The Taste of the Madeleine

I just found this story by classifying old scrawled paperbacks — material that I don’t miss, please believe it. Written in 1987, five years before my initiation of the arcane XIII, it tells how I opened myself to the pure world of night. I was already well advanced towards my center… Emerged from my distant past, this testimony upsets me. Will it touch you as much?

(The violet texts are written by the 76-year-old that I am now)

The Madeleine Finds Time

October 1987

Before I resolutely engage in the twists and turns of the past, it is advisable to instruct the reader in the poem that I will use for this purpose: the one that Proust calls the madeleine. This famous madeleine of Time Found Again, which completes the Recherche du Temps Perdu, master work of Marcel Proust.

Since Marcel Proust, no biography worthy of the name can ignore the Proustian technique. It is simple, solid, and relatively reliable. Or to say better subjectively reliable.

For Proust, it was the long-forgotten taste of a madeleine soaked in a cup of tea that suddenly made him dive back into the heart of his past, at that time when he was tasting this madeleine and this tea. Each of us experienced in the same way a music, a song, an air that immediately carried it back to a bygone era, a vacation in the sun, an affair, of which this music has become the inseparable accompaniment.

For me, these incidents can be controlled. Proust accidentally tasted a madeleine in tea, I try to isolate in my memories the different madeleines that will open access to the different periods of my life.

Gems

We all have our madeleines. These are the gems that sparkle under the shell of our memories. While an ordinary memory only transports us mentally into the past, a gem has this power to plunge us back into it all alive. And it is our current being who rediscovers, amazed, the being he once was.
(A gem is a fine, precious or ornamental stone or any very hard or colorful material having the appearance of these jewels and used as an ornament. It was clearly understood that I use this word in a figurative sense)

What we relive, what we revisit thus possesses in itself many keys to the total being that we are. Each aspect of my apssé that will be mentioned in the following pages will have been relived, revisited by the grace of a gem. Nothing is easier, when you have the gem, than to turn back time. The most risky thing is to isolate the right gem.

The Key To Lost Time

To achieve this, it is necessary to operate, in the crush of our memories, a first sorting at the end of which will be eliminated false reminiscences, memories acquired a posteriori, the reminiscent of memory, this courtesan who plays at pretending.

Then, in the raw material of authentic souvenirs, we will strive to detect clusters, knots, portions where the weft of the memorial fabric seems tighter. It is at the heart of these knots that the gems are hidden. With the patience of a watchmaker, we will go through the confused canvas bit by bit. And under the gangue will appear the gem.

Which amounts to dismissing the true and false memories to discover the secret key that assembled them. Only such a key can open the door of lost time.

Early Childhood

A number of anecdotes, retold by my family, give me glimpses of some traits of my early childhood. But these are not clean memories. They were mediatized, embellished by this family tradition of oral literature, and nothing says that they were associated with a gem. As such, they do not deserve to appear in an autograph biography that only wants to rely on direct observation.

My first authentic memory goes back to that distant time of my three years. It was the summer of 1952 in the Alps. Near a town called Le Grand-Bornand, my parents had rented a chalet for the holidays. I can barely distinguish the shawl in question, but I see very clearly the drinker fed by a fresh source, and the adjoining shed where piles of unsquared planks were sleeping: a real treasure, for kids.

We were three children, my little sister would be born the following summer. My elders, girl and boy, twins of 8 years, used these boards to build huts that seemed like so many palaces to me. Around four o’clock, Mom brought us homemade yogurts. This picnic in our house every day changing was a real delight. Thanks to this precious moment, I have not forgotten, I will never forget.

Outside All the Time

And it’s a chance! Because this incident, altogether very banal, has the ability to reflect fully in my three-year-old body: as it is, I see, I live, I feel like then. And the world in which I evolve seems fascinating to me: a lost paradise that I strive to find again, while knowing that efforts to find it are useless, if not harmful. They only solicit the mind, the ego, which is the main blockage to regressions.

Until I was 3, I bathed in an essentially magical world. I wasn’t aware of my individuality. The only moments when I cared about my body were when a pressing need was felt, hunger, thirst, pee, poop, sleep, libido… And again, did I often endure a thousand tortures with my bladder too full when a captivating occupation deterred me from satisfying this natural need.

I was outside all the time, to use a child’s word. I existed only in my relationship with other children, animals, adults, objects… and, of course, images. I was not yet a monolythic and surrounded consciousness, I was what I lived, read, listened to, said, did.

Body outing all the time.

This state of spontaneous symbiosis with what is, how many years, how much useless efforts by the way, what patience did I need to finally find it — although quite fugitive …

God Remembers

To be what I say is to live in the moment, supreme wisdom. Then try to be the one who hears what I say. Getting out of the body, leaving the self, finally being. I wandered my entire adolescence along this false trail. I wanted to be myself. I was going in the opposite direction. The ego fades in front of the Self — the power to be for the Being.

All those silly years lost when I couldn’t establish contact with another living being. Out of the relationship, no being. Not being able to communicate with others is not being able to communicate with what I am, with the Being in me. The blockage is internal, because I am the middle of everything. Middle in the sense of natural environment and not geometric center. Although.

But what exactly was the situation in this magical world that was then my being? A kind of sphere enveloping me entirely, a quasi-sensory emanation inside which I was at home. My domain was vast. I took it everywhere with me. And God knows there were strange things happening there! God remembers my elves, my nymphs and all my many friends from the Little People. God still smiles while evoking my prosopopotea of familiar objects.

Living At Night

It occurs at the end of childhood, around 14 years old… At that time, I am aware of my body and its limits. And if I am less outside, some hours of the night are conducive to forays into my magical country. I then begin to live the night, intimately convinced that the dreamed life was infinitely preferable to the waking life. It is just as real, contrary to what adults tell me. I see the world upside down: waking life is that of the sleeping ones, the only awakened are those who escape from it.

I write a lot, at night. Strange poems that took me years to understand. It’s for later that I was writing. For an old man, me maybe, but still in a long time:

Ficelle went chugging along
up to eighty-five years
when he was quite old
he came to me to say goodbye
the earth is closing on my steps
I’m away

It is not about what the first surrealists, all imbued with spiritism, call automatic writing. The poems that spring from my pen are not dictated to me by some individual spirit: I visualize in myself powerful images, and words then impose themselves to describe them.

Patate and Pals

Early Ideas

I was drawing, too. The realistic patterns that came at the end of my brush or at the tip of my pencil told incomprehensible legends, which I took months, years to decipher. I was a visionary. I unexpectedly planned countless decisive episodes of my future life, without it being possible for me, most often, to understand these messages otherwise than afterwards.

At thirty-eight years old, some texts written twenty years ago still exist that resist me shamelessly.
(I will have to wait a few more thirty years to go through them …)

I remember having read I don’t know where that all the ideas of a man come to him in the first twenty years of his life. Afterwards, he strives to understand them, to digest them, and in the best case, he exploits them. Most people forget them.

I share this point of view. I even feel like the most enviable states were given to me, as free samples, before adolescence.

Ain’t No Use

Exteriorize, walk outside of one’s physical space, see oneself from the outside, often from above, while diving, I lived it all along. It was during the Easter holidays of 1968. I piously preserved the poems, drawings, and songs that this episode inspired me.

On a radiant Easter Sunday afternoon, the bells rang in the village of Erquy, I was digging the ground in the sloping garden. Suddenly it seemed to me that the spade was a prohousing of my body, that my hands on the wooden handle were this spade, as well as my arms, shoulders, and painful kidneys. The more I observed myself in the chirp of spring birds and the noisy fog of the chime, the more it seemed to recede beyond myself.

There came the moment when I was four or five meters above my body. I jumped upon seeing myself from above, digging into the ground. At the same time, a feeling of what’s the point? Invades me, imposing itself on me to the point of making me see my life, my present action, my daily self as so much baseless nonsense.

Not Vaccinated

The garden where I was at that moment offered a strong slope that encouraged me to rise above myself, following the slope of the land. And in this new state, I had a vision of the weeks that were coming. This calm atmosphere of a Sunday of Easter made me foresee the frenetic agitation of the month of May that was to follow.

So, all imbued with this frenzy, I returned to my almost dead body, and as soon as I could join my room, I started writing and painting. With surprising hindsight, a serene and detached philosophy, my poems and drawings traced the events of May 68 and especially their implications on my future existence.
(At the time I knew nothing about it)

I was warned, but since I didn’t know the day or time, I wasn’t vaccinated. That is why the spring and summer of ’68 made me dive like all those of my age, without being able to rely on a feeling of déjà vu, already lived which would have spared me many trial and error, and no doubt saved me several years of wandering.

Educastration

What’s the point of making history again? She is the one who did it to me again. I don’t blame her, it’s in the past, it’s no longer. As for the different future that would have been mine, I care about it like a joke. My efforts were in vain, it’s by letting go that we progress. The story of a being is a review of his/her renunciations. Tell me what you have, I will tell you what you are not.

Everything happens as if education were to deposit, over the years, its layers of tartar on the primitive ivory of being-in-the-world. The next longest is to find a dentist to be reimbursed by social security. Let’s say an honest one, it seems less attended.
(It was Jean-Claude Flornoy, my soul passer. He appeared four years later in May 1992)

On my side, I have sounded the bell of multiple dental practices of being: Scientology, Sahaja Yoga, Zen Buddhism, ecology, Tantrism, Sufism, Rosicrucians, Masons… Everywhere I found something to drink and piss. I drank the cup. Until the dregs. And I peed hot and dru anything that didn’t suit me well. Yes, everything.

Pure and Digestible

I am my only criterion of well-founded. The living being or the book that dilates my heart, which diffuses a fresh breath in my open palms, this being is pure, for me, and digestible. Everything that closes me is to be avoided.
(Flornoy was pure and digestible for me. A flawless warrior.)

Incidentally, I was able to eradicate intellectual and spiritual intolerance. But I was not yet satisfied.

“The one who drinks this water will never be thirsty again.” I was more and more thirsty. As I advanced on these paths that the wild grass erases, as I rose above my miserable material and social condition, as I tasted the nectar of ambrosia, the mead of the chosen people, the pure air of the peaks, I measured with more dismay the immense expanse without milestones that remained for me to traverse.

I was intensely thirsty for knowledge and no longer knew to which saint, nor to which book to devote myself.

Zero Disciples

I had learned to flee from gurus like the plague. I excrete these false prophets to whom Nietzsche said: “Don’t make disciples, you will only make zeroes.” Neither god nor master. The only power that interests me is the power over me. (This is still my case fifty years later.)

Ruling over others seems to me the height of maya and totally devoid of interest.
(Maya is illusion, a term put into fashion by the Beatle George Harrison, a great mystic, an immense man. He sang “Watch out now, take care, beware of soft shoe shufflers / Dancing down the sidewalks, as each unconscious sufferer wanders aimlessly / Beware of Maya.” This means “Be careful there, be careful, beware of the traitors in slippers / they dance on the sidewalks, where all the torn-up paupers wander aimlessly / Watch out for Maya.”)

Who is a supposed being looking for emulators? The true master is not he who seeks disciples, but he who seeks to make you your own master.

A friend lent me a book by Rudolf Steiner.

No Longer Alone

But this radical philosophy had the disadvantage of making me particularly distrustful of any sect, no matter how disinterested it seemed. Where to find the spiritual foods that were always most cruelly lacking for me?

Then a friend lent me a book by Rudolf Steiner. Shock! It was quite my size, to the point that I was, for weeks, totally disappointed to find out that my philosophy and art studies hadn’t even taught me the name of this true sage. Since then, I have filled in my gaps. I believe I have read most of his books, as well as the transcriptions of his multiple conferences.

But Jke always returns to this small book, small in format but immense in effect, which he named The Initiation. There is in these two hundred pages something to nourish a hundred years of meditation.

A hundred years of solitude to rejoice, finally, in the unshakeable certainty that I will never be alone again.
(On this point, I was gravely mistaken. The wise man is always alone in this crazy world)

At Our Place

Steiner is my bedside author. On the wings of his sublime visions, consciousness swings into the world of spirit, almost every evening, when we return home. The night is always just as propitious for me and I manage to remember my adventures in the moonlight in full sun. No more need to kill my nights writing. I know how to live my nights with an intensity, a presence even greater than my daytime life.

The confused vision that I had formed of the visible and invisible universe, the pregnant and contradictory intuitions that were passing through me, everything that had imprinted its mark deep within me found in Steiner’s work its reason for being and its striking justification. Including ancient insuperable certainties dating from my previous lives.

Yet I had taken care to start up my guru detector. Steiner didn’t impose anything on me. Gently, he settled on me to remind me of many obvious things that I had always known. But the flesh forgets quickly. And the first absence, that of the Being, the little me gets used to it. As I devoured the Initiation, this enigma of the Son of Man came to my mind: “When you know the Truth, you will see that it is so simple that even children can understand it.”

No doubt he meant that children still remember it when adults have forgotten everything.

The Unwritten Sequel

Book 2

To who has not set his life to a certain end, it is impossible to anticipate the propitious actions. It is impossible to properly arrange the pieces for those who do not have the shape of the total in their head.

The worst state of man is when he loses consciousness and self-government. Then he becomes a slave. Also the powerful encourage intoxication.

Looking beneath oneself, if someone is intoxicated with his science, let him look above towards past centuries. He will bend the horns in front of great minds who trample him under their feet.

Do you get drunk

You have to be always drunk, everything is there; that’s the only question. In order not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your shoulders and leans towards the earth, you must be intoxicated without a break. But with what? Wine, poetry, or virtue as you please, but be intoxicated!

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, you wake up, intoxication already diminished or vanished, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock; to all that leaks, to all that moans, to all that rolls, to all that sings, to everything that talks, ask what time it is. And the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, will answer you, it is time to get drunk; in order not to be the martyred slaves of time, intoxicate yourself, intoxicate yourself endlessly with wine, poetry, virtue, as you please. (Charles Baudelaire, In Les petits poèmes en prose)

Quotes

“Morte carent animae semperque priora relicta sede novis domibus vivunt habitantque receptae” — Souls do not die but, after having left their first home, they are received in new homes where they live and inhabit. ~~ Ovid, Metamorphoses, XV 158

“I know by myself how incomprehensible God is since the pieces of my own being, I cannot understand them.” ~~ Bernard de Clairvaux

“And indeed God spreads everywhere, in the lands, in the expanse of the seas, in the sky; from him cattle small and large, men, wild beasts, each being as it is born borrows the principles of life. To him then they return and everything that is dissociated returns to him: there is no place for death.” ~~ Virgil, Georgics, IV 221