Our intention was to demonstrate the unpredictable quality of reality with these poetic acts. Lihn and I pulled ground meat out of our pockets at a meeting of the Literary Academy, flinging it at the worthy attendees while giving cries of horror. This caused a collective panic. For us, poetry was a convulsion, an earthquake. Appearances were to be denounced, falsehoods unmasked, and conventions challenged. Dressed as beggars, we took up a violin and a guitar in front of the patio of a café, as if we were about to play. Then we broke the musical instruments by smashing them against the sidewalk. We gave a coin to each patron and left. At a lecture by a professor of literature in the central hall of the University of Chile, while dressed as explorers we approached the speaker’s table crawling on all fours and with melodramatic moans of thirst fought with each other to drink the water from the official carafe. We lined up to enter a movie theater disguised as blind people and crying loudly. In an act paying homage to mothers, on the tenth of May we dressed in tuxedos and sang a lullaby while pouring several bottles of milk over our heads.
However, our youthful enthusiasm also led us to commit some grave errors. We went to the medical school and, with the complicity of friends who were students there, stole the arms of a corpse. Lihn took one arm and I the other, and we each dressed in an overcoat. Then we went around shaking hands with people, giving them the dead hands. No one dared to comment that our hands were stiff and cold because they did not want to face the reality of those dead limbs. Once finished with this macabre game we threw the arms into the Mapocho River without thinking of the consequences and without paying any respects to the human being who had possessed them.
Our feeling of freedom led us to do evil. On the banks of the Mapocho, a wild area in those days, a colony of ants had built a statuesque city. Enrique and I invited a group of artists to this location, promising an “exemplary comedy.” We set folding chairs around the ant mound. We dressed as soldiers. We advanced, goose-stepping in our boots, saluting like Nazis, and trampled the ant nest, carrying out a massacre of thousands of insects. Driven mad, they spread out in a black swarm beneath the feet of the spectators, who, disgusted, began to stomp on them. Although everyone certainly understood the meaning of our message, this did not make us any less cruel murderers of ants. We felt affected by this experience, and it led us to question ourselves seriously.
What is the definition of a poetic act? It should be beautiful, imbued with a dreamlike quality, should be above any justification, and should create another reality within the very heart of ordinary reality. It should allow for transcendence to another plane. It should open the door to a new dimension, achieving a purifying courage. Therefore, if we were proposing to perform an act deviating from ordinary and codified behaviors, it was necessary for us to evaluate the consequences beforehand. The act should be a vital fissure in the petrified order perpetuated by society, not a compulsive manifestation of blind rebellion. It was essential to distrust the negative energies that could lead to a senseless act. We understood why André Breton had apologized after yielding to excitement and declaring that the ultimate surrealist act was to go out into the street brandishing a revolver and killing random strangers. The poetic act should be a gratuitous act that allows creative energies that are normally repressed or latent in us to manifest with goodness and beauty. The irrational act is an open door to vandalism and violence. When a crowd is enraged, when manifestations degenerate and people set fire to cars and break windows, this is also a release of pent-up energies. But it does not deserve to be called a poetic act.
A Japanese haiku gives us a clue. The student shows the teacher his poem:
“Here’s a butterfly:
Now I will tear off its wings.
I get a pepper!”
The teacher’s response is immediate.
“No, that’s not it. Listen:
“I have a pepper:
Now I add some wings to it.
Here’s a butterfly!”
The lesson was clear: the poetic act must always be positive, aiming for construction and not destruction.
We reviewed the acts that we had carried out. Many of them had been nothing more than hateful reactions against a society that we considered vulgar, more or less clumsy attempts at an act worthy of being called poetic. We clearly saw that on the day we had gone into my father’s shop accompanied by Assis Namur, claiming that Jaime was a holy man because he was selling a beautiful void then opening a box to show that it was empty, we should have arrived in a procession with a bag of socks and filled the box with them in order to realize his dream of becoming a merchant. Instead of putting earthworms between the legs of my parents, I should have filled their bed with chocolate coins. Instead of staring in the dark like a beast at the crotch of my sleeping sister, I should have used immense delicacy to place a pearl between those labia. Instead of cutting off the dead man’s arms, we should have painted him gold, dressed him in a purple robe, put long hair and a beard on him, and added a crown of electric lights, making him into Christ. We should have put a plaster Virgin smeared with honey next to the ant mound, so that the ants would cover her, giving her a living skin . . .
After this gaining of awareness, we had no more regrets. Errors are excusable if they are committed only once, in a sincere quest for knowledge. These atrocities had opened up our path to the true poetic act. We decided to create an act for the consecrated Pablo Neruda. It was known that he would return from Europe the following spring on a very precise date. We knew a gentleman whose passion was to cultivate butterflies. He had a thorough knowledge of the habits of these insects, and he knew how to breed their larvae. We made him an accomplice in our act and went to Isla Negra with him to a beach where the poet had built a retreat by joining together several houses with a tower rising from their midst. Lihn, with the air of a magician, inserted an antique key—apparently a memento from his grandmother—into the old lock, and without applying the least force, unlocked it. The door to the sacred lair swung open! Although we knew that no one was living there, we walked on tiptoe, afraid of awakening some unknown and terrible muse. The rooms were full of beautiful and strange objects: collections of bottles of all types, figureheads with faces flushed by delusions, bizarrely shaped rocks, huge seashells, old books, crystal balls, primitive drums, coffee mills, all sorts of spurs, folk dolls, automata, and so forth. It was an enchanting museum formed by the child that inhabited the soul of the poet. Out of religious respect, we touched nothing. We moved as little as possible, gliding rather than walking to dodge the artifacts. The butterfly breeder, carrying his packets, stood stiff as a statue, hardly daring to breathe. All at once, Enrique was seized by an angelic energy that made him suddenly lighter on his feet. He began to jump effortlessly, intoning a song composed of unintelligible words, sounding like something between Arabic and Sanskrit. We saw him dance as if his body had lost its bones; his balance was amazing, his movements more and more daring, closer and closer to the precious objects. When he reached a final paroxysm, he shook so fast that he appeared to have hundreds of limbs. He did not break anything. All items remained in place. After the dance, we knelt meditating while the butterfly breeder placed his caterpillars in strategic corners. After the task was completed, we started back toward Santiago. The cultivator assured us that when Neruda returned to his house, clouds of butterflies would emerge from every corner.
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 pupp
et 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.
FIVE
Theater as Religion
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.
A dog show also came to town. There were a great number of dogs of all breeds dressed like people: the nice young lady, her fiancé, the bad guy, the seductress, the clown, and so on. For an hour and a half I saw a universe in which dogs had supplanted the human race, which, I imagined, might have been decimated by plague. When I left the theater, the street seemed to me to be full of animals clad in human clothes. Not only dogs, but also tigers, ostriches, rats, vultures, frogs. At that early age, the dangerous animal part of every psyche became apparent to me.
The magnificent Leopoldo Frégoli also came to town. He played an entire theater company, changing costumes at a dizzying speed. He could be fat or thin, male or female, sublime or ridiculous. His performance made me realize that I was not one, but many. My soul was like a stage inhabited by countless characters fighting to take command. Personality was a matter of choice. We could choose to be what we wanted to be. An
Italian family consisting of a father and mother with fourteen children also came to Tocopilla. The children, as obedient as dogs, danced, did acrobatics, performed balancing acts, juggled, and sang. My favorite was a three-year-old boy dressed as a policeman, whacking the guilty and the innocent alike with his baton. Thanks to them, I understood that the health of a family is maintained by shared labor, that there is not a moat separating the generations, that the rebellion of children against parents should be replaced by the absorption of knowledge, provided, of course, that the previous generation takes the trouble to expand its knowledge and pass on what it has acquired. Moreover, seeing children dressed as adults I realized that the child within us never dies, that every human being who has not done his spiritual work is a child disguised as an adult. It is wonderful to be a child during childhood and terrible when we are forced to be like adults at an early age. It is also terrible to be a child during adulthood. To grow up is to put the child in its proper place, to let it live within us not as the master but as the disciple. It should bring us everyday wonder, purity of intention, and creative games, but should never rule as a tyrant.
The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography Page 14
