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

So the act conceived in this manner does not have a purifying and therapeutic value?

Of course it does. If one thinks so. Our individual histories consist of words and acts. Most of the time people are content with small innocuous acts, until one day—“crack”—they lose control, they get furious, they break everything, hurl insults, they succumb to violence, sometimes committing a crime . . . If a potential criminal were familiar with the poetic act, he could sublimate his homicidal expression by staging an equivalent act.

All the same, there is still an outrageousness, which is, without a doubt, dangerous.

That’s right. Society has put up barriers so that fear and its expression, violence, do not spring up at every moment. Which is why when one carries out an act different from ordinary and codified actions, it is important to perform it conscientiously, measuring and accepting the consequences beforehand. Carrying out an act is a conscious process that aims at voluntarily introducing a fissure into the dead order that permeates society; it is not the compulsive demonstration of a blind rebel. One should agree to not identify oneself with the poetic act, to not be driven by the energies that it releases. For example, Breton fell into a trap when he, taken by his enthusiasm, declared the poetic act could entail going out on the street armed with a revolver to open fire on people. He really regretted that later, even though he didn’t actually do it. His declaration in itself was an attack on society. The poetic act allows for expressing energies that are normally repressed or asleep inside us. The unconscious act is an open door to vandalism, to violence. When the crowds erupt into violence, when the demonstration deteriorates and the people begin to set cars on fire or throw rocks, it is also about a liberation of repressed energies. For this reason, acts of violence do not merit the title poetic act.

Were you and your friends conscious of this?

We ended up being so, after observing some dangerous acts perpetrated by hot-tempered individuals. These experiences shook us up and made us question ourselves seriously. A Japanese haiku provided a key for us. A student brought the master his poem, which stated:

A butterfly :

take away the wing s

and it turns into a pepper !

The master’s response was immediate: “No, no; it is not like that. Let me correct your poem”:

A pepper:

add wings

and it turns into a butterfly!

The lesson here is clear: the poetic act must always be positive; it must be constructive and not destructive.

However, many times it is necessary to destroy to be able to build later.

Yes, but be careful with destruction as an end in itself! The act is an action and not an uncouth reaction.

In this regard, how do you categorize some of the “acts” you have mentioned?

Indeed, many of them were nothing but reactions or, let’s say, more or less clumsy attempts in the direction of a dignified act worthy of the title: so much so that I gave myself over to self-examination. I saw very clearly that instead of emptying all of my father’s drawers, we could have arrived in procession loaded up with socks and let him fill his boxes so that his dream would become reality. Instead of putting worms in my parents’ bed, we should have upholstered it with chocolate currency wrapped in gold paper. Instead of simulating my mother’s wake, we could have depicted a scene in which she would have been admired in all her glory, like the Virgin ascending. The shock caused by the act must be positive.

Through all of this, did you and your friends feel guilty? Did you experience any remorse?

No, and I continue to say guilt is useless. A mistake is permitted if it is committed only once and as part of a sincere search for knowledge. This is the human condition: man seeks knowledge. And what is a man in search of something if not, by definition, an erratic being? Error is an integral part of the journey. We abandon the negative experience, but without any remorse. We have opened the door to the true poetic act. To make the tortilla, you have to break the eggs.

TWO

THE THEATRICAL ACT

We have discussed the metaphysical dimension of the act, but let’s go back to its artistic aspect. If, before all else, poetry is action, what place should writing occupy? Did you and your friends write or were you content to only execute acts?

Lihn continued to write and became one of the country’s greatest poets, so much so that today no one remembers his acts. Chileans would be surprised to know what kinds of games their national poet devoted himself to. As for me, I abandoned poetry as such to dedicate myself to theater.

How did this transition take place?

Love for the act required creating props. Among other things marionettes, with which I quickly fell in love. Straightaway, I saw in the marionette a highly metaphysical form. I loved to see an object fabricated by my own hands escape from me. From the moment I put my hands on the marionette to animate it, the character began to live in an almost autonomous way. I witnessed the development of an unknown personality, as if the doll made use of my voice and my hands to take on an identity that was entirely his own. It seemed that I became a servant more than a creator.

Finally, I had the feeling of being directed by—manipulated by—the doll! This very deep relationship with the marionettes gave birth to a desire to become a marionette myself, in other words a stage actor.

You really think an actor is like a marionette? That’s debatable.

In any case, this was what I thought of theater and acting. I never liked psychological theater, dedicated to imitating “reality.” For me, this realistic theater was a vulgar expression in which, under the pretext of restoring something real, the most obvious aspects are re-created as well as the most hollow and the crudest, just as it is perceived normally. What is generally called “reality” is just a part, an aspect of a much greater order. This so-called realistic theater appeared to me—and it still does—to wash its hands of the unconscious dimension, the dreamlike magic of reality. Because, I repeat, reality is not rational, no matter how much we want to believe that it is to reassure ourselves. Human behavior is in general motivated by unconscious forces, those to which we can attribute rational explanations later. The world itself is not a rigid place but an amalgam of mysterious influences. To retain from reality no more than the immediate appearance is a betrayal, a surrender to illusion disguised as “realism.” Hating, as I hated the realistic theater, I began to feel repulsion toward the notion of author. I did not want to watch actors rehearse a previously written text; I would prefer to attend a theatrical performance that had nothing to do with literature. I asked myself: “Why call something a play that’s based on a text? Everything can be acted by direction. I could stage the daily newspaper, raise a marvelous drama from the front page of the newspaper.” That’s how I began to work and to experience an expanding freedom. Since I did not try to imitate reality, I could move as I fancied, make the most extravagant gestures, howl . . . Very quickly, the stage itself appeared to me as a limitation. I wanted to remove the theater from theater. For example, I imagined a piece staged on a bus. The public waited at the stops and got on the bus, which traveled through the city. Suddenly, one had to disembark and enter a bar, the maternity ward, a slaughterhouse; in essence, to get in there where something was happening before setting off again. The events that I enacted were taken up again later by others. When it was announced that my piece would take place in a theater, sometimes I would take the audience to the cellar, to the rest rooms, or to the rooftops. Later, the idea occurred to me that the theater could do without spectators and should not involve more than actors. So I organized big parties at which everyone could perform. Finally, interpreting a character seemed useless to me. The actor, so I believed, should try to interpret his own mystery, to externalize what he carries inside. One does not go to the theater to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are. Theater interested me less as a distraction than as an instrument for self-knowledge. For this reason, I replaced the classical “performance” with what I called “the ephemeral panic.”