Some pictures
from Jan, before he got married. In Morocco.
Jean-Marie Mensaert lived for many happy years in
Morocco. Here are 65 pictures from that time.
Poems from the
mountain of Lening.
One
of the poem books that Jan wrote. In Dutch; The
cover.

Merovingian
poems.
One
of the poem books that Jan wrote. In Dutch.
A text his
ex-wife had send to us a time ago:
FROM EGYPT TO
THE PRESENT
I
met Jan Mensaert in Marrakesh, Morocco, arriving
there in the early morning of my first trip to
Europe, alone. Realizing that it was necessary to
have companions in this country, in contrast to
France or Spain (I was 24), I had in my mind to find
a friend. The ground-level terrace of a large café
at Jemaa-El-Fna Square (overlooking where live snake
charmers sat in the open, monkeys did acrobatics,
and a dentist might set up instruments, to pull
teeth and insert false ones, in the middle of the
square in the heat of the day) was empty, except for
one cup—without an owner, on top of a table. Inside
the Café de France, many people were drinking
coffee. However a quick glance assured me that they
would not be acceptable friends. Therefore, I sat
beside the coffee cup and waited.
Not
long afterwards he returned; as he read a French
newspaper we began to talk. The spontaneous, comical
nature of that beginning depicted one aspect of his
approach to life; in reality he was in Marrakesh
during a school break (he was an admired French
teacher in a Spanish area of the country; the
students needed to learn French for national exams;
Larache, his home, had been under Spanish rule,
whereas most of the country had been under the
French). Jan Mensaert had arrived in Morocco,
brought there by visions of The Arabian Nights,
"Scheherazade," and the Orient, which he had pursued
around the age of 20, in a hitchhiking trip to
Bangkok and the East from his home in Belgium,
undertaken on virtually no money—a trip where, among
the colorful stories he was to recite about it, he
had slept on the cold floors in temples and begged
for old crusts of food, that bakeries amassed to
throw away. Such a style imprinted his experience of
life. The art of everything (adding those dimensions
into a conversation for instance) intrigued and drew
him. Anything done inartistically, he ignored.
Back
to that first meeting: he was visiting Marrakesh
during the Ramadan festival, with a friend. Out of
money, he had been up all night, playing cards in a
smoking den, to win ticket fare to return to
Larache. He had won. But his friend, not expecting
him to win against Moroccans, had bet against him.
So in reality he had lost. Thus the situation rested
when I sat before his coffee cup. He strode back to
the now-occupied table, the only one occupied on the
terrace—carrying his newspaper, Le Monde. Looking
for archetypes, one might see Desdemona, being
introduced to someone who knew an unfamiliar part of
the world. Alternately, he himself had come here to
learn a section of the world unknown to him,
romanticized—a cultural imprint he had to make
connections with. He did not feel at home in the
Western world—the materialistic preoccupations. He
did feel at home here, in the loping countrysides of
nature, where the people themselves made space when
none existed—a family of 17 in a three-room house,
for instance. No space existed outside, they learned
how to make it in the society's customs. Probably
those beyond the country boundaries never dreamed
how it worked. Morocco was called "the thinking
man's country." Of course, that was "man's," but we
will not go into here what spirit the women were
carrying, totally different. Lessons also—such as
few can imagine, in the modern world: out of the
heart of Africa, and in the backgrounds of our past,
where pottery was made and cooking an all-day,
sitting-on-the-floor art. Breads not known to exist
were crafted here, delicate pastrylike breads, with
"lace" formations as intricate as on any Brussels
lace. It was the way the tradition had enforced a
pre-terrorist consciousness. Looking back, I found
something significant in the name of the newspaper,
The World, and that he had handed to me the very
introduction to this area of the world, that he
himself had received from a friend he met at this
same café—who took him into the indigenous
situations that a born Arab could.
Jan
Mensaert's apartment in Larache, which I was now to
discover, was unusual in the village, which rested
on the Atlantic Ocean, on a beach that only men
could respectfully walk on (yet he was increasing
the female literacy rate significantly, in this
teaching stint), with caves that had many-colored
rock formations—where ships from Carthage had been
viewed in the past. This was a contemporary of
Carthage. The caves as well, if not older. The
apartment, in a Moroccan neighborhood—once one
opened the door—had an array of copper and brass
handwork from both England and Morocco; along with
his record player and perhaps 100 discs, from
classical music to the complete Edith Piaff. The
comedy of the initial meeting continued inside the
apartment, in which an acquaintance seriously
suggested buying me as a second wife.
For
five years this friendship flourished through
correspondence—a friendship, not a romance. He had
sat on a rock with me, overlooking the Atlantic,
reading poems stored inside a trunk. I had
encouraged him to publish them. By the sea he built
a tomb of sand and pieces of twig and buried a
beetle in it. Remarkably then, when all seemed
finished, he added the concluding touch—a long
walkway leading up to the tomb. I am sure I said not
a word, as he built so retrospectively a monument
from the past. I do not and did not know exactly to
what it referred. But his reconstructions always had
some connotations and references. This one rising
out of the sand, with a beetle as its occupant, has
so many mythological meanings that the very act of
re-creating it now captures the imagination. Did he
entomb the symbol of "Life" in burial, as in a
pyramid or cave. And did he wordlessly also cross
the barriers of spoken language with some
unhinted-at, undreamed-of implications in the
psyche—supposing one could take this dream language
and authenticate it in life.
Five
years later, when we remet and married, we went to
Egypt on our honeymoon, where he would buy me a
scarab ring (lost in travel soon afterwards). From
Cairo, to Karnak and Luxor, past the Nile, where he
was eager to see the Valley of the Kings, entering
the recessed area, where behind the door one saw
gold relics of those centuries past; how the burial
ceremony connected to the afterlife; the ritual
preparations, things one should carry—plus the
towering statues and memorabilia. Everything was
done in a giant way here. He could not believe that
I did not know which end of the chariot to stand on.
He of course did.
When
we visited the Sphinx in Cairo, a guide, saying that
he would ride me through the near-desert of the Gaza
Strip (a war zone at the time—in fact, a blackout
had greeted our arrival—) in actuality galloped off,
to the west, as if kidnapping me on camel. Though
that could have been light humor, a newspaper
reporter, showing us the pyramid, took the matter
seriously. And went racing through the sand into the
distance, chasing my camel. Jan Mensaert always
accepted such situations as part of life—expecting
the intensity as contributive to the source of his
art. When things were truly serious, that was
another matter. On that honeymoon, he converted to
Islam (both from a belief in the religion and in an
attempt to "burn his bridges"); this took place
before the high Moslem religious leader, in
Cairo—covered by the local reporters. He announced
to me that I was to leave Egypt alone, because he
wanted to walk his way up the Nile—as Richard
Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer, had. For
some days holding to this idea, he abandoned it
because of the excruciating late-February
temperature.
Born
artist, he felt that he had been showered with
possibilities—he first wanted to be an architect (he
noted the similarity of his name to the great
"Mansart"), then painter or composer—only lastly
directing the drive into poetry. So deeply
historical was his mind, formed by culture and its
expressions, that he used to draw up his own lists
of the greatest ten painters, the top ten writers,
of all time, and determine who he believed them to
be. He hoped to join such a list. In the Ancien
Régime, he told me, he would have had a patron; to
support this, he cited the fact that he had been
discovered at twelve, when reproducing a style of
window that he would not have been expected to have
seen. Left to himself without encouragement and
discipline, self-taught at the piano, he suffered
from lack of structure. In Larache he would draw
blueprints of towns. Afterwards often put an arm
over his eyes, and with the arm still blocking where
the attack fell, he would bomb the blueprint with
quick-landing pencil points.[1] This, in deep
concentration. It speaks to such a poem as "The
Bombs of Dresden." As a child, he said, he (like the
psychologist C. G. Jung) had constructed block
towers, then toppled them to the ground with his
hands. About the physicalities of life, he paid
little attention, which had disadvantages. He could
do without material things. Alternately, he never
protected what in himself needed physical
protection. Though he was quick to care for wounded
animals. In fact, death defiance was inside his
fiber. If he ever met death, it would be inside an
art situation too, or a principle. Though perhaps
only the deepest sense of art could understand how
his actual death was an act of art and of
belief-statement. A stand. Even Custer's.
First realizing he was afraid of death, he dared the
fear to be important to him. He stayed overnight,
hidden, in a morgue. By morning when he came out he
had brought a skull. In drinking from this skull in
the weeks ahead,[2] or having it near his side, he
conquered the fear that he did not want to dominate
him. Thus, though he had what we call a suicidal
streak strongly in his components, that was only
sometimes present (not in the Third World lands);
when there, it was present at the same time as this
refusal to allow death to be important—that is, so
important that it dominate his choices and
responses. On the other hand, he had a certain
fascination with death and the many ways one could
meet it—even as if he were in a challenge with it.
Or sprung from a culture that had a fascination with
it, that he did not remember. Death would not kill
him when he walked up to it and, as in Greece, set
the stage (see letter excerpt, where he describes
this dramatic incident). It refused to accept this
player. And it waited.
Why?
In
Hillman's Commentary to Chapter One and Two, of the
Gopi Krishna autobiography, he places the two events
described below (of which there are parallel events
in the autobiography of Jan Mensaert) under
particular "signs." They portend, or can, of the
life work.
The
"personal myth" of Gopi Krishna, "the experience of
having almost died and having been saved by a
wonder" (p. 43) is called the "child-in-danger
motif." "Part of the mythologem of the savior-hero.
It establishes chosenness. One has in childhood met
the powers of darkness and been rescued from them by
supernatural forces. The Gods single out at an early
age those who are to carry consciousness further.
The miracle of consciousness is frail at the
beginning and can easily be snuffed out. Moses,
Christ, Dionysius, Hercules are examples of the
child-in-danger" (pp. 44-45).
Jan
Mensaert's encounter with this motif—in biography
and in his autobiographical novel The Suicide
Mozart—is a variation. The child-in-danger, in his
biographical life story, is met by a nurse who
prevents it from crying. He is to remember that when
he tried to cry, this nurse—watching over him during
the day in his parents' absence—would put a
cigarette to his lips to frighten him and evoke
silence. He was forced into the world of silence, in
this backwards way. That this stayed in his psyche
is evidenced in the following tiny anecdote. When he
read (for the first time) pages of writing by me, he
noticed that the character Ian took a step to assure
that he would never again meet a particular person
(this character was based at that time primarily on
a Scot, met just before Jan Mensaert, even though
the name turned out to be, by a quirk of fate,
similar). He said (in a rare comment of advice in
the writing) that if Ian was to decisively get rid
of an address, to ensure he would never remember it,
he should not—as I had written—merely throw the
address away. "He should roll it up and burn it in a
cigarette!"
The variation is
that there WAS NO miraculous intervention. This WAS
the intervention: to turn everything on its heels,
to begin the deflection from the natural path RIGHT
HERE. It could even be that he was telling me, in
this oblique way, that the relic of the cigarette
experience would remain branded in his associations
or relationships. I do not know how old he was when
this memory became clear or if he held it always
(but it was corroborated). Thus, he had built on the
sand some sort of Ancient Tomb (placing, or laying
out as if in burial, the beetle inside);
additionally, the beetle/scarab is the instigator of
the first demonstration of synchronicity publicly
associated with C. G. Jung).[3] So was it a
synchronicity IN ITSELF, that it was in fact the
ancient scarab, such a symbol-laden creature, that
brought the illustration of synchronicity into
modern science and psychology, which I don't believe
anyone has ever pointed out. That the symbol of
synchronicity's arrival is likewise a heavily loaded
symbol, of Egyptian immortality. It was in fact a
beetle, the symbol of both Egyptian belief and of
the original display of the theory of synchronicity,
that Jan Mensaert mysteriously buried on the beach.
Why?[4]
Hillman continues: "Lastly, in regard to the
author's personal psychology, we find two further
typical facts. The failed [scholarly] examinations
cut Gopi Krishna off from a substitute career, in
which his spiritual aims could have become an
intellectual or academic ambition. This sort of
failure is often to be found in biographies of
unusual people. It is a signal, preventing the
personality from developing along collectively
approved lines. After the examination failure,
there was only one way to go: his own" (p. 45).
This
second parallel, the failure of an exam—in the case
of Jan Mensaert, a single FINAL EXAM in the
university curriculum, which he thought he had
passed—points to a similar loss of a foregone
natural career. Not receiving his license in a kind
of fluke—due to this unexpected failure or
miscalculation of his conscious self—he was pushed
out of that line of development. That he would wind
up, ending The Suicide Mozart, AFTER DEATH, in a
position of reaffirming the survival of all that had
been thought lost forever—specifically, in his
words, the character Fiss rediscovers hope, faith
and love have always remained in his heart—he has
won everything in losing everything. And realized it
after the "death" end of the life story. That is, if
one could go just a little bit further. So the
author anticipates what is in store, imagines what
DEATH will change and reveal in himself.
He sent back,
before-the-fact—in this posthumous fictional
perspective—a longer-range concluding note. Opening
that door. He sent it back, as a message from
somewhere beyond physical "life"; there, he was
encountering an exam. This time, in terms of how it
looked FROM THE SOUL LEVEL, not the human. In this
case, it happens that the message comes in a
reworking of a passage lifted (without bringing in
any name) from St. Paul; in the oblique reference,
Jan Mensaert's autobiographical character Fiss
states that he has experienced (he, Jan Mensaert)
what St. Paul prophesized, after the end of Life.
The end is built on top of a famous passage from St.
Paul, omitting his name—but once one realizes the
source, the levels began to enrichen even more. How
failing (or rather, shall we say, was it only
"rebelling" and fashioning a different sort of
biography?) on the human level was part of
establishing—on a larger scale—what it was that such
a person as he (who prized freedom!) also prized, as
part of the heritage of every Earth citizen. A
citizen who moaned loud and long at the bombing of
the art history of these civilizations. Who rather
than creating more art, in the largest sense, tried
to insist on an appreciation of it, so that it would
survive. So that all the values which upheld it
would.
*
Now,
I have presented the Anti-Mozart, self-titled, as
being, in a true Mozartean sense, in a position more
complex than even the stated position, with
mysteries attached that to decipher require
mind-stretching. Or they can be left out.
This
is only the beginning of a retrospective,
down-the-tunnel-of-time look at what his life
brought in! But it will do, for the tiniest
impression of a start.
He
wrote a few short letters, from the clinic where he
was to die, saying to publish his book, and summoned
me a few times to see him, just to tell me to
publish his book. And then, one day, choosing among
the many implausible ways attempted before—turn a
screw driver into his head, jump off a wall, cut his
wrists in a tub, take all the pills in sight and go
out as Popeye the Drunken Sailor, take arsenic
day-by-day—having outgrown these and sombered into
merely the position of having outgrown his life
(other things calling him: things this side of
himself heard and said to the child that he was, yes
you have done your work), he, and if this sounds
contradictory to the above paragraph, they were both
true at the same time, in two directions of looking
toward the future—one where there was a future here,
one where the future was elsewhere but the past
exonerated—he died. He committed suicide. But only
if one contextualizes to this extent. Moreover—can
one say it?—it was not an act against God or even
the lifetime he had been given. Just as, and this is
not being sacrilegious, a guru might sit in a
position and say now I know it's time to go. We can
think of it like that and be not far "from the
fact," touching at least the periphery. He was, we
remind ourselves, in a physical way, "wounded beyond
despair". Besides, he had had enough. He was now a
nonparticipator. He dreamed of being busily
involved in writing a book about God; the dream
brought the information as if the task still
remained to him here. Truly it could no longer be
here; he left, to become—one can speculate (not
quite in the snap of a finger; there would be
healing required first)—the self he had given up in
the first place, when coming here "on a mission, the
work of Divine Sin."[5] Left, to do the next work of
his soul.
Can
all this be true?
I
would hope that if I leave anything behind, it is
the habit of wider thinking, the habit of stretch,
of the solution beyond the boundary of solution, the
explanation beyond the last boundary of explanation,
where resides the truth coming into being—for which
lives are paid, by bringing us to the border where
we stop. Or knowing something doesn't fit, doesn't
make sense, we go on and become—in universal
contexts, however—individual. Then we say what is
left out, what no one else can. Then we stand
shining in the only light we have. Then we talk to
each other in what Kierkegaard called "poetic
infinity." Then we are unreproduce-able and
uncopyable, though we can be stood on top of.
*
This young poet, concealed from all others, drew
cathedral after cathedral, interspersed into pages
of poetry and novel—for whom the tall, straight
lines of the cathedrals of the past had privately so
much significance that the bombing of some meant
that all he stood for had been bombed. But he hadn't
openly stood for the cathedrals of his drawings. He
had kept the relationship, as of many things,
private. Just like the boxes of music composition,
some of which no one but he heard played.
The
death date—December 27—is (for the Romanian
Orthodox) the celebration day of the stoning of St.
Stephen; it is also reportedly a date observed in
honor of the Slaying of the Innocents, to try to
prevent the growing-up of the authentic Christ. All
these symbols swirling around together, put into the
box (Pandora's?) of anti-self, in the final Jan
Mensaert work, are introducing something even more
radical yet. This, in our preparation for the
centuries ahead. He always wanted things to be taken
to the genius statement—that is, the thing no one
else has said! So we have tried. As if one might
spray genius seeds, in unconscious planting. From
that, perhaps in being picked up—without having
lived one's genius, in a sense, for it was too
unconsciously located—to make it survive. For it
would be beaten into ploughshares of its own
planting. And that means— BUT WE HAVE TO STOP
SOMEWHERE.
Afternote:
Hillman says, by the way, that reading The Arabian
Nights, as Gopi Krisna did—he could have alluded to
the storytellers on the Jemaa-El-Fna Square as
well—put one in touch with the transpersonal and
archetypal level of things; being connections into
not the conscious pathways, but the unconscious
information that these by-streams and side passages
can reveal to us. The closed roads and doors into
the main streams of life were the unconscious
pilgrimages on the pathways of the unknown futures
in a more collective way. That they could become
known and could succeed, in their own way and on
their own terms, is nothing short of a miracle. We
could have totally lost this information. As the
lifework of Gopi Krishna was inside the evolution of
the human race, and it pursued some of these
personal-myth checkpoints, is this, then, also a
story about pathways into the unconscious
evolutionary future. The real pathways, those that
no one knows until being on them. And figuring out
where they are. Is it an unconscious MESSAGE???[6]
No, in the end, no longer unconscious.
*
Even his suicides were original and up-in-the-air—an
artistic act that might or might not result in
death, and he himself was not in charge of the
result or particularly concerned which it might be,
to all intents and appearances. Yet the childlike
aspect redeemed this irresponsibility, the playful
interaction with circumstance, the utterly serious
relationship to the art of everything; the style,
the refusal to live on the surface. He once said, "I
would hate to die with a stranger"—meaning AS a
stranger to himself. Principles such as this give
credence to the seriousness of an investigation of
his life.
Referring to a page of an unpublished text I wrote
then:
He
was introduced as a man with an ailment: "Too much
imagination."
This
ailment was incurable, as things stood. Too much
imagination could breed, of course, an extreme love
of freedom.
Still, after his death, almost too many questions
remained. Someone offered a challenging insight, in
saying that: "He couldn't make art out of the rock.
He could make art of suffering. Art out of
everything. But not the rock."
This
comment came through Dr. Russell Dean Park.
*
So
tell the story any way you like. This is the only
way I can tell it.
But
you told a fairytale.
Maybe to you. To him, however, not so.
REFERENCE:
Krishna, G.
Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man (with
psychological commentary by J. Hillman). (1997).
Boston & London: Shambhala.
1]The young
Mozart had the habit of shaking ink from his pen,
which made dots on the music page. One can see the
rudiments of such a gesture (in irony) in the
bombing pencil points. (Not to say what in the
psyche caused this gesture.) The child shaking the
ink pen, to make it write better, the man "bombing"
(blindfolded) sheets of paper that had excavations
and blueprints of towns on them—is there any
likeness??
[2]The latter
part of this incident with skulls—set up in his
living room—also figures in the life of Lord Byron.
[3] It was, of
course, in the "meaningful," simultaneous appearance
of a beetle, or "golden scarab," during the
recalling of a client's dream, that Jung was able to
demonstrate the new concept of synchronicity,
formulated with Wolfgang Pauli. The beetle/scarab is
welded to the gestation or arrival of it.
[4]By chance, in
conversation, with someone who had often been there,
just before this essay was handed in, I learned that
the Temple of Karnak and the Temple of Luxor have
ancient walkways (formerly connected), lined on each
side with palm trees and statuettes. Of course,
there are other architectural designs from the past
that include extremely long walkways. Where?
[5]I use this
phrase, having heard it after a dream. I do not know
to whom it referred. It can be applied here, as a
"for instance." The dream words, not specifying
about whom: "he came on a mission—the work of Divine
Sin." That's "hypnagogic-state" language.
[6]An analogy
came to me as I was putting the final touches
here—urgent, stark. The image of the bearer of a
Letter by St. Paul. How fragile, survival—when
thought of in these terms. How fraught with chances,
when using only one logical outlet. How like the
scarab—if it does manage to cross the dangerous
terrain into the consciousness of the human Psyche.
To stand as an archetype of the next century. What
tomb was in his psyche as he buried the beetle
there? What synchronicity? What precognitive
awareness, that the "tomb" would be found,
recovered. Here, indicating the tension or dichotomy
of a discovery, even birth, of this level of the
consciousness of Love in a psyche primarily focused
on preserving a very special and fearless
consciousness of the meaning of FREEDOM! To lose
nothing by way of freedom; then discover that one
did not, as in "Aziza's Dance," end up "the way the
seagull dies somewhere unseen"—but that there were
ramifications. How? Why? Well, it had something to
do with the opening of his heart after he died,
because there was something he wanted to see—with
the heart. If this is true, then his words also
were: that the message of his unpublished novel
would be "PROPHETIC."
Last Modified on
February 14, 2002
This page © 2001
Margaret A. Harrell (Harrell Communications), All
Rights Reserved
marharrell.com
domain name, Love in Transition SM, Space Encounters
SM and Photo-PaintingSM are all trade marked SM's,
All Rights Reserved |