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XXXIV
THE ONLY PERMANENT
job that was assigned to me that
Spring was the care of a small, enclosed garden known as the
Herb Garden. It was a small, shady triangular area near the
irrigation ditch that ran through the property, and except for a
certain amount of weeding, watering and hoeing there was not
very much work to do there. The rest of the time I worked at
the same old routine jobs and on various projects.
My jobs, however, were of less interest to me that Spring than
some of the events and new arrivals. The first excitement of the
year was the denouement of the " Affaire Serge". We learned
about it through one of the Americans who had suffered the
greatest losses in what we had all come to think of as the
"robbery". After the Americans had put the police on his trail,
and several months after the actual robbery, he had been
caught in Belgium, and although no valuables had been found
on him, he had confessed the robbery to the police and some of
the jewels had been found in the possession of an Arab "fence"
in Paris. Serge had been brought back to France and im-
prisoned. Gurdjieff at no time made any comment on his
failure to "rehabilitate" Serge, and the Americans who had
been robbed generally thought that Gurdjieff was at fault for
having allowed him to stay at the Prieure in the first place.
Gurdjieff did have some defenders among the older students,
however, and their defence consisted in pointing out that
jewels and money were unimportant -- particularly to wealthy
people -- but that Serge's life did have value and that his im-
prisonment would probably ruin him for life, and that it was
unfortunate that the police had been brought into the case. To
a great many of us, however, this reasoning seemed to be noth-
ing more than an attempt to maintain the position of Gurdjieff
as never being wrong in anything he did -- the common attitude
of the "worshipful". Since Gurdjieff took no interest in the
entire question, and since Serge was in prison, we lost our
interest in the case soon enough.
For a short period in the late Spring I was again assigned to ,
work on the lawns, not mowing them this time, but straightening
and trimming the edges and borders. To my surprise, I was
even given a helper, which made me feel like a dependable,
experienced "old hand". I was even more surprised when I
found that my helper was to be an American lady who, up to
this time, had only made occasional weekend visits to the
Prieure. This time, as she told me, she was going to be there for
two whole weeks, during which time she wanted to be a part
of the "tremendously valuable experience" of working at what
she called the "real thing".
She appeared for work the first day, looking very glamorous
and colourful; she was wearing silk orange pants, with a green
silk blouse, a string of pearls and high-heeled shoes. Although I
was amused at the costume, I kept a perfectly straight face as I
explained to her what she would have to do; I could not refrain
from suggesting that her costume was not entirely appropriate,
but I still did not smile. She waved away my suggestions as
unimportant. She set to work, trimming the border of one of the
lawns, with ardour, explaining to me that it was necessary to do
this work with one's entire being and, of course, to observe
oneself -- the famous exercise of "self-observation" -- in the
process. She was using an odd sort of tool or implement which
did not work very well: it was a kind of long-handled cutter,
with a cutting wheel on one side and a small ordinary wheel on
the other. The cutting wheel, of course, was supposed to actually
cut the edge of the lawn in a straight line, while the other wheel
helped to support and balance the apparatus and to give it
power. The use of this implement required a good deal of
strength to cut anything at all, since the blade was not very
sharp; also, even when it was used by a strong man, it was then
necessary to go over the edge that had been "trimmed" with
this machine with a pair of long-handled garden shears and
straighten up the border or edge.
I was so interested in her approach to this work and also in
her manner of doing it that I did very little work myself, but
watched her as she worked. She walked very gracefully, breath-
ing in the country air, admiring the flowers, and, as she put it,
"immersing herself in nature"; she also told me that she was
"observing" her every movement as she worked and that
she realized that one of the benefits of this exercise was that one
could, through continuous practice, make every movement of
one's body harmonious, functional, and therefore beautiful.
We worked together at this job for several days, and although
I finally had to actually trim all the edges and borders after her
on my hands and knees with the long-handled shears, I enjoyed
it very much. I had long since discarded the idea that work at
the Prieure was intended to produce the expected results ( except
of course in the kitchen) but that the work was done for the
benefit of one's inner being or self. I had often found it very hard
to concentrate on these invisible benefits, and much easier to
simply, and unimaginatively, try to accomplish the visible,
obvious, physical task. It was a pleasure to achieve a hand-
some, straight edge at the side of a lawn or flower bed. Not so
with the lady, who when she realized, inevitably, that I was
following her and doing all her work over again, made it clear
to me that as long as our "selves" or our "inner beings" were
benefiting from what we were doing it would not matter if it
took us all year to finish the work -- that, in fact, if we
never finished it it would not matter.
I liked the lady well enough; I certainly enjoyed being her
temporary "boss" and I had to admit that she looked hand-
some on the lawns, that even though she did not seem to
accomplish anything that was visible, she was persistent and
reported regularly for work. Also, for all I knew, she might
have been doing a great deal of good work on her "inner
being". I had to admit that she obviously made a point when
she said that the actual results -- on the land, as it were --
were not very important. The grounds were living evidence of
this -- littered, as they were, with unfinished projects. All the
work of uprooting trees and stumps, building new vegetable
gardens, even the actual construction of buildings which
remained unfinished, attested to the fact that physical results
did not seem to matter.
I was sorry when our work on the lawns came to an end,
and although I was dubious about the benefits she had, or
had not, acquired in those few days, I had enjoyed my associa-
tion with her. It gave me a somewhat different point of view
about the school as a whole, and its purposes. While I had
realized that none of the work was ever considered important
from the simple point of view that it needed to be done; that
there was, in short, another aim -- the engendering of friction
between people who worked together plus possible other, less
tangible or visible results -- I had also assumed that the actual
accomplishment of the task itself had, at least, some value.
Most of my jobs, up to that time, had supported this view:
it surely mattered, for instance, that the chickens and the other
animals were fed and cared for, that the dishes and pots and
pans in the kitchen were washed, that Gurdjieff's room wag
actually cleaned every day -- with or without benefit to my
"inner self".
Whatever thoughts I may have had about all of this and
about her, the lady left after about two weeks, and seemed to
feel herself "immeasurably enriched". Was it possible, after
all, that she was right? If it had done nothing else, her visit
had served to increase my need to re-examine the Prieure and
the reasons for its existence.
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