The Karapet of Tiflis

Well, it can't be helped . . . now that my introductory chapter has turned out to be so long, it will not matter if I spin it out a little more to tell you also about this extremely engaging Karapet of Tiflis.

     First of all I must state that twenty or twenty-five years ago the Tiflis railway station had a "steam whistle."

     It was blown every morning to wake up the railway workers and station hands and, as the Tiflis station stood on a hill, this whistle was heard almost all over the town, and woke up not only the railway workers but all the other inhabitants as well.

     The Tiflis local government, as I recall it, even entered into a lengthy correspondence with the railway authorities about the disturbance of the morning sleep of the peaceful citizens.

     To release the steam into the whistle every morning was the job of this same Karapet, who was employed in the station.

     When he would come in the morning to the rope by which he released the steam into the whistle, before taking hold of the rope and pulling it, he would wave his arms in all directions, and solemnly, like a Muslim mulla from a minaret, cry in a loud voice:

     "Your mother is a so-and-so! Your father is a so-and-so!  Your grandfather is more than a so-and-so!  May your eyes, ears, nose, spleen, liver, corns, . . ." etcetera.  In short, he pronounced in various keys all the curses he knew, and not until he had done so would he pull the rope.

     When I heard about this Karapet and this practice of his, I went to see him one evening after the day's work, with a small "boordook" of Kahketeenian wine, and after performing the indispensable solemn "toasting ritual" of the locality, I asked him, of course in a suitable form, according to the local code of "amenities" established for mutual relationship, why he did this.

     He emptied his glass at a draught and, having sung the famous Georgian song, "Drink up again, boys," obligatory when drinking, he began in a leisurely way to answer as follows:

     "Since you drink wine not as people do today, that is, merely for appearances, but in fact honestly, this already shows me that, unlike our engineers and technicians who plague me with questions, you wish to know about this practice of mine not out of curiosity but from a genuine desire for knowledge; and therefore I wish, and even consider it my duty, to confess to you sincerely the exact reason for the inner so to say scrupulous considerations that led me to this."

     He then related the following:

     "Formerly I used to work in this station at night cleaning the boilers, but when they put in the steam whistle, the stationmaster, evidently considering my age and incapacity for the heavy work I was doing, gave me the one job of releasing the steam into the whistle, for which I had to arrive punctually every morning and evening.

     "The very first week of this new service, I noticed that after performing this duty of mine Ifelt vaguely ill at ease for an hour or two.

     But when this queer feeling, increasing day by day, eventually became a definite instinctive distress from which even my appetite for "makokh" disappeared, I began to rack my brains in order to find out the cause.  I thought about it with particular intensity, for some reason or other, while going to and coming from my work, but however hard I tried I could not make anything clear to myself, even approximately.

     "Things went on like this for almost six months, and the palms of my hands had become calloused from the rope of the steam whistle when, quite suddenly and accidentally, I understood why I was experiencing this uneasiness.

     "The shock that brought about a correct understanding, resulting in the formation of an unshakable conviction, was a certain exclamation I happened to hear in the following rather peculiar circumstances.

     "One morning when I had not had enough sleep, having spent the first half of the night at the christening of my neighbor's ninth daughter, and the other half reading a rare and very interesting book I had come across entitled Dreams and Witchcraft, I was hurrying on my way to release the steam, when I suddenly saw at a street corner a barber-surgeon I knew, employed in the local government service, who beckoned me to stop.

     "The function of this barber-surgeon friend of mine was to go through the town at certain hours, accompanied by an assistant pushing a specially constructed cart, and to seize all the stray dogs whose collars lacked the metal tags issued by the local authorities on payment of the tax.  He then had to take these dogs to the municipal slaughterhouse, where they were kept for two weeks at the town's expense and fed on slaughterhouse offal.  If by the end of this period their owners had not claimed them and paid the tax, these dogs were driven, with a certain solemnity, down a passageway that led directly to a specially designed oven.

     "Shortly afterward, from the other end of this remarkable and salutary oven, there flowed, with a delightful gurgling sound, a certain quantity of pellucid and ideally clean fat, to the profit of the fathers of our town, for the manufacture of soap and also perhaps of something else, while, with a purling sound no less delightful to the ear, there poured out a fair quantity of useful substances for fertilizer.

     "My friend, the barber-surgeon, proceeded in the following simple and admirably skillful manner to catch the dogs.

     "He had somewhere obtained an old, quite large fishing net, which he carried on his broad shoulders, folded in a suitable manner, and during these peculiar excursions of his through the slums of our town for the good of humanity, when a dog 'without its passport' came within the range of his all-seeing and for the whole canine species terrible eye, he, without haste and with the softness of a panther, would steal up close to it and, seizing a favorable moment when his victim was interested and attracted by something, he would cast his net over it and quickly entangle it.  Then, pulling up the cart to which a cage was attached, he would disentangle the dog in such a way that it found itself imprisoned in the cage.

     "When my friend the barber-surgeon beckoned me to stop, he was just waiting for the opportune moment to throw the net over his next victim, which at that moment was standing and wagging his tail at a bitch.  My friend was just about to cast his net when suddenly the bells of a neighboring church rang out, calling the people to early prayer.  At this unexpected sound ringing out in the morning quiet, the dog took fright and, springing aside, shot off down the empty street at its full canine velocity.

     "This so infuriated the barber-surgeon that his hair, even in his armpits, stood on end and, flinging his net down on the pavement, he spat over his left shoulder, and cried:

     "'Oh, Hell! What a time to ring!'

     "As soon as this exclamation of his reached my comprehending apparatus, numerous thoughts began to swarm in it which ultimately led, in my view, to a correct understanding of just why there proceeded in me the aforesaid instinctive distress.

     "The moment I understood this I even felt annoyed at myself that such a simple and clear idea had not entered my head before.

     "I sensed with the whole of my being that my interference in the communal life could have no other result than the distressing sensation that had been proceeding in me all this time.

     "And indeed, everyone awakened from his sweet morning slumbers by the blast of my steam whistle must doubtless curse me by everything under the sun--just me, the cause of this infernal din--and thanks to this, there must surely flow from all directions toward my person vibrations of all kinds of malice.

     "On that memorable morning, after performing my duties, while sitting in my usual mood of depression in a neighboring 'dukhan' and eating'hachi' with garlic, I continued to ponder; and I came to the conclusion that if I should curse beforehand all those who are outraged by my service for the benefit of some of them, then according to the book I had read the night before, however much all those still lying in the 'realm of idiocy'--that is, between sleep and drowsiness--might curse me, it would have no effect on me at all.

     "And in fact, since Ibegan to do this, I no longer feel that 'instinctive distress.'"

 Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, G.I. Gurdjieff, Viking Arkana Edition, 1992, pages 41-45

Commentary

 I was one of the principal audio editors of the complete recorded version of Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson as read by Margaret Flinsch. One of my good friends both in life and the work, an accomplished audio engineer and media personality in his own right, spent five years making these recordings, and we spent three years editing them to  prepare them for publication.

At the end of the process, Peggy generously agreed to have  the members of the editing team over for lunch. She lived in a colonial house in Connecticut, completely traditional in nature— old school, as, indeed, everything about her was.

Although my notes from the meeting were extensive (I'm still trying to find them on one of my older hard drives somewhere,  and will publish them at some future date if I can), I want to share a specific impression she gave us during that luncheon.

She recounted the original manuscripts of Beelzebub, and how they would read them as they were delivered chapter by chapter (she was one of the principal appointed readers in the United States for the English text as it was prepared.) She expressed absolute astonishment at the fact that the first versions of the book did not include this story.  It was never, it turns out, a part of the original in all of its initial drafts.

He added it after the whole book had been completed.

Peggy wanted to make this point very clear to us. She was extremely emphatic in the way that only she could be and repeated herself several times.

"Can you imagine!" She said. "He added it after the book was done!" You had to be there to see the intensity with which she conveyed this. There was no doubt she wanted us to understand that this rendered the passage very special indeed; of a different order, in fact, than the rest of the book, if you will allow me to suggest that.

 To her, the addition of this material was both striking and extraordinary, in that Mr. Gurdjieff rarely went back and "fixed" things after he was done with them. Her point, I think, was that this story contained an absolutely essential point regarding his teaching, which he felt still hadn't been sufficiently made after all the massive weight of the text itself.

We might take note of the fact that this particular book has an extemporaneous commentary at both the beginning and the end of the tale.  Allegory, it seems, has its limits — even for the master. There are times when things must be stated plainly. Yet, in one of those delightful paradoxes that can only bring a smile to our faces, as we state things plainly, suddenly, we discover that in doing so, allegory once again becomes necessary.

 These subtle turnarounds in the text, its presentation, and the devices that Gurdjieff used are only fitting for a master of the dance— which is, after all, how Gurdjieff described himself.

—Lee van Laer, Sept. 2013