Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography

In 1953 I threw my address book into the sea and boarded a boat from Valparaiso, bound for Paris with a fourth-class dormitory cabin ticket and barely a hundred dollars in my pocket. I had decided never to return again, not because I did not love Chile or my friends (it hurt me deeply to cut all my ties), but because I wanted to fundamentally live the idea that the poet must be a tree that converts its branches into celestial roots. Before leaving, I carried out two poetic acts, one in Lihn’s company and the other alone, that affected my character profoundly.

In a bookstore that, not merely by chance, was called Daedalus, Enrique and I put on a puppet show of a play by Federico García Lorca with our little theater, which we called the Bululú. Taming my poet friend enough to rehearse, and tearing him out of the arms of Bacchus, was a herculean task but luckily we were encouraged by our girlfriends and their sisters, who patiently sewed all the costumes. On the day of the performance the audience, mostly civil war refugees from Spain, filled the place and did not hold back their applause. Although the price of admission was modest, we took in a good amount of money. Elated by success, after several toasts we decided to rent a victoria, one of those open horse-drawn carriages popular among romantic couples and tourists. We asked the driver what route he would take us on in return for the amount that we had earned. He suggested a five-kilometer route past the most beautiful sights in the city center and its surroundings. We accepted, but instead of traveling comfortably seated, we ran behind the victoria. (That is to say, we were pursuing fame.) For the last three hundred meters we got on, sat down, and finished the ride with our arms raised as if we were champions. We had intuitively discovered that the subconscious accepts metaphorical facts as real. This act, seemingly absurd and eccentric, was a contract we made with ourselves: we would invest our energy in our work; we would devote ourselves to pursuing victory; we would not be losers but winners. Enrique Lihn devoted his entire life to art and worked unceasingly to perfect what he did until his death at the age of fifty-nine. He is considered one of the great Chilean poets. While in his sick bed, the last verse he wrote was: “. he unravels the skein of death with his hands, which they say are those of an angel.”

As I was preparing to leave the second poetic act took place at a farewell party that my friends threw for me at Café Tango on the Alameda de las Delicias. We heard a rumbling that grew and grew, as if a gigantic wave were approaching. We young artists, living isolated in our idealistic sphere and paying no attention to vulgar politics, had not noticed when the country voted to elect a new president. In an absurd historical phenomenon, the popular candidate in this democratic election was the former military dictator Carlos Ibáñez del Campo. Now, by their own will, the people had put him in command for the second time. The deafening rumble proclaiming triumph originated from a crowd of some hundred thousand people who joined the throng, from homes in the slums around the Central Station to posh neighborhoods. It was as if a dark river of euphoric, drunken ants had invaded the broad avenue. Moved by I do not know what force I jumped up and ran to the avenue, full of uncontainable joy, stood in the middle of it, and waited for the crowd to reach me. When the first line of marchers was a few meters from me I began yelling loudly, without thinking for one second of the dangerous consequences, “Death to Ibáñez!” It was not David versus Goliath; it was a flea against King Kong. How could I have had the idea of confronting a hundred thousand people? In a state of ecstasy, alien to my body and therefore alien to fear, I shouted and shouted until I was hoarse, insulting the new president. The river of people did not react. My act was so foolish that it was unthinkable to them. They simply integrated me into their triumph. I was one of them, one more citizen cheering their new leader. Instead of “death to Ibáñez” they heard “long live Ibáñez.” As the human torrent passed all around me and I stood there like a salmon swimming against the current, I realized that I was not doing this because I wanted to die, but on the contrary, because I wanted above all to live, meaning to survive without being swallowed by this prosaic world — a world that is so prosaic, however irrational it may seem, that it has glimmerings of the surreal. The people who were marching along were not shouting “long live Ibáñez” but “long live the Horse.” The winning candidate had begun his career as a cavalry officer, and because he spoke little and had abnormally large teeth the people called him the Horse. Perhaps that is why he governed the country by stomping on it.

My friends, who had initially thought I had run to the bathroom to vomit, became concerned about my disappearance and went to look for me in the street. They spotted me standing there, shouting against everything in the middle of the parade. Pale, they made their way to me and got me out of there at top speed. I collapsed on a table in the café, short of breath. My whole body ached as if I had been beaten. Then I was seized by nervous laughter and severe trembling, at which point they calmed me down by throwing water from a jug in my face. The Alejandro they calmed thus would never be the same again. A force had awakened within me that would enable me to overcome a great many adverse currents. Years later, I applied this experience to therapy: you cannot heal someone; you can only teach him how to heal himself.

Before 1929 northern Chile attracted adventurers from all over the world, the Germans had not yet invented synthetic saltpeter, and natural saltpeter was known as white gold. Foreign vessels came to be loaded with thousands of kilos of this ambiguous, dual-natured, androgynous substance that on the one hand is an ally of life due to its application as a powerful fertilizer and on the other hand is an ally of death due to the application for which it was more coveted: making explosives.

In this world of miners money was made hand over fist. In Iquique, Antofagasta, and Tocopilla the bars, whorehouses, and artists all thrived. Huge theaters were built in the mining villages. All kinds of performers visited this new California. Great opera singers, dancers such as Anna Pavlova, and extravagant variety shows all came to perform. Around the time of my birth not only did the stock market collapse in the United States, but synthetic saltpeter also began to come on the market at a much lower price than what was produced in northern Chile. The mines and the cities that fed on them began their slow death. However, despite the economic crisis there was a kind of inertia that kept some performing companies, albeit the more modest ones, visiting those theaters as they slowly crumbled from lack of upkeep; the Municipal Theater of Tocopilla, which had been converted into a cinema, occasionally rolled the white screen back to reveal the large stage, especially in winter, the best season due to lack of rain. Many shows were put on there. Each one taught me something. This is not to say that my childhood brain translated this knowledge into words. My intuition absorbed it like seeds, which grew slowly over the years, changing my perception of the world, guiding my actions, and finally manifesting itself in psychomagic. Besides Fu-Manchu, the magician described in chapter 1, I marveled at seeing Tinny Griffy, an immense white woman weighing at least three hundred kilos who sang, performed, and danced, tapping her feet, dressed like Shirley Temple. The stage, corroded by the salty environment, could not support such a weight, and the fat lady fell through the floor. A compact group of men dragged her out, like ants carrying a beetle, and deposited her in a taxi that took her to the hospital in Antofagasta, a hundred kilometers away. In order to fit in the backseat Tinny Griffy had to stick her huge legs, which looked like enormous hams, out through a window. I learned that there is a close relationship between our gestures and the world. If we break through the resistance of our medium, then that medium, while being destroyed, destroys us at the same time. What we do to the world, we are also doing to ourselves.