P D Ouspensky

Gurdjieff was living in a modest apartment at 6 Rue des Colonels Renard.  Here, through the 1930s and the war years, he had welcomed a range of Seekers including the small, all women group “the Rope” and a young, fearless set of French groups which met in occupied Paris during the war.  Now, in the last period of his life, the various tributaries of his teachings – France, Russia, America, England - were returning to him.  The environment they entered was like nothing they would experience before or after.  With curtains drawn and lights on at all times, Gurdjieff’s apartment operated like a psychological hermetic chamber, cutting one off from the outside world and one’s own forms of security and certainty.  Here, there were no blackboards or lectures, only a large, elderly man with a red fez and discerning eye, whose presence was palpable and whose gaze seemed to sift and weigh each visitor and ask that they scrutinise as exactingly not him, but themselves.  For the “Ouspensky people” this was a shock indeed. What were these serious people with “the chapel-going faces of Plymouth Brethren”[v] to make of injunctions such as “all who come to me, must have enema, each day” or the casual assertion that Hell “is only terrible for the first few days”[vi]?  Kenneth Walker had no doubt:

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For me, at any rate, Gurdjieff represented the last and only link in an immensely long chain of teachers stretching back into a distant and misty past[vii].

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If the central medium of the Historico-Psychological Society had been the lecture, here, in the hot, crowded, stuffy apartment, it was the meal. The atmosphere Gurdjieff created was more than a laboratory for the application of theory to practice, it was a form of experiential learning par excellence; each day at lunch and dinner, with separate days for English and French groups, one encountered - could not escape from - a realised presence that could play whatever role necessary – the clown, the rogue, the volcano – for the purpose of helping someone to see and sense themselves without pretext or fabrication.

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The size of the flat and the large numbers, some forty to fifty on occasion, was in itself an exercise in alertness. No moment, no space, was safe from the need for the mobilised, embodied attention that Gurdjieff demanded.  Plans were made and abruptly changed, with phone calls and messages to wherever people might be to inform them of a lunch at a different time.  Often meals were preceded by readings – up to several hours – from Beelzebub or Gurdjieff’s Deuxieme Serie, Meetings with Remarkable Men.  Latterly chapters from Ouspensky’s own unpublished Fragments were also read. Then, with food prepared, a human-chain from the kitchen formed and the room would fill with aromas from plates of food and soup, one balanced atop the other, while Gurdjieff surveyed the enterprise and engaged in the serious activity of mixing salade.  

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Rina Hands, given the role of “Madame Egout [sewer] pour Sweet”, was tasked with finishing any desert Gurdjieff did not eat.  Such roles often pushed one to the limits of comfort and beyond, but there was, from the many accounts, always a moment, an encounter with their master, in which the role and the perfunctory task took on a more individual significance.  Rina, in her diary, makes reference to a change in a problematic attitude to eating after fulfilling her obligations in this role.  And in advice on how to read aloud she sensed an altogether deeper lesson:

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All the time he was talking to me, I felt strangely that a quite different conversation was taking place between us. He was really telling me what I wanted to know about objective love[viii]. 

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Hers is not an isolated account. John Bennett writes of experiences that changed the path of his life utterly, while Kenneth Walker, musing on the difference between Ouspensky and Gurdjieff observed that the chief difference was himself.  Ouspensky had been a strict disciplinarian, who tended towards didactic autocracy: “nothing was ever left to a pupil’s discretion”, which meant tasks were completed assiduously but without much initiative.  Here, beneath Gurdjieff’s gaze, he began “to develop; a sense of personal responsibility and to experience a new sense of freedom”[ix].

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For pupils who had only recently heard Ouspensky repudiate Gurdjieff’s teaching this was rich fare indeed.  For some, like Melissa Marston MacLeod, it was too much.  Finding the atmosphere oppressive and the heat stifling, she slipped away one lunchtime.  Even among the throng of new faces Gurdjieff noticed her absence.  She arrived at dinner full of excuses and apologies but he brushed these aside, repeating several times “your loss”.  Here too, the master demonstrated his ability to deploy a phrase with scalpel-like precision. In her memoir she wrote that “I never forgot his words, although I never saw him again and no amount of heat or other difficulties kept me away from anyone or anything of value”[x].

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An inimitable feature of the meals was the toasts, predicated on Gurdjieff’s hierarchical Science of Idiotism.  Great importance was assigned to it and each newcomer was required to select from a choice of types. A “round idiot”, for example, was one who avoided blame, while a zigzag idiot “goes this way, that way. Takes different I’s for reminding factor.  Struggles against the merde he knows he is…”[xi] Gurdjieff maintained that number 21, Unique Idiot, denoted God alone, and 17-20 represented spiritual developments of a very high order.  With toasts arranged for categories of idiots and an accompanying quaff of vodka or Armagnac, an ambience was created in which even the seemingly absurdist conception of “subjective” and “objective” “Hopeless Idiots” could have a signal resonance for whichever individual Gurdjieff concentrated on at any one time:

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No description can convey the terrifying reality of this distinction as it was conveyed by Gurdjieff, with the burning eyes and the vibrant tones of a Jeremiah.  I saw old men break down and sob who perhaps had not been so moved since their childhood [xii].

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Gurdjieff confronted the evident lack in Ouspensky’s version of the teaching, now reflected in his pupils; “You must feel” he told them, “…you must feel, your mind is a luxury. You must suffer remorse in your feelings.”[xiii]

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There were gentler times and more intimate ones too.  For those who had regretted the loss of contact with Ouspensky as the number of students increased, the chance to go into Gurdjieff’s “office”, actually his stacked pantry, redolent with aromas of exotic spices, and there to sit, take coffee, smoke and to talk with him was not simply a treat or an honour, it could be the pivot of the master-pupil relationship.  Here Gurdjieff would dispense specific exercises “This that I tell you is for you alone…”[xiv] , or discuss a private matter, and for a moment one was not in a pantry in Paris but any one of a number of exotic, distant places. These conversations had profound effects with the listener struck by the fact that his words “…seemed to be backed, not only by his own wisdom, but by the authority of a long line of unseen and unknown teachers”[xv].

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Movements classes were held almost daily, with Gurdjieff choreographing his new “39 series”. In a spirit of reconciliation and integration, some pupils from England were included in the troupe of 18 people going to America to demonstrate the new Movements in New York.