Chapter 30
SOMEWHAT TO THE surprise of all of us at the Prieure, the Russian family that Gurdjieff had met in Vichy took him up on his invitation to visit the school. After welcoming them personally, he arranged for someone to entertain them during the afternoon, and then closeted himself in his room with his harmonium.
That evening, after another "feast", the guests were told to come to the main salon at a certain hour, and they retired to their rooms. During that time, he assembled all the rest of us in the salon and said that he wanted to explain, beforehand, an experiment which he was going to perform on the daughter. He reminded us that he had told us before that the daughter was "particularly hypnotizable" but he now added that she was one of the few people he had ever met who was susceptible to hypnotism of a special sort. He described the more or less popular form of hypnotism which usually consisted in requiring the subject to concentrate on an object before hypnotism could be induced.
He then said that there was a method of hypnotism, generally unknown in the western world, that was practised in the Orient. It could not be practised in the western world for a very good reason. It was hypnotism by the use of certain combinations of musical tones or chords, and it was almost impossible to find a subject that responded to the western or "half-tone" scale on, for example, an ordinary piano. The special susceptibility of the Russian girl who was visiting the Prieure with her parents was that she was actually susceptible to combinations of half-tones, and it was this factor that was unusual about her. Given an instrument which could produce audible differentiations of, say, sixteenth-tones, he would be able to hypnotize, in this musical manner, anyone of us.
He then had M. de Hartmann play, on the piano, a composition which he had written that very afternoon, especially for this occasion. The piece of music came to a kind of climax on a particular chord, and Gurdjieff said that when this chord was played in the presence of the Russian girl, she would immedi ately go into deep hypnosis, completely involuntary and unexpected on her part.
Gurdjieff always sat on a large, red couch at one end of the main salon, facing the entrance to the room, and when he saw that the Russian family was approaching, he indicated to M. de Hartmann that he was to begin to play, and then motioned to the guests to come in and seat themselves as the music was playing. He indicated a chair in the centre of the room for the daughter. She sat down in it, facing him and in full view of everyone in the room, and listened to the music intently, as if very moved by it. Sure enough, at the given predicted moment when the particular chord was played, she seemed to go completely limp and her head fell against the back of the chair.
As soon as M. de Hartmann finished, the alarmed parents rushed to the girl's side and Gurdjieff, standing by them, explained what he had done and also the fact of her very unusual susceptibility. The parents calmed down soon enough, but it took more than an hour to bring the girl back to consciousness, after which she was for perhaps two additional hours in a highly emotional, completely hysterical state, during which someone -- designated by Gurdjieff -- had to walk up and down on the terrace with her. Even after that, it was necessary for Gurdjieff to spend a large part of the night with her and her parents in order to persuade them to stay on at the Prieure for several more days, and to convince them that he had not done her any irreparable harm.
He was apparently completely successful because they did agree to stay on, and the daughter even obliged him by submitting to the same experiment two or three times again. The results were always the same, although the period of hysteria after she returned to consciousness did not last for quite so long.
There was, of course, a great deal of talk as a result of these experiments. A good many people seemed to feel that there had been connivance on the part of the girl, and that there was no proof that she was not working with him. Even so, and without any medical knowledge, it was unquestionably true that she had been hypnotized, with or without her cooperation. Her trance was always complete, and no one could have feigned the manifestations of absolutely uncontrolled hysteria which always resulted.
The purpose of the experiments was something else again. They may have been conducted to dramatize the existence of a form of "science" which was unknown to us, but they also seemed, to some of us, just another demonstration of the way Gurdjieff would often "play" with people; they certainly stirred up another series of questions about Gurdjieff's work, his aims, and his purposes. The fact that the experiments seemed to prove a certain amount of unusual power and knowledge on his part was not, finally, necessary to most of us. Those of us who were at the Prieure of our own choosing hardly needed such demonstrations to prove to us that Gurdjieff was, at least, unusual.
The experiments reawakened some of my questions about Gurdjieff, but more than anything else they produced a certain resistance in me. What I began to find difficult and irritating about just such things was that they tended to lead me into a realm in which I was lost. Much as I might have liked, at that age, to believe in "miracles" or to find reasons and answers concerning man's existence, I wanted some sort of tangible proof. Gurdjieff's own personal magnetism was often enough proof of his superior knowledge. He was generally credible to me because he was sufficiently "different" from other people -- from anyone I had ever known -- to be a convincing "super" man. On the other hand, I was troubled because I would always come up against a seemingly obvious fact: anyone who sets himself up as a teacher in any mystical or other-worldly sense had to be some sort of fanatic -- totally convinced, totally devoted to a particular course, and, therefore, automatically opposed to the socially accepted, generally recognized, philosophies or religions. I t was not only difficult to argue with him, there was nothing to argue against. One could, of course, argue about questions of method or technique but before that it was necessary to have agreed on some aim or purpose. I had no objection to his aim of "harmonious development" for mankind. There was nothing in the words that anyone could oppose.
It seemed to me that the only possible answer would have to lie in some sort of results: tangible, visible results in people -- not in Gurdjieff -- he was, as I have said, convincing enough. But what about his students ? If they had been practising his method of harmonious development for several years, most of them, wouldn't it be somehow visible?
Except for Madame Ostrovsky, his deceased wife, I could think of no one other than Gurdjieff himself who had "commanded" any sort of respect by the simple fact of their presence. One thing that a great many of the other, older students did have in common was what I thought of as a kind of "affected serenity". They managed to look composed and controlled or unruffled most of the time, but it was never quite believable. They gave an impression of being outwardly controlled that never rang quite true, particularly as it was easy enough for Gurdjieff to upset their equilibrium whenever he chose to do so, with the result that most of the senior students were always alternating between states of outward calm and hysteria. Their control seemed to me to be achieved by repression or suppression -- I always felt that these words were synonyms -- which I could not believe was desirable or worthwhile as an aim, other than socially. Gurdjieff frequently gave the impression of serenity , also, but it never seemed to be false in his case -- generally speaking, he manifested whatever he happened to want to manifest at a particular time, and usually for a reason. One might well argue with the reason, and discuss his motives at length, but at least there was a reason -- he appeared to know what he was doing and to have a direction; which was not so in the case of his students. Where his students seemed to attempt to rise above the ordinary tribulations of life by affecting a certain disregard for them, Gurdjieff at no time manifested calmness or "serenity" as if it were an aim in itself. He was far more likely to fly into a rage or to enjoy himself in an apparently uncontrolled fit of animal spirits than any of his students. On many occasions I heard him mock the seriousness of people, and remind them that it was essential for any well-rounded human being to "play". He used the word "play" and pointed out the example of nature -- all animals knew, as humans did not, the value of "playing" every day. It seemed as simple as the trite "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" ; no one could accuse Gurdjieff of not playing. By comparison his elder students were lugubrious and morose and were not very convincing examples of "harmonious development" which -- if it was generally harmonious -- would certainly include humour, laughter, etc., as at least aspects of well-rounded growth.
The women, particularly, were no help. The men, at least in the baths and at the swimming pool, did engage in earthy backyard human humour and seemed to enjoy themselves, but the women not only did not indulge in any humour, they even dressed the part of "disciples", wearing the kind of flowing clothing that is properly associated with people who become involved in "movements" of whatever kind. They gave the outer impression of being priestesses or novitiates in some religious order. None of it was either enlightening or convincing to a thirteen-year-old.