We are all born seekers, but many of us forget or deceive ourselves into ignoring this calling. Henri Tracol challenges us to rediscover our taste for things that are true: to return to the abandoned filed of our lives, to 'clear and cultivate this unworked ground' and 'to realize the significance of our presence on earth'.
~from back cover
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent book from a serious thinker and artist,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Taste for Things That Are True: Essays and Talks by a Pupil of G.I. Gurdjieff (Paperback)
I had read Tracol's articles and interviews for many years in Parabola magazine and was very pleased to see this book of his articles dating from the sixties to the early nineties. They have a very personal style that gives a feel of relevance to a normal person's search for meaning. But I indeed find in his writing a taste of a higher voice glimpsing through. He seems to be a man who has applied himself to these questions.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Every Stick has Two Ends,
By James Moore (LONDON) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Taste for Things That Are True: Essays and Talks by a Pupil of G.I. Gurdjieff (Paperback)
George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff's All and Everything was unashamedly vast in concept: a 1238 page magnum opus. Catholicity, thematic and stylistic, remains the hallmark of today's burgeoning `Gurdjieffian' oeuvre. Even so, these slim, unindexed paperbacks - by his niece Luba and by Henri Tracol, Institut Gurdjieff President - make extraordinary companion pieces. "Of course", concedes Tracol, "in any kind of ascesis, there is always an element of apophatism". Or as Luba exclaims: "I was fed up with caviar".Eldest daughter of Gurdjieff's worldly brother Dmitri, Luba garnishes her free-wheeling autobiographical sketch with slapdash bistro recipes for galubtzy, custard sauce and "Rabbit à la Sylvie" (cf. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book). Her cameos of Gurdjieff's Prieuré circle in the 1920s and 1930s reach us as patently uncensored reportage: rich dumplings of naïveté, warmth, vitality and candour, likely in vulnerable constitutions, to induce cardiac arrest. Tracol's infinitely more judicious book comprises a dozen or so disparate texts ranging back 50 years - broadly `philosophical' modules, spared from their author's hypothesised "wild and vengeful bonfire". Tracol's youthful resolution to live out Malraux's injunction "transform into consciousness as wide an experience as possible", presaged decades of globe-trotting incident and discriminating reading, which here guarantee a quiver of intriguing adductions: Pueblo Indians, French cinema, the Fisher King's castle, Manichaeism, macrobiotics, meta-linguistics, Sengai's Zen drawings, and so forth ...Acute individual insights not only abound (Tracol's International-Airport-as-analogue-of-psychic-dispersion would adorn Barthes' Mythologies) but, more importantly, cohere - eloquent witnesses to his long spiritual Odyssey in the Gurdjieffian tradition. Luba, sensing perhaps that her famous uncle dwarfs his apologists and detractors alike, breezily pre-empts our objections: "Silly. I'm a silly woman. I laugh too much. I love too much. I have too many friends who love me". Her ensuing Niagara of ungrammatical indiscretion seats an opéra bouffe Gurdjieff in a child's electric-powered car; displays him hiding Easter eggs under rose bushes; and - extrapolating a minor grievance over royalties - comes perilously close to misconstruing the raison d'être of the post-Gurdjieffian Foundations ... Yet Tracol, high in that movement's pantheon, personifies disinterested Gallic intelligence, fastidious, erudite, perspicacious, he glides on the subtlest of dialectics towards ever more quintessential and rarified truths; agree with him or not, his authenticity is bankable. To history's validated roll-call of VIP visitors at Gurdjieff's Fontainebleau Institute Luba adds, without a peppercorn of embarrassment or evidence, the young Franklin D. Roosevelt: "It was all done so hush-hush. When he left, and he became President of the United States ... I said `Gosh! It's Teddy'. Is Tracol similarly a-historical? Never in Luba's Monty-Pythonesque mode. Yet a fine nose for chronology is essential to sniff one's way through this sacred literary grove to the paradigmatic evolution at its heart ... The Tracol who met Gurdjieff in October 1940; who found himself "standing before him ... confronting the exacting benevolence of his gaze"; who thenceforward for nine years stoicly met the rigours of group work in German-occupied and post-war Paris - this Tracol emphasised a "voluntary concentration on struggle". The Tracol of serene old age (palpably closer to Simone Weil) also leans touchingly on higher and transcendent forces. Luba, offering umpteen hostages to fortune, innocently trumpets her uncle's all-too-human aspect but curiously misses the `superhuman' Gurdjieff of insights, powers, and real ideas; she cannot conceive that her magpie family hatched out an eagle. Tracol, by contrast, rejoices in antennae which instantly pick up Gurdjieff as avatar. Less tangible in his book, however, is his master's Rabelaisian alter ego, the creature of surreal incident and ribald humour so brilliantly evoked in Fritz Peter's autobiography Boyhood with Gurdjieff. Is Henri Tracol himself perhaps an unringed falcon? Certainly the voltage of his intellect is not disgraced by those of the moderns who crop up in his discourse: René Guénon, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Stephane Lupasco, Paul Mus, Wolfgang Pauli, Pitirim Sorokin, etc. Fed at Gurdjieff's `ideas-table', Tracol has feelingly repaid with the lifetime's service of a first-rank mind ... Luba's idiosyncratic tribute to her Uncle George issues from unmodulated emotions and calls to the emotions: "He loved life ... He was more alive than anyone I've ever seen. I loved him. I like him. I admire him. He was fantastic". The sheer discrepancy of these two approaches conveys something of their begetter's universality. The fiftieth anniversary of Gurdjieff's death has come and gone yet he remains `X the unknown quantity'. James Moore is Gurdjieff's biographer. He undertook the Gurdjieff module in the Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism.
4 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
not much here,
By A Customer
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This review is from: The Taste for Things That Are True: Essays and Talks by a Pupil of G.I. Gurdjieff (Paperback)
One of the second-order source documents of the Gurdjieff movement, this one is probably for specialists only. It consists of interviews and low-level explanations in essay form of simple mystical viewpoints, as filtered first through Gurdjieffian jargon and secondly through Tracol's mediocre intellect.
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