A little talk for Axel’s funeral, February 21, 2003 in Oddernes kapell, Kristiansand.

"AXEL’S SPRITUALITY"
by NOEL COBB

There is a story from Gurdjieff's childhood that Axel and I found great delight in: When his grandmother was dying she called Little George to her bed. He was perhaps 8 years old. The old lady leant forward and whispered: "Listen, George, there is one thing I ask you. Don't grow up to be like other people. Don't do what everyone else does. Be different!" Then she died.

When all the relatives had gathered in the house to accompany the coffin to the local graveyard, no one could find George. Having hunted everywhere, they finally gave up and set out to the burial without him. Hiding in the cellar, he waited for them all to go, then crept out and ran to a woods overlooking the ceremony. The prayers were said, the coffin lowered into the grave and everyone returned to the house. Making sure they had all left, George went to the grave and danced on top of it.

And that, metaphorically, is what I imagine Axel would wish from us. For there are many ways of 'dancing on the grave' of someone you love. For to celebrate the extraordinary, we must invoke the extraordinary, not the ordinary. Try as he might, there was very little Axel did that was ordinary. People in ancient Greece might have said that here was a man who was inhabited by a rare and incorrigible Daimon. Ronnie Laing, who knew and loved Axel's untamed refusal to obey the blind dictates of a sleepwalking society, said to me: "Axel is a Free Spirit! 0ne of the very few there are!"

A Free Spirit never becomes a joiner or groupie, no at least of any orthodox school or sect. Axel's early experiences of Maurice Ficage, John Cook and Leonard Cohen taught him to be suspicious of giving his power to anyone else. At least, not to anyone living. With Gurdjieff it was a different matter. Gurdjieff was no longer alive. He was as much myth as fact.

For Axel it seems that Gurdjieff became Pure Metaphor – and perhaps the most important metaphor for the Living of Life and the Dying of Death. The prominence of this kind of mythic image in a life could be called a "Guiding Fiction". Proof of this for Axel's life is the last book of his career: GURU, a fantastical, wild, yet subtly accurate, tribute to the Genius or Daimon that pushed and propelled and drove Axel to be the person he was – all disguised as the story of a man called "Gurdjieff".

Axel's Daimon was the metaphorizing spirit that as a child made him see through the illusion of SOCOL – the teddybear-sized, made-of-chocolate Black Boy, who, in spite of his spectacular red hat and gold buttons, turned out to be Empty. It was the same spirit that later led him to see through the "empty" illusions of Maurice Ficage, John Cook and Leonard Cohen, as literal embodiments of Spiritual Authority. Once that was done, the rest was simple, though by no means easy. But the way was clear: he knew he had to find a source of wisdom in himself that he could trust. To get there he studied everything he could find of Those Who Were Reputed To Know.
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And he travelled – both around the planet and into the far reaches of inner space, all the time, I believe, keeping up a secret dialogue with that Spiritual Escape Artist, his Daimon, that paradox of many-mindedness who knew all along where they were going.
But does this make Axel "a spiritual person"? Not perhaps in any ordinary sense. But we can forget about "any ordinary sense". The ordinary sense says that to be spiritual is to reject matter and earthly things; to fly high above all the suffering and turmoil of this world. This is a view held by millions of 'spiritual' people of all religions. Even certain buddhists hold that the purpose of the Buddha's teaching is to find out how to escape ever being re-born again and to snuff out one's being forever, in the emptiness of nirvana. Icaros is the myth which teaches the folly of that kind of spirituality. Axel's daimon did not want him to go there. On the contrary, it pulled him further down into the world. It seems clear to me that Axel's project, after discovering the revelations of lysergic acid, had to do, not with ,growing up'-~ but with 'growing down'. The alchemists had a word for this.

in alchemical books the alchemists always refer to the Greater Work and the Lesser Work. The Lesser Work is called the "Spiritualization of Matter" and that is difficult enough. But even more profound is what comes later: "the Materialization of Spirit". It is a measure of Axel's great stature as a human being and a creative man that he chose to continue working and creating as long as he had access to any, however slight, form of communication. No longer able to communicate, he could just as well be dead. And so he died. That is not strange. Many Tibetan lamas do exactly that

How then did Axel's spirituality manifest? First of all it manifested in his Spiritedness – the way we say a wild horse is 'spirited' or full of spirit. Second, it manifested in his insight into Emptiness – what the Buddha called Interdependent origination. In the last pages of Livet Sett Fra Nimbus, Axel says that he doesn't see death as anything, neither darkness nor light. It is nothing. And nothing can not be spoken about. Here, he is either declaring his stance as a complete Nihilist or he is joining the long tradition of those belonging to the Path of Negation, like the Buddha, Plotinus and Dionysos the Areopagite, as well as our friend, R.D. Laing – who all said that the One, or God or the Great Silence or Emptiness, can not be described by any kind of verbal formulae, but only known through direct experience. You can choose how you take Axel's words, but I sense that by not talking about Death, by saying it is nothing, Axel implies something more than that Death or Nothingness is the end of speech. The Sufis say that he who knows does not speak.

The third way I see Axel's spirituality is in his understanding of the manyness of the human soul: that we are not single persons, but a multitude. The soul as a multiplicity of persons is an insight which has inspired some of the greatest works of world literature – just think of all the characters that comprise Shakespeare's soul, or Homer's or Dante's, or
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Victor Hugo's, BaIzac's or Ibsen's! Coming to grips with the soul's multiplicity is a truly spiritual experience because it is the beginning of all tolerance and compassion. Axel gives us a hint of this when he lets slip that he has a special affection for one of the characters in his books: the character of Lem, the "retired pensioner", the one who refers to himself as 'we': "for there are", Axel said, "many houses in Lem's world." Axel was still learning about Lem during his long illness; Lem was something special – even though Axel was not finally certain who he really was.
Some may disagree with me but I believe that the highest form of spirituality is a compassionate care for the world and all the beings on it. For Axel this took the form of a passionate concern for how we use language. He wanted to make us more aware of the implicit attitudes and thoughtpatterns buried in our grammar and speech – all the falsehood and lies which constitute what Gregory Bateson called "epistemological pollution"-in other words, the mystifications in language, resulting from an arrogance which claims we are distinct and separate from our world and not a part of it. Because of this arrogance, Axel said, we have fallen into a "conspiracy against each other and against that which we are inextricably a part of: this little planet and its biosphere". In the Nimbus tapes he says, I have always understood that if we do not get over this obstacle and if we do not see that a fundamental attitude shift must happen in our brains, we will continue to cut down the rainforests and destroy that nature with which we are so interwoven."

Axel has given us all something immeasurable through his life and his work, and it will be a long time if ever before anyone appears in this world with his unique, creative gifts. In the Nimbus tapes, Axel modestly says:

Egentlig kan jeg ikke gi noe svar på hvorfor jeg skriver. Inne i meg et sted
er det selvfølgelig også en slags profetisk ambisjon, men det er sånn som jeg
helst vil skåne mine lesere for. Men la oss si at jeg har en liten ambisjon,
iallfall i noen av de senere bokene, om å få folk til a trekke litt på
smilebåndet. For du kan gjøre verre skade her i verden enn å gi folk en god
latter.

Så, i denne gravalvorlige atmosfære, la oss huske spacebaby and refuzee, Lul
fra planet Kushtulk, som Axel siterer ved slutten av sin Nimbus fortelling om sitt liv, og trekke litt på smilebåndet – hvis det er ikke altfor smertefylt.

'Men alle er den samme story'n om veien som fører til Dampen og folkekrematoriet på Holbreins Plass.
Ovnen, som vi sier.
Resten?
Resten, Partner står skrivd i stiernene".


Link to: Leon Redler's letter read by Noel Cobb
TILBAKE TIL HOVEDMENY

Link: R.D. Laing

Foto:Profero
Robert E. Haraldsen i Oddernes kapell 2I.februar 2003
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