Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography

Dawn was breaking. Reality resumed its dance. A man passed by selling red heart-shaped balloons. With a harsh shout, I stopped the poets’ soccer game. With my remaining money I paid the three carriage drivers and bought all the man’s red balloons. I tied the corset to the volatile bunch and released it. It rose up until it was just a small black spot in the middle of the rosy dawn sky. I compared this ascent to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. I started coughing and had to take a long drink. Perhaps it was then that I understood the close union that the subconscious forms between people and their intimate objects. For me, releasing my mother’s corset, sending it high into the sky carried by heart-shaped balloons, was like setting her free from her daily imprisonment, her lackluster life as a shopkeeper’s wife, her sexual misery, the blinders of an unwanted fatherless child, and her absolute lack of love. I had spent all those years complaining about her lack of attention and tenderness to me, but I had been unable to give her the slightest bit of affection, blinded as I was by my own spite. As for her, a prisoner of her narrow consciousness, there was little I could give her. I offered my love to her corset, making it into an angel.

The burned house seemed to send us a message that one world was ending and another was about to be born from the ruins. This event coincided with the end of winter and the beginning of spring. Realizing that no carnival had been held in Chile for more than twenty years, we set out to revive the Spring Festival. There were three of us who had this idea: Enrique Lihn; José Donoso, later well known as a novelist ( The Obscene Bird of Night ); and I. Every day at six in the evening, the time at which people left work and filled the streets, we went out in costumes in order to create collective enthusiasm. Lihn dressed as a thin, electric devil, wiggling like a scarlet noodle, waving his hard arrow-tipped tail, questioning passersby about their intimate depravities with an underhanded canniness. Donoso, dressed as a nymphomaniac, wearing black with two soccer balls as breasts, went around sensually assaulting men who escaped from his attacks amidst collective laughter. And I, dressed as Pierrot, in white from head to toe, exuding a universal loving sadness, would nestle in the arms of women in order that they might cradle me like a wounded child. Other poets and a group of college students followed our example, and soon a euphoric costume show was there for passersby to see every day in the city center. Some astute shopkeepers made the most of the idea and organized a dance at the National Stadium. It was an unprecedented success. The seats all filled up, and also the stands, and then the exterior grounds and adjacent streets. One million people danced, got drunk, and loved one another that night. We, the initial performers, had to pay admission like everyone else. Nobody thanked us. We had turned into part of the general anonymity. Disgusted, knowing that a bunch of businessmen had robbed us blind, we went to drown our sorrows at a bar near the Mapocho station, where we drank under the spell of the strident noise of the trains. We no longer had the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita: “Think of the work and not of the fruit.” We were annoyed that we had not been recognized. I learned years later from certain bodhisattvas to secretly bless everything within my view. That night we wanted to be congratulated: “Thanks to you, a marvelous celebration has been reborn. You deserve an award, a cup, a diploma, or at least a hug or free entry to all the festivities.” We got nothing, not even a smile. We decided to celebrate in the Mapuche style: we put the chairs on the table and sat on the floor with our legs crossed, forming a circle. We stopped talking, and each one of us drank with a funereal rhythm from his own bottle of rum until it was finished: one liter of alcohol per head. My friends crumpled in silence. I felt like I was dying. I was drowning in the excess of alcohol. I ran out into the street, threw up next to a street lamp, walked with my arms open to the sky, and finally sat down in the ditch at a solitary corner. The sadness of Pierrot began to invade me. Who was I? What was my purpose in life?

Thus I sat, ruminating on my ideas, pierced by the cold of dawn, when I heard the tapping of velvety paws. I raised my head, which I had buried in my chest, and saw the dog approaching. I do not say simply a dog, I say the dog for I have seen this dog again and again in my memory so many times that it has become an archetypal example of something marked by the divine. He was of medium size, with a shaggy coat that might have been white had not the vicissitudes of life turned it gray and crusty. He had a limp in his right front leg. In short, a miserable dog, with that look of doleful pride mixed with humility that is common to dogs without masters. He approached me with an intense need for companionship. His heart was beating so hard that I could hear it pounding. His tail, scarred from bites, was wagging happily. When he came up to me, he let a white stone fall from his mouth with great delicacy. His eyes revealed a love so profound, I had never before received such a sign of affection, and it made me suddenly see how little I had been loved in my life. Aided by drunkenness, which brought down the walls of my shame, I began to cry. The animal gave a couple of feeble jumps, ran a few yards away, stopped, came back, and licked the stone. I understood. He wanted to play. He was asking me to throw the stone so he could chase it, pick it up in his mouth, and bring it back to me. I did so, many times, at least twenty. A cyclist passed by. The dog ran off after him. Both disappeared around a corner. They did not return. I was alone with the white stone. That stone was my ancestor. Millions of years old, it had dreamed of speaking, and there I was, Pierrot, as white as the stone, becoming its voice. What did it want to say? I waited to receive the most beautiful of poems, dictated by this stone dropped from the muzzle of a dog. In my mind I received something that I can only compare to a blow from a hammer! This stone was going to last longer than me! I understood with a hallucinatory lucidity that I was a mortal being. My body, with which I so deeply identified, was going to age, rot, and disintegrate. My memory was going to dissolve into nothing. My words, my consciousness, everything, would fall into the black well of oblivion. The houses and streets would also disappear, and all living beings — the planet, the sun, the moon, the stars, the entire universe.

I flung the white stone away, as if it were a witch: it had injected an anguish that would last for all of the short life that indifferent fate had granted me. I had not received any metaphysical bromides from my father. He had never inculcated any idea of an afterlife in my youthful mind: reincarnation, the hope of a merciful God, an eternal soul, or all those myths that the religions so effectively proclaim in order to comfort the mortals. I set off running through the streets, howling. No one was surprised to see this clown, thinking I was a last remnant of the carnival ball. I arrived at my studio, fell on the floor, and slept like a piece of inanimate matter.

This fear of dying would haunt me for the next forty years. It was an anguish that drove me to travel the world studying religions, magic, esotericism, alchemy, and the Kabbalah. It drove me to frequent initiatory groups, to meditate in the style of numerous schools, to seek out teachers, and in short wherever I went to search without limits for something that might console me in light of my transient existence. If I did not conquer death how could I live, create, love, prosper? I felt separated not only from the world but also from life. Those who thought they knew me only knew the makeup on a corpse. During those excruciating years, all the works I accomplished, as well as all my love affairs, were anesthetics to help me bear the anguish that gnawed at my soul. But in the depths of my being, in a hazy kind of way, I knew that this state of permanent agony was a disease that I had to cure by becoming my own therapist. At its heart, this was not about finding a magic potion to keep me from dying, but above all about learning to die with happiness.