Alejandro Jodorowsky - Psychomagic - The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

All the same, Chile has never had sole rights to poetry.

No, poets are everywhere. But the poetic life is a more rare property. In how many countries does a real poetic atmosphere exist? Without a doubt, ancient China was a land of poetry. But I think, in the 1950s in Chile, we lived poetically like in no other country in the world.

Can you explain?

Poetry permeated everything: teaching, politics, cultural life. . The country itself lived immersed in poetry. This was due to the temperament of the Chileans and in particular the influence of five of our poets, who were transformed for me into a species of archetypes. These poets were the ones who molded my existence from the beginning. The most well known of them was no less than Pablo Neruda, a politically active man, exuberant, very prolific in his writing and who, above all, lived like an authentic poet.

What does it mean to live like an authentic poet?

In the first place not to fear, to dare to give, to have the audacity to live with true excess. Neruda constructed a house in the form of a castle, gathering together around it a whole village; he was a senator, and he nearly managed to become president of the republic. He handed his life over to the Communist Party, for idealism, because he truly wanted to achieve a social revolution, to build a more just world. And his poetry touched all of the Chilean youth. In Chile, even drunks on a full-blown alcoholic binge recited Neruda’s verse! His poetry was recited as much in school as on the street. The whole world wanted to be a poet, like him. I’m not only talking about students, but workers and even drunks spoke in verse! He knew how to capture in his texts all the crazy atmosphere of the country.

Listen to this poem that comes to mind. We would recite it in unison when, in university-student fashion, we intoxicated ourselves with the patriotic wine of our Chilean land:

It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails

and my hair and my shadow.

It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Still it would be marvelous

to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,

or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.

It would be great

to go through the streets with a green knife

letting out yells until I died of the cold.

[TRANSLATED BY ROBERT BLY]

Apart from Neruda, who enjoyed worldwide fame, another four poets were of seminal importance. Vicente Huidobro came from well-to-do surroundings, in any case less humble origins than Neruda. His mother knew all the French literary salons, and he received a very thorough artistic education, through which his poetry, of great formal beauty, saturated the entire country with its elegance. We all dreamed about Europe, about the culture. . Huidobro gave us a great aesthetic lesson. As an example, I will read to you this fragment of a lecture given by him in Madrid, three years before the appearance of the surrealist manifesto:

Apart from the grammatical meaning of language, there is another magical meaning, which is the only one that interests us. . The poet creates, outside of the world which exists, a world which should exist. . The value of the language of poetry comes directly from its separation from spoken language. . Language converts itself in a ceremony of conjuring and presents itself in the luminosity of its initial nakedness, unconnected from all prefigured conventional dress. Poetry, the ultimate horizon, is, at the same time, the edge where the extremes rejoin, where there is neither contradiction nor doubt. Reaching this last border, the usual sequence of the phenomena breaks its logic, and on the other hand, there where the land of the poet begins, the chain is soldered together in a new logic. The poet takes you by the hand to drive you closer to that last frontier, above the point on the great pyramid, toward that field which extends beyond what is true and false, beyond life and death, beyond space and time, beyond reason and fantasy, beyond spirit and matter. . There is, in his throat, an unquenchable inferno.

Then there was a woman, Gabriela Mistral. Her appearance was that of a dry, austere lady, very separated from sensual poetry. She taught in the low-income school districts, and this little governess succeeded in becoming a symbol of peace for us. She pointed out the moral requirement with respect to the pain of the world. Gabriela Mistral was for Chileans a kind of guru, very mystical, a universal mother figure. She spoke of God but testified to such rigor. . Listen to these fragments of the “Oration of the Teacher” (the teacher in question was, naturally, the governess):

Sir! You who taught, forgive that I teach; that I bear the name of teacher as You did here on Earth. .

Teacher, make my fervor everlasting and disillusionment temporary.

Tear from me this impure desire for laws which disturbs me still, this stingy insinuation of protest

that overtakes me when they hurt me. .

Make me enemy of all power that is not pure, of all pressure that isn’t your ardent will over my life. .

Give me simplicity and give me depth; release me from being a complicated person or banal in my everyday lessons. .

Lighten my hand in punishment and soften it more for caresses.

The fourth major Chilean poet is Pablo de Rokha. He also was an exuberant being, a kind of boxer of poetry about whom the craziest rumors circulated. They attribute to him two anarchist attacks, frauds. . He was actually a Dadaist expressionist who imported cultural provocation into Chile. He was rowdy and unruly and could be terribly insulting, and he had a terrible, dark aura in literary circles. These loose phrases that emerge like echoing salvos should suffice to give you an idea of his furious ardor:

Incinerate the poem, decapitate the poem. .

Choose whatever material, as the stars are chosen from worms. .

When God was still blue inside man. .

You, you are precisely in the center of God, like sex, precisely in the center. .

God’s furious corpse howls from my bowels. .

I am going to beat Eternity with the butt of my pistol.

Finally, the fifth was Nicanor Parra. A native of the pueblo, he climbed the university echelons to become a professor at a large school and to embody the intellectual figure, the intelligent poet figure. He introduced us to [Ludwig] Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, Kafka’s private diary. He had a very South American sex life. .

That is to say. .

South Americans are crazy about blonds. From time to time Parra went to Sweden and returned with a Swede. It fascinated us to see him with a stunning blond. . Then they would divorce, and he would go back to Sweden and return with a new creature. Apart from his intellectual influence, he brought humor to Chilean poetry; he was the first to introduce a comedic element. In creating antipoetry, he reduced the art form. Here I have a fragment of Parra’s “Warning to the Reader”:

My poetry may very well lead nowhere:

“The laughter in this book is canned!” my detractors will argue,

“Just crocodile tears!”

“These pages bring yawns instead of sighs”

“He kicks and screams like a baby crying for the breast”

“The author sneezes to make himself understood”

All right: I invite you to burn your ships,

Like the Phoenicians, I’m trying to develop my own alphabet.

“Why bother the public then?” the reader friends will ask:

“Then why give the public such a hard time?” my friendly readers will ask: