Saury Alain - Back to the wild: a practical manual for uncivilized times

Process Media Self-Reliance Series

Process Media

1240 W. Sims Way #124

Port Townsend, WA 98368

Back to the Wild

Copyright 2012 by Editions Dervy

English translation Copyright 2015 by Process Media

ISBN: 978-1-9341-7059-5

All rights reserved.

Cover design from vintage Boy Scout manual.

Photo of Alain Saury by Billie Thune-Larsen

The awake, regardless of any disagreements, have but one world. The sleeping, however, each have his/her own world through which opposition, politics, and hatred are created.

Heraclitus

ALAIN SAURY was born in Enghien, Belgium, in 1932 to Catalan and Brazilian parents. He was forced to work to support himself at age sixteen. He wanted to be a shepherd, but his father wanted him to be a doctor. By all appearances, this obvious conflict made him a worker first of all. The practice of about fifty trades then guided him toward his true vocation: poetry, which he transmitted through various artistic media.

He endured a long series of pathological mishaps brought on by ignorance and ambitionand aggravated by deadly allopathic therapieswhich forced him to undergo an intense period of agony from which he was relieved, little by little, through vegetarianism and fasting. This long process of awareness brought him to take on other media through which he shared his conversion. He gave lectures, wrote books, and gave consultations. Undoubtedly influenced by Hanish, Tomatis, Jesus, John of the Cross, Leclerc, Goethe, Steiner, and Saint Francis of Assisi, he turned to the plant.

In 1972, he became head editor of the magazine Guitare et musique chanson poesie, which he transformed during his three years there (until the founder of the magazines passing). He was then named Vice President of the Vegetarian Association of France, and embarked on a lecture tour that took him across Europe and into Canada. He created psycho-dietetics, which considers all vibrations to be nutritional, especially the most subtle of these vibrations, which arise out of the giving of oneself and out of the revelation of that unique being each of us is carrying within. Art therapy, occupational therapy, spirituality, and music therapy become his focus, through an asceticism of fasting, reflection, and prayer.

In 1977, he organized the Health and Nature Congress in Nice, in partnership with Nature and Progress, and then suggested a series of lectures with the most dedicated upholders of ecology and spirituality. At this time he became president and founder of the Green Hands Foundation, whose purpose was to rediscover the laws of life, and to follow them, and to teach these laws in such a way so that every individual might harmoniously heal, protect, and save him or herself, and everything around him/her, and to selflessly pour his/her energy into personal and altruistic creations In this way, we recover the virtue of humility and dismiss ourselves as kings of nature.

In 1977, he received the Craftsman without Borders Prize in Nice for one of his sculptures. In 1979, he was named a member of the Accademia Tiberina gi pontificia in Rome, for his selfless work as a poet, sculptor, painter, journalist, and writer.

In 1981, he created and directed the collection Vie et survie (Life and Survival) at ditions Dangles, which saw the publication of some dozen books aimed at protecting our environment.

He created Le Jardin des Affinities cultural center in Nice, where he served as professor of dramatic arts and stagecraft.

He died in 1991, in Coaraze, a tiny medieval village in the Alpes-Maritimes region of France. There he had devoted his time to naturopathy, painting, sculpture, his spirituality, poetry to nature and to human nature.

Jean Cocteau said, Alain Saury seeks to embody words and to penetrate the soul as others penetrate the body: poetry is an act of love.

Table of Contents

To Jean Sulivan, who died too soon.

I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete,

The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.

I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those of the earth,

There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate the theory of the earth,

No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account, unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth, Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude of the earth.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Song of the Rolling Earth

Man does not live on bread aloneprovided that he has some.

Alain Saury

None of our books will perish; we will restore our broken statues; from domes and pediments other domes and pediments will be born; some men will think and work and feel as we do; I dare to count on his followers, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, on this intermittent immortality. I will say here that Hadrian was luckier than us. He was not facing, as we are now, a world in which we are perhaps the last ones capable of fighting against, with such scant possibilities of success, this immense mass of evil-doings and errors threatening, no longer only civilization, as anticipated, but life on earth itself. He could at best glimpse the end the of Greco-Roman world, then still far away; he could not foresee what we witness on a daily basis, the poisoning of our air and rivers, the death of the oceans, the extinction of animal species, the endemic torture and genocide, the degradation of the ideal of humanitas that he made his own. It is more difficult for us to continue to work courageously and it is nearly impossible to continue to believe, even in a partial and mitigated way as he did, in the wisdom of man.

Marguerite Yourcenar, Interviews, Mercure de France

I name as universal heir, the worlds youth.

The worst thing that can happen is that you are of no use to anyone, that your life serves no purpose. Enrich yourselves, you, on the happiness of others. If something is missing from your life, it is because you have not looked high enough. And then, believe in kindnessin humble, sublime kindness. The treasure I leave you is the good I did not do, but I wanted to do, which you shall do now that Im gone.

Raoul Follereau

The 21st century will be religious or it will not.

Andr Malraux

If the worst should happen to our brutal speciesat the hands of an imminent and immanent justice and a desirable fate (because disharmony is unbearable)we may have only a few weeks, months, years, centuries or just this single moment with which to consult the works of art we have compiled for your use.

May this modest survival bible allow us the possibility of enduring in the reality of true hunger and no longer in the lie of genocidal appetites, or simply the possibility of meeting our needs without any lack.

Come! The man brings the child close to the river, near the woman sitting at the waters edge. Who knows that everyone dies so that everything may live among the murmur of colors and words?

Alain Saury, Now

Leitmotif drawing by Rav Bret Koch

The Whirlwind of the Stars

In his remarkable book Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry portrays the death of his heroine Yvonne in a magnificent whirlwind of stars.

The sky was a sheet of white flame against which the trees and the poised rearing horse were an instant pinionedthey were the cars at the fair that were whirling around her; no, they were the planets, while the Sun stood, burning and spinning and glittering in the center; here they came again, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto; but they were not planets, for it was not the merry-go-round at all, but the Ferris wheel, they were constellations, in the hub of which, like a great cold eye burned Polaris, and round and round it here they went: Cassiopeia, Cepheus, the Lynx, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, and the Dragon; yet they were not constellations, but, somehow, myriads of beautiful butterflies, she was sailing into Acapulco harbour through a hurricane of beautiful butterflies, zigzagging overhead and endlessly vanishing astern over the sea, the sea, rough and pure, the long dawn rollers advancing, rising, and crashing down to glide in colorless ellipses over the sand, sinking, sinking