The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography (31 page)

I used a different technique with the closest memories, those I had experienced during that same day: I got in the habit of reviewing them before going to sleep, first from start to finish, then the other way around, following the advice of an old book on magic. This practice of “walking backward” had the effect of allowing me to place myself at some distance from events. After having analyzed, judged, and reprimanded or praised myself upon first examination, I went back over the day again in reverse and found myself to be distanced. Reality, thus captured, presented the same characteristics as a lucid dream. What this made me realize, more than ever, was that like everyone, I was to a large extent immersed in a dreamlike reality. The act of reviewing the day in the evening was equivalent to the practice of recalling my dreams in the morning. But to merely recall a dream is to organize it rationally. We do not see the complete dream, but the parts that we have selected depending on our level of consciousness. We reduce it to fit within the limitations of the individual “I.” We do the same with reality: when reviewing the last twenty-four hours, we do not have access to all the events of the day, but only to those we have captured and retained, which is to say a limited interpretation; we transform reality into what we think it is. This selective interpretation is the largely artificial foundation on which we then base our judgments and evaluations. To be more conscious, we can begin by distinguishing our subjective perception of the day from what constitutes that day’s objective reality. Once we stop confusing the two, we can view the events of the day as spectators, without letting ourselves be influenced by judgments, evaluations, and juvenile emotions. From this point of view, life can be interpreted as a dream is interpreted.

One client did not know how to get some young and unscrupulous tenants to vacate a house he owned. Something kept him from going to the police, even though the law was on his side. I said, “This situation is fitting for you. Thanks to it, you are expressing an old anxiety. Try to interpret it like a dream from last night. Do you have a younger brother?” He said yes, and I asked him if he had felt neglected when this intruder robbed him of his parents’ attention. He answered that it was so. Next, I asked him about his current relationship with his brother. As I had expected, he told me that it was not a good relationship, considering that they never saw each other. I explained that it was he himself who encouraged the invasion of his tenants (who were younger than he) in order to externalize the anguish he had felt in his childhood due to the presence of his younger brother. I added that if he wanted to resolve the situation, it was necessary to forgive his brother, treat him well, and become friends with him. “You should bring him a big bouquet of flowers and have lunch with him, so as to establish a fraternal relationship and set aside the past, in which you felt displaced by him. If you do this, you will put an end to your problem with the tenants.” He looked at me oddly. How could solving an old problem resolve a present difficulty? And yet, he followed my advice to the letter. He later sent me a short note: “I brought flowers to my brother and spoke with him on Friday at midday. On Friday night, the tenants left, taking all my furniture with them. But at least they left and I could get my house back. Could the loss of furniture mean that I have broken away from a painful part of my past?” This question revealed that my client was learning to decipher real situations as if they were dreams.

If we realize that we are dreaming in the dream world, then in the waking world, trapped in the limited conception of ourselves, we must jettison preconceived ideas and sentiments in order to immerse ourselves in the Essence with a naked spirit. Once this lucidity is gained, we have the freedom to act on reality, knowing that if we only try to satisfy our egotistic desires we will be swept away in the whirlwind of emotions, lose our equanimity and control, and thus lose the ability to be our own selves acting on the level of consciousness that corresponds to us. In the lucid dream, one learns that everything one desires with true intensity—with faith—will be realized after patient waiting. Knowing this, we must stop living like children, always demanding, and live like adults, investing our vital capital.

Two monks pray continuously. One is worried, the other smiling. The first asks, “How is it that I am anxious and you are happy, if both pray for the same number of hours?” The other replies, “It is because you always pray to ask, while I only pray to give thanks.” To achieve peace, both in the nighttime dream and in the daytime dream that we call waking, we must become less and less implicated in the world and in our image of ourselves. Life and death are only a game. And the ultimate game is to stop dreaming, that is, to disappear from this dream world and integrate oneself into the one who is dreaming.

There is a dimension with which I have not yet been lucky enough to experiment: shared therapeutic dreams. It is said that María Sabina, the mushroom priestess, received a man who had a terrible pain in his leg. Neither the most sophisticated remedies, nor acupuncture, nor massage had been able to relieve it. The old woman divided a portion of mushrooms into two equal parts to share with her patient. She lay down beside him. They fell asleep embracing. In her dreams, she saw the patient as a wizard, devouring a lamb. The shepherd of the herd struck it with his staff, injuring a leg. María took the animal and, laying her hands on it, healed the injured limb. The healer and her patient awoke at the same time. The pain in his leg had vanished. He never again experienced such suffering.

SEVEN

Magicians, Masters, Shamans, and Charlatans

My first encounter with magic and madness combined into art was during my childhood. I was about five or six years old when Cristina came to work as our maid. With my childish eyes I saw her as an old lady, though in fact she was only forty years old; the air, doubly salt-laden from the sea and from the nitrate dust of the desert, had made furrows in her forehead and cheeks. All her clothes were brown, like the habits of Carmelite nuns. Her hair, stretched and tied back to form a bun, looked like a helmet. It was she, clean, quiet, and friendly, with large but sensitive hands, who gave me the touches that my mother withheld, who rubbed my feet when I had a fever, who dressed me in the morning to go to school, who baked my favorite pastries filled with dark caramel that we called
manjar blanco.
How I loved Cristina! My need for my mother was very affective and painful, I was united to her absence, but Cristina, with her rustic humbleness, was balsam for my wounded heart.

I was surprised when my father, seeing me in the arms of my beloved maid, said in front of her with a cynical, self-satisfied smile, as if she were deaf: “I’m the only one who will give work to a madwoman.” Those words pierced my soul like a knife. I blushed, struggling to hold back my tears. Jaime shrugged his shoulders with a look of contempt, and left. Cristina began to rock me in her arms until I fell asleep. At about three o’clock in the morning, I woke up in my bed. I heard my father’s loud snoring and my mother’s breathing, which sounded like grumbling. I had gone to bed without my supper. Hungry, and with a dry mouth, I got up to get a glass of water and a fruit. The rooms were dark, but from the kitchen came the faint glow of a candle flame. At first, Cristina seemed not to notice my arrival. With strange concentration, she was sitting on a stool before the bare table, gently and precisely moving her hands in the air. She seemed to be shaping something, creating forms, smoothing invisible matter, going over and over imaginary surfaces with her fingers. A long time passed, maybe an hour. I stood there, mesmerized, transfixed, watching something that I could not understand and that corresponded to nothing I had known. At last, tired, hungry, and thirsty, I could hold back no longer.

“What are you doing, Christina?”

She slowly turned her head and, still stroking the air, looking at me with glazed eyes, said anxiously, “Do you see? I’m finishing. When God took my son, the Virgin of Carmen came to me and told me, ‘Make me a sculpture of me from the air. When it’s finished and everyone can see it, your child will rise from his grave, alive again.’ You see it, right? Tell me!”

What could I say? I did not know how to lie. It was the first time I had been in contact with madness, the first time I had seen a person acting as a unit without observing herself, without a social mask. Terrified, I felt frozen to the spot. The cold night wind, blowing down from the mountains, started sighing. Cristina embraced her invisible sculpture, distraught. “No, I don’t want you to take him, damn you!” She seemed to be struggling against a hurricane, then, sobbing, put her face on the table with her arms dangling as if her hands were empty. After some seconds, she returned to being the person I knew. She gave me a glass of water, peeled an apple for me, and took me to bed. She stayed by me until I dissolved into sleep.

My second encounter with magic was in Santiago. Our group of young poets attracted many older homosexual intellectuals. Sometimes they were painters, sometimes writers, sometimes university professors. They had a unique culture, spoke several languages with French being the preferred one, and were very generous. Knowing us to be heterosexual they fell in love platonically, revered us in silence, and in order to enjoy our youthful presence often invited us to the German pub to drink beer, eat sausages, and listen to a string trio accompanied on the piano by Pirulí (Lollipop), a lanky effeminate man with hair dyed a violent yellow who played Viennese waltzes. Among these men was Chico Molina, about fifty, short in stature with a broad chest, slender legs, and tiny feet, who seduced our minds with his encyclopedic knowledge. He was a polyglot, could read Sanskrit, and knew every author or artist that one could name. One day, apparently more drunk than usual, he revealed to us that his intimate millionaire friend, Lora Aldunate, owned a magic mirror made in the fourteenth century. He had apparently bought it in Italy, in Turin, a city consecrated to the devil. If certain secret rituals were performed in front of it, the mirror would stop reflecting reality and would show old reflections. Molina swore to us that he had seen, more clearly than on film, a night scene in a forest in which naked women kissed the anus of a billy goat beneath the light of the full moon. Excited by such revelations, we rushed him out of the German restaurant and took him to the home of Lora Aldunate, which was very close by. We started yelling, asking him to let us in, demanding to see the magic mirror. A tall, distinguished, deathly pale man opened the blinds on the second floor and emptied his bedpan full of urine onto our heads. “You indecent drunks, don’t play with magic! You will never see my mirror! When I die, I’ll take it to the grave, locked in my coffin with me!” Molina looked at us with a wide smile on his simian face. “See? It’s true. I never lie. As Neruda said, ‘God forbid me from making things up when I’m singing!’”

Some time later, we learned that he was a pathological liar and fraudster. For months he had sparked our admiration by reading us chapters from his magnificent novel
The Swimmer without a Family
in exchange for invitations to dinner, until one of our friends, a philosophy professor, discovered that it was a translation of Herman Hesse’s
The Glass Bead Game,
which had not yet been published in Spanish. Well then, did the magic mirror exist, or was it a lie made up with Lora Aldunate’s complicity? His anger had seemed sincere when he opened the blinds, but Lihn raised a doubt: no one fills a chamber pot with urine in a single night; it was hard to believe that such a distinguished man would accumulate so much of the yellow liquid just for the pleasure of collecting it. But countless depravities exist . . .

I have encountered this kind of certainty exhibited by Chico Molina, claiming something reason cannot accept is the truth, in almost all people who say they have had contact with higher planes. It was after this that I began to consider that lying, apart from its despicable quality, also has a mystical utility. In the Bible, in Genesis, Jacob cheats his brother Esau by persuading him to sell his birthright for a meal of lentil stew. He then takes advantage of his father’s blindness to impersonate his brother and get his blessing. Later, it became clear to me that lying, or “sacred trickery,” as I called it, is a technique used by all masters and shamans.

Thanks to Marie Lefevre, in 1950 I had my first encounter with the optical language that is the Tarot. At what age had Marie arrived in Chile? She never wanted to tell us. When we knew her, she was over sixty years old. A small woman made up and dressed like Dracula’s daughter with her long gray hair dyed with a blue rinse, she lived in a basement with her lover Nene who was an unemployed and uneducated youth of eighteen years, but of an angelic beauty. After having heated metaphysical discussions at Café Iris, we poets would arrive drunk around three in the morning at her basement, knowing that a pot full of tasty soup would be waiting for us there, heating up on a slow fire. Nene, naked as usual, with a pink silk ribbon tied in the shape of a butterfly around his penis, slept soundly. She, who never slept, got up to serve us cups of the delicious soup made from all the leftovers that the nearby restaurant gave her in exchange for reading the Tarot to customers. Lefevre had drawn her own deck of seventy-eight cards. Instead of cups, swords, wands, and coins, she shuffled
sopaipillas
(coins), gourds of maté (cups), Shivalingams, male and female genitalia forming a unit (wands), and eyes above a triangle (swords). I remember some of her major arcana: she had a cowboy and a beautiful cowgirl in place of the Emperor and Empress. The Priestess was a Mapuche machi. The World was a map of Chile. Despite the ingenuousness of this deck, she gave readings of a surprising psychological accuracy, her very Chilean language contrasting with her strong French accent. I had removed money from my life without feeling poor, surviving on adventure, caught up in the present without ever thinking about tomorrow; for me, she predicted hundreds, thousands of trips all around the world. It was hard for me to believe her, and yet her prediction came true. To Carlos Faz, an exceptionally talented painter, she said, “Never travel by sea!” A year later on his way to America at a stop in Ecuador where the passengers were forbidden to disembark Carlos, drunk as usual, jumped from the ship toward the dock, misjudged the distance, fell into the water, and drowned. He was twenty-two. For me, this lady was an example of generosity, freedom, and subtlety. She did not tell Faz that he was going to drown, which would have become an order to commit suicide (the mind tends to fulfill predictions), but warned him of danger, leaving him the possibility of either confronting it or not. She also taught me that one can create miracles for others: somewhere in this world, there was a well-intentioned woman who would receive you at any hour with a humble smile on her lips, give you a bowl of soup, and read the cards for you, for free, just out of love for human beings.

Another teacher who changed my worldview was Nicanor Parra. When I met him I was a teenager, he a grown man, a mathematics professor at the School of Engineering. As a revolutionary reaction against the emotional poetry of Neruda, Pablo de Rokha, García Lorca, and Vicente Huidobro, he had declared himself an anti-poet. For us young people, his emergence in the literary world was akin to that of a messiah. After my awkward encounter with him at Café Iris, my pathological shyness kept me from visiting him. Stella Díaz had to help me. Making what for her was an immense concession, she covered the flames of her hair with a beret. “Nica doesn’t want me to show up with my hair uncovered. He says that redheads drive the students mad.” And she took me into the territory of the great anti-poet. Parra was an unassuming man, and the admiration of young poets encouraged him. We met many times, also with Enrique Lihn present. We talked in a small bar near the National Library, over that wonderful drink that is sweet chicha. One day Nicanor handed me a large envelope full of typewritten sheets of paper of different sizes. “They’re various writings, a sort of literary journal. Can you organize them for me? I’ve reread them so many times that I can’t see their value. I labeled them ‘Notes on the edge of the abyss.’” To receive such a gesture of confidence from a consecrated poet was like a spiritual explosion for me. I spent many nights locked away, reverently reviewing these unpublished texts, sorting them by subject, eliminating repetitions. In a concise style—“I want a clinical-photographic art”—the poet described his inner life in prose. After fifteen days I returned the notes to him, copied onto regular size sheets of paper, in an order that seemed perfect to me. Parra never published them, nor did he ever speak of them again.

With a university education far superior to that of his predecessors, who were all self-taught, Parra had specialized in the study of the Vienna Circle and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Galileo interested him just as much as Kafka, whose diary he admired above all else. He had his own interpretation of the famous phrase from the
Tractatus,
“What one cannot speak about, one must be silent about.” For him metaphysics, like religion, was forbidden territory; likewise the expression of personal feelings. “The poet should not exhibit himself: the strings must be pulled from outside.” Neruda and his followers presented themselves as great justices, great lovers, great humanists, with sublime anxieties and hopes—in short, as inflated romantic egos. Parra hid behind his intellect, then assumed one mask, then several. The poet was a professor with his tongue eaten away by cancer, a little man crushed by society, by women, a tragic clown; later he spoke through an ingenuous character who believed in Christ; then an old skeptic; and finally, he became a translator and took on the personality of Shakespeare. Lyricism was replaced by acerbic humor. “Knowledge and laughter become confounded.” Ultimately, he invented himself. As I write these lines, Parra must now be eighty-six years old, and like Castaneda—“the warrior leaves no footprints”—I am sure that no one can boast of knowing him intimately. The anti-poet has made his heart into an impenetrable fortress. The words of Jesus, “By their works ye shall know them,” cannot be applied to him.

The memories I have of Nicanor Parra, over a bottle of chicha, date from half a century ago. At the age of twenty, I had his theories burned into my mind as if by a red-hot iron. But this concealment of the ego, this veiling of personal emotions, this impersonality of the creator, led me toward magic rather than distancing me from it. In magic, the same principles apply, but go further: the magician accepts the cutting of the ties that bind him to external influences, but knows how to receive, from the inside, the essential, impersonal being that has its origin beyond our solar system.

Parra was present in one of my happy dreams in 1998: in the helicopter I am piloting circling around the mouth of an erupting volcano Nicanor, as a young man, gives a lesson in poetry to a group of elderly poets. “Do not describe your experiences; the poem should be experience. Do not show what you are, but what you are going to be. Do not show your feelings; create a new feeling with the poem. Do not reveal what you know, but what you suspect. Do not seek what you desire, but what you do not desire. So, now that you are a dream, stop dreaming.” Then I woke up.