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A Voice at the Borders of Silence

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What are we to make of William Segal? Born in 1904 to parents of modest means, his early life followed the classic trajectory of the self made American man. After attending college in New York on a football scholarship, he went into the magazine business and quickly became a successful entrepreneur, amassing a stable of design and lifestyle magazines. Business wealth brought him material rewards, the Park Avenue apartment, the country place in New Jersey, the house on Fire Island.

So far, a typical American success story. But there were other facets to William Segal. He was a painter of some talent who kept at it for over 60 years. He focused mainly on self portraits, part of his life's real work, which was looking for answers to the two big questions: who am I, and why am I here? His search led him to Ouspensky and eventually to Gurdjieff, and he stayed involved with the movement that grew up around Gurdjieff's teaching for over half a century. He also met and maintained friendships with several Buddhist scholars and spirtual leaders, from TD Suzuki to the Dalai Lama.

Throughout his long life (he lived to 96) he remained "the man in the marketplace" living fully in this world while seeking ways to transcend it. In one remarkable passage he talks about visiting and practicing at zen monasteries in Japan and then racing back to his day job as a business consultant to a Japanese conglomerate. He never ducked the hard question of how a material man engages in yet moves past the snares and delusions of everyday life. Indeed, one wishes the book talked in more depth about how he reconciled the grasping, sharp-elbowed world of American business with the state of non-grasping, timeless awaress he sought in his zen practice.

The secret to a rich life, this wise man tells us, is paying attention. Being fully engaged with your surroundings means you're always sitting down to a sensory banquet that nourishes your soul. Live in the world, says Segal, but learn to be still and to be receptive.

The book tells Segal's story through mix of photos, interviews, paintings, and reminiscences by the author and his distinguished friends. Reading it is like being led deeper into the woods until you come to a empty meadow, utterly still. In that stillness you can learn something truly important.

There is a wide variety of material in this book which consists of autobiographical fragments by William Segal, photographs, transcripts of interviews, previously published materials and exchanges between Mr. Segal and others who have spent decades seriously practicing Gurdjieff's Teaching. Of particular interest to those who have an interest in these ideas might be the exchanges on the future of the Gurdjieff Teaching and some of the "meditative practices". An inspiring book on many levels.

I was introduced to William Segal by a program on PBS and was interested in learning more about his life and work. This book introduces you to the search for meaning and self expression in one man's life that so many of us wish for, but hesitate to embark on. A valuable and thought provoking read.

This book is a priceless gift to humanity.

Perhaps when Peter Brook celebrates his hundredth birthday we may anticipate a retrospect with some revelatory twist, stylistic shimmer, or special insight into this bafflingly complex character.

Meantime we have Michael Kustow's Peter Brook: A Biography, a well-meant journalistic reprise with all the poetry of "the time sponsored by Accurist". We are reminded that Brook's `white box' production of `A Midsummer Night's Dream' was a succès fou; that his book The Empty Space re-energised theatre; and that he discreetly resonates to the spiritual teaching of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff.

During his long life Brook has met many people with interests similar to his own: and certainly many with magnetic readership pull - Castro, Grotowski, Hitchcock, Capote, Aleister Crowley, and Jean

Genet (whom he alarmingly wanted to be Godfather to his daughter). Yet significantly A.W.O.L from Kustow's text and ten-page index is William Segal, hero of A Voice at the Borders of Silence.

If Kustow's is a dutiful exhumation, the Segal item (fulsomely prefaced by Brook) is an unindexed and undisciplined scrapbook, thrown together like a rich plum pudding by its subject's widow Marielle Bancou-Segal. So blatantly does it sacrifice critical vigilance on the altar of conjugal love that it bids to give hagiography a bad name. Everyone gets swept away in a Tsunami of mutual admiration: Segal thinks gods to Brook, while Brook recklessly asserts that Segal's "innermost core was an opening to eternity".

Thirty evocative photographs redeem Kustow's biography (not least David Farrell's trapeze-lofted Oberon and Puck in the fairy realm above Bottom and Titania) and Brook himself is modestly presented...Segal was anything but camera-shy, blatantly viewing his entire existence as a serial photo-opportunity. When young he was photogenic in All-American mode: in old age, following a drastic car accident, he deployed a monocle and piratical black eye patch. He was an artist too. "William Segal the painter", explains Brook, "looks at the outside world and leads us into William Segal the man." He certainly does. Most of his paintings are self-portraits; his motive being analytical - and apropos he nods kindly to Rembrandt.

Brook has powered forward from Doctor Faustus in 1943 to Tierno Bokar in 2004, like a self-fulfilling prophecy - "a man who has guided his own profusion to a rich simplicity" claims Kustow, in his best sentence. By contrast, the young New York sophomore William Segal, heralded as the speediest left halfback of a decade and sentenced to "a brilliant gridiron future", quickly swerved vocationally. Of Romanian Jewish ancestry and entrepreneurial flair, he somehow broke into fashion publishing and became emancipatingly rich. Looking down from his elegant office in Empire State Building, he would sometimes ruminate on profit margins, sometimes on difficulties facing "the average person", and sometimes on Meister Eckhart.

Aptly enough, in the early 1940s, aged about thirty-eight, Segal chanced to fall in with the author of Tertium Organum Piotr Demianovich Ouspensky ("a regular fellow in many ways"); in 1947, the year Ouspensky died, Segal met the prolix Zen theoretician Daisetzu Teitaro Suzuki - cultivating him and even taking him to meet Madame Ouspensky and watch sacred dances at Mendham, New Jersey; in 1948 and 1949 Segal won sporadic contact with Gurdjieff himself, teacher both of Ouspensky and of the avant-garde lesbian Jane Heap. By 1951 Brook, aged twenty-six, had become a pupil of Heap in London, and Segal had launched the bon ton journal Gentry ("It truly had a superior audience")...Curious lines were now converging.

It is Brook's endorsement of Kustov's biography which dignifies it; here then is the memorial or C.V. favoured by a first-rank cultural icon...Arguably more oblique is the American book's significance. The wearisome extolling and self-extolling of Segal ranks for nothing historically compared with the en passant disclosure of how traditional Gurdjieffian praxis was radically modulated by a hitherto unsuspected coterie; those photographs alone are as revealing as a C.C.T.V. camera.

Gurdjieff, who died in 1949, never went to Japan but Segal did - and became entranced. Arriving in a B-24 bomber carrying introductory letters from D.T.S. ("I could see I was on the beam with Suzuki right from the start") he hit the Zen Buddhist trail. As year followed year, Segal captured the interest of Madame Jeanne de Salzmann, Gurdjieff's de facto successor, and her son Michel the heir apparent. Respectively at Kita Kamakura and Ryutaku-ji monasteries Segal introduced the de Salzmanns to Suzuki and Soen Nakagawa Roshi (superb calligraphist, haiku composer, and innovatory celebrant of the tea ceremony using instant coffee and polystyrene cups).

The striking Sacred Dances which climax Peter Brook's film Meetings with Remarkable Men are supremely ranked in the portfolio of Gurdjieffian praxis, and no-one has prospered them more than Jeanne de Salzmann. In Japan she nevertheless allowed herself to be persuaded by an insistent Segal and Nakagawa that they needed buttressing by Zen-like meditation `sits'. Difficult to guess the critical moment when Madame de Salzmann acceded. Perhaps it was in cherry blossom time in 1966 when Suzuki, crying "Here, Mr Segal!", threw a startled cat at him. Certainly the grand policy shift delighted Segal: "Because you can sit for 100 years and still say, oh yeah, I feel good."

Segal died in 2000, aged ninety-six. And had he actually met Brook? Oh indeed, time after time (and sports ten photos to clinch it). As for his `enlightenment', one only wishes it were susceptible of forensic proof. Yet if this self-fixated pilgrim inspired just one "average person", let alone Peter Brook, that must suffice.

James Moore is author of `Gurdjieff:

the Anatomy of a Myth' (1991) and of

the Gurdjieff module in `Dictionary of

Gnosis and Western Esotericism' (2005).