Against the Pollution of the I Read online

  ALSO BY JACQUES LUSSEYRAN

  And There Was Light: The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II

  New World Library

  14 Pamaron Way

  Novato, California 94949

  Copyright © 2006, 2016 by Claire Lusseyran

  Introduction copyright © 1999 by Christopher Bamford

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, or other — without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

  “The Blind in Society,” “Blindness, a New Seeing of the World,” and “Against the Pollution of the I” are reprinted by permission of the Myrin Institute (www.myrin.org)

  “What One Sees Without Eyes” originally appeared in Jacques Lusseyran, Ce que l’on voit sans les yeux (Paris: Cahiers de L’Unitisme, 1958). Translation by Rob Baker.

  “Jeremy” and “Poetry at Buchenwald” originally appeared in Jacques Lusseyran, Le monde commence aujourd’hui (Paris: Editions de lat Table Ronde, 1959). “Jeremy” was first published in English in Parabola, Vol. 11, No. 2, “Mirrors.” “Poetry at Buchenwald” appeared in The Parabola Book of Healing (New York: Parabola Books, 1994). Translations by Noelle Oxenhandler. Both essays are reprinted by permission of The Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition / Parabola.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Names: Lusseyran, Jacques, author.

  Title: Against the pollution of the I : on the gifts of blindness, the power of poetry, and the urgency of awareness / Jacques Lusseyran.

  Description: Novato, CA : New World Library, 2016. | Originally published: New York : Parabola Books, c1999.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015049062 | ISBN 9781608683864 (alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Lusseyran, Jacques. | Spiritual biography. | Vision--Religious aspects. | Prisoners of war--France--Biography. | Prisoners of war--Germany--Biography. | Blind--France--Biography.

  Classification: LCC BL73.L87 A3 2016 | DDC 940.53/44092--dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049062

  First published by Morning Light Press in 2006

  First New World Library printing, February 2016

  ISBN 978-1-60868-386-4

  Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

  New World Library is proud to be a Gold Certified Environmentally Responsible Publisher. Publisher certification awarded by Green Press Initiative. www.greenpressinitiative.org

  10987654321

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Christopher Bamford

  CHAPTER 1: The Blind in Society

  CHAPTER 2: Blindness, a New Seeing of the World

  CHAPTER 3: What One Sees Without Eyes

  CHAPTER 4: Against the Pollution of the I

  CHAPTER 5: Jeremy

  CHAPTER 6: Poetry in Buchenwald

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  A FRIEND TELLS THE STORY of a Dutch girl, born deaf, whose parents decided to treat her no differently than if she had been born hearing. They spoke to her constantly, read fairy tales, sang lullabies and songs, played music for her. The girl grew up to be an exceptionally intelligent, happy woman. She speaks clearly, without the slurring common among the deaf. In a conversation, where she can lip-read, an interlocutor would never guess that she is deaf. More remarkably still, this deaf woman, who today counsels the parents of deaf children, enjoys music and goes to concerts.

  Evidently, we hear with more than our ears. What we hear is much more than bare acoustic information. The story of the Dutch girl puts in question whether we “hear” sound in the usual sense at all. When my friend said that the deaf girl’s parents spoke to her, he meant that in their unconditional relationship, the parents sought — with intention and attention — to participate with their daughter in a world of love and meaning. Meaning is not abstract or intellectual, but real, a lived experience, at once cognitive, soulful (filled with feeling), and intentional. This is true of music as well as of the sounds of nature (birdsong, wind-breath, waterfugue) which are harbingers of superhuman, cosmic meaning. But the question remains: if this deaf girl did not hear with her ears, with what organ or sense did she “hear”? We would be equally correct if we replied either “with her mind” or “with her body.”

  I say “either” because, to understand the world and our place within it, we must pass beyond the old dichotomies of body and mind, self and world, to a larger unity. “Inside and outside,” Jacques Lusseyran writes, “have become inadequate concepts.”

  The poet Rainer Maria Rilke coined the expression Weltinnenraum, “the inner space of the world.” In an uncollected poem, he writes:

  What birds dive through is not

  the familiar space which heightens form for

  you —

  there, in the free, you are denied,

  you disappear without return.

  Space grasps out of us and translates things:

  to realize the existence of a tree,

  throw innerspace around it, throw it out

  of the space that is in you. Surround it with restraint.

  It is without boundaries. Only in the frame

  of your renunciation does it become truly tree.

  Rilke also writes about an experience that occurred while he was walking up and down, reading a book outdoors at Duino (where he wrote the Elegies). Without thinking, he was moved to lean against a tree and remained rapt, absorbed by nature, in a state of what he calls “almost unconscious contemplation.” Gradually, he noticed a slight sensation, an almost imperceptible vibration, passing into him from the interior of the tree. He writes that “he felt he had never before been filled with more delicate vibrations. His body was being treated in some sort like a soul, and made capable of receiving a degree of influence which could not really have been felt in the usual well-defined clarity of physical conditions.” He could not distinguish through which sense this sensation was reaching him. After a while, he said aloud to himself, “I have reached the other side of nature.” His body “became indescribably touching to him and of no other use than that he might be present in it.” It was as if he were looking at the world from the other side, from a spiritual distance, where everything had an inexhaustible significance and an odd contingency. “He was looking back at things, as it were, over his shoulder, and a daring sweet flavor was added to their existence, now finished for him, as if everything had been spiced with a touch of the blossom of farewell.” Later, trying to find analogues and precursors, he recalled a moment when in another garden “a bird call in the open and in his inner consciousness were one, when it did not as it were break on the barrier of his body, but gathered both together into an undivided space, in which there was only one region of the deepest consciousness, mysteriously protected.”

  Such is the world to which Jacques Lusseyran bears witness. He does so existentially, with his life, and phenomenologically, in that he allows his experience to speak for itself. For Lusseyran, it is a world that he discovered for himself and that discovered him; and it affected him with the full transformative power of a religious revelation. He became the voice of that world, speaking with the power and conviction of a new convert. It was a world, he insisted, not peculiar to him, but in fact the real and true world to which we all belong. Lusseyran gives us a miracle: a genuine act of self-discovery that is at the same time a universal reality. As if that were not enough, he was also a genuine twentieth-century “hero” or
, viewed from another perspective, a “saint” — one of that select company of secular saints (others would be Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein) whose presence has sanctified our time and made it luminous.

  Born in Paris in 1924, his childhood was exceptionally happy. As he tells it in his autobiography And There Was Light, his parents were ideal — generous, attentive, warm, protective, confidence-inspiring. In his own words, they were “heaven.” Very early, they communicated to him the sense that “another Being” loved him, concerned itself with his life, and even spoke to him. For his first seven years, Jacques Lusseyran lived a life of pure, unadulterated, childhood joy. He loved everything in life, especially light in all its manifold forms and colors, including darkness.

  When he was seven, around Easter, something happened. It was time to go back to Paris from the little village in the Anjou where he had been vacationing. The buggy was at the door to take him to the station. Inexplicably, he stayed behind in the garden, by the corner of the barn, in tears. “I was crying,” he writes, “because I was looking at the garden for the last time.” Three weeks later, at school, as class ended, there was a rush for the door, a scuffle; Jacques was taken off guard and fell. His head struck one of the sharp corners of the teacher’s desk. He was wearing spectacles, one arm of which drove deep into his right eye. He lost consciousness, and when he came to, his eyes were gone. The doctors had decided to remove the right eye, and the operation was successful. As for the left eye, the retina was badly torn too. The blow had been so severe as to cause sympathetic ophthalmia. Jacques “had become completely and permanently blind.”

  But though Jacques became blind, he continued to see. After a few days, he realized that by looking inward, he could see a radiance: “light rising, spreading, resting on objects, giving them form, then leaving them.” He was able to live in this stream of inner light which, like outer light, illuminated objects and people, giving them form and full color. There were times when the light seemed to fade, or disappear, but this was only when he was afraid or hesitated, doubted or began to calculate.

  Lusseyran also began to understand that there was a world beyond the ordinary auditory sense, where everything had its own sound. These sounds were neither inside nor outside, but “were passing through him.” Similarly with touch: a new world of infinitely differentiated pressure opened up to him. To find one’s way around the world, all it took was a certain training in attention. Reality was a complex field of interacting pressures. “By the time I was ten years old,” he writes, “I knew with absolute certainty that everything in the world was a sign of something else, ready to take its place if it should fall by the way. And this continued miracle of healing I heard expressed fully in the Lord’s Prayer that I repeated at night before going to sleep. . . .“

  What accounts for this? Lusseyran gives no global explanation, except, as in the case of the Dutch girl, to insist on the wisdom and the health of his parents’ decision not to treat his blindness as a “disability” and sequester him from the world among the “disabled,” but to allow him to continue to lead an ordinary life among the “seeing.” He went back to school. When he learned Braille, his parents bought him a Braille typewriter. The rest was imagination, attention, and a deepening sense of the inner light. He was reborn.

  Lusseyran was an extraordinary soul. A brilliant student, he quickly became the head of his class — a lively, joyful, reflective, deeply caring young person. He loved languages, literature, art, theater, life. Then, on March 12, 1938, Germany invaded Austria. The thirteen-year-old heard the news on the radio and heard the German language, twisted and tormented in unimaginable ways. To understand what he heard, he decided to perfect his German, for he intuited that what was happening would destroy his childhood.

  When war broke out, he did not at first know whether it was his war or not. Its reality permeated his consciousness only “drop by drop, like the effects of hard liquor.” Eventually he knew that it was. The family moved south to Toulouse. He was fifteen. He discovered love. But France was falling, Hitler was moving southward, exams were canceled. There was confusion everywhere. On June 17, the collaborator Henri Philippe Pétain announced the surrender of France. The next day, Charles de Gaulle, from London, made his first appeal for resistance. There was no question as to which call Jacques Lusseyran and his friend, Jean, would respond.

  The family moved back to Paris. The lycée reopened. Paris seemed to be praying. The young Jacques began to study philosophy, “from Pythagoras to Bergson, from Plato to Freud.” “I tried all the avenues, one after the other,” he writes. “All the way from Heraclitus to William James, no one of them seemed to me without function, but none satisfied me completely.”

  The turning point came when the Gestapo showed its hand. People began to disappear. Jacques fell ill with measles, and when it left him “it set free a torrent of energy.” He formed his own Resistance movement. Fifty-two young people between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one attended the first meeting. Within a year, there were more than six hundred. Calling themselves the Volunteers of Liberty, they took it as their task “to give people the news” — creating an information network, a newspaper. It is a miracle of the Resistance, this army of young people, commanded by a blind adolescent who kept everything, including fifteen hundred telephone numbers, in his head to avoid having anything incriminating on paper. Nor was that all; in the fall of 1941, he entered the University of Paris to study literature.

  Fate’s inevitable stroke came in July 1943: Lusseyran was arrested. His reflection on it in his autobiography is revealing:

  One small piece of advice. In a spot like this don’t go too far afield for help. Either it is right near you, in your heart, or it is nowhere. It is not a question of character, it is a question of reality. If you try to be strong you will be weak. . . .

  No, reality is not your character which, for its part, is only a by-product — I can’t define it, a collection of elements. Reality is Here and Now. It is the life you are living in this moment. Don’t be afraid to lose your soul there, for God is in it.

  Make all the gestures you like. Wash your hands if there is a place to wash them, stretch out on the ground, jump up and down, make a face, even shed tears if they help, or laugh, sing, curse.

  If you are a scholar — there is a gimmick for every category — do what I did that night.

  Reconstruct, out loud, Kant’s arguments in the first chapters of his Critique of Pure Reason. It is hard work and absorbing. But don’t believe any of it. Don’t even believe in yourself. Only God exists.

  This truth, and it holds good always, becomes a miraculous healing remedy at such a time. . . .

  From July 22 to September 8, he was taken thirty-eight times to be questioned by the Gestapo. There was a certain amount of brutality. To survive, he writes, he managed to forget their presence and dwell in the depths, in the innermost sanctum, of his being that was pure light. Then the SS changed the subject, and the questioning came to an end. He was sent to prison at Fresnes. In January, an SS lieutenant came to his door and called his name. Was it freedom or its opposite? They said he was lucky: they were taking him to Germany. He had just spent a hundred and eighty days in a cell, and he could hardly stand up. A nightmare journey followed, ending as they drove through a monumental entrance with military bands drawn up on either side playing what sounded like dance tunes. The inscription read Konzentrationslager Buchenwald. He survived there for eighteen months until liberated by General Patton. He has left us a vivid record of his Buchenwald experiences in “Jeremy” and “Poetry in Buchenwald.” We will not forget.

  The challenge with which Lusseyran confronts us is that these two realities of light and faith are ineffable and unstated realities. Faith must become an experience that unfolds “our very self.” This is why I think it legitimate to call him a secular “saint,” as well as a hero. What he has to say about his cognitive and suprasensory experiences is challenging enough. The world is other than what
we seeing, sleeping ones imagine. He convinces us of the truth of this other world, even if we do not quite understand it. We realize that there is more than simply an altered, perhaps truer state of consciousness: Lusseyran is really talking about metanoia, a change of mind in God.

  In “What One Sees Without Eyes,” after describing his realization that he had lost nothing when he had become blind — that an inner light greater than any outer light had come to take the place of that which he had lost — he writes: “When one realizes that . . . I assure you it is not difficult to believe in God. He is there under a form that [is] . . . quite simply alive. . . .When I remember it, I have exactly the sensation of someone taking my hand, or that a ray of light — it is exactly this way — comes toward and touches me. If I know where that ray of light is, I no longer have any problems.”

  This thought explains the crux of his insight. Attention, the thread that leads us from the labyrinth, is not only attention. It is the way we turn toward that ray of light so that it can come toward and touch us. It is the part of our relationship to God that depends on us. It is what connects us to reality. Another word for it could be presence, being present: wakeful, active receptivity. Anything that disturbs this presence must be avoided. One must strive for what the ancient monks called apatheia, detachment, and the German mystics, Gelassenheit, letting go. We must become blind again and again. Then the one who is seeing — what he calls “the essential power,” “our link with the principle, with God” — can be present.

  That is one side of Lusseyran: the mystic. This side is rarely evident in isolation. Lusseyran is not a cloistered monk, but a man of action, a human being in love with humanity — a man who loves human beings and is torn apart by their ignorance, foolishness, and inhumanity to each other. Therefore, he cannot help but talk to change the world. This is because, as he writes in “The Blind in Society,” there is only one way to the inner light — love. For this inner light, which is life, is love.