Hitler arising as an externalized superego, and even described the phenomenon as "inevitable" given the condition of men's self-understanding. Nonetheless, he was stunned by the fierce joy with which his fellow-Austrians fell at the feet of the man-beast with the funny moustache who removes the agony of choice from all who will obey him, while licensing their blackest instincts.

    Around him in London, the English he so greatly admires are jittery as they pass out gas masks and dig trenches in the parks, talking of how Hitler's bombers will turn the world's greatest city into a mega-Guernica. And he is losing the strength and the vision even to keep turning the pages of a book. He chooses, as the last book he will ever read, La peau de chagrin, the novel that made Balzac famous. The title has been translated as "The Magic Skin" or "The Wild Ass's Skin." It has a double meaning in French that escapes these clumsy translations. Chagrin (as in English) means sorrow or disappointment, often resulting from failure; it also means the rough, untanned hide from the rump of a horse or wild ass once often used for binding books. In English, this kind of leather is called "shagreen".

    Anyway, the hero of Balzac's tale - a character named Raphael - is a penurious scribbler who has decided to kill himself after losing his last money, when he stumbles into a curiosity shop that seems to contain the emblems of a whole world, like a kind of 3-dimensional Tarot deck. The owner shows Raphael a piece of shagreen with magic properties. The young writer can have this for nothing and the skin - covered with indistinct Eastern spells - will grant his every wish. But he would be well-advised not to use it.

    The skeptical writer decides to give it a try. What does he have to lose? He's already bent on death. He rubs the skin and wishes for a revel worthy of a dissolute king. Instantly we are transported by Balzac's muscular prose into a scene of wild orgy and banqueting. The catch (and there has to be a catch in wishcraft involving lower powers) is that every time Raphael makes a wish, the skin shrinks and when it does so, he loses some of his own life-force. Eventually, having wished himself wealth and fame, he is desperately using his money to try to obtain a medical treatment that will reverse the process that is turning him into a shrunken, grotesque little old man.
    He tries to stop wishing for everything, ordering his servants to provide him with everything he thinks he could desire at appointed times. The plan is overthrown in a scene with a beautiful woman for whom he feels passionate love. She flees from him, bent on killing herself to stop him destroying himself by wishing for her. Exactly the opposite is accomplishes. As Raphael pursues her and flings himself on her, the last scrap of shagreen vanishes and he dies.

    The summary brings out the fantastical elements in Balzac's story, but anyone who has read Balzac will know that its great success lies in what was more fantastic than fantasy in all his writing: his power of vividly realistic description. The reader is spared no detail of Raphael's decline into an ugly, shriveled wreck. 
    It is impossible not to be moved by the picture of Freud, himself now a shriveled invalid, following this page by page. When he finished, he told his doctor, Max Schur, that it was the right book for him, because it was about "shrinkage and starvation", his lot. That same day, he gave his doctor the nod to give him huge doses of morphine that hastened his death. This non-religious Jew whose last work, Moses and Monotheism, boasted that it wss going to deprive the Jews of their defining hero (and this at a moment when the swastikas shadowed all of Europe) died on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in 1939.

    He wanted to "die in harness, like King Macbeth", and very nearly succeeded. I respect his stoicism and absolute dedication to his life's work. I am also curious to know whether, looking back from the Other Side, Freud has experienced chagrin for his persistent denial, through his long career, of the reality of spirit and its survival of physical death. And whether he has made up with Jung now that certain essential things are much clearer.

Source: I have drawn some of my facts from an excellent recent study of Freud's last years by Mark Edmundson, The Death of Sigmund Freud (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007)

Statue of Freud in front of the Tavistock Clinic, near his last home in London. Photo by Mike Peel