Proust, Art, and the Search for Essence

  “Bien qu’on dise avec raison qu’il n’y a pas de progress, pas de découvertes en art, mais seule, dans les sciences, et que chaque artiste recommençant pour son compte un effort individual ne peut y être aidé, ni entravé par les efforts de tout autre…” Marcel Proust
   Trans. " It is rightly said that there is no progress, no discoveries in art, but only in the sciences, and that each artist re starting for himself an individual effort cannot be neither helped, nor impeded by the efforts of all the others"
   We all know that scientific discoveries become obsolete, when replaced by newer findings in their area. The treatment they gave Proust for asthma, for instance, is completely outdated, and medicines that didn't exist in his time took its place. On the other hand, Leonardo Da Vinci's La Gioconda, among other famous artworks, was made all the way back in the Renaissance, and is art through and through. It is timeless, and will never be replaced.
Among Proust's extensive reflections on art, he talks about the book he had within and that had already been written for him, that is, transcended him. He also asserts that all of us have his own book inwardly, expressing thereby the transcendence and individualism of each. He also says that he (like each of us) only has to discover this book and bring to light. A task from which, according to him, people in general will do anything to escape. Escaping from something that exists within, independently of one's will,  means escaping from one's own essence. 
    Every artwork is contextual, in the sense of being traceable to a period in Art History, or to a determinate culture. In this sense, it is bound to time. But insofar as an expression of the uniqueness of the artist's individuality, of its absoluteness, it is timeless, like Proust's book, or La Gioconda.  People no longer paint like Renaissance artists because the culture and ideals of that time, its context, in other words, is gone. But the unique way Da Vince painted is alive forever. 
   Scientific discoveries, on the other hand, go on dethroning one another, because they are stages of a development that is collective and objective, since this development is empirically deduced from the observation of facts that should be the same for all, or from the development of laws that should also be the same for all. Knowledge is objective: The subject of science (the scientist) objectifies the world, abstracting his field of inquiry into knowledge, and being, therefore, split from it. The artist, on the other hand, feels, senses,

 or communes with his, rather than abstracts it. His rules are his own, because they oblige the expression of his uniqueness.
    The fact that these rules, or ways of expression, are individual, does not detract from the universality of an artist's work. On the contrary. The miracle of art concerns precisely  the point in which subjectivity is soul, instead of arbitrariness. This miracle is the elevation of what would be mere particularity to absoluteness. 
   Proust contends that the duty of artists is to live for themselves; for their inner world. Like Proust's narrator, they have to look within, to discover this world in the depths of themselves. To discover what has been already there, uniquely for them: their essence. Their struggle is, paradoxically, that of being led by it as they construct it, that is, that of bypassing bypass their ego. From the sphere of being one-among-many, they become alone in being.
I would say that while science aims at asserting the truth, art is beyond the polarity between true and false. While science is conquest, art  is surrender, and if science "tames" the world, art gives it a new birth.

The Unveiling of Proust

Marcel Proust comes to Light:
Like all, or most, human beings, the sculpture of Marcel Proust, made by Edgar Duvivier, took nine months of gestation, from the conception of its idea to its inauguration. Nine months of anxiety through the vague and slow communication with local authorities in Cabourg (Proust's Balbec); nine months of uncertainty:
What if the French people didn't appreciate this type of accessible, life size sculpture- instead of something on a pedestal-and with which one can interact? What if they only liked the traditional way of turning the sculpted person into a monument to be looked up at from below, being above the direct reach of people?
I shared Edgar's concern because his emails to France would takes weeks and weeks to be answered. "When will the inauguration be?" " Where will you place "him"?
One should be ready for any kind of receptivity from people anywhere but, lo and behold, the returning of Proust to Cabourg was blessed.
Following the warm speech of Tristan Duval,  who was the current mayor of Cabourg and of the writer and Proustian authority, Gonzague Saint Bris - who confessed he'd already seen the statue prior to its unveiling and found it a magnificent work that shows both the inner and the communicative character of Proust. 

Questioning how it had been possible that a dandy, who was ill and bedridden while writing The Search, could have aroused passion in the whole world, Gonzague brilliantly concluded that it wasn't for writing about general subjects, but because he got closer and closer to himself by going deeply within, no-holds-bar. In his absolute authenticity, Proust resonated with people of all nationalities.
 The Proustian approach to oneself involves the search of one's profound self, that which, ignored by most, concerns the essence of each one, that which is promised and sought after by meditations of all types, transpersonal psychology, Junguian psychology, and New Age's doctrines.
With the typical daring of French intelligence, which in my opinion uniquely weds the intimate and the transpersonal, passion and intellect, M. Saint Bris passed from the historic, psychological and factual dimension, to that of spirit: Declaring the inauguration to be a moment of World Communion, he concluded that Edgar, with his ancient, French family name, had been chosen from above by Proust himself, to make his sculpture and take him back to Cabourg.
The statue is endowed with life not just for its elegant similarity to Proust, but also its interactive nature, the wonderful and dynamic possibility for people to be personal, with it.
Life, in interaction, concerns the requesting of not only the observation of the spectator, but his immersion in or participation in the work. Like it happens in Contemplative Interaction- the contemporary art of installation- the spectator contemplates the artwork, at the same time as his immersion in it is  what allows this work to reveal itself, transforming him into spectator and agent at the same time. Interaction is a communion of he who acts and he who reflects.
 Edgar's sculpture gives the spectator the opportunity to interact with it in a personal way: the possibility, really, of re creating it. Each person can take a selfie in whichever way he/she wants; each becomes unique through the particularity of his/her participation, equally making, through it, the sculpture to be reborn. For, in its generosity to give each spectator the chance to add something of him/herself, the sculpture eternally reveals itself. It is constantly created anew and constantly re creates, like an expression of the essence of life.
It is with great joy that we thus see the generosity of Marcel Proust being propagated through that of Edgar in the statue he gave life to and now lives in Cabourg. It  echoes the immense grace of Proust in writing a book whose readers  would be also the readers of themselves, as he stated it, that is, would be able to make the revelations of Proust's sublime intelligence, their own.
I think M. Saint Bris was right, when thinking that Proust chose Edgar Duvivier to resurrect his likeness and expression. When we returned to the hotel late at night, we saw many people taking their particular selfies with the sculpture, including a couple passionately kissing by its side. Would it be inspired by the passion of Proust himself? Or by the passion that he arouses? I bet!

Proust and the Real, Transcendent Reality

   Looking at this photo of Marcel Proust,  I remember, from his angelic expression, Iris Murdoch declaring that,  Proust writes like an angel. 

Not only does Proust write like an angel, but he uses  frequent metaphors about the angelic nature, in his poetic descriptions about what he sees. The delicacy and purity of the passage in which he mentions the pear trees in flower he saw in the "accursed" city, while waiting for Saint- Loup and the latter's maitresse,  even led him to wonder whether those were not really angels!
This alternation of a higher reality with the one we take for granted and is in front of our eyes happens often throughout The Search, and makes, in my opinion, some of the highest peaks of this novel. I say amen to flowers being angels, after I read Proust's angelic description of them.
Note that, in this passage, he mentions Mary Magdalene's mistaking Jesus for a gardener, her confusing  the  resurrected one for a mere mortal man. By this, Proust makes a parallelism between our usual, commonsensical view of flowers as mere plants, and our overlooking their angelic nature.
The  passage I am referring to was supposed to be happening around Easter, which certainly contributed to Proust's  mention  of Jesus resurrected. 
Resurrection is another frequent theme through The Search, whether taken metaphorically- as death of an old self and rebirth into a new one- or botanically, like in the passage Proust writes, when thinking about his work to be written, that he, as a seed, must die so that the fruit can grow out of "him", what actually did happen. Proust is essentially Christian because he is self-sacrificial to the core, and he is an angel because he did channel the angelic nature.

From Imagination to Contemplation to Absoluteness

     Right at the start of reporting his train trip to Balbec, Proust says that it would then be made by car, (on le ferait sans doute aujourd'hui en automobile).  He explains that a car can make the voyage more realistic, because it allows the traveller to be closer to the path and intimately follow the several ways through which  the surface of the Earth changes. However, the pleasure of a trip, according to him,  is not that of getting out of the vehicle one is traveling in and stoping whenever one wants, but of rendering the spatial diversity between one's departure and arrival  imperceptible,  so as to be able to feel it in its totality and intact. Just as it was in our thought, when our imagination took us from the place where we live to the heart of our destination.  This leap in space, for Proust,  felt less miraculous when covering a distance between two cities step by step, than when directly uniting two distinct, individual places on Earth. He points out that the individuality of each is represented by the train stations, which are not part of the cities but contain the essence of their personality. 

Preferring to go from one essence to the other, by leaving "intact" the distance between them, that is, by being removed from the diversity one experiences when covering this distance inside a car, Proust expresses his search for absoluteness, that which is whole independently from what led to it. 

Essences, or absolutes, cannot be relative to anything. They are "truths" in themselves and can only be accessed by contemplation, a mode of mind that is alien to considerations of causality, utility, and transiency- the main categories of reality. Our awareness of them spring from our respect, or reverence, to their endlessness. 
   Each train station, as the essence of a city, is everything one could possibly think and expect of this city at once, that is, regardless of temporality. Essences, the source of awe, are above ordinary thought and its sole concern for material reality. 

By conveying that when one transports oneself in imagination from the place one lives to the heart of a desired destination and keeping intact the distance  between them, one travels from one essence to the other, Proust identifies imagination, as the seat of essences, and contemplation, as a recognition of what is above reality.

 He expresses the same search for absoluteness,  when criticizing the showing of a painting along with trivial objects surrounding it. According to him,  such display, unlike what happens in museums, detracts the artist's act of mind that precisely isolated  his work from the real, and eradicates the uniqueness of such work. Making relative, in other words, that which should be absolute.

  Like Kant, Proust does not believe that what is objectively considered reality is ultimately real. But, unlike Kant's giving transcendence to practical reason by admitting free will in the realm of ethics, that is, freedom of choice to obey the categorical imperative against all one's possible inclinations and above all determinism, the Proustian mind finds this same freedom in accessing  the transcendence of essences, by imaginative and contemplative thought .

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.