"Was there laughter around Mr. Gurdjieff?"

Paul Reynard, ill but still active, was visiting Seattle for the final time. Among a cluster of visitors from Portland, I sat through an unusually quiet, serious evening, as many of us labored to formulate something useful to ask Paul, while, we must assume, working diligently on ourselves. The air seemed heavy and a sadness entered me, since this could be the last time these young members, in a growing center far from New York, would be with someone who was "with Gurdjieff," and might speak about those days and atmospheres, long past. I found myself wondering: did this evening have to be this quiet, with, in my perceptions, undertows of fear? But I said nothing, contributing my share to the general heaviness.

Afterward, a senior figure in Seattle drove Paul to where he would sleep that night and I was in the back seat, behind Paul. A mile or so along our route, I finally asked the question I had wanted to ask, back in that ultra-heavy meeting.

"Paul, was there laughter around Mr. Gurdjieff?"

In a voice charged with feeling, he said, "Always!"

Then began a narrative I had never heard, of how skilled Mr. Gurdjieff was in leading the assembly into quiet inner reaches, into hushed silences, with just a few words. "Then, unexpectedly, a shift, perhaps to an even quieter place, so dense as to be painful. Yet, seconds later, a joke, a quip or bit of teasing, and everyone would roar with laughter!"

"There was," he said, "everything in that apartment, including profound tensions, from which there was escape only by deepening one's work. But often there was laughter."

"Living on the other side of Paris, well into the morning and with public transportation no longer functioning, I walked across Paris to my flat. As I walked I carried some of the atmosphere of our work together, there in Mr. Gurdjieff's apartment, and still I wasn't drunk. But finally that atmosphere began to wear off and by the time I put my key in the apartment door, then I was drunk."

Photo: G.I Gurdjieff with just-married Rita Romilly and Martin Benson. Image from the cover of Martin Benson Speaks, available from Gurdjieff Books and Music.

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