GENESIS REJUVENATED by Carlo Suarès : Part 1

Part 1 : GENESIS REJUVENATED by Carlo Suarès - this episode features a reading of the book's brief introduction along with the opening chapter of this spectacular literary and spiritual effort. Originally written in French, then published in France in 1929 under the title La Nouvelle Création, Genesis Rejuvenated was not available in English until 1973; both publications are now rare. 

Genesis Rejuvenated was translated from the French by Edouard Roditi.

Before the Page, in successive episodes, will continue with the reading of Genesis Rejuvenated until listeners hear it all. 

La Nouvelle Création : Au Sans Pareil, Paris 1929

Genesis Rejuvenated : The Menard Press, London 1973

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Before we come to the page, before the first word is ever written down, or read, or listened to, there is a longing to connect. My name is Charlie Merhoff, your host here at Before the Page, a podcast featuring poetry, parable, fiction, and none words to echo our longing. Welcome to episode thirty-nine of Before the Page. What you are about to hear is a vision, a vision that brings us to the threshold of the golden age of humanity. It was composed nearly a century ago by Carlo Giuseppe Suarez. He was born in eighteen ninety two, Alexandria, Egypt, into a renowned Sephardic family. He died in Paris, July of 1976. Carlo Suarez was an architect, a painter, a kabbalist, a wizard of sorts, and a writer. He was the author of numerous essays and books, all originally penned in French. Here are some of the titles available in English Krishna Murti and the Unity of Man Chatana Bombay nineteen fifty. The Cipher of Genesis Stuart and Watkins London nineteen seventy The Song of Songs deciphered according to the original code of the Kabbalah nineteen seventy two Shambala The Resurrection of the Word nineteen seventy three Shambala Seferitzera nineteen seventy six Shambala The Second Coming of Reb Yehoshua, the rabbi called Jesus Christ, published posthumously in English in nineteen ninety four by Samuel Weiser, York Beach, Maine and Genesis Rejuvenated, which was originally published in nineteen twenty nine in Paris as La Nubel Creation, which did not become available in English until nineteen seventy three as a booklet offered by the Menard Press London. And it will be from Genesis Rejuvenated, this fifty eight page booklet read over successive episodes that before the page listeners will be hearing. Genesis Rejuvenated was brought into the English by the renowned Sephardic poet Eduard Roditi. We are going to open with the introduction that Carlo wrote in nineteen seventy three for the English translation. La Nuelle Creation was first published in French in Paris in 1929 and has never been reprinted. By now it has long been out of print. Soon after its first publication there was some talk of publishing an English edition of it, and Edouard Roditi, encouraged by John Middleton Murray, Sir Richard Rees, and other London friends who were then connected with the editing of the Adelphi, undertook an English translation which, like many other literary projects in those years of financial and political crisis, never saw the light of day. Some four decades later, however, typescripts of this translation turned up again in my own archives and in those of its translator, but we decided to revise them for the present publication, if only because the English language in the past half a century has undergone a considerable evolution. After re reading my original French text for the purpose of the present English edition, I decided, moreover, that its whole first chapter needed to be rewritten. The opening chapter of the present English text is thus entirely new and has never been published in French. If this book happens now to be reprinted in an English version, this may well be because it has meanwhile acquired in many ways a new significance. Its author has indeed been able in the last few years to develop his basis philosophy in a number of other published works of which this one remains, although he may not have been fully aware of it in 1929, the real forerunner. This philosophy consists in a revival of a very ancient science which is generally misunderstood or forgotten under the name of Kabbalah, and which is concerned with revealing the structure of universal energy. According to this science, the vital energy of the universe consists in the union of two opposing forces which become one, both centrifugal and centripetal, both explosive and compressive, known indeed to Taoist Chinese philosophers as Yin and Yang. Again, that was Carlos Soire's Paris nineteen seventy three. And here is the translator's note Edward Roditi Paris nineteen seventy three. I was barely twenty one years old when I translated La Nuel Creation. Sir Richard Rees, John Middleton, Murray, and George Orwell were encouraging me to do the job and the editors of the Adelphi planned to publish it as a pamphlet. By the time I had finished a year later, the political and financial crisis of the 30s led to the abandonment of this project. Forty years later, I chanced to read a recent issue of the American Periodical Tree, where I saw that works of Soirees are now being translated and published in English. This encouraged me to search in a trunk full of old papers stored in my sister's basement in Washington for the typescript of my old translation. I found it and communicated it to Anthony Rudolph, who decided to publish it. I then phoned my old friend Soarez, whom I had not seen for many years. Together we revised my translation. But Soarez then rewrote the whole first section of the French original, though in English, which I only edited and revised slightly. In spirit, Genesis rejuvenated, I feel needed to be published in English. Only readers familiar with William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell can appreciate its full significance. Again, that was Edouard Roditi Paris 1973. And so we begin Genesis Rejuvenated Chapter one Utterances from a living past The Sun I know not when I became truth. Was it the night when truth's silent voice was heard from hidden depths of the forest, while skies and earth and trees communed in timeless prayer with infinity? Or was it that brave noon pregnant with lust for conquest when my nakedness had made all armors become obsolete? Or that sweet morning bathed in flowers and colours, when the most intoxicating sunlight descended into my heart? The truth of immemorial timelessnesses had called to me unheard, and I no longer know when I answered its call. To hear was to become, and the flow of time is now drown in amnesia. Could night await the sun or disappear, never knowing it? Can sunlight but summon dancing shadows swift and fleeting? Oh to quarter my soul, to open it, slit it with a scalpel and light up this darkness so as to extirpate desires for eternal rebirths The birth The fugitive moment when night is no longer there and day not yet the disturbing moment to moment when mysterious darkness and mysterious light coexist and assert their mutual negations such is the becoming of truth. Had I expected to paint its portrait? The original unknown and unfelt anxiety had not been dispelled or understood. The positive emotional impact had not sent out sparks, nothing had happened when all was fulfilled. Later, much later, an activity took possession of me, so that I knew that I was and had always been inhabited. My astounded mind sought to witness its own creations, not heeding their clumsiness, and carefully noted all circumstantial evidence of a suspected happening. Any doubt would be fatal, yet doubt was the driving force so that the mind lost its way, not perceiving the reality of inspiration and hesitating between the real and the fictitious. The mind foolishly declared the proof is in the results. But what results are proofs in themselves and for that matter, what are the criteria for appreciation? The intellect's pleasure or disapproval, its partaking or not, what was that to me? Nothing created was still part of me. I was a renegade and denied all my own doings. Creation was always in the process of becoming. But the problem was solved at once. I had no skills and no tools. My disintegrated armors had left me innocent of all materials previously gathered along trodden paths and from past experiences. In vain I tried to plead guilty. In vain I attempted to gather past shadows of active sins, lost capacities for mistaken activities that had never been my real vocation. The intellect was granted no entry to the secret ways of materializations so new, so varied, slow and opaque, or quick and clear, warm and heavy, with golden fruit or dry, frozen and keen, all now loading my emptiness. I But where was the I? Thus recorded the course of events, a call, another call, physical sensations, emotions, desires, great joys, unconscious sufferings, search for happiness, wild and forlorn ramblings, new contacts with life, vibrations, swift impulses, and then a halt. The sudden halt of the intellect's intervention, labors, machinery, mental annihilation of clothing, furniture, houses, caves, shrines, pet ideas, prisons, categories, an imaginary leap over the moon, flight in reverse, skipping on one foot, limbering up, breaking, hacking into fragments, damn it all, and casting all into the furnace. Everything going full speed ahead at its best, then a crash against a brick wall, and my brain in smithereens, shooting down with no parachute, but nutcrackers to finish off the small bones. That, after all, was in a way a vicarious but quite enjoyable experience. The man I was said to be rested and in turn the assertion I am truth, whose meaning eluded and still eludes me seemed amply to satisfy the tumultuous it in me, heedlessly picking random words here and there for the sake of my exhibitionism Fear A day came. However, when all this was no longer enough, my mind needed to see my body involved in its adventure, and my body needed to accompany my mind. This was a time of abject servility, of yielding to what by all standards of reason was and was not sheer lunacy. I seemed to be inoculated against fear, and against the loss of it, as I see it today, a strange unnamed faith in a nothingness that is the all that is, a nothingness of self, of course. It was no merit of mine. I simply could not locate my ego. It must have been suspended in that fleeting space where heaven and hell coexist and negate each other, in the no man's land which is the home and presence of truth. Had I longed for a structure or image to dispel my uncertainties, fear would have been lying there in ambush, waiting for the split second that is the moment of reckoning and threatening me with sudden grinning death. But my luck was in my enjoyment of uncertainty. I loved the not knowing and the not belonging, and my Savior was thus my own stupid mind, which, unwilling to lose or to be lost, clung obstinately to its old habits. Imposing its authority like that of a strict accountant, the intellect forced every fantasy to become a clear materialization expressed and offered in the realm of weights and measures. Truth was thus made to become fictitious and fiction to become truth. Intent absorbed, swallowed up and lost in the flow of my own thoughts. I meanwhile forgot to panic and thus even forgot to be. But I now strongly suspect that I penetrated as a trespasser through the windows of my own abandoned habitation and then rebuilt it by destroying it in order to create it anew. When I emerged at long last from all this younger by countless centuries, I found myself surrounded by incalculable millions of words, all scattered in no particular order, while all the symbols of my own personal myth stood facing me as if they were still staring at my living past. A multidimensional sunlit space filled me, an inscrutable wanderer with an infinity of earthly gestures. The veiled antimony that had been a source of anguish was no more. Responding to these gestures and images, an eyeless vision now dissolved the all in nothingness. The fear which, for fear of itself, had deserted the blessed battleground of life now revived, coiled like a snake in the dark mental recesses of righteous humanitarian souls and pious pillars of their church. Responding now to a challenge, this fear could not help but reveal and declare itself. It thus appeared in the form of panic in the eyes of those witnesses who looked without seeing or saw without looking, who are too sterile to tolerate any mysteries and to flourish in their sense of ritual, liturgy, ceremony, rank, and accumulated honors. It likewise made its presence felt in the heavy load of morality and transgressions, in quests for truth and in its discovery, in good made manifest and in evil still unspoken. It appeared innumerable and singular as the fear of death. By now it has proliferated in the form of countless tidal squatters, all well entrenched behind their protective walls. Friends and companions, our island floats high above their fortresses and is driven ahead by indomitable desires. Desires I would smash a cage rather than come to terms with it. I would puncture inflated bladders rather than minister to them, and would knock down a man who relies on props rather than help support him. I would unleash all my desires, free every atom of their multitudinous oneness. I would be alone, yet in the company of all, I would love but not feel and awaken but not sleepwalk. I would be all worlds and one and one in nothing, I would not belong. Freedom is the all unknown. I would give and harvest my own gifts. I would be rich in imminent affection. I would love in order to love, but I would not know what love is. I would be confident in my vulnerability and rest on my own helplessness. I would ignore my own creations and be an apostate. I would thank and not demand, acknowledge grace and never pray. I would seek no peace but would rest in strife. I would absolve. Paltry desires had swept paltry desires away. Petty longings had tumbled over petty longings. All wishes had succumbed for lack of energy or had vanished in temporary satisfactions. A breach had thus been made in the outer defenses of consecrated morality, so that the way lay opened for the passage of mighty desires, superb and blood guilty warriors who, until now, had been confined in servitude. These now burst through the heavily restrictive gates of reasonable judgment and invaded their battlefield of flesh. The body which was said to be the man I was then awoke in flaming madness and shook off its chains of cosmic degradation. The dancing fury of nature's delights grasped in its inexplicable grip the vaguely hovering spirit of abstraction, but infinity, always equal to itself in its relentless emanations, never yielded for a moment. The fabulous struggle that ensued then nourished and vitalized both contending energies, and their constantly increased and accelerated speed and impetus, they penetrated each other so as to be borne by the single perception of their common embrace. Duration seemed to have been torn in shreds and a new timelessness was thereby created as heaven's visitations responded to hell's pleasures. The mental void between these two had at last been bridged by a speeding arrow that was blue. As it pierced my heart the voice of it then spoke to me. I am blue, it said, though my wake is purple. I am your ultimate desire born of your own death. I draw my words from your decaying flesh, but my strength is my own. I am you, but you are not I transcending the ruthless agitation of mankind, I feed myself on myself. We are going to close out this episode of Before the Page with the final piece in chapter one of Genesis Rejuvenated Discipline. Such was my ultimate desire in my regenerated blood. Now it leaps ahead and rushes along my beck and call. When I rest it is content, when I toil it is pleased. Both in success and in failure it remains satisfied. You may name it love or joy or rock, or heavens or reality or bliss or affirmation or necessity or freedom or resurrection or power or wanderings or goal or game or projection or forcefulness or the word or the all or fragmentation or whatever you will, it is it. I am a disciple of indeterminate love dependent on its probability. And thus concludes our first reading from Genesis Rejuvenated by Carlos Suarez, and we'll continue the next episode reading on with chapter two. Until then, be well. And again, if you want to reach out to BeforeThePage, that's easy enough to do. Go to before the page at gmail.com. Spell just how it sounds before the page at gmail.com. Be blessed.