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In this novel/allegory the narrator/author sets sail in the yacht Impossible to search for Mount Analogue, the geographically located, albeit hidden, peak that reaches inexorably toward heaven.
Demonstrates how Rene Daumal, author of Mount Analogue, (a study of Hindu philosophy and poetics) and the teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff combined with Daumal's early surrealist tendencies in determining the quality of his writing.
You've Always Been Wrong is a collection of prose and poetic works by the French writer Reni Daumal (1908-1944). A fitful interloper among the Surrealists, Daumal rejected all forms of dogmatic thought, whether religious, philosophical, aesthetic, or political. Much like the Surrealists (and French theorists of more recent decades), Daumal saw in the strict forms and certainties of traditional metaphysics a type of thought that enslaves people even as it pretends to liberate them. These "cadavers of thought, " Daumal wrote with youthful bravado, "must be met with storms of doubt, blasphemes, and kerosene for the temples." Daumal tied Surrealism with mystical traditions. A devoted student of ...
Demonstrates how Rene Daumal, author of Mount Analogue, (a study of Hindu philosophy and poetics) and the teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff combined with Daumal's early surrealist tendencies in determining the quality of his writing.
The French poet and author of Mount Analogue shares a satirical allegory of the absurdities of intellectual society. As in Rene Daumal’s cult classic Mount Analogue, A Night of Serious Drinking concerns an autobiographical protagonist on a mind-expanding journey. But rather than seeking enlightenment, the anonymous narrator recounts an evening getting drunk with a group of friends. As the party becomes intoxicated and exuberant, the narrator’s wandering lead him from seeming paradises to the depths of pure hell. The characters our hero encounters go by absurd titles, such as Anthographers, Fabricators of useless objects, Scienters, Nibblists, and Clarificators. Yet the inhabitants of these strange realms are only too familiar: scientists dissecting an animal in their laboratory, a wise man surrounded by his devotees, politicians angling for influence, and poets expounding their rhetoric. Their hilarious antics and intellectual games reveal incisive social commentary that combines poetic imagination and philosophical depth.
Translation (with introduction and bibliography) of Rene Daumal's two short stories, written in 1925-26. The stories are allegories of self-destruction and self-destructing writing.
Pataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions, of laws governing exceptions and of the laws describing the universe supplementary to this one. Alfred Jarry's posthumous novel, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, first appeared in 1911, and over the next 100 years, his pataphysical supersession of metaphysics would influence everyone from Marcel Duchamp and Boris Vian to Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. In 1948 in Paris, a group of writers and thinkers would found the College of 'Pataphysics, still going strong today. The iconoclastic René Daumal was the first to elaborate upon Jarry's unique and humorous philosophy. Though Daumal is better known for his unfinished nove...
René Daumal's Le Contre-Ciel is a collection of poems about death, not a death that ends life but a death that begins it. For this early 20th century French poet-philosopher, Life, in its most dynamic sense, can only be experienced after the facade of self identity has been systematically negated through a kind of metaphysical suicide. In Le Contre-Ciel, Daumal invites us, his readers, to go through this process of regeneration-through-negation with him in order to revive in ourselves a knowledge and understanding of our primordial sources.
Daumal's symbolic mountain represents a way to truth that "cannot not exist," and his classic allegory of man's search for himself embraces the certainty that one can know and conquer one's own reality. In this novel/allegory the narrator/author sets sail in the yacht Impossible to search for Mount Analogue, the geographically located, albeit hidden, peak that reaches inexorably toward heaven. Daumal's symbolic mountain represents a way to truth that "cannot not exist," and his classic allegory of man's search for himself embraces the certainty that one can know and conquer one's own reality.
Since his death in 1944, Rene Daumal has come to be recognized as one of the original minds of the twentieth century French letters. Poet, essayist, philosopher and translator, Sanscrit scholar and pupil of Gurdjieff, Daumal was a founder of the...