Richard Wright is telling his personal story from birth in the South to May Day 1936 in Chicago. And he is telling this story in the first person singular using his own name and we can assume the real names of other people. It is then an autobiographical novel.

The first fundamental value of the book is a testimony of life in the early 20th century in the South for Blacks. We have to take into account the real social or cultural characteristics that produce what Richard Wright renders in his novels, the phenomenal level of Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome/Disorder that shapes the mental life and the behavior of the descendants of slaves in the South as well as in the North.

1- The Blacks then, being the descendants of the slaves, keep and at times cultivate, often unconsciously in many elements, the recollection of plantation slavery since at least one generation, the grandparents, were slaves and the parents were directly educated by them in the period after the Civil War, especially in the Jim Crow period and its Ku Klux Klan terrorism. This recollection is translated in daily life in a few ways among the Blacks themselves, and of course in their relations with the whites.

2- The grandmother and grandfather are typical. The grandfather enlisted in the US army during the Civil War and he was wounded. He lives in the dream of that period, keeping his rifle always ready and loaded, though he never got the pension he should have gotten, because of a mistake in the spelling of his enlisted name done by an improperly literate white person. The grandmother developed an extreme religious commitment in the Jehovah Witnesses that is so fundamentalist that it becomes a real dictatorship for Richard Wright who can’t accept it and particularly because it bans all reading materials from the house except the Bible. We can even consider that the PTSlaveryDisorder is such that this religious commitment and the nostalgic attachment to the Civil war represent in these two ex-slaves the compensation for the loss of slavery with an alienating behavior or religion that become reassuring as the strong frame supporting the frame house of their life that is nothing but a life of mostly self-imposed suffering.

3- The mother and father ran away from the plantation world to small cities where they survive on the father’s small underpaid job till he decides to run away with another woman. This instability of paternal commitment in the father is a direct ingrained result of slavery. The father-slave had to live up with his “wife” being common goods for all white people on the plantation, including teenagers, with his “wife” being a breeding animal to produce more slaves, and with the possibility of his “wife” being sold away, or his own children and all her children going through the same fate. We must also understand that this father-slave could also be selected to become an example of public punishment to all the slaves including his own “wife” and children assembled to see the event. He could be whipped, tortured, emasculated, split in two with horses or plainly put to death, all these procedures leading to death anyway, and many more could be found in the South: to be tied up to a tree in the sun and abandoned there to die of thirst, with or without whipping; released in the fields and hunted by dogs that tore him to pieces when they caught him; being buried alive; and so many other variants. And women could also be submitted to the same tortures, though less often since they are a good breeding investment, at least up to a certain age. We should of course mention the tarring (with burning hot tar) and feathering of a slave to be after a long time of suffering during which the tar cools down be set on fire. All these punishments were then amplified by the mothers onto the children who were at times violently tamed into obedience by the mothers themselves as a prevention allowing survival. We can note here this violence is a preventive measure because for the slaves, and for the descendants of slaves, it is better to survive, even in slavery or under harsh discrimination, than to die straight away.

4- Richard Wright’s mother then is the last stand, protection and resort for her two sons and beyond the mother her own parents, eventually her own sisters and brothers. In this case Richard Wright went through it all: his abandoned mother, his aunts and uncles, his grandfather and grandmother, and he will have to escape from them all and yet to recuperate his mother and his brother out of this post-slavery Black hell.

5- I will skip his southern education up to eighth grade, ninth in fact but that ninth grade was mostly a repeat of the eighth grade. Then he is confronted to working in the South and to the status a Black Boy like him can have or can be granted or imposed by the whites in general, the white employers particularly and the white employees of the places where the Black Boy works. He has to learn to satisfy what the whites expect him to be, do, say. He is denied any kind of personal mind, personality, psyche, and he is supposed to be the way he behaves, hence he has to learn exactly how he is expected to be and behave. In many Blacks that requirement develops a schizophrenia that can take two forms. Either the real mind, psyche, personality of the individual is repressed into total negation and we have a case of PTSlaveryD. Or the individual learns how to develop a double personality and that is schizophrenia since the two have to never mix or overlap. If the individual can control that schizophrenic procedure, on one hand, he may find a way out. Otherwise on the other hand he will be schizophrenic and he will break down sooner or later. Richard Wright is of the previous type: he found a way out. But he gives marvelous examples of the other case. One example of this latter case is a young man, exactly his age, who has exactly the same ancillary unqualified job as his, simple delivery boy in two white businesses one across the street from the other. The whites on both sides manipulate the two Black Boys into fighting for their own white pleasure watching these black animals fighting for a miserable five dollar prize each. Richard accepts the fight after a long period of resistance because the other boy is building a personal project (buying a suit) on the five dollars. But note that even in this case, this schizophrenic boy who accepts to do this absurd fight has a personal motivation that has nothing to do with the whites: he wants to buy a suit, hence to improve his self image: there is a certain amount of self-pride in that behavior and that’s why Richard Wright accepted that fight.

6- Richard escaped that schizophrenia because he set an objective to his private, secret, deep personality in order for it to be satisfied and develop. His objective is to read in order to write and to bring his mother and brother to Memphis where he has escaped from his grandparents’ home, and later to Chicago where he wants to go. This objective will enable him to remain sane in the South and to get himself on some kind of social promotion – or is it social climbing? – in Chicago that will lead him to being published, to having a real writer’s career.

This leads us to the second part of this autobiography, his Chicago period where he will go through the 1929 crisis and then get involved with the Communist Party up to May Day 1936 when he is violently and physically expelled from their ranks during the demonstration.

His epiphany comes in two stages.

First he has to imagine a better world, a better future in a collective way:

“. . . embracing a creative attitude toward life. I felt that it was not until one wanted the world to be different that one could look at the world with will and emotion.” (p. 297)

When this future is thus reopened in general terms, the future has to be realized in himself because it is by changing oneself that one can bring to life the dream one has for the world.

To realize that change Richard Wright looks for various allies, people or institutions that could recognize his writing ambition. That’s how he gets involved with the Chicago John Reed Club that works with the communist party. But he finds out between 1933 and 1936 that the communist party is not really interested in his writing. They want him because he is black and they want him to be an organizer of the action of the Blacks on the South Side. He discovers that in 1935-36 the communist international changes their policy. He was attracted by Stalin’s “The National and Colonial Question” because of the linguistic work done for all ethnic and national minorities in the USSR. He dreams then of the same thing happening for the Blacks in the USA: to study and liberate their personal mind, psyche, soul, imagination. And he sees himself as the writer who is going to do it, at least one of them. But in 1935-36 the communist International shifts policies and against Hitler they advocate a vast alliance of already recognized writers and artists. He feels rejected along with all the younger artists and writers he had been organizing.

It will yet take him some time to realize that his own consciousness is right, and that the communists and their demands for him to be a pamphlet writer and neighborhood organizer are just wrong because the communists may be right on the general world’s situation but they are blind as for the position of the Blacks in the USA.

“They are blind . . . Their enemies have blinded them with too much oppression.” (p. 381)

But Richard Wright is here a witness of the folly of the communists at the time. They became, along with Stalin, obsessed by Trotskyites and they started a campaign to rid the communist party of all “Negro Trotskyite elements” (p. 346) and Richard Wright himself will become the target of accusations like: “smuggler of reaction,” “petty bourgeois degenerate,” “bastard intellectual,” “incipient Trotskyite,” “possess[ing] an anti-leadership attitude,” “seraphim tendencies.” The last one is funny and requires an explanation: “one [who] has withdrawn from the struggle of life and considers oneself an infallible angel.” (p. 350-351). The use of such a metaphor is surprising for anti-clerical people but anything having to do with religion becomes in that way of thinking an insult or accusation they could level at those they assess to be their enemies. In the same line, Richard Wright identifies the feeling of these communists concerning him: it is a feeling of fear:

“Alone, they said, a man was weak, united with others, he was strong. Therefore, they habitually feared a man who stood alone.” (p. 373)

Richard Wright in 1944/45 is a pioneer of the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome/Disorder in its general form and not only in its post-slavery form. He states this disorder in simple terms for the communists in general and for the black communists in particular. He even goes farther with the case of the black communists Ross who is put on a trial by the communist party for all kinds of political crimes for which he pleads guilty – in order to be pardoned and not expelled:

“The communists had talked to him until they had given him new eyes with which to see his own crime. And then they sat back and listened to him tell how he had erred. He was one with all the members there, regardless of race or color; his heart was theirs and their hearts were his; and when a man reaches that state of thinking with others, that degree of oneness, or when a trial has made him kin after he has been sundered from them by wrongdoing, then he must rise and say, out of a sense of the deepest morality in the world: “I’m guilty. Forgive me.”” (p. 374)

In the first case of blindness Richard Wright is the precursor of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in which the secretary general of the communist party is a black man with one glass eye that he drops in a glass of water to support his reasoning that should be clear even for a blind person. Ralph Ellison’s hero was invisible to a half-blind man just as much as he was invisible to every white person in the street who either did not see him at all since he was black, or only saw his black surface and ignored what could be under that surface, hence his humanity.

In the second case of the trial Richard Wright is a pioneer of the Stockholm syndrome and he identifies being a member of the communist party as a post traumatic stress syndrome that erases your own personality and merges you in the collective personality of the communist party as defined by its leadership. But he is also the precursor of Artur London’s 1951 trial in Czechoslovakia who was submitted there to the same kind of ordeal by the local communists. Moreover the fake trial of “comrade Ross” in early 1936 was an obvious echo of the real purges that took place in 1936 in Moscow that were concluded in the same way with mass court trials in which the accused pleaded guilty, with the difference that these accused were all sentenced to death and were executed after the mass-trials.

But what is interesting is how the communist party used its members to make Richard Wright fail wherever he is sent to work by the Chicago social services, be it for example a black theater with a black company like the Federal Negro Theater where he tried to get a better director and a better project around Paul Green’s Hymn to the Rising Sun and himself, the newly appointed director and the project, all in one move, will be ousted by the Blacks of the company manipulated by the communist party. This is very important and it is not typical of the communist party but it is a fact of life: some people mix up what they think and feel with any objective knowledge they could collect with some minimal effort. They refuse that effort and it is comfortable to follow one’s own convictions, forgetting that these convictions sound like a plain condemnation in a moral court, but the sentence they pass is irreversible and final against the person they have decided disturbs their peace of mind or their projects. This is fundamentalism, bigotry and we find that in all kinds of fields: religion, politics, all social institutions, research, universities and many others. At times too in our parliaments in the form of filibustering that does not aim at any ethical logic but only at blocking a reform they know has to go through.

The communists often prefer using demonstrations to achieve their aims, like in Prague in February 1948, though recently Greece, Spain, Portugal and France have been flirting with what some French “historians” call “street democracy.” Danielle Tartakowsky is one of these communist idealists and dangerous ideologues who consider working class demonstration and violence to be both justified and the acme of democracy. Richard Wright shows how this vision is nothing but a post traumatic stress disorder. It is also funny to see how the communists in Europe supported the Arab Spring, not understanding that after the “revolution” there will be elections and then they yell, cry and moan that the “revolution” has been betrayed because the elections do not go the way they wanted. After two centuries of compulsory marginalization of Islam in these countries by European powers and the USA, it was to be expected that the Islamic argument was going to be an essential rallying flag for the people who had been alienated for so long in their religious beliefs and practices. This forced secularism being an incentive to become more fundamental in their belief than a tool to reach freedom of thought. And we must keep in mind, which Richard Wright does not always do, that religion is part of this freedom of thought.

The conclusion I can reach here is that this black author had explored and exemplified the Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome/Disorder in detail long before this PTSlaveryS/D was ever conceptualized. At the same time Richard Wright also explored ways to get out of it for one individual, but within a wider concept of collective resistance, though he clearly says the black consciousness being born in the 1930s was hijacked by the Communist Party and that will make black emancipation lose twenty years up to 1956 when the Civil Rights Movement starts with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.

Could that Civil Rights Movement have started earlier? No one can say that. One thing is sure though, the communists party’s call for the action of the Blacks in general to be included into the action of white workers, did not help the emergence of the necessary consciousness that had to be built by the black community, with the black community and for the black community, before they could integrate the general field of action of American society. Before becoming part of “We the people” they had to define and build their own “people” and their own “we,” and the communist party in the 1930s plainly refused this perspective.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

This book about Buddhism is difficult to capture for various linguistic reasons, and yet the meaning is extremely interesting. It is an important attempt at secularizing Buddhism as a psychological theory. But let’s start with the linguistic remarks because that’s what makes the book difficult to read, and evaluate.

First of all he refers to the canonical texts of Buddhism that are all and have always been in Pali. We must also remember that the Buddha’s teaching or preaching was always in some Indo-Aryan language and not in Sanskrit, the ancestor of all Indo-Aryan languages that had become in the Buddha’s time a religious language, the language of Hinduism. The Buddha stands against that Hindu tradition and thus does not use Sanskrit. It is thus very disturbing to find “dharma” systematically used instead of “dhamma”, “kharma” instead of “khamma”, “nirvana” instead of “nibbana” and a few other words.

The second remark in that line is that he uses his own translations of the Pali terms but he does not always, far from it, in fact most of the time, provide the standard translation nor the Pali term itself, so that we cannot situate what he is talking of, except if we are already very well read in Buddhist literature. The book in other words is written but an uncultivated audience interested in Buddhism but that knows little about it and can read it since it is in plain English. The point is that this presentation makes it very difficult then to go on reading in the field since it is not easily compatible.

The third remark is about the author’s knowledge of Pali. This remark is going to go into some Pali cases that are not typical of this book but that are quite frequently misunderstood in the English-speaking Buddhist world, because no particular effort has been made to understand the original words, or at least to be prudent about them. I will now enter a few of these misunderstood words, knowing that they are central concepts in Buddhism. An intellectual construction necessarily reflects the language used to construct it. We must keep in mind that Indo-Aryan languages are only distant cousins of the badly named Indo-European languages.

The two families come from the same migration out of Africa that settled on the Iranian plateau long before the ice-age (the peak of it is at 19,000 years BCE) where it will be trapped by this ice-age that will split the vast linguistic conglomerate into two essential families, with a remaining section somewhere in Iran, probably in lower southern areas. This surviving pocket will develop in today’s Farsi, known some 25 centuries ago as Persian. But from there two migrations are forced by the ice-age. One to the East will become Indo-Aryan languages, the oldest recorded form being Vedic Sanskrit, though there were older forms but they have been lost because they were not transcribed. These Indo-Aryan people will move into the Indian subcontinent pushing the languages of the Tibetan subfamily of the isolating languages of Asian north into the Himalayas, and the Tamil subfamily of the same isolating languages of Asian south into the Indian peninsula. The other family of Iranian languages will migrate west and will produce most European languages, though Kurdish, Armenian, dead Hittite and some Caucasian languages like Ossetic are of that family and the first three are not European at all. Initially they were called Indo-Germanic with even a theory that they moved back to India later on. The 19th century was very surprising, though The Nazi party and Hitler favored the idea that Buddhism was the pure expression of Indo-Aryan culture and that Germanic culture was directly descending from this religion, philosophy and language, I mean Pali.

This being said it is right to refer Pali to Sanskrit since it is a Prakrit language descending from Sanskrit. It is wrong to refer it to Latin, Gothic or any Indo-European languages because it is a very distant cousin. Thomas William Rhys-Davids, in his Pali-English Dictionary systematically makes the mistake and thus warps Pali and its functioning. Olendzki does not make that mistake but his limited understanding of Pali, and I guess Sanskrit produces the same effect: he does not capture the functioning of the language. Let me give a few examples.

He refers to the word “bhuta” (p. 73, 57 for instance) and translates it as “becoming” which is a present participle or gerund. This is a mistake that covers the real meaning. He also says that it is derived from the verb “bhu” that would mean “be” according to him. In fact “bhuta” is the past participle of the causative verb “bhaveti” derived from the simple verb “bhavati” derived from the state verb “bhu.” “Bhu” does not express a static state but a dynamic state, hence is both “be” and “become” and also “have” with a genitive since Pali does not have any “have” verb. The verb “bhavati” is derived from this dynamic state verb to express a dynamic process of evolving into a state of being but it is never static because of the basic principle of impermanence of all things that is derived directly from the language. Everything is a process that is being performed or generated in a way or another, not by an agent but by a general procedural situation that fulfills some conditions that make the emergence of this process possible. I insist on the fact that we are not in a cause-effect explanation but in what is called in Pali “paticcasamuppada” and often rendered as “dependent origination” meaning everything emerges from a vast context that makes that emergence possible when it is fulfilled. That implies that “bhaveti” is not a causative but expresses that “dependent origination.”

We must then take into account the fact that the past participle “bhuta” has to be understood in opposition of the preterit participle. The latter expresses a real past action: a process that has been fulfilled, whereas the former expresses a passive process and thus should be called passive participle. In Indo-European languages the two are expressed with one form. In Prakrit languages, at least those I know, the two are separated. That leads “bhuta to being understood as “that has found itself in a situation bringing up the emergence of becoming” or in a simple though less accurate expression “that has been ‘caused’ to become.” We are far from “becoming” that is understood in English as “(is) becoming” hence something that is in the process of being performed. Olendzki also quotes the negative “abhuta” in which the negative or privative prefix “a-“ brings this word to the meaning “that has not found itself in a situation bringing up the emergence of becoming” or “that has not been ‘caused’ to become.”

Olendzki misses this point of everything being processes and his insistence on the cause-effect deduction is wrong. In fact Buddhism does not practice deduction from cause to effect, nor induction from effect to cause, but the third type of thinking which is subduction, a fully generative experiential, circumstantial, situational, existential and phenomenological context that brings about the emergence of one or several new processes. This implies “anicca” (“impermanence”) of everything seen as constantly transforming, changing, moving. This implies “dukkha” that refers to the cycle of “samsara” from birth to rebirth via living aging and dying. More about these two later, especially “dukkha” that is extremely badly translated (systematically with Olendzki) as “suffering.” And finally that brings the last basic concept “anatta” which means nothing can have any static self or essence since everything and everybody is moving, changing, transforming. The translation of “non-self” is by far not the best. Once again the fact that Olendzki does not use the Pali word and mostly only the translation “non-self” more or less erases the real meaning. He does say that the Buddha did not reject the concept of self but his case is not built strong enough: the Buddha advocated a theory of the self, of the essence of things and beings as being impermanent, hence as not reducible to anything basic and static, and he was there rejecting the Hindu concept of soul, or descent from Brahma’s body parts or whatever other religious approach of his time like the Bon religion in Tibet.

That also prevents Olendzki from seeing that rebirth is bringing up a problem: if we state “non-self” or “anatta” what passes from my dying body to the next newly born body (or animal, or even objects, imagine reincarnation as a bell, how long a bell can live, etc, in the line of the Tibetan Book of the Dead)? Pure energy is not nothing, hence this self that is “anatta” and has no stable essence is nevertheless energy that can merge into cosmic energy when the dying person escapes from the cycle of “samsara.” His approach of the problem from a metaphorical point of view, rebirth being the mental or whatever heritage I will leave behind in the hands and minds of my descendants or survivors or relatives, or whoever and whatever, does not solve that contradiction and brings up another problem: the materiality of that mental heritage and how it can be transmitted to other people, hence the materiality of the mind.

Another essential example of the lack of understanding of Pali is the case of the prefix “san-“ (pronounced “sang,” rhis “ng” sound, a functional marker, is written in three different ways by the various transcribers). Olendzki never identifies this prefix properly when he refers to the phrase “sankharam abhisankharoti” (p. 145) from Samyatta Nikaya, 12:51.

“san” (pronounced “sang”) is the accusative form of an obsolete “sa” nominative basic form of a deictic covering both “this” and the third person singular pronoun “he/she.” This prefix is thus a pointing movement (at what comes after) that is abstracted enough to become circular, self-deictic. This deictic circularity is fundamental in Buddhist thought, the best-known circular phenomenon being “samsara,” the cycle of birth-life-death-rebirth, more about it later.

The word “sankhara” is composed of this self-deictic prefix and the root “khar” which is the root of “karma” in Sanskrit, “khamma” in Pali. This root means the process of doing, making, performing an action. Hence “khamma” is all the actions a person has performed and is performing and will perform before dying and this builds his/her merit that will determine in standard Buddhism his future after death, either escape from rebirth or rebirth. “Sankhara” then is the actions that are self-deictically abstracted into a set that is one of the basic sets of elements that constitute our existential context, the material active and procedural elements, generally called “formations,” which is reductive. I prefer “essential conditions, a thing conditioned, mental coefficients” (buddha-vacona.org). The value varies with the context. Then the phrase “sankharam abhisankharoti” is composed of the accusative of “sankhara”, then the prefix “abhi-“ meaning a process of mastering, and the verb sankharoti, third person singular present. The phrase he translates “forms formations” or “one constructs constructions” is not really understood. We could approach the meaning wirth “he/she masters the performing of mentally performative actions.”

This is essential. The Buddha creates a conceptualized language with the means of his Prakrit language, not Sanskrit, though the phenomena I am pointing out are also true of Sanskrit and probably of most Prakrit languages of the time (26 centuries ago). The expression discussed here is tremendously circular, self-deictic, person-contained and actively performative. These characteristics do not exist in Indo-European languages, at least not at that level of importance because they have been lost in the migrations. Translating is then very difficult. It is better to keep the Pali terms and develop a glossary. I insist here on the fact that we are dealing with the central conceptual system Buddhism contains, that of “dependent origination” or “paticcasumappada,” what I have called subduction.

Now we have said that, we can consider some important points in the book.

The three basic concepts of Buddhism, “anicca”, “dukkha” and “anatta” are duly studied or mentioned by Olendzki. The first one is that every changes. The second one is extremely badly systematically translated as “suffering” by Olendzki, and the third one by “non-self.” Here it is necessary to reexamine “dukkha.” Olendzki says “pleasure is not ultimately sustainable and pain is not avoidable.” (p. 6) He misses the real dynamic of Buddhism on this subject. First he misses the couple “sukha”-“dukkha” that are the two sides of the same thing: the fact that we are satisfied or dissatisfied in our expectations as for a particular phenomenon. We have to understand every phenomenon, according to the Buddha, has to be examined as objectively as possible in all its experiential, existential, circumstantial, situational and phenomenological elements, and it is only when this is done that we can situate ourselves and proposes our eventual responses. Buddhism is an extremely mental philosophy based on meditation, which is first of all introspection as much as extro-spection afterwards.

When we have done or are doing this, some elements will be on the side of “sukha” and some on the side of “dukkha.” In fact the Buddha calls for a middle way between the two seen as eventually mastered by “tanha,” a concept that is not examined properly by Olendzki. “Tanha” is “excessive attachment” that prevents us from examining what good and what bad there is in a situation, prevents us from keeping what’s good and rejecting what’s bad, from cultivating the good and terminating the bad. The Buddha never rejects attachment as long as it does not become “tanha,” “excessive attachment.” In fact he advocates a policy, a behavior, even ethics based on “metta” derived from “mitta.” The latter is a friend, and the former is the mental state developing towards friends, and the Buddha turns it into a systematic behavior we have to cultivate towards everyone, everything, the whole universe. “Metta,” or, as it is translated most of the time, “mindfulness,” can only develop if we cultivate this friendship towards the world that brings us “sukha” and that is possible only if we push away “dukkha.” Olendzki does not negate that fact. He just sets such an emphasis on “dukkha” systematically translated as “suffering” that we forget the other side of the coin, because suffering is referring in the west to the Christian ideology of “the vale of tears” or “drowning in an ocean of lachrymal fluids” or “vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” The Buddha rejected that tearful approach of life and “dukkha” would be better rendered by “dissatisfaction” or even better by “absence of lasting satisfaction.”

In fact Thomas William Rhys-Davids is extremely prudent on the term and he does refer to the couple “sukha”-“dukkha”: “There is no word in English covering the same ground as dukkha in Pali. . . We are forced therefore, in translation, to use half synonyms, no one of which is exact.” (Pali-English Dictionary, p. 324) Olendzki does not follow in that direction and Thomas William Rhys-Davids gives several translations, and “suffering” is not the first one.

Andrew Olendzki refers to the Abhidhamma and the fifty-two mental states. Among these “dukkha” or “sukha” are not mentioned. These two are something else connected to “samsara.” This concept goes back to what we have said. The prefix “san-“ (pronounced “sang”), a self-deictic circular movement of designation and the verb “sarati” meaning “to flow”. The concept then is a circular self-deictic flowing movement. It is the circular concept of the cycle birth-life-death-rebirth. This shows the value of the prefix “san-,“ since it carries the circular and cyclical meaning. “Dukkha” and “sukha” have to do with this cyclical conception of life. Nothing can satisfy us (sukha) for long, nor anything can dissatisfy us for long (dukkha) because everything is impermanent and changing in self and essence. We are at the heart of Buddhism here and Olendzki more or less side-tracks this essential conception. The four noble truths are dominated for him by the first one “dukkha” seen as “suffering,” though these four noble truths should bring us to the eightfold path (“magga”) which is the escape from the cycle. In an oral style it is the last element that is most important and not the first. Here we have to wonder if the transcription of these oral discourses have or have not modified the meaning of the oral discursive language.

As a psychologist or psychiatrist he insists too much on the sole individual level of the procedure proposed by the Buddha. He in fact reduces the individual to that personal psychological dimension. He speaks of a “post-Copernican revolution,” which is anachronic since the Buddha taught and preached twenty centuries before Copernic, and in many ways unacceptable when he says for instance:

“The ancient contemplative traditions of India started with the empirical phenomenon of consciousness – the capacity we each have for awareness – and developed a model of existence flowing out from that. The view around which they built their understanding is one becoming more familiar to the contemporary cognitive and neurosciences, namely that each individual mind and body system constructs meaning as a synthetic momentary act. Each one of us, in other words, is planted squarely in the center of a virtual world we create for ourselves every moment.” (p. 33-34)

It is amazing how he reduces what modern neuroscience has brought us about the brain and how the brain works. The neo-cortex of the brain has a very specific structure and functioning: hierarchical, massively parallel, using heavy feedback and producing “invariant representations” (Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence). These invariant representations enable the brain to conceptualize what the brain processes. The brain processes what the six senses send to it. We know five of them and Buddhism adds the mind as the sixth one (we mean “mana” here). The outside world, but also the inside world (inside the body with myriads of sensors all over, and inside the mind itself) impact onto the various senses. These impacts creates nervous influx that goes to the brain. This nervous influx is processed either as recognizable or as new, leading in both cases to an identification and name (that can be purely some kind of neuronal code). These identifications and names, based on the invariant representations are the procedure that makes conceptualization possible. Without considering here the body itself, we can say that this conceptualization needs a language to become real, and Homo Sapiens invented this articulated language of ours in all its varieties and families, enabling communication, transmission of knowledge, education and leading to a cyclical cognitive procedure that is acculturation-deculturation-acculturation. Every new knowledge is integrated by destructuring the already structured knowledge and restructuring the old knowledge to integrate the new knowledge. This is not material, meaning constructed in the chemical elements of the brain, at least not only. It is virtual too though entirely carried by the chemical elements of the brain. What we know, and the Buddha had a tremendous vision about it, is that the brain as such (the neurons) and the mind (the construct carried by the brain’s neurons and the mental power carried by the architecture of the brain) both are flexible, adaptable, malleable, etc. There would be no possible “magga” if this fundamental fact were not true.

I am surprised that Olendzki does not go that far and does not note that Buddhism would not even have ever existed, even as a germ of anything, if Homo Sapiens had not emerged in Africa, then emerged out of Africa with a language and so many other mental and physical possibilities, not to speak of cultural , social, religious, scientific potentials and capabilities, hence promises for the future. It is amazing how Olendzki speaks referring to the context of the 5th century BCE Buddha as if he were living in the 21st century. The mental trajectory of an individual today cannot be compared to what it was or could be in the Buddha’s time. Today we have long education, mass media and mass communication, etc. One human is never alone, or hardly ever. Any human is constantly confronted to ideas, behaviors, actions from other individuals or from society as a collective body.

If there is a post-Copernican revolution it is not what Olendzki says. It is the fact that every single human being is confronted to scientific, religious, philosophical, historical knowledge, more or less objective, and of many forms and affiliations. In fact Copernic himself was that modern man before many others. He knew he was the center of the real world and he used that central position to look at it and find out the earth was not the center of that world. Copernic was a scientist and as such was the center of his scientific construct and Copernic had to know it. Olendski has it all wrong on that point.

That leads him to some reductive simplifications. I am only going to take one. He constantly quotes three negative mental states (out of 14 with no explanation why), viz. “greed”, “hatred” and “delusion”, in this order with a long reference to the Abhidhamma. In, fact in this canonical book they are in the reverse order and “delusion” is the first one because without “delusion”, that is to say ignorance, the lack of knowledge or the detention of some wrong knowledge, there cannot be any negative mental states. We do wrong because first of all we know wrong, or to speak like the Buddha, our wrong doings emerge from a full context of generatively growing wrong elements, from “samsara” and the four other “aggregates” (material or mental contextual and environmental elements in which we live. How could we do wrong if we had the proper knowledge? Olendzki never explains why he uses the inverted order. If it comes from some teaching of the Buddha, then it is the oratory style of his teaching, from the less to the more, a progression from the less fundamental to the more fundamental. The lack of an explanation is very frustrating. And a book is not an oral discourse.

The last remark is about his proposal to see Buddhism as the possible mental system that could produce a new species of Homo Sapiens, what he calls Homo Sophiens. He just ignores what we consider today to be about at least 300,000 years of evolution from the first Homo Sapiens to today’s humans. Homo Sapiens reached the stage of wisdom as soon as he started articulating his first words and then his first sentences and then exchanging and transmitting his knowledge to other humans who depended on that knowledge for their survival first, but and that is what is missing in this approach, second for his development as an individual within a group and as a species, a development that implied producing more than necessary to plainly survive and migrating as soon as numbers made it necessary. Homo Sapiens is a migrating species that not only targets survival but also targets development. The tools of this development are and have been for 300,000 years language, technology, religion, science, philosophy, and today knowledge of all types in our knowledge economy and society.

Homo Sapiens owes that to three elements that are too often reduced to one in Indo-European languages, “mind” in English, impossible in French. First “mana,” “the intellectual functioning of consciousness, . . . The rational faculty of man and special senses acting on the world. . . a sense adapted to the rationality of the phenomena.” Second “viññana,” the field of sense and sense-reaction (“perception”).” Third “citta,” the subjective aspect of consciousness.” These are the definitions given by Thomas William Rhys-Davids. The mental rational capability, the sensorial level or sensorial connection between the world and the organic individual, and the mental states the mind develops in concrete situations from which various behaviors can develop. If we take into account these three levels of the mind, of mental functioning, we have a chance to avoid the absolute individualism and idealism that lurk here and there in Olendzki’s book. That also enables us to understand the hierarchical and transcendental way of thinking human beings have developed. It is the result of the very architecture of the brain and the way it functions. “Mana” is the transcendental hierarchical dimension that constructs the virtual model of the world and the virtual tools of communication, imagination and speculation we often call the mind, then the sensorial system from the sensations to the perceptions, and finally the behaviors our mind develops on the bases of the two other levels, that is to say in constant confrontation with the real world and with the tools and knowledge accumulated and constructed in the virtual mind by our mental faculty, both contained and carried by the brain itself, though most of the virtual model and the knowledge can be transmitted directly (viva voce) or indirectly (in books, articles, and other artifacts).

He concludes with “mindfulness” but I consider that this mindfulness is a basic characteristic of the human species because of the mirror neurons that make a human being both imitate other human beings and empathetically experience other human beings’ feelings and emotions and empathetically share his/her emotions and feelings with other human beings. This is not typical of all ammals as he says twice; these mirror neurons can only be found, as far as we know in human beings and in some apes (in quite smaller numbers though for these). I must say I prefer the word “metta” that is derived from “mitta” and that implies we do not live alone, we do not face our present and future alone, because one of the three jewels of Buddhism, after the Dhamma (knowledge, wisdom) and the Buddha (the incitative model) is the Sangha, the order, the Buddhist organization based on “metta,” mindfulness if you want, rather universal empathy. And that triad is universal: knowledge-models-empathy.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

La Pièce a un potentiel énorme et Alban Berg ne s’y était pas trompé. Il en a fait un opéra. Mais la pièce est beaucoup trop longue et cette production n’a pas resserré les boulons.

Le potentiel c’est la femme sous tous ses aspects dans l’exploitation qu’est la sienne dans cette société, allemande en premier lieu, française en second lieu et anglaise pour finir. Il n’y a pas une seule charge qui manque depuis le plus jeune âge et son père, du moins, c’est ce que l’on nous dit, bien que l’on puisse penser que ce n’était qu’un mendiant comme un autre qui avait recueilli la fillette abandonnée, puis vendeuse de fleurs sur les trottoirs qui, à la différence d’avec My Fair Lady de George Bernard Shaw, en même temps que vendre des fleurs en profite afin d’alourdir son escarcelle de servir de jouet passager aux passants de passage. Puis finalement recueillie par un homme riche et beaucoup plus âgé, son éducation continue avec cet homme et son fils, un gamin à l’époque qu’elle initiera car on ne parle pas d’école vraiment. Voilà pour sa jeunesse et son enfance, ou vice versa. On dira qu’à quinze ans elle gagnait déjà bien sa vie.

Son père adoptif lui fait épouser un vieux médecin qui fait faire son portrait. Elle séduira le peintre qui est plus vierge qu’elle et qu’elle initiera, dans sa profonde ignorance, sur les choses de la vie sexuelle et quand il apprendra ce qu’elle a été avant lui, alors qu’elle lui a fait croire qu’elle était pure et innocente, il se tranchera la gorge. Ensuite ce sera la folie des hommes qu’elle prendra, mènera à la mort pour finalement sombrer peu à peu dans la prostitution la plus sordide jusqu’à sa mort sous le couteau de Jack l’Eventreur, bien que cette production nous évite cette identification franchement d’un goût plus que déplaisant, sans cependant nous éviter l’anglais, alors qu’on nous avait évité l’allemand. Noblesse touristique oblige, j’imagine. Car ici il faut le dire Wedekind fait de la dentelle avec du câble de bateau et le metteur en scène torsade le câble de bateau pour en faire du câble de navette spatiale.

En fait le Théâtre National de La Colline à Paris ayant une orgie de moyens et en particulier un plateau tournant et toute la machinerie généralement réservée à l’opéra qui va avec, sans compter le personnel de scène, sous la direction de Stéphane Braunschweig que l’on connaît cependant comme généralement plus inspiré, se laisse aller à une utilisation de ces moyens sans voir qu’il amplifie encore la longueur et la lenteur de la pièce, sans vraiment remettre sur le devant de la scène le potentiel qui se noie dans tout ce fatras.

Il faut ajouter à cela deux autres dimensions exploitée dans le séjour parisien de l’intrigue : la spéculation boursière pourtant à peine débutante à la fin du 19ème siècle, comme un cri de panique devant une faillite financière spéculative et un cri d’alarme pour mes nouveaux riches industriels fascinés par l’argent facile (une allusion à la crise de 2008-2009 à peine cachée mais inutile ici) et le colonialisme, ici l’Egypte transformée en lupanar pour riches internationaux qui viennent se payer du temps impossible d’avoir ailleurs du fait des bonnes manières que les maisons closes européennes, même russes, doivent respecter. Mais ces deux intrigues intermédiaires sont noyées dans le reste, entre ee sordide de la vie de Lulu à Berlin jusqu’à l’assassinat de son second mari, anciennement et ci-devant son père adoptif, d’une part, et, d’autre part, la fin misérablement ignoble de Londres. Le seul point important est qu’elle est ruinée par la chute de la spéculation sur le téléphérique du Jungfrau (traduit un peu abusivement par pucelle ou vierge, alors qu’on aurait pu éviter et parler, ou plus exactement ne parler que de jeune fille, ou rien du tout).

Mais c’est là un choix du metteur en scène sur la trame prétendument érotique lourde de la pièce qui est parfois tellement sexuelle qu’on n’ose même plus en rire. Il ose même une masturbation, la masturbation d’un prince bien sûr car c’est un art noble. Samuel Beckett, lui, dans « Ah les beaux jours » fait, la chose cachée derrière un mamelon de terre et de la part d’un inconnu sans titre, surtout de noblesse, Trop c’est trop, surtout que c’est toujours particulièrement sinistre. Cette production en rajoute d’ailleurs sur les ambiguïtés d’orientations sexuelles au point de jouer à être mieux encore que Ben Jonson qui dans « La femme silencieuse » avait un homme déguisée en femme (la norme sur une scène anglais de ce temps-là) mais se faisant passer pour une femme pour épouser un puritain qui voulait à tout pris une femme qui ne parle pas, ce qui était parfait pour un homme qui se fait passer pour une femme. Stéphane Braunschweig, quant à lui, fait jouer l’aristocrate lesbienne amoureuse de Lulu par un travesti mâle. On ne voit pas ce que cela ajoute à la pièce sinon une ambiguïté supplémentaire gratuite surtout que ce travesti joue à la femme de cuir et n’a donc rien d’une drag-queen, mais plus d’un homme qu’autre chose.

Dans le domaine il est clair que la fille à treize ans et le garçon à quatorze n’a d’avenir lucratif que la sexualité rémunérée. Ainsi une fille de dame riche ruinée par le Jungfrau embrasse une carrière de prostituée pour riches messieurs et le groom de Lulu à Paris mange aux deux râteliers, le banquier qui n’a rien perdu au Jungfrau et paye généreusement et la fille de la dame riche ruinée pour le plaisir, ambivalence qui est la meilleure façon de n’avoir jamais faim, ni soif d’ailleurs.

En d’autres termes, et pour ne pas pêcher en longueur excessive, je trouve que cette production est en dessous de ce que Wedekind pourrait donner entre les mains d’un metteur en scène ne visant pas la classe culturelle moyennement éduquée dans la chose théâtrale de Paris et le public des touristes qui doivent voir le sens plus que le comprendre en l’entendant. Et il faut dire que le langage corporel est, et de loin, plus expressif que le langage linguistique qui lui a pour avatar d’être plutôt grossier. On regrette la force d’un vrai auteur comme Bernard Chartreux ou Gildas Bourdet, quant à ce dernier à la fois auteur et metteur en scène.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Il y a d’abord l’excellent décor qui fait que la maison où ces deux sœurs servent comme bonnes n’est qu’une armature avec des escaliers de fer comme l’armature de cette maison qui devient alors un échafaudage qui est en fait un échafaud auquel les bonnes montent et descendent jour après jour de la cuisine à la mansarde en passant par les couloirs et toutes les pièces, se pendant pour passer la serpillère, se pendant pour écouter aux portes, se penchant pour regarder par le trou des serrures, se penchant pour servir, se penchant pour honorer, se penchant pour toutes les autres activités machinales et habituelles que des bonnes peuvent bien faire dans une maison.

Il y a ensuite l’excellent de ces bonnes, sœurs de naissance et sœurs de crime, qui mènent une vie quadruple au moins puisque chacune joue son propre rôle, le rôle de sa sœur, le rôle de leur maîtresse qui est différente pour chacune de ces sœurs. Cela fait bien quatre, et si vous ajoutez monsieur qui n’est qu’un spectre nu dans le placard de la vie de cette maison cela fait à nouveau quatre et donc quatre de plus, et on n’en finit pas de multiplier les quartes de personnages fuyants et faux, tous plus faux jetons de casino les uns que les autres.

Il y a encore l’excellent des haines qui s’accumulent entre ces personnages en quarterons répétitifs. Les deux sœurs jouent à leur jeu préféré : fais-moi peur et tue-moi si tu peux si tu oses. Alors leur jeu dans le dos de la maîtresse sortie consiste à tuer la maîtresse en l’imitant, imitation fatale pour l’imitatrice comme pour l’imitée. Et de fil en aiguille, la haine aidant, les deux sœurs veulent vraiment se venger de leur maîtresse qui les as si souvent rabaissées à n’être que des pantins sans voix, sans cœur, sans âme, sans moi non plus, des pantins qui parlent à propos de rien pour ne rien dire sinon passer de la pommade dans le dos de madame. Alors on monte une vengeance exécrable. On dénonce anonymement à la police le fait que monsieur est un voleur, ce qui met monsieur en prison, du moins pour un court temps car il se débrouille pour être libéré. Patatras. Tout s’écroule. Il revient et tout le monde va savoir le jeu des lettres anonymes.

Alors on se précipice vers une seconde solution : empoisonner madame avec du gardénal dans son tilleul. Cela a presque marché car madame rentrée tard a failli vouloir en finir avec cette vie impitoyable et a légué ses robes et ses fourrures à ses bonnes, comme si elles étaient des mannequins de vitrine. Mais hélas l’une des deux sœurs a laissé le récepteur du téléphone décroché quand monsieur a appelé pour dire qu’il arrivait et madame voit cela et madame s’étonne et l’une des deux sœurs se doit bien de répondre et de révéler l’arrivée imminente de monsieur. Alors le tilleul dormitif est oublié et on annonce, on réclame, on vitupère du champagne. Le poison en reste dans le tilleul froid, non bu, non usité, négligé.

C’est alors que les sœur, madame partie à nouveau, se reprennent au jeu de madame et celle qui aurait du faire boire le gardénal au tilleul à madame se voit accusée et étranglée par sa sœur sans qu’on sache si c’est vraiment la sœur ou la maîtresse jouée par la sœur qui est étranglée puisque la sœur porte la robe de la maîtresse. On n‘en finit pas de jouer au quiproquo. Surtout que la sœur ou madame se relève de son étranglement et se décide alors à rendre utile ce gardénal au tilleul et elle boit le tilleul avec le gardénal en prime. Et c’est ainsi que tout se termine avec la sœur incapable de tuer madame qui boit le tilleul au gardénal de madame pour en mourir de sommeil après avoir été étranglée par sa sœur alors qu’elle portait la robe de madame.

Aussi clair que du jus de boudin noir dans une bouteille en bois de chêne noir. A force de « gringonner » les sols de madame avec une « since » et une « gardale », on en attrape des lumbagos existentiels qui deviennent mortels, empoisonnés et franchement dormitifs comme du gardénal dans un bol de tilleul.

Il y a enfin l’excellent des jeux des acteurs, enfin plutôt des actrices car l’acteur n’est guère qu’un corps nu au démarrage et subrepticement rhabillé à la fin, mais il ne sert pas à grand-chose vraiment. Les actrices sont par contre hyper super vipère virulentes et venimeuses et tout le suc mortel de la morsure de ces femmes exhale une odeur de recuit et de surcuit et de réchauffé car la vengeance est un plat qui se mange mijoté puis réchauffé, comme le ragoût de lapin aux pruneaux, peut-être d’ailleurs an argent car on parle ici de suceurs de sang de bonnes et d’expéditions punitives contre le vampire patronal, car à la différence du café qui bouillu est foutu, le tilleul au gardénal surchauffé ou complètement refroidi fonctionne de toute façon entre les mains d’expertes de la haine sociale.

Et on doit dire que ces deux bonnes et leur madame de maîtresse, question haine sociale, ne font pas dans la dentelle. Jean Genêt non plus qui sent plutôt la corde à cent lieues à la ronde, même si on ne doit pas parler de corde dans la maison d’un pendu. Et on en revient à l’échafaud squelettique de cette maison que l’on nous fait tournoyer sur scène pour nous donner le tournicoti tournicoton, le torticolis torticolon comme un vestige de vertige devant les ambitions criminelles frustrées des deux bonnes qui sont doublées en beauté par leur maîtresse de madame.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Etrangement, une pièce avec une seule actrice sur scène, donc une femme, qui raconte l’expérience d’une femme du Maghreb qui de bergère dans la montagne devient prostituée et enfin femme d’Imam après un séjour de trois ans en prison pour prostitution de luxe, c’est une pièce que certains diraient une pièce de femme, surtout qu’elle est écrite par une femme.

Et pourtant je dirai que plus que le sort de cette femme, plus que l’aliénation à laquelle elle est confrontée, l’exploitation qui est la sienne, l’ignorance au bord de la naïveté, voire de la sottise qui devient rapidement du savoir-faire, de la roublardise, du courage même, tout cela ne raconte pas tant le sort de cette femme que l’immense sous-développement social, mental, moral de l’homme, des hommes dans cette société maghrébine moderne confrontée à une civilisation de la consommation et de la liberté, et dans ce cas de la jouissance des femmes en tant que simples objets, de la jouissance des hommes qui n’a de fin qu’en soi, qui n’ont de fin qu’en eux-mêmes.

Et justement on voit une transformation dans ces hommes du berger de la montagne qui utilise cette fillette en lui faisant croire que rien n’arrivera, à son père qui la chasse quand elle devient enceinte de ses jeux avec le berger voisin, aux serveurs du restaurant où elle travaille qui l’utilisent comme un accessoire, au fils de la riche famille où elle est devenue bonne qui la prend comme si elle n’était qu’une serviette définitivement hygiénique qu’on jette comme un mouchoir en papier après usage, au sheik d’Arabie et ses amis qui font d’elle une partenaire de tous les plaisirs interdits dans le jeu marital mais qui soudoient les flics et s’en vont en laissant les prostitués derrière pour les juges et la prison. Et justement le dernier sera l’Imam qui l’épouse et accepte de tricher la tache de sang au drap pour faire croire à sa mère qu’elle était bien vierge.

Les hommes qu’elle satisfait, qu’elle prend, qu’elle utilise pour apprendre, qu’elle satisfait parce qu’ils lui apportent le avoir qu’elle n’a jamais reçu, ces hommes sont bien l’objet de l’histoire, surtout qu’elle s’adresse régulièrement à un homme spécial, à savoir Allah à qui elle fait des confidences sans la moindre illusion mais comme pour se rassurer sur son sort, sur sa vie. C’est bien l’homme qui est le centre de sa vie, le seul objet de ses désirs et de ses entreprises. Elle ne change jamais de cap et ne s’intéresse qu’à ces hommes qui lui permettront de bien vivre, dans le luxe même, d’apprendre à se faire une vie malgré tous les obstacles et tous les traquenards.

Cela prouve, s’il en était besoin, que la femme dans cette société que l’on dit profondément misogyne est la vraie maîtresse du jeu et que son pire ennemi est la belle-mère plus que tout autre personne, et plus encore tous les hommes tout autour. Dans une société où la femme est reléguée à la deuxième place, c’est en fait la femme qui gouverne avec des moyens subtils, parfois gros comme des maisons au milieu du chemin quand il s’agit des belles-mères, et pour qui même le voile noir le plus intégral qui ne laisse visible qu’un seul œil devient un allié qui lui permet d’échapper à la concupiscence et à la convoitise, et donc à la bêtise et à la violence des hommes. Ce sont bien les hommes qui sont les inférieurs, quelque part les bêtes de la fable.

C’est cette dimension surprenante qui me parle le plus : le monde musulman marche sur la tête, les pieds dans les nuages et le smains dans la fange du chemin car les femmes laissent les hommes à leurs affaires car elles savent qu’elles auront le dernier mot le soir dans l’intimité, parfois même exhibée, de leur chambre, de leur lit, de leurs émois sexuels après une rude journée où l’homme n’aura pas pu regarder ni voir la moindre parcelle de corps féminin. Supplice de Tantale par manque absolue de l’eau qui pourrait satisfaire leur soif, si ce n’est parfois un œil voilé comme une goutte d’eau qui leur tombe sur le front. Pauvres hommes.

Cette pièce, et sa comédienne, montrent à merveille comment la femme musulmane peut devenir un repère dans le monde d’aujourd’hui surtout quand elle règne au cœur même du repaire des hommes privés de toute féminité.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

MAUDIT MODIGLIANI.

Voilà un film des plus étranges sur un artiste des plus méconnus et mystérieux du 20e siècle. Réfugié italien, juif par-dessus le marché, il fait tâche dans le milieu plus qu’étrange des peintres du début du 20e siècle. Il les côtoie tous, mais il se construit des rivalités inutiles mais qu’il ne sait pas gérer alors qu’il en a besoin pour simplement pouvoir respirer malgré sa tuberculose. Sa rivalité avec Picasso est légendaire mais elle n’est qu’une suite de gamineries d’enfants tout autant perdus que gâtés sinon pourris qui n’ont jamais entendu dire que l’on ne doit pas jalouser son voisin. Ils se font mal parce qu’ils ne savent pas se faire du bien.

Ce milieu est perclus d’alcoolisme, de drogue (l’opium en ce temps-là), de folie plus ou moins bien réglée ou gérée en un temps où la camisole de force était le tranquillisant le plus courant. Entre absinthe et opium mon cœur balance et tombe souvent en plein milieu dans le délirium tremens galopant. La sexualité y est débridée et sans vraie frontières entre le droit et le courbe, le plat et le bossu, le creux et le bombé. Picasso semble lui avoir été une exception qui n’aimait pas l’humour dans ce domaine.

Mais le film se centre sur la liaison amoureuse que Modigliani entretient avec Jeanne qu’il n’aura même pas le temps d’épouser après avoir publié les bans car quelques heures plus tard il sera agressé et mourra peu de temps après. Tout le monde sait la fin tragique de Jeanne, une double fin tragique, mais le film est presque discret sur ce sujet pour éviter de toute évidence le mélodrame.

Il n’en reste pas moins que dans ce milieu des peintres qui font l’histoire de l’art, la préoccupation majeure est de survivre dans un monde de compétition si sauvage que c’est une vraie jungle emplie de caïmans et de lions, avec en plus tout autour les hyènes et les vautours de la rue qui sont prêts à tuer pour une pièce de cinq sous. Le monde de l’art est montré comme le monde des caprices les plus vains et les plus sots mais des caprices qui font avancer l’art d’inspirations nouvelles qui peuvent être de génie et n’auraient jamais été sans ce milieu d’araignées toutes enfermées dans le même panier.

Une tranche de vie artistique qui a probablement en grande partie disparue, non pas parce qu’il n’y a plus de peintres mais parce que les techniques et le mode de vie et de communication ont été parcourus par tant de changements que la jungle est devenue une mégapole parcourue d’un vent de panique à une heure de pointe.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

This book is going to be very surprising to many readers because it more or less tells the true story of millions of young people of the Baby Boom who got tired of western narrow morality and hierarchical alienating if not frustrating and castrating society in the West up to 1968 when the Hippie movement, Bob Dylan and a few others broke the mould and left these young people without a model. So they moved out. You have to understand most of these movers were from the middle class, and even at times the upper middle class. The poor did not even have the idea, certainly not the opportunity, of moving out. The chains were too heavy.

The most surprising fact concerning these emigrants out of the west is that they looked for both exotic cultures and practices and at the same time the most esoteric beliefs they could think of, in fact not think at all, they could let themselves be captured by. Being from that generation but from the working class, under the lower middle class, I could not move out that easily; So I went to Africa on a cooperation program, then I went to the USA on a personal working program, and then to the USA again on an exchange university program. My freewheeling experiences remained in Europe, including some working summer camps in East Germany, after ten or twelve summers spent on farms, working day after day, especially Sundays. It is only more recently that I moved to the vast Orient, Sri Lanka, to Buddhism and a three months placement in a Buddhist temple.

My experience makes me understand Stephen Batchelor’s enterprise at that time and also makes me understand that some time along the way his quest will have to make him scream “Fake! Sham!” but I fully understand that he will and does retain the essential learning he accumulated during his time in the Tibetan, or Korean Buddhist institutions, and that heritage is the Dhammapada, though he has a slightly wider approach than just the Dhammapada or even the Abhidhamma. But we must understand that Stephen Batchelor rewrites or even rewires history. His whole escape at the beginning was nothing but a full submissive adherence to what he found there, even if today when he writes he seems to be taking some distance with some of the most foolish Tibetan assertions.

“. . . in the Kangyur and Tengyur (the Tibetan Buddhist canon). There you would learn that the earth was a triangular continent in a vast ocean dominated by the mighty Mount Sumeru, around which the sun, the moon and planets revolved. Driven by the force of good and bad deeds committed over beginningless former lifetimes, beings were repeatedly reborn as gods, titans, humans, animals, ghosts or denizens of hell until they had the good fortune to encounter and put into practice the Buddha’s teaching, which would enable them to escape the cycle of rebirth forever. Moreover, as followers of the Mahayana (Great Vehicle), Tibetan Buddhists vowed to keep taking birth out of compassion for all sentient beings until every last of them was freed.” (p. 6)

And he knows he believed in all that at once and without any pangs of questioning. As he says “It was prompted by my craving for belief.” (p. 7) Hence to escape that eternity of dramatic if not tragic or purely inhuman rebirths he accepted the idea that life is nothing but suffering, a cyclical repetition of suffering from which you can only escape via “nirvana” that is to say perfection in thoughts, speech, acts and all other elements of one’s life that brings enlightenment, or awakening, and makes you step out of this hellish life of all humans. What’s even worse, a good enlightened and awakened Buddhist who could escape into nirvana and become a Buddha has the duty to serve his fellow human victims and refuse to take nirvana and vow to stay in the rebirth cycle to serve again as a Boddhisattva till the very last human being is finally saved from this “suffering.” Even the worst ideologies advocated in the Middle Ages by the Christian churches, or by some Christian sects up to today, or by Islam in its most fundamentalist versions have not put forward such a bleak picture since for a good Christian who has suffered a lot, like Job, death will be a reward and a liberation in the Christian dimension, or for a good Muslim who has fought for the triumph of his faith will be transported into paradise after his death with the compensatory gift of a few virgins.

In that line of total mental alienation the Tibetan Book of the Dead is a masterpiece that anyone who does not want to become a bigot of any faith has to read and ponder upon. It is a real salvation when you finally understand that all that is nothing but a mental construction meant to deal with a hostile world and totally out of touch today in a world that is not exactly dominated by the survival of the species, at least in numbers, since the real agenda should be to reduce the numbers.

But let’s enter one more minute into Stephen Batchelor’s nightmare.

“Every morning I could become the glorious and mighty bull-headed Yamantaka: ‘with a dark azure body, nine faces, thirty-four arms, and sixteen legs, of which the right are drawn in and the left extended. My tongue curls upward, my fangs are bared, my face is wrinkled with anger, my orange hair bristled upward. . . I devour human blood, fat, marrow, and lymph. My head is crowned with five frightful dried skulls and I am adorned with a garland of fifty moist human heads. I wear a black snake as a brahmin’s thread. I am naked, my belly is huge and my penis erect. My eyebrows, eyelashes, beard, and body hair blaze like the fire at the end of time.’” (p. 23)

This is one of the essential source of cannibalism, vampirism and were-wolfism that have roots deep in the oldest religious devised by Homo Sapiens when confronted to the ice age, receding waters, advancing ice, and then the thawing period with mounting waters, receding ice, and all kinds of dramatic transformations in both cases. These Homo Sapiens colonies all over the world devised blood lust and religions based on that lust. Tibetan Buddhism has not been able to let go of this pre-Neolithic heritage. His conclusion though is brutal:

“I was being indoctrinated. Despite a veneer of open, critical inquiry Geshe Rabten [his master at the time] did not seriously expect his students to adopt a view of Buddhism that differed in any significant respect from that of Geluk [a Tibetan branch of sect of Buddhism] orthodoxy. I realized that to continue my training under his guidance entailed an obligation to toe the party line. This felt like a straightjacket.” (p. 45)

If I have insisted on this side of the book, and I could quote it a lot more, it is because Stephen Batchelor’s project is to desacralize and de-divinize Buddhism, to purge this deeply human and vastly creative philosophy and humanism that Buddhism is of all the feudal (if not frankly slave-age), medieval apparatus of subjugation and submission and subservience imposed on the faithful with two classes in the traditional (today exiled) Tibetan society: on top the professional monastic people who produce nothing and live on what they get from society, from the other class (in one word that is called parasitic exploitation in my dictionary) and the second class of those who work, produce what the monastic population needs to live in comfort (at the height of Buddhism in Tibet before the Chinese take-over 25% of the male population were in the monasteries living on what the rest of the population produced, especially male children to make this monastic nursery perennial), and eventually, not necessarily, what they, the populace, need to survive.

Stephen Batchelor states the existence or development of a third class in the world with the spreading of Tibetan Buddhism to the middle or upper middle class in the West. These refuse to follow the superstitious bigotry that thrives under the blanket of the smiling Dalai Lama. His smile charms but his real thought and action harm, to plagiarize an English motto from English Buddhist monks when the Dalai Lama visited this country. And Stephen Batchelor only considers the Mahayana Tibetan sphere. He should have studied the Hinayana (Lesser Vehicle) or Theravada Buddhism of Sri Lanka and South East Asia and he would have learned how Buddhist communities in Laos, with the help of UNESCO is building a real economy with their know-how and their knowledge in order to become sustainable as a community without having to rely on the people around them to feed them. That will not change their relation with the population but that will provide the monasteries with means to develop, create, produce some added value and even promote tourism with meditation camps and training sessions in Buddhist arts and music, not to mention the services they will be able to provide their surrounding population.

When this is understood we can wonder what remains behind, what Stephen Batchelor retains from Buddhism in his present life, and I will say a lot and I can only be skimpy on that lot.

There remains a long and serious attempt at reconstructing the real life of the real Buddha and the book is quite clear about his origin, not the son of a king but of what would be a provincial governor within a wider kingdom, with many wars around and inside and many plots and counterplots from one family against another at the top of this aristocratic slave and feudal agrarian society. You will have to read the book yourself because it is enlightening, awakening too. You may not reach nirvana but you will definitely start understanding how as soon as the Buddha was dead from some kind of slow poisoning a recent convert (a convert who was understanding there was going to be a free position in the hierarchy of this new religion that had important supporters and providers, or who was even preparing that free position behind the wings), a certain Kassapa, plainly took over the order and made it into a lasting religion though it will be rejected from India later on and pushed into Tibet to the North and abandoned to its own in Sri Lanka and South East Asia from which it moved to China to become the Zen tradition, to Korea and to the islands Taiwan and Japan.

Personally I am connected to the Theravada tradition that has no problem with living without gods, since they reject the concept and they have purified Buddhism from all the feudal discourse and practices and insist on the fact the monastic population is there to serve society with education, healthcare, benevolence, refuge, knowledge and so many other services, including of course meditation practiced to relieve the mind and the body of real suffering and to help people to find happiness and eventually liberation in “nibbana” (Pali word for Sanskrit nirvana)

Stephen Batchelor does not question the anthropological dimension of this Kassapa. From an old religion, Hinduism, with even older religions behind like the Bon religion in Tibet, emerges a new religion, the preaching of the Buddha, essentially carried by one man. When this man dies a self-appointed successor turns that potential project into a stabilized institution, Buddhism. In the same way from the old religion Judaism with older religions behind, emerges a new religion, the preaching of Jesus and his direct half brothers and some friends. The four brothers will die: one, Jesus crucified by the Romans at the demand from the priests of the Jewish temple; the second, James, stoned to death by decision of the High Priest of the Jewish Temple; and the two other brothers, Theudas (“Jude”) and Cleophas (Simon or Simon “son of” Cleophas – not Joseph) martyred. And then a self-appointed apostle of the gentiles, Paul, ex-Saul, invents Christianity out of a fully rewritten story. And later on from the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition and Abraham’s son from his slave servant, Ishmael, will arise another religion with the intervention of the self-appointed prophet Mohamed. What did these Indian and Middle-Eastern societies (and Roman Empire) find in these religions being born from older traditions? Why in these two cases three men took over the drama or the tragedy of death to transform what was essentially a personal, even if collective, venture, into a global (at least at the time) institution? Stephen Batchelor does not answer this question though it is always present behind.

Then the main Buddhist principles he retains are simple.

First of all think by yourself (p. 33 and 39). Zen Buddhism cultivates doubt (p. 65 and 71). And this is based on one of the oldest discourses of the Buddha, the famous Kalamas discourse.

“The Buddha: . . . Do not go by oral traditions, by lineage of teaching, by hearsay, by a collection of scriptures, by logical reasoning, by inferential reasoning, by reflection on reasons, by the acceptance of a view after pondering it, by the seeming competence of the speaker, or because you think ‘The ascetic is our teacher.’ But when you know for yourselves, ‘These things are blamable; these things are censured by the wise; these things, if undertaken and practiced, lead to harm and suffering,’ then you should abandon them. . . These things are wholesome, these things are blameless; these things are praised by the wise; these things if undertaken and practiced, lead to welfare and happiness, then you should engage in them.”

It is obvious from this very old discourse that the Buddha did not privilege “suffering,” in Pali “dukkha,” and that this “dukkha” is set in parallel with “happiness,” in Pali “sukha,” the two words being built on antagonist roots “du-“ and “su-“ with the suffix “-kha.” “du-” applies to something that has a negative dimension including that could cause injury or pain. “su-“ is absolutely parallel and applies to something that has a positive dimension including that could bring joy and happiness, if not bliss. Unluckily in standard Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism only “dukkha,” translated since Rhys Davids, the founder of the Pali Text Society in London at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, as “suffering” recuperating the narrow Tibetan vision, the identical Hindu vision in India and the good old Christian tradition of the valley of tears drowning in a sea of lachrymal fluids, if not blood.

This false and misleading translation sticks to Buddhism because the Dalai lama himself and the global Tibetan Budhhist organization are imposing it in the media. My practice of Theravada Buddhism is in perfect agreement with the Kalamas discourse: both “dukkha” and “sukha” have to be taken into account. Life is an alternating succession of positive and negative elements.

Then, and Stephen Batchelor is not clear enough on this subject, man has six senses and not five, the mind being the sixth sense. In Theravada Buddhism and in the Budhha’s teaching it is quite clear that the world is a reality outside ourselves that cannot be denied at all. Then this world is only captured by us via our six senses. The five material sensorial organs are simple to understand: hearing, sight, smell, taste, touch (plus all kinds of internal sensors in the body). But the mind is difficult to understand. The mind is attached to the neo-cortex that builds it as a virtual construct from the circumstantial, existential, experiential and situational surrounding context as received as nervous impulse from all the senses. This mind, like the neo-cortex is first of all flexible, adaptable, and can be remapped according to new circumstantial, existential, experiential and situational surrounding contextual elements. This is in perfect agreement with the first precept from the Buddha: you must become aware of the exact context in which you are and at the same time the exact state in which you are.

As long as the mentalists of this world go on making the mind something immaterial, they will run into the dichotomy body-mind, or body-soul, or body-psyche, or whatever other pair of concepts seen as antagonist. The conception of the mind emerging here is essential.

It is the surrounding conditions and the real state in which I am in these surrounding conditions that produce via the work of my six senses a behavior, an action, a thought, or whatever initiative, be it willful, instinctive, unconscious or anything else, my mind and my body will take. Stephen Batchelor is finally, along with others, understanding that the Buddha never negated the “self.” In fact Stephen Batchelor does not insist enough on the three basic concepts of Buddhism. First, “anicca” and the observation that everything is changing, that nothing is permanent. This concept is often translated “impermanence.” If nothing is permanent, then second everything is going through successive cycles or birth-life-death-rebirth. The point is that it is simple to understand that for a plant that grows from a seed and produces more seeds before dying. It is the same for man. Every single experience will have a beginning, a development and an end and there is not reason to suffer, because, to take one common example in the field of Buddhism, the birth of a love affair is pure bliss, except to bliss-haters, and the love affair itself is pure bliss, even if with some difficult moments, except of course for bliss-bashers, and the end of a love affair, no matter how, has to be a simple event because nothing is eternal. So this love affair will end in a divorce, in a separation if we are speaking of a married couple of any kind. It can also just change from a very passionate physical affair to a very passionate mental and spiritual affair. In fact it can also be the reverse. Or it can also be the fact that the two people decide conjointly that they have to follow their own tracks that lead them to two different trails, but the love affair has been bliss and the separation is leading to more bliss.

Then “dukkha” is nothing but the couple “dukkha-sukha,” this cycle of necessary change in life and the acceptance of this change. A pain always covers a joy and a joy always carries a pain. Some can even enjoy a blissful moment so much that it becomes painful to them, and vice versa, some can enjoy a pain so much that they find it exquisite.

If we accept this “dukkha-sukha” emerging from “anicca” in the surrounding physically real and mentally virtual conditions the result is the emergence of the fact that nothing in reality, in real life is the same thing in two successive moments. That is “anatta” in fact badly translated as “non-self” or “not-self” or “unself.” Another word is needed, though I am for keeping the Pali concept and developing a lexicon. But we could think of “existential transient essence.” We must understand our mind can develop the concept of dog, but it is a concept not a permanent essence because there are dozens of different species, and each individual dog is different from all others even from all others in his own species, and every single dog is the locale of a cycle of birth-life-with-reproduction-death-rebirth-in-the-puppies, and at each moment that particular dog is different from what it was a minute ago and what it will be in a minute.

Then “awakening” is nothing mysterious, no trouble at all to understand.

When we accept what I have, along with Stephen Batchelor, explained awakening is pure bliss because it is first realistic about what is around me and what I am at one moment and what I could be at another moment, and the same about everyone else around me, Then it is the determination by my fully awake, or aware, concentrated and willful, equanimous and empathetic mind of a course of action, or thinking, that will make me what I will have to be for the time this situation will last. This can be bliss or danger and pain. The end is never programmed in some computer and you are free to build your happiness or your unhappiness, even if some may say that you are free to choose to accept the happiness or the unhappiness the world imposes onto or proposes to you. Bliss is the result of serendipity, though at times pain can be the result of the very same accidental discovery called serendipity. I was always so fascinated by this guest house, hotel and restaurant in Sigiriya, Sri Lanka, whose name was Serendipity, in the middle of the fields and the jungle with wild elephants roaming around at night.

The main requirement here is that we get rid of our addictive, compulsive, neurotic, obsessive attachments that are often nothing but good or bad habits that cannot produce happiness because happiness is necessarily a construct, something we each one of us at each moment of our lives construct with our own hands and our own minds.

That leads us to Stephen Batchelor’s conclusion:

“I think of myself as a secular Buddhist who is concerned entirely with the demands of this age (saeculum) no matter how inadequate and insignificant my responses to these demands might be. And if in the end there does turn out to be a heaven or nirvana somewhere else, I can see no better way to prepare for it.” (p. 240)

His bet “à la Blaise Pascal” is in a way a relapse into believing. The very principles he has been defending of the awareness of the real complex context of each moment of life should prevent him from this casuistic remark. He has to be a realist and say, and that’s what I personally say, if that eventually did pop up, I will consider it then. That will only be one more river to cross. And the Buddha explained that when we build a raft to cross a river we do not take the raft along for the next river and we leave it behind for the next person who will want to cross the river. If there is another river ahead we will build another raft then, or we might have to swim across it. “I know each day will bring its task.” (Helen Hunt Jackson, 1830, Amherst, 1885, San Francisco)

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Il n'y a pas en France une seule école ou classe que je connaisse où il n'y a pas une brebis galeuse, un mouton noir, un vilain canard parmi les élèves ou les professeurs.

Je ne pourrai jamais oublier tel élève catalogué en conseils des professeurs (sans parents et sans élèves) comme gauchiste parce que ses parents ont fait 68 ou fument du shit, ou encore tel autre comme fasciste ou quasi-fasciste parce que ses parents sont connus comme de droite, rien que de droite dans un fief de gauche.

Et qu'on ne croit pas que cela n'existe pas à l'Université et surtout dans les entreprises, les administrations. La liste est longue et n'a pas de fin.

Le moindre détail qui dérange entraine des ostracismes parfois musclés et surtout administratifs. Devrais-je parler du cas d'un étudiant de BTS audio-visuel à Roubaix?

Indochine a raison d'avoir commandé ce clip et il a d'autant plus raison que les ministres de l'Education Nationale, d'avant et d'aujourd'hui s'empressent de le condamner.

Et que dire des inspecteurs, ces harceleurs de métier dnas l'Education Nationale contre les professeurs qui n'appliquent pas les instructions officielles, ou simplement qui portent une cravate qui déplait ou acceptent de visionner en classe un film choisi par les élèves et qui déplait aux hiérarques de la mise des cerveaux au carré. Et les inspectrices ne sont pas mielleures.

Oh bien sûr qu'il y a des gens honnêtes et que les harceleurs sont une minorité mais les majorités silencieuses sont trop souvent complaisantes avec cette minorité de toute façon dominante.

Je dois même avoir une thèse d'état remise sine die à la Sorbonne Paris 4 sur le diktat, deux fois, de Claude Delmas qu'elle était trop "programmatique" alors qu'elle traitait des stratégies cognitives à l'école, ce qui ne pouvait pas éliminer le fonctionnement hiérarchique exaspéré de l'institution de formation des jeunes Français, ou d'ailleurs étrangers car l'école est ouverte à tous les enfants résidant en France, plus qu'ouverte: obligatoire.

N'est-ce pas du harcèlement que d'interdire aux enfants d'une oriogine non française d'employer leurs langues dans l'école de la République et de ne pas leur fournir la formation dans leurs cultures et langues d'origine.

C'est que nos ancêtres les gaulois sont toujours les ancêtres de beaucoup de gens qui n'ont absolument pas une goutte de sang celtique ou indo-européen dans leurs veines. N'est-ce pas là du harcèlement? Poser la question c'est y répondre, même si monsieur Claude Delmas n'est pas d'accord et pense que l'université ne doit pas poser de telles questions.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Un de ces films que seuls les Français savent faire. Trois ou quatre hommes d’un côté et deux ou trois femmes de l’autre. Ajoutez à cela un garçon dans un couple divorcé et une fillette qui n’est en fait pas légitime, mais acceptée par le mari qui n’est pas le père. Le père du garçon a une liaison avec une prostituée et le père réel de la fillette revient pour voir sa fille et se trouve entre le tronc et l’écorce.

Tout le reste n’est alors qu’habillage, avec un peu, très peu de déshabillage, et surtout trois toutous blancs trainés par une dame anonyme, et un chien noir abandonné par sa maîtresse poursuivie par des flics et ce chien filera à l’anglaise un jour que ces maîtres adoptifs font l’amour dans une forêt qui pourrait être n’importe quelle forêt de France, sauf celle des Landes. L’habillage à la française est de la haute couture car on ne voit pas le fil a bâtir et on remarque à peine le patchwork dramatique largement amplifié par un montage parfois si bout à bout et elliptique que l’on pourrait développer un peu de torticolis.

Que reste-t-il quand la prostituée se découvre enceinte et décide de partir et que le père biologique de la fillette décide de partir après avoir vu sa fille et avoir été presque écharpé par la mère. Mais après cela que reste-t-il dans cette histoire, sinon que les deux sur le départ prennent le même train pour une destination inconnue.

Mais alors pourquoi regarder ce film ? Car c’est une tranche de vie quotidienne à la française rien qu’avec des couples boiteux, des couples dépareillés et des couples décomposés. C’est ça la France, le seul pays au monde qui a un Président qui vit maritalement avec une femme avec laquelle il n’est pas marié. Si vous voulez comprendre un tant soit peu la France c’est dans cette soupe brownienne hétérosexuelle que vous la trouverez. Et dire que bientôt il faudra ajouter un peu de sauce quantique gay et lesbienne. Là ça va devenir vraiment amusant. Mais franchement excitant même si un peu déjanté.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

INSPIRATION CHRISTO-BOUDDHISTE.

La mort a longtemps été une tragédie et un certain Ray Kurzweil en fait en plus un mélodrame de boulevard. Heureusement qu’on aura bientôt un milliers de nano-robots dans les veines pour nous rendre éternels.

Mais ce film veut aller plus loin que cela. Aussi il reprend une très vieille légende judéo-païenne qui veut que les gens qui voient le mort de très près, et même carrément de l’autre côté de la vie, et reviennent de cet autre côté, ont été choisis par je ne sais quelle dimension divine qui fait la loi entre la vie et la mort et ils sont alors les messagers de cette fin ultime, enfin de ce moment où la vie cesse et où commence ce que personne ne sait puisque personne ne peut prouver qu’au-delà il n’y a rien ni qu’au-delà il y a quoi que ce soit. Vous savez, personne n’en est revenu pour nous dire.

Le messager n’a en fait qu’une qualité que personne d’autre n’a : il est capable de voir avant la mort de quelqu’un que ce quelqu’un va mourir et le film nous refait le coup de Simon Wells dans son film « Time Macihine » d’il y a une dizaine d’années. On peut éviter cette mort, protéger ce mourant une fois, mais de toute façon ce mourant devra mourir et donc s’il en réchappe une fois par notre entremise, il n’en réchappera pas une deuxième fois, ou une troisième fois ; de toute façon quand c’est l’heure de mourir il faut mourir. Les autres ne peuvent que simplement accompagner.

Cette légende se greffe aujourd’hui sur la diffusion du bouddhisme tibétain dans le monde, un bouddhisme, et c’est le seul, qui est construit entièrement sur l’au-delà de la mort, sur la réincarnation, « rebirth » en anglais, et il n’y a que sept possibilités : échapper à cette réincarnation car on a atteint le niveau de perfection mentale qui permet cette évasion et c’est pour l’éternité. Alors l’énergie vitale qui est en nous, va rejoindre le cœur central de l’énergie cosmique. Le nirvana en un mot. Autrement, si nous n’avons pas atteint la perfection mentale et éthique, nous avons le « choix » entre six possibles réincarnations : en être divin, mais pour simplement la longueur d’une vie ; en Asura de nature divine mais jaloux de tous les autres dieux, et temporaire de toute façon ; en être humain, seul cas où le réincarné pourra améliorer son mérite (ses atouts qui déterminent s’il doit être réincarné ou peut partir dans le nirvana) ; en animal mais sans la possibilité d’améliorer votre mérite ; en monstre assoiffé de sang et de chair, bonjour le cannibalisme et le vampirisme, le sloups garous sont les deux à la fois ; et finalement directement en enfer comme soi-même pour une bonne vie de torture.

Cette résurgence dans notre monde de la peur de la mort fait qu’alors on ne peut plus vivre d’aucune façon. Et le film montre comment le pauvre Nathan, séparé de sa femme après la mort dans son berceau de leur fils Paul, devenu le messager de la mort car à huit ans il est mort et ressuscité grâce à la médecine moderne, puisqu’il sait que sa femme Claire va mourir, l’accepte et donc change de vie, change sa vie, revient auprès de sa femme et de sa fille pour devenir celui qui va accompagner son épouse jusqu’à ce moment ultime que sera sa mort, en même temps que leur fille qu’il devra prendre en charge après cette mort annoncée. Tout est vu de ce point de vue, jamais de celui possible de Claire qui d’ailleurs ne le croirait pas ou croirait que son cher ex-époux est devenu maboule.

L’humanité est à ce point entre deux périodes historiques. Avant, quand l’homme vivait moins de cinquante ans et quand la mort était un fait quotidien ou presque. On mourrait, c’était le grand départ, on savait que cela devait venir. On n’avait pas le temps d’en devenir traumatisé. Et après, depuis que l’homme vit plus de 80 ans, depuis que l’homme prend sa retraite quand ses enfants sont encore en formation, depuis que l’on a au moins trois générations, sinon quatre, qui vivent en même temps, la mort est devenue une tragique erreur de la nature. On recherche partout les moyens de ne pas mourir et on recherche partout les mythes qui permettent d’accepter de mourir, d’accepter la mort des autres. C’est là que le bouddhisme tibétain nous envahit la conscience et ce film est une leçon des quatre nobles vérités de ce Bouddhisme : préparez-vous à la mort en considérant que chaque instant de vie n’est qu’un drame qui finit toujours mal. Le bouddhisme tibétain à la sauce occidentale est une réécriture de la vallée des larmes des judéo-chrétiens d’antan.

Ce film contient quelques moments très forts mais grosso-modo c’est une vision plutôt désespérante de la mort. Jamais la question fondamentale n’est posée : ai-je réalisé le potentiel qui est en moi quand je meurs ? Etrangement cette dimension contenue dans le bouddhisme canonique du Sri Lanka ou de l’Asie du Sud-est, le bouddhisme original ou presque originel, est totalement effacée et on ne voit plus que la mort et un au-delà indécis pour des gens qui ont perdu toute religion – quel drame suprême ! – mais jamais on ne fait le bilan de la vie qui précède cette mort. La seule survie possible et tangible reste ce que l’on laisse derrière soi et qu’on ne peut pas emporter en paradis. Encore faudrait-il se demander ce que l’on laisse derrière soi. Cette absence rend ce film glauque.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU