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

Also, we dedicated ourselves to very innocent acts that were no less powerful, like putting a beautiful shell in the hand of the conductor when he came to take our bus tickets. The man stood there stupefied for a long time without saying anything.

You were scarcely twenty years old. What did your family think of these eccentricities?

As you know, I come from a family of immigrants who spent eight hours a day working in a store. When poetry entered my life in this form, they were aghast. One day my friends and I took a mannequin and dressed it with my mother’s clothes. Then we laid it out like a corpse, surrounded by candelabras, and we held a wake in the living room. Since we were involved in theater, we had all the necessary props, and it made an eerie impression. When my mother arrived, she saw herself being veiled! All my friends came to give their condolences. It naturally had an enormous impact on my family. Another time, we filled my parents’ bed with worms.

But this is very cruel, you were a hateful son.

I loved them, but I wanted, with all the insanity of youth, to break out of the confines. These acts shook them up, forced them to open. What else could they do before the unforeseen? Life is like that, you understand? Totally unpredictable. You think things will happen this way or that way and, in reality, while standing on the corner talking to a friend, you can be run over by a truck; you can run into an old lover and go to a hotel to make love; or the roof can fall on your head while you work. The telephone can ring to announce the best or the worst of news. Our acts as young poets were performed to prove this, to swim against my parents’ rigid world. To get into bed and find yourself with a swarm of worms powerfully symbolizes what happens to all of us, every day.

My father practiced Psychomagic without knowing it: He was convinced that the more merchandise he had, the more he would sell. He had to give shoppers the image of superabundance. Once he had behind him a row of drawers supposedly full of socks. He would stick a sock out of one of the drawers so it looked like the drawer was jam-packed, when there really was absolutely nothing inside. One day, when the store was full of customers, one of my friends, drunk, started opening all of the drawers. Then he wrote a poem proclaiming that my father was an exceptional man, comparable to the great mystics—equal to those who sold pure emptiness!

Your father must have been furious.

Actually, no. Every time something like that occurred, my family suffered a huge impact followed by silence and colossal perplexity. They were completely overwhelmed, and the results were so extraordinary for them that they thought they were living a dream, outside of the usual limitations of their existence. All of these acts had a dreamlike quality, imbued with madness. Remember Lihn and I set strange objectives. When we were fed up with the university, we would take the train to Valparaíso, determined not to return until an older lady had invited us to drink a cup of tea. Successful, we returned to the capital victorious.

One day, with a friend of a friend, we went to a fine restaurant. We were both dressed very elegantly and ordered steak au poivre. Once served, we rubbed the meat all over our bodies, staining our clothing. When we had finished, we again ordered the same and repeated the act. We did it five or six times back to back until the whole restaurant was seized by panic. A year later, we returned to the same establishment, but the maître d’ proclaimed: “If you are thinking to repeat what you did the other day, no way! I will not permit you to enter this restaurant.” The act had made such an impact that time found itself stopped. It had happened a year earlier, but for him it was as if it had happened a week ago.

Your words remind me of an episode when I was fifteen or sixteen years old. I was absorbed in Dostoevsky and the impassioned Russians who passed from despondency to exaltation in an instant, inflamed with a cause, knocked to the ground; they fascinated me. One day I asked my friends: Why continue progressing? What would happen if the whole world decided to stop moving? Where would we go? And we decided to throw ourselves on the ground in the middle of the street and not move. The pedestrians walked over us; some made comments. If I’m not mistaken, this was a poetic act.

Of course! And I am sure that our readers, if they think about it, will remember similar moments of questioning consensus reality. We also lay down in front of a park bench, filthy and dressed in tatters, to remind people that an economic crisis is always possible, that misery can emerge at any moment. But remember, all of this happened in Chile, in a country subject to a form of collective insanity. Surely we could not have gone so far in another environment. The majority of the Chilean bureaucrats lived politely until six o’clock in the evening. Once out of the office, they got drunk and changed their personalities, almost changing their physical bodies. They abandoned their bureaucratic and social identities to assume their magical identities. The party was everywhere—the entire country was surrealist without knowing it.

Could only the Chilean temperament itself explain this atmosphere?

People who are thought to be reasonable, those who believe in the reality and the soundness of this world, do not plan crazy acts. But in Chile the earth trembles every six days! The country’s floor itself was, literally, convulsive. This meant that everyone always was subject to a tremor—either physical and existential. We do not inhabit a robust world ruled by a bourgeois order supposedly well ingrained, but we live in a trembling reality. Nothing remains fixed, everything trembles. ( Laughter. ) Everyone lived precariously, as much in the material plane as in the relational. No one ever knew how to end a party: the couple married at six o’clock in the afternoon could dissolve at six o’clock in the morning, the guests could throw the furniture out the window . . . Naturally, anguish was at the heart of all this craziness. The country was poor, the social classes very differentiated.

Forty years have passed. In retrospect, how do you see these acts? Beyond being picturesque, what did they teach you?

Boldness, humor, an aptitude for questioning the postulated mediocrity of ordinary life, and a love for the free act. And what is the definition of the poetic act? It should be beautiful, aesthetic, and without any justification. It can also lead to some violence. The poetic act is a call to reality: One must face one’s own death, the unforeseen, our own shadow, the worms that swarm inside of us. This life that we want to be logical is really crazy, shocking, marvelous, and cruel. We claim our behavior is logical and consistent, but it is, in fact, irrational, crazy, contradictory. If we lucidly observe our reality, we would affirm that it is poetic, illogical, exuberant. In those times I was, without a doubt, immature, a young, harebrained, insolent kid; this does not deny that that particular period taught me to perceive the crazy creativity of existence and to not identify with the limits the majority of people enclose themselves in until they cannot bear it anymore and burst.

Poetry does not respect a preordained stereotype of the world.

No, poetry is convulsive! It’s bound up in the earth’s tremors! It denounces appearances; it pierces lies and conventions with its sword. I remember one day we went to the medical school and, with the help of a friend, stole an arm from a cadaver. We hid it in a coat sleeve and amused ourselves by shaking hands with people, touching them with the dead hand. No one dared remark that it was cold, without life, because they didn’t want to face the crude reality of this dead member. By telling you now, I realize that I am almost confessing. I know that all of this seems far-fetched. For us, it was certainly a game, but a profoundly dramatic game. The act created another reality in the same sense as ordinary reality. The act allowed us to access another level, and I am still convinced that with new acts we can open the door to another dimension.