The Unveiling of the Sacred in Men and Stones

The Unveiling of the Sacred in Eliade’s Men and Stones Ali Shehzad Zaidi State University of New York at Canton Mircea Eliade’s Men and Stones is an extended dialogue between a poet, Alexandru, and an earth scientist, Petrus, as they explore a cave in the Carpathians. The title of the play comes from the Koran: “fear the fire whose fuel is men and stones, which is prepared for those who reject faith” (Sura 2, Verse 24). The verse situates Alexandru’s crisis of despair in an Islamic context, confirming E. M. Cioran’s belief that Eliade “stands in the periphery of every religion by profession as well as by conviction” (413). After an accident in the cave, Alexandru experiences an epiphany that is best expressed by Hafiz: “He never dies whose heart is alive with love: / Our persistence is recorded in the register of the Cosmos” (Collected Lyrics 34). At the onset of the play, Alexandru1appears to be attempting to listen to something just beyond his hearing. When they discover a spring where primitive men once gathered, Alexandru tells Petrus “I do dream it, as it is” (249). Alexandru seeks in that human dawn the wonder and terror of cave dwellers: “Art permits any regression. To the ultimate limit of the consciousness, to the ultimate limit of life itself. You can descend anywhere, and to any depth, provided only that you return fuller and richer, and that you believe” (259). ‘Alexandru’ is the Romanian form of ‘Alexander,’ a name that recalls the Macedonian conqueror that went beyond the frontiers of the known, searching for the elixir of life. The name prefigures the character’s restless spiritual quest in Men and Stones. 1 Petrus, a speleologist or cave explorer, is somewhat older than Alexandru.2 The name Petrus, a Greek word for ‘rock’ from which the Romanian word piatra is derived, hints at both his profession and a solidity that contrasts with the anguished instability of Alexandru. Petrus recognizes his artistic limitations, joking that he had to give up violin lessons in order to save his marriage. He tells Alexandru to “pay close attention to your dreams, so you can tell them to us, to us who don’t dream, or whose dreams aren’t so beautiful” (264). Petrus expects much from one who has already shown him “something angelic, something from another world” (265). He asks Alexandru to transfigure the cave through poetry: “I want to see it created by you! That’s why you’re an artist -- to show us the world as more beautiful than it is” (266). As Matei Calinescu observes, “it is only through imagination that one can reach that consciousness of universal creativeness which constitutes the dynamic and inexhaustible meaning of life” (15). And it is through the imagination that Petrus and Alexandru must reconstruct early human culture.3 Alexandru, however, is tormented by self-doubt. He tells Petrus, with a hint of false modesty as well as a genuine sense of inadequacy, that he too is destined to be inartistic. Alexandru tries to summon a magical past by conjuring images of fairies and dwarves, but he immediately dismisses them as clichés.4 Although his contrived visions are missteps towards 2 Bryan Rennie notes that the characters in the play represent different sides of Eliade, who was both a historian of religions and a writer of fantastic fiction (10-11). Alexandru personifies Eliade’s artistic or intuitive side while Petrus embodies his scientific or rational side. Eliade observes that “the imagination constitutes an instrument of cognition, because it reveals to us, in an intelligent and coherent form, the modes of the real” (Journal I 3). 3 This inability to experience and articulate the transcendent reflects, perhaps, the writer’s block that Eliade experienced during a personal crisis in the mid-forties. Eliade’s first wife, Nina, was dying of cancer and Eliade was distraught to see Romania, along with most of Europe, torn apart by war (Ricketts 92). At the time that he was writing the play in early 1944, Eliade was a cultural 4 truth, Alexandru is on the verge of revelation. He hears voices telling him to be silent and listen. Alexandru is a poet and, as Eliade notes, poets preserve the sacramental dimension of existence: “all things that have existed we have not definitively lost; we find them again in our dreams and our longings” (No Souvenirs 80). Alexandru dismisses those imaginary voices of the dead, but prophesies that “when the stones begin to move and the vault of the cave becomes animated – just the stones, without any human profile, without anything being added to them – then, maybe then, I’ll begin to see… and to believe” (260). Petrus and Alexandru use spools of phosphorescent metal thread to find their way back to the cave entrance. They search the caverns by flashlight, the green light of which recalls an early childhood memory of Eliade. In an interview, Eliade describes how one summer afternoon he pushed open a door to discover a parlor that was golden green from the light coming through the curtains. The infant Eliade felt a strange calm as though he were “inside a ripe green grape” (Ordeal 7). This paradisal feeling resembles Alexandru’s giddiness at the end of the play, and the wonder of Albert Einstein: “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness” (quoted in Eliade, Journal III 59). attaché at the Romanian legation in Lisbon and Romania’s military regime was still allied with Nazi Germany. Eliade did not publish his play until the year of his death, possibly because the play reflected a particularly unhappy period of his life or perhaps because his imaginary return to a human dawn found a more poetic expression in his short story “Un Om Mare,” which written shortly after Men and Stones. As they struggle through the caves, the men speak of Adriana, the wife of Petrus, whom Alexandru describes as “in large measure, the author of my poetic genius” (257). Though she is not physically present in the cave, Adriana nonetheless participates in their quest. “This cave has haunted all three of us for years,” says Petrus (265). Alexandru identifies another one as “the Adria Cave,” using a shortened form of Adriana’s name. Mircea Handoca notes that ‘Adriana’ is an anagram of Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos who saved young Theseus from the Minotaur, the mythological creature that devoured men (Ricketts 97). Ariadne gave Theseus a magic sword to slay the Minotaur as well as a spool of thread to escape the labyrinth. After slaying the Minotaur, Theseus abandoned Ariadne, who later became the wife of Dionysus, the wine-god. Ariadne is emblematic of love as a means of cognition and of escape from self-made prisons and labyrinths. According to Gary R. Varner, “the labyrinth symbolizes the journey of the spirit along a difficult route which, if accomplished, leads to the spirit world or the deity” (178). Eliade observes that “A labyrinth is a defense, sometimes a magical defense, built to guard a center, a treasure, a meaning. Entering it can be a rite of initiation, as we see in the Theseus myth. That symbolism is the model of all existence, which passes through many ordeals to journey toward its own center… Once the center has been reached, we are enriched, our consciousness is broadened and deepened, so that everything becomes clear, meaningful; but life goes on: another labyrinth, other encounters, other kinds of trials, on another level” (Ordeal 185). In a December 1944 journal entry, Eliade writes that Men and Stones “confesses something about the nihilism provoked by the loss of faith in the beyond” (Ricketts 101). Petrus assures Alexandru that his despair will pass, to which Alexandru replies, “No, it’s not that. Here you understand better what you are and what you’re not” (257). For Alexandru, death is the ultimate and terrible truth: “Why did we come into the world? To live like butterflies for a night?” (272), he wonders. Petrus remains unperturbed. He believes that their quest for knowledge in the cave informs other generations: “These things are their work, the work of all people… I sense myself at one with all the people who have lived up to now and who will live after us” (269). Alexandru finds no comfort in their shared adventure: “Even here, under the earth, you haven’t escaped pride. Not even here have you realized that you’re living an illusion… Why don’t you have the courage to look directly into the void?” Petrus replies that “there’s no such thing as a void. It exists only in your imagination, in your exhausted nerves” (268). He offers pills to Alexandru, who refuses them, since he believes that they only mask meaninglessness. Petrus, however, sees drugs as a defense against fear: “We’re getting revenge for all we’ve suffered for hundreds of thousands of years, ever since we emerged from stone. All the humiliation we’ve had to endure when we lived in caves and were naked – and weak, and stupid, and trembled at every shadow, and were frightened by lightening and the night and phantoms” (269). Petrus’ allusion to the emergence of men from stone recalls the verse in the Koran which describes man as made from clay (Surah 55, Verse 14).5 Stone represents an enduring dimension of transient humanity and its mythos “offers an image of a reality that survives the passing of time… the stone symbolized the essential being: the soul or spirit of animate life that was not 5 We find a similar passage in Job, Chapter 33, Verse 6. In his diary, Eliade attests to the transhistorical importance of the Koran, with two quotations. The first is from Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi, a twelfth century Persian philosopher: “Recite the Koran as if it had been revealed only for your own case.” The second is from Imam Muhammad al-Baqir: “If the meaning of the Koran were limited to the circumstances and personalities to whom it was revealed, the Koran would have died long ago” (No Souvenirs 305). subject to decay, but endured beyond and beneath all appearances” (Anne Baring and Jules Cashford quoted in Varner 6). Varner notes that caves were “time-altering places” in the folklore of many cultures, used for initiatory purposes and “symbolically associated with the emergence of mankind” (144). Eliade notes that “a rock reveals itself to be sacred because its very existence is a hierophany: incompressible, invulnerable, it is that which man is not. It resists time; its reality is coupled with perenniality” (Myth of the Eternal Return 4). Initially, the dark, cold cave convinces Alexandru that life “begins and ends here, with us” (273).6 Without the gift of poetry, Alexandru sees himself as but one of many “little men, petty men, men cursed by God” (266). “Admit it’s all a farce,” he tells Petrus, “life, love, science, morality, humaneness” (272). Like Dostoevsky’s characters Ivan Karamazov and Rodion Raskolnikov, Alexandru feels that if there is no God anything goes. He tells Petrus that he will run wild without scruples or remorse. “The absurd can’t be expressed,” Alexandru says. “You feel like howling” (271). Alexandru’s anguish reaches the extreme where, to quote Eliade, “one arrives at God out of despair” (Journal I 13). Love and suffering save Alexandru from his labyrinth. Alexandru loves Adriana, his friend’s wife, as a dear and inspiring friend; and as the fifteenth century Persian poet Jami advises, “Avert not thy face from an earthly beloved since even this may serve to raise thee to the love of the True” (quoted in Bell 19). Seriously injured when he falls into a void, Alexandru undergoes the initiatory ordeal that Rumi welcomes: “accept at least the Alexandru’s claustrophobia recalls that of Mrs. Moore in the Marabar Caves in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. The cave reduces all voices to a single sound, dissolves individual profiles, and unifies all forms of life. 6 tribulations God gives you without choice on your part, for affliction sent by the friend is the means of your purification” (quoted in Rice 46). Alexandru wonders aloud what Adriana might be doing at that very moment. He remarks to Petrus that a melody that she liked was running through his head, one that made him feel better and yet sad. “It’s as though all that world outside is incredibly beautiful and wide. And so far away,” says Alexandru. He tells Petrus that “knowing counts.” Petrus agrees, saying that every act of courage and daring amounts to a spiritual renewal (277). Alexandru feels that only something fundamentally real could explain his sudden illumination (278). He has grappled with existential terror, to emerge triumphant like Sultan Bahu: The heart is a river deeper than any ocean. Is there none among the mariners who can fathom or predict its mysterious ways? Ships laden with a king’s treasure harbours built to last forever, tempests, whirlpools, shimmering islands, and the sweat of galley-slaves -all these exist in the heart. And so do the seven strata of the earth stretched and upright like the tents of nomadic tribes. He alone knows the truth of God who has walked on the ocean-floor of his heart and wrestled with the monsters of the deep. (“What I Am”) Petrus attributes Alexandru’s elation to rediscovery of life, but Alexandru responds that “it’s more than life. It precedes it. It comes from another place… from beyond” (278). Death appears in an entirely different light, as seen by Hafiz: “Do not fret the heart with being and nonbeing and rest content: / Being nought is the end of every perfection that there is” (Collected Lyrics 48). Alexandru sees the world anew in a vision of the ineffable. As Gary Eberle explains, the recognition of the sacred is a way of seeing: “Rather than thinking of the sacred and profane as absolute opposites, we can think of them as shifting gestalts, two different lenses through which we can view the experience of life…. Regarded through the lens of profane time, the material world looks like a sequence of unrepeatable events, combination of physical processes and material forces. Looked at through the lens of sacred time, however, the physical world is seen as something of an illusion permeated by the far more real world of spirit that exists outside the normal laws of time and space and unifies all things” (132-33). Suffering heralds the divine, as the Koran forewarns: “Be sure we shall test you with something of fear and hunger, some loss in goods or lives or the fruits (of your toil) but give glad tidings to those who patiently persevere, who say, when afflicted with calamity, “To God we belong, and to him is our return” (Sura 2, verse 155-56). In the final scene, Petrus carries the injured Alexandru in his arms, telling him to “grit your teeth and bear it! This is our destiny – to suffer.” (275) Alexandru tells him, “You’re awfully stout, Petrus, like a bear!” (275). The simile of the bear recalls an earlier scene in which Petrus speculates on the fears of cave dwellers that are defenseless against bears. Petrus’ musings prompt Alexandru to daydream about a guardian bear spirit speaking to men gathered around a fallen bear in the cave. Speaking from beyond life, the bear complains that he had been alone and sleepy when the men felled him. The men reflect that bears are good luck and do not die.7 Men and Stones ends with Alexandru’s cryptic words, the last of which is a final rose: “This is terrible… that I don’t have any way… to tell you… or Adria…” The graves of those distant human ancestors are living fossils, sacred stones.8 Caught “betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay,” to quote John Keats (434-45), Alexandru sees the unveiling of the sacred that Hafiz describes: Last night I saw the archangels break down the tavern-door. I saw them 7 Bears were worshipped in ancient tribes throughout Europe and many ancient bear pictures survive in caves. Romania is home to half of the brown bears in Europe, though the bear population has dropped sharply in the past two decades, a loss that is both ecological and spiritual. According to Eliade, “primordial images and symbols of ancient cultures are the only way to open the Western mind. These spiritual documents – myths, symbols, divine figures, contemplative techniques -- had been studied with the detachment and indifference with which nineteenth century naturalists studied insects. It is now understood that these documents express existential situations and consequently they form part of the history of the human spirit” (No Souvenirs xii). Petrus and Alexandru refer to the cave dwellers as ‘troglobites’ (from the Greek words troglos, ‘cave,’ or ‘hole’ and bios, ‘life.’ As Eliade observes, “neither the objects of the external world nor human acts, properly speaking, have any autonomous intrinsic value. Objects or acts acquire a value, and in doing so become real, because they participate, after one fashion or another, in a reality that transcends them” (quoted in Allen 76). 8 take Adam’s clay – lustily they kneaded it and then from it they created goblets of surpassing beauty. Thank God – the rift between us has healed – the dark clouds lifted. The houris are dancing voluptuously gracefully as only the celestials know how to celebrate our reconciliation. (“Tavern”) Eliade tells us that “the ‘sacred’ is always hidden behind the mask of ‘profane’ realities or actions… religious experience consists of ‘tearing off the veil’ and of ripping off the mask” (Journal III 136). Men and Stones rends the veil to deliver us from the “fire whose fuel is men and stones.” In the dank and cold cave, Alexandru discovers this truth of Sultan Bahu: “Whoever has one grain of love is drunk without wine. / They are true mystics, Bahu, whose graves are alive” (Death 31).9 Works Cited Allen, Douglas. 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