Jodorowsky, Alejandro - Psychomagic - The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

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:

“If the author himself begins by putting down his own work,

How good can it be, after all?”

Watch out, I don’t put anything down

Or better yet, I’ ll praise my way of seeing things,

I’m proud of my shortcomings

I’ ll praise my creations to the skies.

Aristophanes’ birds

Buried the corpses of their parents

In their own heads.

(Each bird was actually a flying cemetery)

The way I see it

The time has come to bring this ritual up-to-date

So I’ ll bury my quills in the heads of my readers!

[TRANSLATED BY DAVID UNGER]

I understand then that these five characters greatly marked the young man you were.

They were alive. Alive and fighters! They were the best enemies in the world; they spent their days fighting, exchanging insults . . . Pablo de Rokha, for example, published an open letter to Vicente Huidobro in which he exclaimed: “I am beginning to be annoyed with this story, my little Vicentito. Apart from that, I am not one of those cowards who beats up a clucking chicken because she says she has laid an egg in Europe.” Do you know what he said about Neruda? “Pablo Neruda is not a Communist, he is a Nerudaist—the last of the Nerudaists, or probably the only one.” These people exposed themselves; they were not afraid to live their passions. As for us, we embraced one cause and then the other . . . We were immersed in poetry from morning to night. It was truly in the center of our existence. For us, these five poets formed an alchemist mandala: Neruda was water, Parra air, de Rokha fire, Mistral earth, and Huidobro, in the center, quintessence. We wanted to go beyond our predecessors who had done no more than anticipate our quest.

And this, how was it?

All of these poets had a public role. Huidobro said, “Poets, why sing about the rose? Make it bloom in the poem”; Neruda seduced a woman from the pueblo promising a marvelous gift and then showing her a lemon the size of a pumpkin. They had begun leaving literature to participate in acts of everyday life, taking the aesthetic and rebellious positions typical of poets.

You and your friends then wanted to go further in this direction.

I was lucky to be the same age as the famous poet Enrique Lihn, now deceased. One day, he and I and other friends found in a book about Italian Futurism an illuminating phrase by Marinetti: “Poetry is an act.” And from that moment on, we decided to pay attention to the poetic act. For three or four years, we dedicated ourselves to carrying out poetic acts, thinking about them all day long.

What did these acts consist of?

For example, Lihn and I decided one day to walk in a straight line, without ever wavering. We walked down the avenue, and we came to a tree. Instead of going around it, we climbed up and over it; if a car crossed in our path, we climbed on top, walking on its roof. In front of a house, we rang the doorbell, entered through the door and exited where we could, sometimes through a window. The important thing was to maintain the straight line and not pay any attention to an obstacle, as if it did not exist.

This should have caused more than one problem . . .

Not at all, why? You forget that Chile was a poetic country. Remember, having rung the bell of a house and having explained to the lady of the house that we were poets in action and that our mission required us to cross her house in a straight line—she understood perfectly and had us leave through the back door. For us, this crossing of the city in a straight line was a grand experience, the way we managed to avoid all the obstacles. Little by little, we went about inventing more extreme acts. I was studying psychology. One day I was really fed up and decided to find a way to physically express that I had a bellyful. I left class and went calmly to urinate in front of the door of the office of the rector. Of course, I ran the risk of being permanently expelled from the university. A magical thing: no one saw me. I carried out my act and left incredibly relieved—in all senses of the word. Another day, we put a large quantity of coins in a bag full of holes and traveled to the center of the city. It was extraordinary to see everyone crouching down behind us, the streets filled with doubled-over bodies! We also decided to create our own imaginary city within the real city. For this we needed to celebrate inaugurations. We headed for the foot of a statue, a famous monument, and we began an inauguration ceremony, in accordance with our fantasy. We transformed the National Library into an intellectual café. Without a doubt, this became the seed of the Mystical Cabaret. What we call things is important; by giving things different names, it seemed to us that we transformed them.