Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography

“And you, young man, where are you from?”

“I’m Chilean, like you. What happened is that my grandparents were immigrants, they came from Russia.”

“Russian? Comrade?” Sly muttering. “And where do you work?”

“Well, I don’t work. I’m an artist, a poet. ”

“Ah, a poet, like that pot-bellied Neruda! Come on, have a drink with us and read us a poem!”

Stella still seemed to be invisible to them. Their lewd glances were directed at me. They exuded the sexuality of prison inmates. My youthful white skin turned them on. I drank from a glass of sour wine. I started to improvise a poem. The clientele turned their attention toward me.

Where there are ears but there is no song

in this world that dissipates

and in which existence is given to those who do not deserve it

I am much more my footprints than my steps.

In the midst of reciting I saw that all eyes were now on Stella, and no one was listening to me. Determined to steal my audience, my friend was impaling her arm with a large hairpin that she had taken from her sequin-covered purse. Without any sign of pain, she slowly pushed the pin through until it emerged on the other side of her arm. I was fascinated as well. I had not known that the poet had the skills of a fakir. Once she was sure she had captured the patrons’ attention, she began to recite a poem in an insulting tone while lifting up her shirt, millimeter by millimeter.

I am the guardian, you are the punished men

the farmhands with oblique gestures

from whom, as you engender false furrows,

the seed flees in terror!

She now showed her perfect breasts, accusing the offended drunks with her erect nipples, which she moved in a provocative semicircular motion. If I have ever in my life thought that I was going to defecate out of fear, it was on that occasion. Like a volcano beginning a devastating eruption, these dark men were beginning to stand up, reaching into their pockets for the knives they carried at all times. Their hatred was mixed with bestial desire. We were about to be raped and eviscerated. Stella, who had a deep, masculine voice, took in a deep breath and let out a deafening yell that froze them all for an instant: “Stop, macaques, respect the avenging vagina!” I took advantage of their bewilderment to grab her by the arm and make her jump with me through the open window. We ran toward the well-lit streets of the city center like hares being pursued by a pack of raging predators.

We reached the Alameda de las Delicias. At that hour of the night there was not a soul around. We leaned our backs against the trunk of one of the great trees that lined the avenue, catching our breath. Stella, reeling with laughter, pulled the pin out of her arm. Her laughter was contagious, and I started laughing as well, until I shook. Suddenly, our joy vanished. We realized that a strange shadow was covering us. We looked up. Above our heads, a woman was hanging from a branch. The light of a neon sign tinged the suicide’s hair with red. In this I saw a sign. There was nothing we could do for the dead woman, and we left quickly so as not to have to deal with the police. At the door of the boarding house, I said goodbye to Stella.

“I need to be alone for a while. I feel like I’m drowning without a lifejacket in your immense ocean. I do not know who I am. I’ve become a mirror that only reflects your image. I can’t keep living in the chaos you create. The woman hanging from the tree, you invented that. Every night you kill yourself because you know that you will be reborn the same as you were. But maybe someday you will wake up as someone else, in a body that you don’t deserve. I beg you, let me recover; give me a few days of solitude.”

“Well,” she said in an unexpectedly childlike voice, “let’s meet at midnight on the dot, in twenty-eight days, one lunar cycle, at Café Iris. But before you go, come with me to urinate on St. Ignatius of Loyola.”

For those twenty-eight days, under the pretext of nervous exhaustion I ate only fruits and chocolate and did not leave the room the Cereceda sisters were loaning me. I felt empty. I could not write, think, or feel. If someone had asked me who I was, my answer would have been, “I am a mirror broken into a thousand pieces.” Sleeping very little, I spent hours piecing together the fragments. At the end of this lunar cycle I felt reconstructed. However, I realized I had not rediscovered myself; once again, I was the mirror of that terrible woman.

Like a drug addict needing his fix, I went to Café Iris. I got there right at midnight, even though I knew she might be hours late. But it was not so. She was waiting, standing by a window wearing a sober military coat and no makeup. Without her mascara she was still beautiful, but now the expression on her unadorned face was that of a saint. In a voice so soft that she reminded me of my mother when she sang to me in my crib, she said, “I am a carrier pigeon in your hands. Let me go. The god who was waiting has come down from the mountains. I’m not a virgin. I’m sure that I am carrying in my belly the perfect child that destiny has promised me.” She showed me a needle threaded with one of her long hairs. I could not keep from shedding tears while she sewed up my pocket. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, Stella had disappeared. I saw her again fifty years later, a prisoner in another body, a sweet little grandmother with short gray hair.

The world fell away from me. I went back to the house in Matucana. My parents did not ask me any questions. Jaime handed me a few bills. “From now on I’ll give you a weekly salary. All you have to do is help in the shop on Saturdays; there are more thieves every day.” My mother got a hot bath ready for me then served me a hearty breakfast. I saw in her eyes the anguish of not understanding me. If I, being a part of them, was incomprehensible, then that meant the world they had built so strongly had a fault, an area populated by madness that did not match up with their scheme of “reality.” It was absolutely necessary for them to consider my behavior as delusional. To maintain their own equilibrium, they had to force the madman into the straitjacket of “normal life.” When they realized they could not break me down, they tried to persuade me by filling me with shame. And they succeeded. After several weeks I felt guilty; I lost my confidence in poetry and promised myself not to frustrate their hopes, to continue my studies at the university until I got a diploma. But one night, in a dream, I saw a high wall on which one sentence was written: “Let go your prey, lion, and take flight!” I packed a few books, my writings, the few clothes I owned, and returned to the Cereceda sisters.

I absorbed myself in making my puppets. Like a hermit, I spent the day locked in my room engaging in dialog with them. Only late at night, when my hosts and their friends were asleep, did I go to the kitchen to eat a piece of chocolate. One morning someone gave a few short, discrete, delicate knocks on my door. I decided to open it. I saw before me a woman of short stature with amber-colored hair and an ingenuous expression that touched me deeply. However, I asked her with false brusqueness what her name was.

“Luz.”

“What do you want?”

“They say you make some very nice puppets. Can I see them?” I showed them to her with great pleasure. There were fifty of them. She put them on her hands, made them speak, laughed, “I have a friend who is a painter who will love to see what you do. Please come with me to show him your characters.”

What I felt for Luz had nothing to do with love or desire. I knew that for me she was an angel, the polar opposite of the Luciferian Stella; rather than breaking the poisonous world into a thousand pieces, she saw a chaos of sacred fragments that it was her duty to put together in order to reconstruct a pyramid. Luz came to draw me out of my dark retreat, to lead me into the luminous world, and once there, to vanish. And so it was. Luz and Stella were two opposing views of the world. Although they both felt themselves to be foreign to the world, outsiders in it, one saw it as having heavenly ties while the other saw it as having roots in hell. One wanted to show the good things in the world by making herself its mirror, the other, in the same way, wanted to reflect its failures. The two were of a piece, consistent with each other: cobras charming men, one wanting to inoculate them with the venom of the infinite, the other with the elixir of eternity.