The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography (10 page)

When I emerged from meditation and saw myself as a human being once again, all my problems seemed insignificant. I went out into the street, and with an arrogance that barely fell short of being a delusion of grandeur, I saw people immersed in their narrow mental space absurdly accepting the brevity of their lives, much closer to being animals than angels. As I had not been loved I did not know how to love myself, and thus, being unable to love others, I watched them with vindictive cruelty.

I thought that I could make my mind into whatever I wanted. If no one would deign to form me, I would be my own architect. Many paths presented themselves before me. Philosophy was one, art another; between intelligence and imagination, I chose imagination. Before setting myself to developing what I then considered the supreme power of the spirit, I asked myself what my ultimate objective would be. “The power to create a soul for myself!” And the objective of humanity? Not one, but three: to know the totality of the universe, to live as long as the universe lives, and to become the consciousness of the universe.

I realized that the basic (why not call it “primitive”?) imagination corresponded to the four primary mathematical operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. With addition, which is equivalent to enlargement, I considered how literature and cinema have used this technique to exhaustion. An ape becomes King Kong, a lizard becomes Godzilla, or an insect becomes Mothra, a butterfly so enormous that the movement of its wings brings about hurricanes. Inspired by this, a sugar cube might expand to become a runway for starships to land on. My grandmother could extend one arm, reaching around the entire world in order to scratch her back. A saint’s heart swells to the point that his chest bursts open, continuing to grow in volume until it becomes as large as a skyscraper. Poor people by the millions come to live near it. They feed by cutting pieces off the organ, which moans with pleasure as they mutilate it.

The second technique, subtraction, decreasing, could be found in fairy tales, where there is an abundance of dwarves, gnomes, homunculi. Alice eats the cake that makes her shrink. Jonathan Swift sends his hero to the land of Lilliput.

Applying this technique, I imagined the wedding ring of a dissatisfied husband shrinking to cut his finger. Eve, cast out of paradise, searches for it for centuries, asking around among the people for its location, but nobody knows the answer. Desperate, she becomes silent; then paradise, as a tiny spot of vegetation, grows on her tongue. A locomotive, pulling train cars full of Japanese tourists, travels among the cerebral lobes of a famous philosopher.

Another aspect of diminution is the removal of some parts of a whole, eliminating them or making them independent. For example, in a movie the hands of an assassin are detached from his dead body and grafted onto a pianist who has lost those precious appendages in an accident; they then acquire their own will and force the musician to commit murder. In
Alice in Wonderland
a cat becomes invisible except for his grin, which remains floating in the air. Dracula has no reflection in mirrors . . .

The windows of a skyscraper, wishing to see the world, detach themselves from the facade and fly away. Flocks of tiny seagulls come to nest in the empty eye sockets of a blind sailor. A holy man’s shadow breaks away and goes off on its own adventures, fornicating with the shadows of all the women it meets . . .

Another basic technique is multiplication: a painting by Breughel shows the invasion of thousands of skeletons. One of the seven plagues is the invasion of locusts. To prove that Rahula is his son, Buddha gives him his ring. He says, “Bring it to me,” and multiplies into thousands of beings identical to himself. The son, paying no heed to the false Buddhas, goes directly to his father and gives him the ring.

I imagined a parade through the streets of Rome consisting of a hundred thousand Christs, each one on a cross. In Africa, a rain of albino children falls. The Statue of Liberty appears black one morning, because it is covered in flies. The emperor of Japan cuts out the tongues of his two thousand concubines and serves them as sushi to his victorious army. Millions of rabbis blacken the streets of Israel, protesting against their Messiah because, after being awaited for thousands of years, he has decided to return in the form of a pig.

I concluded my development of these simple techniques by visualizing the simplest one of all: grafting. Some part of a ruminant is joined to part of a lion, and to another part of an eagle, along with a human face, creating a sphinx; stick a woman’s torso onto a fish’s tail and you get a mermaid; put bird wings onto an androgynous human and you have an angel. And instead of having long hair, why shouldn’t an angel have very thin rainbows? The trunk of a man on the body of a horse: a centaur. Why not graft the same human torso onto a snail, onto a stone, as the living figurehead of a ship, as the conscious part of a comet? The Aztecs combined a reptile with an eagle and obtained Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, while an eagle covered with scales lurks in the shadows of the stream. If the god Anubis had the head of a jackal, why couldn’t he also have that of an elephant, a crocodile, a fly, or a cash register? And why not think that the mysterious face of Muhammad is a mirror or a clock?

Another primary technique is the transformation of one thing into another: a worm becomes a butterfly, a man becomes a wolf, or else a vampire, a robot becomes an interplanetary spaceship, a good fairy becomes a witch, a demon becomes a god, a frog becomes a princess, a whore becomes a saint. In
Don Quixote,
windmills turn into aggressive giants, an inn becomes a palace, bottles of wine turn into enemies, Dulcinea becomes a noble lady, and so forth.

Walking around the city I imagined houses becoming huge lizard heads, an industrialist’s wallet transformed into a raven, the pearls on a diva’s necklace suddenly becoming small oysters, groaning like cats in agony. My mother grabbed me first with two, then six, and finally eight arms: now she was a tarantula.

From transformation, I went on to petrification: Lot’s daughters became pillars of salt, the daughter of King Midas became a gold statue, the adventurers who looked at the Medusa were turned into stone. Time ceases to pass, planets, rivers, people, all things are paralyzed forever; the universe is a museum that no one visits; swallows, transformed into granite, fall from the sky in a deadly rain.

I applied the idea of union to my imaginary world, conceiving of an invisible bond with infinite extensibility, and saw it pass through the third eye of every human being, linking all the denizens of the planet in a living chain; the poet is joined to a humble stone, discovers that it is his ancestor and that what he recites is nothing more than the reading of love that has been inscribed in matter since the beginning of time; I was united with the sick and the poor, I felt that their pain and hunger were mine; I was united with sporting champions, their triumphs became my own; I was united with all the money in the world, making it mine: this energy invaded me like a whirlwind, giving me health, driving me to stop asking for things and start investing, making me realize that I must change from a harvester into a sower. I identified myself with the unifying chain. I felt like a canal; what I had I was receiving, and in the same instant that I was receiving it I was also giving it; there was nothing for me that was not for everyone else. If a child in the desert grabs a handful of sand, then lets it go, all of the desert may pass through his open hand. I was united with Chilean poetry, the poets faded away as their words melted:

In the evening when the ghosts crack what little earth

lingers in my body while I sleep

my heart could deny its small chrysalis

and those dreadful wings could sprout from it, out of nowhere.

Who are you? Someone who is not you is singing behind the wall.

The voice that answers comes from somewhere more distant than your chest.

I walked like you, probing the infinite sta
r

and in my net, at night, I awoke nake
d

just a catch, a fish trapped in the wind
.

I walked along all the roads asking for the way

without route or line, driver or compass

looking for the lost paths of what never existed

viewing myself in all the broken mirrors of nothingness.

Oh abyss of magic, open the sealed doors,

the eye through which I may return once again to the body of the earth

What would become of us without the unlit labor

without the double echo toward which we reach out our hands?

Humberto Díaz Casanueva, Vicente Huidobro, Pablo

Neruda, Pablo de Rokha, Rosamel del Valle

I realized that the desire for union was present in every cell of my body, in every manifestation of my spirit. This was not a matter of imagining bonds, but of realizing that they already existed: I was tied to life and bound to death, tied to time and bound to eternity, tied to my limits and bound to infinity, tied to the Earth and bound to the stars. Joined to my parents, my grandparents, my ancestors, united with my children, my grandchildren, my future descendants, joined to every animal, every plant, every conscious being. United with matter in all its forms, I was mud, diamond, gold, lead, lava, rock, cloud, magnetic field, electric spark, soil, hurricane, ocean, feather. I was anchored in the human and joined to the divine. Rooted in the present, united with the past and the future. Anchored in darkness, united with light. Tied to pain, joined to the delirious euphoria of eternal life.

After joining in this manner I decided to look at what was driving me to separate: the voice of the dead father resonating for years throughout the house; millions of tiny silver eagles rising up from half-dollar coins and flying up into the stratosphere to devour satellites; the tiger’s skin, having lost the Buddha who used to meditate on it, tells a murderer to use it as his cloak; in the land of the decapitated, the last hat is publicly burned. When all living things perish, the roads moan, thirsty for footprints.

I had the idea to materialize the abstract. Hatred: a cornucopia inside a chest to which we have lost the key. Love: a road where our footprints go in front of us instead of following behind. Poetry: the luminous excrement of a toad that has swallowed a firefly. Betrayal: a skinless person who jumps into another’s skin. Joy: a river full of hippopotamuses, their blue mouths gaping open to offer diamonds that they have taken from the mud. Confidence: a dance without an umbrella in a rain of daggers. Freedom: a horizon that detaches itself from the ocean, flying up to form labyrinths. Certainty: A lone leaf turned into the shelter of a forest. Tenderness: a virgin clad in light, hatching a purple egg.

Thus I devoted myself for a long time to conceiving of techniques to develop my imagination. For example, how to overcome the laws of nature (how to fly, how to be in two or more places at once, how to draw water from rocks); how to reverse qualities (fire that cools, water that burns, salt that sweetens); how to humanize plants (a tree grows lottery tickets), animals (a gorilla becomes faculty chair of the philosophy department), and things (an army tank falls in love with a ballet dancer); how to add what has been taken away onto something else (put an octopus’s tentacles on the Venus de Milo, the head of a fly on the Winged Victory of Samothrace, an elephant’s eye as the apex of the Pyramid of Giza); how to extend the qualities of one being or thing onto all beings or things (a log on fire, a cloud on fire, a heart on fire, a saxophone on fire, a moral judgment on fire).

One night, seeking to enrich my view, which was usually in the horizontal plane, I threw my head back as far as I could to see what it would be like to see along a vertical line. I was distracted by the sight of a cobweb on a lamp: at its center, the web’s weaver crouched, waiting. A fly buzzed around the lamp. Instead of feeling sorry for myself, seeing the neglected state of my room—which Sara grudgingly cleaned once a month to satisfy the critical eye of her mother, who complained of the stench of Matucana when she came to visit us—I imagined the different degrees of a story, organizing them into a scale ranging from the lowest to the highest level of consciousness. At the lowest degree, not conceiving of change, striving always to remain what they think they are, the fly spends its life trying to avoid the spider while the spider spends its life trying to catch the fly. At a higher degree the fly, perceiving the spider’s carnivorous desire as an input of energy, loses its fear, accepts that it is food, and sacrifices itself. The spider, meanwhile, learns to put itself in the place of the fly and decides to give up trying to catch it, even to the point of starving itself to death. At a third degree, the fly voluntarily enters into the sticky trap and when it is devoured by the spider invades its cells, its soul, and transforms it into a luminous being. The two creatures, thus amalgamated, are a new entity: neither fly nor spider but both at the same time. At a fourth degree the spider-fly, realizing that the light that inhabits it is not of its own making, that it is a servant whose master is an impersonal inexhaustible energy, breaks free from the web and, attracted by the light, rises up until it is immersed in the sun. At the fifth degree, similar to the first, the spider waits in its web, hoping to catch a fly. But now the spider is not crouching, it is showing itself openly, without greed, and the fly, without distress or unnecessary buzzing around, flies directly toward the web. Change, transmutation, and adoration have submerged the menacing reality in a bath of joy. The hunt has become a dance in which continuous death is accompanied by continuous birth.