Blessed Fishes - II
For full citations of abbreviated references, please see Introduction and Bibliography.
Continuing from:
In the month of February, high up in the mountains near Cannes, on their “Riviera trip,”1 in 1937, Gurdjieff and the “Rope,”2 and associates, went “up into the snows and we open cans of sardines, anchovies, tuna—fish oil dripping on our hands and only snow to wash in!” He had been talking about music that day, and how “fine and clear were the notes in the mountains,” and now he wishes for his hand organ, so he could play to them from even higher up. Then they “would know something about the ‘Deevine!’ ”3
The combination of salty and oily fish, mountains, snow and divine music, makes evocative imagery.
The previous year, Gurdjieff had told Louise Davidson, "Never I see squirming fish get back to sea—always finish on sand.4 In this way he described the sardine, by which name he called Louise. A similar thing seems to be expressed in how Gurdjieff describes someone who is between two stools - neither happily living a mechanical life, nor yet happily on the next step of the evolutionary ladder of inner transformation.