Proust and Intelligence

                                                                
  Proust is love of intelligence,
  Proust is love and intelligence,
  Proust is the intelligence of Love!

THE CONSTANT PRESENCE OF GOD IN PROUST'S MASTERPIECE

  

  I stopped reading Mauriac's book on Proust,  when coming to the point where he said that God is absent from a A la Recherche.  The letters G,O,D, may be, but it is rather "blind" to not "feel" the divine presence in Proust's text, beginning with his recognition of beauty, in the immense depth of his thought. 
It should be also considered that, in often placing the truth of the heart over that of facts, ie. the intensity of a subjective state over that of objective reality, the Proustian text asserts the  value of authenticity over facts; individual essence, above transience. 

  In believing that  there is an individual truth to each of us (some are lucky to discover "the hour of truth" before that of death, in the Proustian text) he identifies this truth to the  life we did live but ignored. To the book that has already been written, inside of us. We  have to decipher what is inwardly deep and at the same time transcends us: What turns out to be our work of art, our authenticity, and our soul.
   Proust gives the reader the opportunity of experiencing  the divine presence by him/herself, instead of indoctrinating the latter with conceptualizations of it. He doesn't spell the letters G, O, D, because he doesn't need to. Proust is all words and, at the same time, the overcoming of them. 
   In his text, he takes the readers by the hand through his deepest spiritual experience, allowing them to make this experience their own, and to soar high above, with him. But if he'd indoctrinated faith, he would have committed, to quote his words, a grand indelicatèsse. He would have written a book that would be like an object with a price tag on, to use his own metaphor when talking about books with theories. 
   Metaphors, which often appear in Proustian descriptions, assert nothing directly and thus escape the one sidedness of concepts. They are transmitted from heart to heart, and not from intellect to intellect. Like Proust's departing from the most personal and concrete element,  his individual  experience, in a confessional style that is the pure generosity of sharing his best self, is also transmitted from heart to heart. The poetic exuberance of the search for "his" truth shows that the depth of one's real self is beyond particularity because it is paradoxically ultimately individual; it is one's soul.
Proust's sentences, like his text as a whole, have the cosmic circularity that makes them self-sufficient. In this sense, the circularity of these sentences and that of the whole Proustian text reflect each other, like Jung's representation of the Self, in which an inner, small dot in the middle of a circle, reflects the whole of the circumference and is reflected by it. 

 The use of metaphor,  as well as the  intimate report of the narrator's personal life, are equally fundamental traits of Proust's style, and equally point to his faithfulness to the physical dimension of reality, of his departing from the small and apparently simple to the great; from brief facts, to the endlessness of essence, from amorality to sanctity, from matter to spirit.

 Through the Proustian "lenses" the reader sees, in his own self, depths that he would never have been aware of before. 
 And in identifying individual truth to essence and to artistic creation, Proust transmits the divine presence, the sublime reality  above factuality. 

   Here are examples of the evocation of religious dimension, through the poetic beauty of Proust's words:  

In Le Côte de Guermantes, after a long, descriptive passage of pear trees that the narrator contemplates, he compares their white flowers  to angels, mentioning even a biblical story:  Ces arbustes que j'avais vu dans le jardin, en les prenant pour des dieux étrangers, ne m'étais-je pas trompé, comme Madeleine quand, dans un  autre jardin..... elle vit une forme humaine et "crut que c'était le jardinier?  Gardiens des souvenirs de l'age  d'or, garants de la promesse que la realité n'est pas ce qu'on croit, que la splendeur de la poésie, que  l'éclat merveilleux de l'innocence peuvent y resplendir et pourront être la recompense que nous nous efforcerons de mériter, les grandes créatures blanches....... n'était-ce pas plutôt des anges?

  The miracle of beauty is its power of exclusivity: a reality that dims everything around it. With nothing to be added nor detracted from it, beauty admits of no randomness, like the materialization of something that precedes it,  like a divine plan. As the visible dimension of faith, it is sheer existential reassurance. Pledged to the atemporality of essences, to their beauty, Proust speaks for God and shares the divine presence undogmatically.

   This presence is also expressed when he describes Swann thinking about la petite phrase, and comes up with the breath- taking conclusion:  Peut-être est-ce le néant qui est le vrai et tout notre rêve est-il inexistant, mais alors nous sentons qu'il faudra que ces phrases musicales, ces notions qui existent par rapport `a lui, ne soient rien non plus. Nous périrons, mais nous avons pour otages ces captives divines qui suivront notre chance. Et la mort avec elles a quelque chose de moins amer, de moins inglorieux, peut-être de moins probable. 
   By not asserting directly the existence of an after life, Proust, yet again, leaves the  implication  of it to be experienced by the reader by suggesting that death cannot put an end to  ces captives divines, these messengers of God: Swann n'avait donc pas tort de croire que la phrase de la sonate existat réellement. And, ...ele appartenait pourtant `a une order de créatures surnaturelles..." 
   The poignancy of what Proust transmits is, much beyond a proof or an assertion of divine existence, an experience of its reality. 
   Identifying, as mentioned again, artistic creativity to the truth of essences' dimension, the timelessness of the divine, Proust doesn't indoctrinate anything.  With the same humbleness and generosity, he offers the reader, instead, the experience of such identification, when eloquently saying: 
... au fond the quelles douleurs avait-il (Vinteuil)  puisé cette force de Dieu, cette puissance illimitée de créer?
   Divine presence and that which is the source of creativity, our highest self, are at one, giving us the precious clue to fulfill God's ways to one and each of us.

Proust and Ayahuasca

   The shapes on the ground were suggestive but unrecognizable by constantly shifting in the wee hours of the night, the density of the vegetation, my disorientation, and the pulsating of Ayahuasca through my whole being. I’d just been part of the ritual Onça conducted in the village of his tribe for more than sixty people, with a television staff in attendance. It took place under a starry sky, on the soccer field of the village. Onça and a few others that were his apprentices sat with the jars of Ayahuasca on the earth in the middle of the space, behind a few candles providing a minimal glimmer to detach them from the darkness as one golden figure, and the participants were placed on the narrow benches that ran by the two longer sides of the field, meeting at a ninety- degree angle. There was a poignant sense of sobriety in being under the endless stars of an infinite sky, sitting across different people whose shapes merged in the dark like they were a single expecting entity. The momentous gravity of the occasion made it feel like it was a preface for a cosmic, ultimate event. Slowly, the moon made its entrance in the sky, enveloping everything in its dreamy, silver light, that gave the shadows of what it touched a mysterious, concentrated intensity speaking for the inwards of the earth. More than one shaman chanted, but no one could see their faces nor exactly their shapes, so that their disembodied voices were like an echo of haunted secrets.       The chanting of Onça’s father, coming from a totally dark, invisible spot, had something in common with the meowing of a big cat, and those of the others, going from long stretches of lower notes to wild, strained highs, had the eerie sound of an otherworldly communication with the life of the forest. The barely distinguished vertical stripes of some of the Indians' robes, as they walked to the golden point where Onça was serving the brew and gravely went back to their invisible places, were solemn and sinuous in accompanying the movement of their bodies, like responding to a choreography from beyond.
   Onça had allowed the kids and I to drink as much Ayahuasca as we wanted, because I told him we had experience with the Vine. But when visions started coming to me, I had to rush to God knows where, to find one of the holes that were used as toilet by the natives. One of Onça’s helpers pointed me in the direction of what should be the nearest hole after a good many steps and some turns away from where we were. It was circled by a flimsy and irregular fence, that a small flashlight Chris gave me to carry showed to harbor insects dried up on their back or dragging their carcasses in the final throes of their crawling existence. Little did I know how repeatedly I would have to go to that spot of relief and revolt, and by the third time I was on my way there I couldn’t know what I was stepping on, what I was exactly seeing, and where I was really going. The ritual had been over, everybody else had retired into their sleeping places, but I was far from done with purging and had to keep going back to the exiled hole. The lack of privacy and hygiene of a proper bathroom had been one of the main reasons stopping me to attend the Huni Kuin festival years earlier, and then, because of ethereal Onça, the grace of his gestures, his presence like a crystal refracting rainbows from itself, I stopped myself from worrying with anything but getting the kids and I to him.
   The old boatman we’d hired with the canoe didn’t really seem to know where he was going, and no matter the time we’d already travelled in the river, whenever he was asked how long we still had to go, he invariably answered, in a faint tone and with an air of having given it a lot of thought: “Three hours…”.
His engine turned out to be slow, for every canoe coming our way left us behind, and besides, all the many times he had to turn the canoe and stop it against the riverbank having been warned by Chris of an approaching obstacle, we spent time having to step out in the water, release the vehicle, turn it around, and step back in. Because of all that, we had to spend two extra nights on the way, before starting on the last leg of water leading to our destination.
There I was now, alone in the middle of the jungle night, trying, over and over to locate the “outhouse” again. The one that had been indicated to me was some half-mile away from the open porch of Onça’s hut, on one side of which, Chris, Olivia, and I, hung our hammocks, and on the other, three natives occupied theirs. But the kids had fallen asleep before my purging ordeal became compulsive, and it was a feat to step out of my hammock, which was squeezed between theirs, or to settle in every time I had to use the God forsaken hole and return, praying my ordeal was over, only to feel I had to rush out again. Groping for the small flashlight and toilet paper with my shaky hands, in the agony of having to calculate my movements to disentangle myself from that crowded corner as fast as I could, I knew how trying it would be to find back my place in it. To walk over the intricate, obscure, tricky, and under my hallucinating eyes, ever changing bushes, to finally locate the roofless, sentenced fence that barely encircled the shitting hole, and feel the repulsion of squatting over the stench of others’ waste, was no easy task. I had to place my feet among clumps of disposed paper, big spiders, dry leaves, desiccated gigantic beetles and other residue I preferred not to identify, fearing the possibility of anyone entering that doorless space without knowing I was in it, and putting up with the mosquitoes’ attack of my genital area. The tyranny of fighting for survival in the jungle, the eat or be eaten, is even creepy. But in the force of Ayahuasca, I could still look up at the sky above my head through the roofless fucking fence and realize, that in its cosmic power to obliterate the schisms that structure our finitude-bound perception of reality, the Vine of the Soul renders shit and vomit as natural as the sublime view of the stars I saw, giving all of it the same right to exist.
   As I felt more depleted, I feared how my predicament was going to end everything I looked at. The constant movement I had to do to settle my stomach made me indifferent to the impossibility of devoting myself to Ayahuasca’s revelations, and in my perpetual motion among morphing shapes, I could not even discern what was there from what might be a vision.
   In one of the times when I found myself yet again walking on the shifting patterns of crawling vegetation, I was trapped in a spot where everything felt unrecognizable and impenetrable to the flashlight I frantically started pointing to all possible directions. Identifying nothing that indicated the way to X’s porch, nor to the “outhouse” I had come from, I was overwhelmed by the blending of darkness and indecisive, mutating shapes all around; the cacophony of frogs, the crickets’ syncopated marking of time, the grunting of some boar like creature nearby, and the remote crow of a rooster, my mind immediately filling itself with demeaning, fearsome images of what would be left of me if I remained stuck there for the rest of the night, and were found by the natives when already devoured by ants, mosquitoes and snakes, in shameful, “civilized'' helplessness. To be lost in the jungle night alone, suspended between two realities, felt like being sentenced to death. I could not move for some time and thought nobody would hear me if I screamed. After some few agonizing seconds, I remembered Txana’s mystical peace when I excused myself for laughing out of control in a ritual he was conducting and he appeased me, saying that whatever happens in the force is part of it and should happen. With the memory of his words, I took a deep breath, and I was able to think that having to bear with the revolt of shitting in a foul hole and with all the difficulty to reach it, managing toilet paper and flashlight with unsteady hands under the voraciousness of the mosquitoes, was the Vine’s lesson to me that time. I’ve trusted Ayahuasca and its freedom to put down the mental crutches we see and shrink the world through, the humbling generosity of its undiscriminating love rescuing the dignity of each and of all, its saintliness to say it in one word. I was able to leave everything up to it, and, lo and behold, a sense of instant, miraculous reassurance came to me. After one more turn of the flashlight, I identified the corner of X’s porch in the distance. Back there, I entered my hammock with gratitude. But I wasn’t done yet, and after what felt like the millionth time stepping out of it to search for the elusive hole, I decided to pick the nearest tree behind which I could squat because I was too weak.
   Out of luck, a depression in the land was revealed to my cautious, hesitant sight, but it was real, and filled with dry leaves that could cover the toilette paper I threw in there. After another three or four more incursions to the same tree, my stomach settled and I could get to zip up the mosquito screen of my hammock over me. In utter nervous fragility, the incessant, spooky crowing of a rooster I could hear around the hut, a co co ri co that ended in a long, plaintive whine out of rhythm and reason and sounding like the response to some indescribable, haunting suffering, was killing me. Never had I heard a rooster, a bird that is proud heralding the day and measures up to it with inviting enthusiasm, produce such a grotesque, ghostly and repulsive lament ending in a low note, like a regret of what it should be hailing. There were also big grey hybrids of chickens and ducks walking around with a ghostly stupidity, moving, noisy bodies picking at each other for whatever and crashing again and again against our porch’s elevated floor, their failed attempts to climb on it producing a reverberating, aggressive noise, that made the wooden hut sound like it was being punched by some gigantic, invisible and mean fist, the thought of which in the anguish of dawn giving a perverse dimension to those birds. With a chill, I thought they couldn’t be just dummy birds falling short of their easy target. No animal is just a creature that can be explained away from what they appear to be doing; I could sense the conspiracy of their tumult with the angst of the unborn day hiding something sinister, that our commitment to survival would looke down upon, just like it erases out of the map what cannot be fit in our utilitarian ends. For these ends, a duck is something edible, period. The mystery of irrational life is overlooked by our arrogant and scientific manipulation of nature for our sake and the sake of an illusory ultimate rational understanding of reality. Rationality and material causality kick out mysteries to make room for rules, intuition for proofs, and humbleness for power, in the expectation of placing the unknown conveniently under its control.
   I remembered the puppy I had fallen in love with, cute, white, fluffy baby animal that anyone would like to pet. The contact with him, the feeling of his little body and scent when I kissed his neck, had been to me not just a petting but an existential comfort. The different between the effect the puppy had on me from that of the village birds’ was much beyond being cute or stupid looking, it had its unknown grounding.
   I knew that in a few moments, a celebratory, ritualistic party would start some distance from there, all the natives and the television staff would be in it, drink a low alcohol beverage they prepare, dance and sing throughout the day. Onça had invited us to it, but I was so drained and tired that I wanted to find myself asleep by the time he awoke. However, it was impossible to stop my mind following the rooster’s obsessive crow from the moment it started, in abhorrent expectation of the concluding lament, which always followed. “Not this time”, I would think when hearing it begin, to no avail. I even hated and pitied the creature, I thought of how to help it, how to make it stop, how to locate it, even how to ask some native around to do something about it. But I would have to get out of the hammock and find the native and make myself understood, maybe with no result. If they put up with it that much why thinking they’d care? Morning was in progress, why that crazy bird couldn’t stop?
I remembered my iPhone with the recording of Proust’s work. It had saved me the night before, in the little community where we’d spent the night, after having travelled the whole day in the river. The riverbank there was very high, and some young men who were on the shore when we approached seemed to behold a supernatural apparition when seeing us ready to disembark from our canoe on their shores. I was fantasizing an inn or a bed and breakfast, and like someone thirsting in the desert has visions of wells- I already felt the air conditioner and even the child of the beer. And when I asked one of them if there was a place where we could spend the night and he pointed to his right with a vehement nod of his head, while saying it was right “over there”, I thought he was a messager from the angelic oasis of my vision. How wonderful. The mirage inside my head should be real after all.
   The young man invited us to eat at his simple and tidy house, the middle of which was provided with a large TV set, and generously cooked for us a few little fishes from the river. He was delighted to chat with American looking Chris to find out what “mystery” had taken us to that forgotten spot in the world. “We are on our way to Onça, Chris said, “Oh, I know Onça, he is my friend!”, the young man declared. Everyone by the side of the river all the way from Acre, in Brazil, to the confines of Peru, knew Onça because he was often called on to heal people throughout that whole area. I left the young man’s house with Olivia to search for the place he’d indicated for us where to spent the night, and in consideration of his kindness, Chris stayed longer to chat with him.
   What I’d expected to be an Inn was an open thatched hut in the roof of which we could hang our hammocks, besides being next door to a small chapel where a fanatic evangelist missionary was indoctrinating the innocents, in a loud, over enthusiastic, and over casual tone of voice of a TV “Enlighted” but still friendly host, with the supposed demands of Jesus Christ. Talking as if his closeness to Jesus were obvious and imperative, he would say to the congregation that “He, the son of God, told me to let you all know how important it is to believe my words for your salvation! Salvation takes place within, and you are all sinners, but Jesus said to me that whoever helps his church will be saved! Jesus confided in me, and it was this morning, you know? On this very morning? He said that helping his church is the only way to be forgiven!” the man kept prevailing over the humbleness of his audience like throwing stones on clear glass. It was Sunday, and most people in that little church might have been there because of not having anything else to do. I couldn’t stand hearing the missionary and was about to go there confront him. After taking three steps out of our hutch, I paused to mature my decision, and thought that with no hostility it should be possible for me to say a few things that would question the genuineness of that “Christ communication” and give those people a chance to think of what they were hearing before swallowing it all up. The words should come to me as the missionary said whatever he would. Chris caught me on my way and held my arm after he heard what I was about to do, “you will entice the wrath of the congregation and the minister and I will have to save you!!!!” he exclaimed, “and make Olivia run with you while I fight the guy! Come to your senses, will you?”
I saw the likelihood of conflict but had only intended to put the missionary on the spot. The fact Chris noticed my daring satisfied me and I felt I had to oblige his request. Salvation came with my iPhone, as I entered my hammock and plugged my ears to the recording of A La Recherche.
   Besides annihilating the minister’s voice, the sound of Proust’s depth, the truth of his descriptions when he unveils beauty, is like a redemption of finitude by the absolute’s faithfulness to itself. I’d listened to a description of a Duchess Marcel, his narrator, was in love with, and the reverence of his words about the woman were God’s fingerprints all over her. Proust’s awe was something the minister’s supposed intimacy with Jesus, of all beings, was devoid of completely. Once more I realized that one cannot transmit awe without diving into one’s heart instead of transforming one’s superficial and put together experience into an indoctrination narrative for the many. In diving there, where God talked to you. Transmitting awe is transmitting God, and the words of Proust reduced to nothing the factual truth that the Duchess was just a woman. Proust could make me believe in anything above reality or even inverted to reality because I live it in the way he puts it into words. His beautiful awe and reverence take you there. But Onça’s tales of shamanic miracles were a report of something but not the words living this something, and this report was up to me to put a seal of belief on it or not, without being able to experience their spiritual power. It helped me to overcome the sort of guilt for not being able to accept everything he said, and I felt a little freer.
   Back to the river in the morning, we spent another five hours to reach the last stop before Onça’s village, where Chris managed to hire another canoe with a more competent driver. But it was already late to attempt doing the rest of the trip before the sun set, and we booked a room with cracked walls in a humble hotel. The small room had a dicey electric shower in its own minute bathroom, and condensation stains right around the outlet a small air conditioning was plugged to; rudimentary comforts of civilization which gave us such relief that we became indifferent to their precariousness. It wasn’t with us those things would cause a short circuit; the rest they gave us as too good to be feared. It wasn’t with us under it, that the shower water would carry electricity, the refreshment of being able to have a shower was too soothing to be a reason for concern…
The little town we found ourselves in bears the name Marshall Thaumaturgo, honoring my great grandfather on my mother’s side. He’d been a mayor of Cruzeiro do Sul (a city he founded himself a few miles from there) and fought a battle against Peruvian usurpation of the very land we were on. He’d been informed of it from one moment to the next, and with no time to expect resources from the capital of the country, he could still recover the invaded Brazilian territory with the few men he had under his command, in a local battle that lasted three days. Five years later, Brazil and Peru signed the treaty that determined the border between their territories.
Thaumaturgo had been a governor of the Amazon, of Piaui, and had also overseen the border between Brazil and Venezuela. He became a legend in my Mother’s family, and she looked up at her pioneer grandfather ever since she was a little girl and saw him coming back to his home with an array of exotic birds, from his excursions in the North of the country. In her advanced old age, Mother wanted to go all the way to Marshall Thaumaturgo to attend the inauguration of a local school bearing the same name, but neither Edgar nor I felt like making time to help her through a difficult trip, to a place that in those days was nothing for us but the uncomfortable and hot confines of Brazil. When I encountered Ayahuasca a few months after Mother passed, I couldn’t help wondering how she would have loved it, how coincidental the fact that Marshall Thaumaturgo could also be the last stop on the way to Txana’s village, and how it was she that must have send him to me. I could also think of how much exchange she and I would have about Ayahuasca, for Mother was fascinated with breaking the limits of rationality and we already shared views on Marijuana, which she loved. But even when I heard Txana’s village could be reached from Thaumaturgo municipality, I still didn’t think I would ever go there, until Olivia, who was doing ancestral work inspired by Jung around the time I met Onça, declared that one day we must visit it, with a conviction that was its own right.
   After our long, half-blind, and unsafe river trip, we felt in paradise being in that agglomerate of small buildings that can’t be reached by car, orbiting around an unpaved road with barely any commerce and no vehicles but noisy motorized bicycles running to and from. I tried to forget how late we already were and overcome my anxiety for not knowing how we would be received by Onça, who might not even be no longer expecting us.
   On the following day, after a few hours in a canoe that had a better engine and a more competent driver, I was awed with the condensation of thick, high trees, as we were closer and closer to our destination, forming a big contrast with the low vegetation and even bareness of prior areas we had seen on both sides of the river. I thought it should be the visible result of Onça’s reforestation, and brought down by the mad heat of the sun, felt almost sure that such a hardworking Indigenous leader, who could make such a difference to the country’s ecological scene, would find us “too much on his plate”. Txana had told me that tribe was defensive, and one could only visit their village with Onça’s permission. When we arrived in the peak of the heat, the sun relentlessly piercing our head and expanding through our body, like claiming our soul and the whole world it shone upon. The children we saw playing in the river ignored us, but at least the owner of the canoe was popular there. I had to put myself together to help carry anything I could and climb the muddy, slippery high bank of the river, with some confidence, to tell the first adult I saw at the top that Onça was expecting us. Asking here and there where to find him, it appeared to me, as it felt hotter and hotter, that we had to cross the whole length of the village to reach him, who was sitting on a folding chair across a group of other natives on a long bench under the shade of a row of trees near his hut. He was sitting on a folding chair, and the others were placed side by side on a long, wooden bench across him. I called his name with enthusiasm when I spotted him from a few steps away, and looking in our direction, he burst out laughing. He should have got the message Chris sent him from the “puppy’s village” in Peru, but two days had gone by, and I made him laugh even more when blaming the numerous hours we’d spent in the canoe to justify our delay “You came from Peru all the way in the river!”, he could barely say.
   Before explaining he was in a reunion to decide some important things with the council of others, he said we could hang our hammocks on his porch, introduced us to his young new wife Rosa, a robust, placid looking girl also sitting on the long bench, and invited us to the Ayahuasca ceremony he would conduct outdoors at night. He had to be available to the TV team but told us that Rosa would call us when it was time to eat.
   When I finally had a chance to ask him if he could be with each of us and give his shamanic healing and orientation, he said he was no longer doing one on one sittings because it drained him, “But I will give you a healing prayer during the ceremony, and you guys can get orientation by sitting with any of the boys I’ve trained and trust”, he said. I couldn’t help feeling disappointed, and remembering his saying, when I first met him, that he’d always been clairvoyant because he was the incarnation of an important Shaman of his people, I didn’t feel inspired to trust any young man that did not bring this extra sight from the beyond but just “learned” it in this world. During the year that had passed after I first met Onça, I was on a search of ways to develop my spirituality, but he got much more on his plate and might have even forgotten what he’d said to me. The apprenticeship that had felt crucial to me no longer had a place among his other activities, and I had to look at the bright side of the situation. It was a victory having arrived there at all, being invited to sit in ceremony with Onça later, and have him pray over the three of us during it. Chris and Olivia were impressed with him, but we had to let him be until ceremony time. After setting up our hammocks, Chris took off exploring the village, Olivia managed to break the indifference of the native children by enticing them to play with her iPhone, and I set out looking for puppies I never found.
   Now, settled in my hammock between my two sleeping children and struggling with the angst the animals around were causing me, I wanted to feel we were protected and remembered a particular point in the ceremony. It happened when Onça’s set of white teeth popped in front of us luminescent out of a bright smile that seemed to float in the night. It had the startling autonomy of unbelongingness as if other entities besides Onça were similing through him, and he was only the vehicle carrying it through the atmosphere. He had been springing from person to person almost imperceptibly, weightless and serpentine, to stop before each and utter healing words. When he was in front of the kids and me, I doubted he wasn't a half human and half mythic, or folkloric, entity. He’d caught us by surprise asking if there was something we wanted to tell him, but we didn’t understand he was giving us the chance to hand over our problems to his praying. He still prayed and blew over our heads, and the thought of it was reassuring now, right before Proust’s recorded text drowned out the bird’s insane misery, dissipated the ominous feeling their crowing seemed to promote and broke the conspiracy of their erratic behavior with the newborn day’s disentangling itself from the last throes of the agonizing, fading night.
   In the passage I happened to hear when plugged to my earphones, Proust analyses his perception of the new, of what is totally unpredictable by the concepts and ideas he had prior to “an individual impression”, something which is unexpected and can only be provided by life- like in an encounter- and alerts us that we have to detach the unknown in a form that we have no intellectual equivalent to, for in the collection of our ideas, there is none that responds to an individual impression. To render the collection of our ideas useless to be open to the unknown, which Proust equates to the individuality of an impression, is the total receptivity of an intellectual nakedness, of an openness to, and peace with, what is beyond one’s mind; the unpredictable, the unplanned, and the self-revealing. Individuality, as what surprises and cannot be foreseen, represents this eternal novelty unavailable to be fit under concepts, or to be comparable and relatable. Unique, therefore, it is alone in being.
   The identification of the unknown to it is also extended to novelty, happiness and beauty, in Proust’s discussion of our judgment of life, after he narrates his admiring the face of a girl who entered the train in which he was traveling to Balbec for the first time: “ I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness. We invariably forget that these are individual qualities, and, mentally substituting for them a conventional type at which we arrive by striking a sort of mean among the different faces that have taken our fancy, among the pleasures we have known, we are left with mere abstract images which are lifeless and insipid because they lack precisely that element of novelty, different from anything we have known, that element which is peculiar to beauty and to happiness. And we deliver on life a pessimist judgment which we suppose to be accurate, for we believed that we were taking happiness and beauty into account, whereas in fact we left them out and replaced them by synthesis in which there is not a single atom of either.” (Within a Budding Grove- trans. By Moncrieff and Kilmartin, from Les Jeunes Filles en Fleur).
Many people react against the purging of their intellect and the humbling effect of it brought about by Ayahuasca for the revelation of newness because of a resistance to what is unclassifiable, a resistance to being disarmed. The inability to fit whatever it is under the prior, abstract concepts of intellect, which mold reality and make it repeatable and foreseeable, can be as frightening as to let go of oneself to the Unknown. No wonder Ayahuasca is also referred to as “little death”.

   Proust not only has the poetic mind that is intellectually disarmed before a revelation, like in the case of the girl in the train, but recognizes how crucial this is by narrating a situation in which the prior concepts of intellect were detrimental. In the passage when Marcel, his narrator, first watched the great actress Berma, anxious to appreciate her performance, he fails to because of them; prior ideas in his mind that were ready to be applied to what “should be” her talent. But on the second time he watched her and had no longer any expectation, he was off guard and could perceive the uniqueness of her performance. In the same way, Ayahuasca strips off the mind so it can “receive” what is unavailable to be a mere and cold object of knowledge, that which we, as the subject of, are split from, instead of at one with. Knowledge and its conceptualizations cannot access a reality that only talks to awe, to a surrender of the mind to what is beyond it, the reality of the eternally new. By fitting reality into concepts, rationality makes the world regular, expectable, and “protected” from unpredictability the most it can. From the language of God. God will not talk through intellectual crutches. Nor will Ayahuasca. If we don’t fight against being stripped of these crutches by the Vine, we become able to surrender and open ourselves up to the sacredness it speaks from. The sacredness with which Proust coexists in his constant search for incorruptibility, for a world of sameness- a sameness that is also constant renewal- above and beyond the transiency and deterioration of time. He did reach this world, and If I had to sum up his work in one sentence, I would say that divine reality is the one and only.

   Proust’s intelligence is courage, the courage of being disarmed before what represents a threat to the perception of a common, repetitive, and predictable world shaped by our mind. He is as open armed to the unknown and the otherworldly as a shaman should. The coincidence of his message with my experience of Ayahuasca “undressing” my mind of its intellectual structure and its judgmental, comparing, relativizing role, was crucial for validating my individual experience with the Vine. Whenever I accepted its non-judgmental reality instead of negating whatever vision it brought me by applying to it a rejecting concept of quality, lo and behold, what appeared bad turned good. Like the vision of being propelled to a monster that I faced, and it turned into a gigantic sacred heart. Ayahuasca brings a viscerally close infinity of distance, an immensity that has no size, and the beauty of a monstrosity, like the vision I had of the devil’s redemption.
   In the dawn of that arid moment inside my hammock, it reasserted my faith in individuality as a right of truth, like it had been to me when I entitled myself worthy of communion, and in everything this faith originated, like my trusting my own experience, my prioritizing duty as duty to myself, my inability to contextualize or relativize people and places I bonded with, in a few words, my focusing on uniqueness; the unrelatedness of soul. Proust’s Shamanic intelligence helped me to understand that in the same token I believe Ayahuasca shows me the sacred, I also believe I become my best self to see it. Like Txana would say, all of it was part of what should happen. Everything I’d endured when still in the force led up to my avoidance of being aware of the rooster, the ducks, the invisible fist “punching” our hut, by listening to Proust. I was meant to be put at peace by the reassurance of the Proustian passage I stumbled upon, independent from a Shaman. Or perhaps, by discovering in a Western writer, a Shamanic power of mind that can help me discovering myself and making sense of my being between two worlds.
   I was about to fall asleep when I saw Onça go by, ready for the party. Dressed in full regalia, he was elegant, unaffected, and moved swiftly, as if every part of his diaphanous figure floated on designs with which the elements around him complied. I’d done the difficult trip there, expecting he could show me the way. Now, I was happy to admire him, regardless of my personal quest.
   In communion with the Vine, circumstances can speak for themselves and bring the answers one eternally searches for.

Why is Proust's work so reassuring and healing?

        Life is faster and faster.  Most of us are constantly running after time in order to do more, to know more, to call more attention, to not be forgotten in the  torrent of information pushed down our throat at every moment.  Besides electronic communication, the progress of technology has also been turning what was new yesterday, into what is obsolete today, like making the world constantly disposable. In the speed to catch up with this inhuman speed, everybody has to be alert and immediately focused, like racers aiming at a finish line. But unlike what happens to racers, no finish line can survive the  ever faster pace of the race itself, and there isn't really anything to arrive at. Running toward elusive, external goals, one runs from oneself, and the inner temple that is the source of creativity and uniqueness becomes more and more ignored.  C.G. Jung was right when he said, almost a century ago, that "modern man" was loosing his soul. Some people don't seem to care or to even realize their inner emptiness. Their distance from themselves is hidden behind propaganda's readymade beliefs that generate prejudice, bigotry, and insane causes.

    To rediscover oneself is to rediscover one's faith. This is where Proust's self-search becomes relevant. Besides the confessional accuracy of his self-analysis, his work ultimately rescues essence from transiency and from the destructive oblivion generated by the passing of time. It returns our technologically kidnapped soul to us by leading us to find, beneath all the layers of learned habits, disposable conventions and behaviors, the truth of our life and of our own person, beyond all change.

    Proust's voice talks to one from within; his readers should be the readers of themselves, as he wanted. His search for incorruptibility, for what is not destructible by time and transiency, is the search for one's soul. Reading his text improves self awareness as well as a deeper awareness of others.

   The greatest generosity of his work lies in allowing us to make his honesty, unabashed questioning, and piercing insight, our own, as we identify with his voice and dive into our own depth. As we reach, through his epiphanies, our own experience of the spiritual dimension and discover within ourselves, an up to then unknown power to face it all.

Proust and the Invisible

Here goes what Ramon Fernandez says about Proust. Translation will follow:

"...Il semblait aspirer la réalité contenue dans la chambre, dans l'instant, dans moi-meme; et l'èspece d'extase qui se peignait sur son visage était bien celle du médium qui reçoit les messages invisibles des choses..." "...il posait un chef-'oeuvre partout où ses yeux s'arrêtaient..."

"... He seemed to aspire the reality contained in the room, in the instant, in myself; and the type of ecstasy that appeared on his face was that of a medium receiving invisible messages from things." "... He'd see a masterpiece everywhere his eyes looked at something..."

Proust and the Resurrection of the Flesh

     Proust has been considered agnostic, because he does not declares directly to have faith in God. Taking agnostic to be the same as unbeliever, or even doubter, I wonder how people can hold this view before considering this great writer's objection to indoctrination, and still expect him to objectively assert faith, instead of transmitting it; instead of enabling the reader to directly experience it within himself. Proust does not have faith, he is faith. 
   As he reports his own humbly personal experience of timelessness,  in Le Temps Retrouvé, for instance, he transmit the reality of spirit. When he talks of his narrator, the man wrenched off the chronology of time, he says that such man can only find his pleasure and nourishment in the essence of things, "... un être qui n'aparaissait que quand, par une de ces identités entre le present et le passé, il pouvait se trouver dans le seul milieu ou il pût vivre, jouir de l'essence des choses, chest-`a-dire en dehors du temps". (a being who only appeared when, by one of these identities between present and past, he could find himself in the only environment where he could live, enjoy the essence of things, that is, outside time.)"
   Always recognizant of the physical dimension through which he reaches the bliss of atemporal reality, Proust is careful to maintain the concreteness of it in the picture, reporting, as the source of his experience's bliss, the irruption, in the present, of a particular sensation that was first felt in the past, and identifying past and present in timelessness.
    As heavenly and as spiritual as this experience is, it is by no means  reached by the mind or by willed thinking, since the first thing to trigger it off are the sensations that enter our being through our body, and whatever causes them in the course of action is given by life, by what is in our way and we inadvertently stumble upon, and not by our conscious will. (This element of fate, or apparent randomness, in this sense, is what makes me think that Proust inadvertently treats what is provoked by a sensation, as well as the experience of timelessness ir causes, like a synchronicity between our subjective world and the external one; a connection of meaning. Since the communication between heterogeneous realities, or their coincidence, is mystical, like the physical element in the spiritual experience  Proust had, I think that besides its mystical dimension, Proust's epiphany, by giving priority to the concreteness of the physical over the disembodied insights of intellect in the reaching of essence, points to physicality's relevance in the spiritual realm, where it would be ever present, like flesh resurrected. 
   In a few words, the resurrection of the past, as it comes to be experienced in the present, is also a resurrection of the physical.
   Thus, Proust maintains the element of time in timelessness itself, when he says,  Tant de fois, au cours de ma vie, la réalité m'avait deçu parce que, au moment `ou je la percevais, mon imagination, qui était mon seul organe pour jouir de la beauté, ne pouvait s'appliquer `a elle, en vertu de la loi inévitable qui veut qu'on ne puisse imaginer que ce qui est absent. Et voici que soudain l'effect de cette dure loi s'était trouvé neutralisé, suspendu, par un expedient merveilleux de la nature, qui avait fait miroiter une sensation- bruit de la fourchette et du marteau, même inégalité de pavés- `a la fois dans le passé, ce qui permet `a mon imagination de la goûter, et dans le présent òu l'ébranlement effective de mes sens par le bruit, le contact, avait ajouté aux rêves de l'imagination ce dont ils sont habituellement dépourvus, l'idée d'existence et, grâce `a ce subterfuge, avait permits `a mon être d'obtenir, d'isoler, d'immobilizer- la durée d'un éclair- ce qu'il n'appréhend jamais: un peu de temps `a l'état pur. L'être qui était rené en moi quand, avec un tel frémissement de bonheur, j'avais entendu le bruit common `a la fois `a la cuiller qui touche l'assiette et au marteau qui frappe sur la roue, `a l'inégalité pour les pas des pavés de la cour Guermantes et du baptistère de Saint-Marc, cet être là ne se nourrit que de l'essence des choses, en elles seulement il trouve sa subsistence, ses délices. (So many times in my life reality disappointed me because, as I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only faculty to appreciate beauty, could not be applied to it (reality) by virtue of the inevitable law that we can only imagine what is absent. But suddenly, the effect of this harsh law was neutralized, suspended, by this wonderful expedient of nature, which made a sensation-noise of the fork and of the hammer- sparkle at the same time in the past- permitting my imagination to taste it- and in the present, where the effective shaking of my senses by noise, contact, had added to the dreams of the imagination what they are usually devoid of, the idea of existence, and thanks to this subterfuge, had allowed my being to obtain, to isolate, to immobilize - in the duration of a flash - what it never apprehends: a bit of time in a pure state. But let a noise already heard, an odor once breathed, be heard again, both in the present and in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, immediately the permanent and usually hidden essence of things is liberated and our true self which, sometimes for a long time seemed dead, awakens, comes alive by receiving the celestial nourishment which is brought to it. A minute freed from the order of time recreates in us to feel it the man freed from the order of time. The being who was reborn in me when, with such a thrill of happiness, I heard the sound common both to the spoon hitting the plate and to the hammer hitting the wheel,  and felt the same inequality for the steps of the cobblestones of the Guermantes courtyard and the baptistery of Saint-Marc, this being only feeds on the essence of things, in them alone it finds its subsistence, its delights.)

   In a few words, l'homme affranchi de l'ordre du temps, (the man liberated from the order of time) the  timeless man, who tastes the celestial nourishment brought to him, is, if for less than one minute, in the place where physical sensations can be real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, that is,  is in paradise. 
Putting it differently, if physical sensations are real without being in the chronological present,  ideal and yet concrete, they do exist in a higher dimension. 

    Looking from another angle, a physical reality that doesn't pertain to the order of time can only be a resurrection of the physical. In the same way,   the "instant" of time that is out of chronology, as Proust says, à l'état pur (in a pure state) is transcendent concreteness, or, resurrected existence.  
   The narrator, posited by Proust as the timeless subject, he who can only find his subsistence in the essence of things, our real self, in the writer's words, is the self who experiences this flash of paradise through the resurrection of his own sensations. It is our own  soul, and insofar as it keeps a dimension of concreteness, which is the seal of individuality, it is our own individual soul.

Proust and Mysticism

    One cannot ignore  Proust's mysticism in his assertion that the book one should write has already been written for one within oneself, and one's task should be that of looking inside and bring it to light.  This would be, for Proust, not just the discovery of one's real life, but a work of art. To talk about the implications of identifying this task to a work of art, and to something that has an ethical/religious dimension, I will begin by emphasizing how Proust viewed art.

   "Art for art's sake", the principle he believed in, following Ruskin, implies the transcendent quality of what values in itself and not in relation to anything else. Hence, Oscar Wilde, another adept of  this principle, proudly declares, "All art is quite useless."  

   A work of art is useless in the sense of finding its validity by being what it is and not by serving a function ahead of itself.  Usefulness is bondage to time: an object of use is only a means through which something else is accomplished down the line.  Meant for the fulfillment of a goal, what is useful has no intrinsic value. 

   Those who do not accept that art exists for its own sake only see it as contextual, transitional, and relative. The value of it from this angle would be purely historic. But although a work of art is made in a historical context, its cohesion, coherence, and uniqueness, account for a wholeness that transcends any context. 
   There can be no enslavement nor relativizing of what is whole; of the in itself, to use Kantian language. "Art for art's sake" means art as noumena, something beyond the limits of time and, in this sense, preexisting the artist- like Proust's "already written" book inside of him- and post existing him, that is, maintaining, throughout time, its same, transcendent quality.
   To fulfill the task of bringing this book, which is hidden deep inside one, to light,  means, for Proust, to make the work of art that expresses one's timeless and individual truth.  

   And he not only equates the genesis of it to an act of artistic creation, but  gives this genesis, or this bringing  of it to light, the ethical/religious quality of obliging that which is one's transcending truth- like a heavenly design-  when concluding that art is the real final judgment.  That is, the judgment based on who obliged his/her transcendent truth vs who didn't. 

   The miracle of art is to bring transcendence to the order of time; to link temporality and eternity, materiality and spirit.  By unveiling what is for one, and yet preexists one, art unveils what has always been; what can only have been willed by God.  

Sacrifice, Death, and Resurrection

  Below is an example of how Proust took the process of death and resurrection as an almost literal metaphor for the constant dynamics of life; the painful overcoming of selves that give birth to new ones, as we go throughout the years:

 "And for a neurotic nature such as mine, the anxiety and alarm which I felt as I lay beneath that strange and too lofty ceiling were but the protest of an affection that survived in me for a ceiling that was familiar and low. Doubtless, this affection too would disappear, and another having taken its place (when death, and then another life, had, in the guise of Habit, performed their double task); but until its annihilation, every night it would suffer afresh and on this first night especially..."

Relativity and Essence: Judaism and Christianity

    It has been remarked, that the radical change in the perception of our world, which introduced relativity over aspects of reality we took to be absolute, is due to three eminent Jewish men: Freud, Einstein, and Marx. 

   Starting with Freud, the assertion of an unconscious realm, which can grant, in spite of our awareness, the unknown reasons for our acting "this" or "that" way, made morals relative: one cannot be considered good or bad for doing something "blindly", that is, led by unconscious reasons. The freedom to choose between courses of action, in this context, is out of the picture, and with it, the responsibility of the agent. 

  As everyone knows, Einstein, with the theory of relativity, discovered that time and space, rather than absolute realities, are also relative, therefore changeable according to the context they are being considered. 

  As for Marx, he destroyed the absolute character attributed to religion, by electing "production" as first principle, that is, by explaining the whole of the human social and creative reality, through mundane, financial values. 

  These three men were Jewish, and deeply perceptive of relativity. In the same way, Marcel Proust's masterpiece has been considered, in literature, the equivalent of the theory of relativity. It has been pointed on and again, how Proust describes the ravages of time on anything we once took to be immutable, like social prestige, physical appearance, love itself, and, what is more disturbing, what we take to be our own self. Throughout our life, we are in the constant process of becoming different selves, to the point of not even recognizing, or justifying, what we were and the way we felt in different periods of our past. We are, like Proust shows, in the constant process of metaphorically dying and being reborn into new selves, as our feelings and the circumstances around us change. What am I, or where is the real "me", if there is one, in the torrential, continuous change that I underwent, from babyhood to now? 

   Is there any "sameness" to identify what we were, in all these stages of life? Is there something immutable, that one can call one's real, steady, self? In a few words, is there an essence to each of us, an individual soul, really? 

  Because Proust starts and finishes his novel with the word "time", and because he, in fact, describes radical changes and deterioration in everything and everyone throughout the years, it has been generally taken that his main concern is to show the relativity of all that is subject to the temporal order. And, like the three other men I mentioned in connection to relativity, he brilliantly succeeded. 

 Proust, however, didn't stop there. Not only is the "Search" permeated with poetic insights of  timeless beauty, but, at the end, Proust spells out his experience of an also timeless, incorruptible reality, through the involuntary memory of moments of his own life, brought about by physical impressions. In rediscovering, thus, what was this "real" life, he asserts himself as the timeless narrator to write it, that is, the one whose only nourishment is the essence of things. 

 This narrator is, therefore, the only adequate one to bring to the light of intelligence, the life he really lived, and wasn't really aware of, in the impossibility of recovering it by intellectual, voluntary memory. It remains hidden to most of us, who are reluctant to dive within ourselves, and, according to Proust, decipher "the book already written to each of us", which is the same as to say, the book that precedes us.  

 This timeless book, concerning the deciphering of the impressions that are brought back to us by involuntary memory, is, therefore, the wording of our "timeless" life, or, still, the essence of our life. The "timeless" narrator, corresponding to the essence of the narrator, is his individual soul. Acknowledging relativity to its most painful effect (the law of oblivion, a by product of the passing of time), Proust emerges from the abyss of an all-encompassing finitude, and victoriously asserts essence; becomes soul. Proust's narrator is the soul of Proust.

Proust and the Christian Sacrifice

   Sacrifice, a common theme in religion, generally stood for a trade off with divinity, even if it was just for an appeasing of "it" in the expectation of an improvement of some critical situation affecting many. Ancient cultures did it, in the hope of obtaining, or making happen, things they needed, as well as stopping those that were destructive to them, the cause of which they often saw as divine wrath. In this sense, sacrifice had some type of utility, just like prayers, that, in the most part, have the finality of obtaining favors, or protection, from God. 

   When people pray, they generally ask for something, and the requests can range from material objects, to forgiveness, or be a need of penance. In this sense, praying, as well as self-sacrificing are expressions of neediness, rather than gratitude. It has an infantile and winning dimension. One forgets, that if one were really addressing divinity, let alone, communicating with "it", one would be in awe, not in want. Maybe that is why Nietzsche considers all religiosity a form of gratefulness, of which, I think, awe is the highest expression. 

 But asking God for "this" and "that", or mechanically repeating the words of a prayer out of religious "duty", makes people consider themselves righteous, even though they do nothing other than "negotiate" with divinity. 

    Sacrifice, in the same line, was some sort of negotiating with God, what is not only disrespectful, but contradictory. In the same way that a real prayer should be an expression of reverence in addressing divinity, sacrifice, an ultimate and final prayer, should never be a transaction with the view to a return. Sacrifice is the extreme surrender of communing with God; become a an offer of oneself, to Him.

   In love with the Father, Christ was a gift, not a victim. 

  The Christian sacrifice, usually understood as a purging of the world's sins by "the lamb of God", was    Christ's terrible, painful and passionate return to his deepest Self, where the endless love between creator and creature resides; "the will of the father". That is why, even being critical of Christianity,  Nietzsche saw the Christian sacrifice not as a trade off of Christ's life for the salvation of the world, but as a matter of authenticity to Christ.  

  As we all know, Christ was not exclusive in considering himself a son of God, but, on the contrary, considered all of us to be children of the Father, just like himself. 

 Christianity reawakened, through metaphor, a still more atavist religious practice, which is that of cannibalism. The immensity of such love, of being at one with the loved one, in flesh and blood, more than self-sufficient, is pure exuberance: it needs nothing, and it asks for nothing. 

In the context of nature, the bond between life and death is constantly revealed.  Animals are killed, so their predators can live on. Babies are born, out of lacerated bodies. The women, who were girls until giving birth, cease to exist when they become mothers. Seeds die, in order to bear fruit(and this is a cherished Proustian analogy). 

Even if just metaphorically, resurrection, as an overcoming of oneself, follows sacrifice. Resurrection is not a "goal"to be attained, but a rebirth that is intrinsic to dying for God. Here, we come to Proust and his enlightened view of the several deaths of the selves that we were, throughout life. 

When he loved Gilberte, he was a different person from the one he came to be, after arduously forgetting her, and eventually falling in love with Albertine. Death of that self, as an overcoming of it through suffering, gives birth to a new self; to a metaphorical resurrection. 

 We all know the saying "no pain, no gain". Proust says the same, when asserting that pleasure is good for the body, but only pain can strength the spirit. He expresses the dynamics of the Christian sacrifice/resurrection, when saying:

"Chaque personne qui nous fait souffrir peut-être rattachée par nous `a une divinité dont elle n'est q'un reflet fragmentaire et le dernier degrée, divinité dont la contemplation en tant qu'idée nous donne aussitôt de la joie, au lieu de la peine que nous avions. Tout l'art de vivre c'est de ne nous servir de personnes qui nous fount souffrir que comme d'un degré permettant d'aceder `a sa forme divine et de peupler ainsi journellement notre vie de divinités." (Each person who makes us suffer may be linked by us to a divinity of which he is only a fragmentary reflection and the last degree, a divinity whose contemplation as an idea immediately gives us joy, instead of the pain we had. The whole art of living is to use people who make us suffer only as a step allowing us to access our divine form and thus daily populate our life with divinities."

Thus, personal suffering is transformed into a path to divinity as the pained self is born into a new one.