knowledge_of_self said:
Hi Beau and all.
Thanks for the link; I’ll check it out for sure!
I haven’t read the Active Side of Infinity. But from what I understand that is his last book, and I am reading his books from first – last. I have to admit, the premises for the books has definitely changed. For the fact that the first and second book were mostly about hallucinogenic drugs and their affects, while the later books deal with more esoteric topics. Although, after reading back to the first two books, you can see in some places how Don Juan is telling Castaneda certain things that he totally over-looks until the later books. All in all I really resonate to Castaneda, and am planning to read all his books and also a book called, “I Was Carlos Castaneda : The Afterlife Dialogues”. By Martin Goodman.
Here is a link to Amazon where they also have a synopsis of the book…
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0609807633/sr=1-41/qid=1138830356/ref=sr_1_41/103-8786826-7127029?%5Fencoding=UTF8
[…] Carlos Castaneda comes back from the dead in a true-life spiritual adventure story set in the French Pyrenees, Machu Picchu, the Peruvian Amazon, and the American Southwest.
Four months after his death, the world-renowned writer, anthropologist, and mystic Carlos Castaneda turns up in the French Pyrenees. He meets with writer Martin Goodman. His purpose? To lead Martin beyond the fear of death and the confusions of mortality, and to offer a clearer understanding of the ultimate wisdom -- the wisdom to live the rest of our days in full and conscious harmony with the living earth.
Martin Goodman is a gifted storyteller who has infused “I Was Carlos Castaneda” with literary verve and humor. When, at their first encounter, an incredulous Goodman confronts Castaneda with reports of his recent death, Castaneda replies wryly, “Details. . . mere details.” And so the story begins. […]
I was wondering if anyone has read this book. It is interesting that Marin Goodman claims that C.C. “turns up” in the French Pyrenees, sounds to be quite interesting indeed.
Any thoughts?
Nina
Hi Nina. I read the book but it was like eating a bun with the hamburger missing! Where's the beef? It was interesting that Goodman claims he met a 'reconstituted' Castaneda (I think that's the way Goodman put it) in the French Pyrenees four months after Castaneda's death but Goodman's writing style was so vague that I gave up reading it! He would very briefly talk about his conversations with Castaneda (assuming it was not a fantasy) and then he would suddenly shift in focus and start talking about the "la-de-da" poetic scenery around him such as the lilies and daffodils (figuratively speaking of course). I didn't want to hear about his in depth descriptions of the 'lilies and daffodils,' I wanted to hear about his conversation with Castaneda! It was a frustrating read to say the least. Here's an example of how he writes:
http://www.martingoodman.com/recoveringcastaneda.htm
Recovering from Castaneda
Part 1 of a sequel by Martin J. Goodman
A year passes. Too much is impending in 1999 to worry about Castaneda. It's a crazy summer. Milan floods. Storms rage on to wipe out the Bahamas, wallop Florida, shut down New York. The mainland of Turkey crumbles into an earthquake, while a tidal wave sweeps across a coastal town whose harbour front drops beneath the sea. Then the earthquake heads west to march on Athens. Kosovo sheds tears, plots revenge, shakes off the dirt and wonders how to live again. Adults and children dance in the streets of East Timor to celebrate their independence, then flee into the mountains so as not to be butchered.
It has become a small world. Global consciousness is setting in. Horrors that would once have happened out of sight now come into our rooms to shock us. It gets to take more effort to seal myself away and pretend to be safe.
I pull the plug on the website I've been editing, pick up pen and paper instead of my laptop, and head back to my village in France.
***
Progress has snaked through the village. The road is widened. The place we stood when I first met Castaneda, a roadside where poppies used to glow in spring, is now asphalt. It's no longer so simple to stand in company of the crucified Christ, as we did then. The pedestal of his cross is now a joint between a railing and a wall. He's received fresh coats of paint too, as part of the improvements. Even the hairs of his armpits are delicately marked in brown, and his whole body shines beneath varnish.
It is changes like this that bring Carlos most to mind. For all of his teachings about the flexible nature of time, my memories of the landscape have been set to the day of his visit. I note how brambles now hang over a path that was clear then. How weeds have massed in a garden that last year was tidy. Regional subsidies were given to strip vines from vineyards and replace them with fruit trees. I note how these trees have suddenly swollen and spread into mature orchards.
My favourite tree, a young poplar just below my house in which a nightingale used to sing through the night, has been chopped down and lies in the river. The frog whose night-time calls were like beeps of a radio transmitter, so I joked that the French Resistance were still in the hills tapping out messages, is now silent.
The year seems one of loss more than of gain. The ease I once felt walking through the valley is now touched by fear.
Wonder transmuted into fear once before in my life. Working in Saudi Arabia, on an oil refinery in Yanbu, every free afternoon I drove out to the Red Sea. Snorkelling above the coral beds was the most exotic experience of my life. It was like being vast and hovering over your personal Grand Canyon, swarming with brilliant alien species of tropical fish.
There comes a point when the coral bed reaches a shelf, and you are looking over a cliff deep into the blue. I swam out into that space, and found I was not alone. A shark somewhat longer than myself was swimming with me. I turned, swam a breaststroke so as not to disturb the water and so attract the shark's attention, heading for the shallows. My head passed over the coral bed, then my torso, my legs. The shark could no longer reach beneath me and turn its head to bite. Now I felt free to splash, swimming as fast as I could for the shore.
I didn't snorkel the area again. The wonders I had seen remained with me, but I now understood how my pleasure was also ignorance. Stone fish dwelt in the sand, as dull and static as their name suggests, but step on one and there is no known antidote to their poison. Some of the most vivid pink coral is fire coral, one scratch from which inflames a limb. For a long while I floated in astonishment and looked in the face of a lion fish, a quivering ball of orange and white quills, never guessing how deadly those quills were.
The shark in the ocean was a wake up call.
What the shark did for the Red Sea, Carlos Castaneda seems to have done for the valley around my French home. He has turned it inside out in some way, so nothing is quite what it seems.
Deadliness flourishes. On one walk the only mushroom I see, more than a foot high, is the amanita mascaria that could see me in agonies with one nibble. The only creature, pinched thin and about eight inches long with a broad head, is an asp.
But it is not the obvious dangers that get to me most. I walk, and bursting out from the undergrowth ahead of me comes a golden swallowtail butterfly. Step further on, and a smaller butterfly of pure white rushes into the air. They are startled like birds can be startled. Their flight is not the meander of butterflies but a direct, zooming flight. The river is a corridor for butterflies, who stream by the side of most of my walks. In other years I've simply thought them pretty. Now they disturb me, pairs of them skittering in frenzies of mating.
I used to like the valley for its solitude. Now there's no such thing as solitude. It's not just the butterflies. These mountains are swarming with different forms of consciousness, nature busting its guts to make the most of the warm months.
I left Castaneda sitting in a cave in these hills. In a game I never really got the hang of he granted me ten questions, and I still have one left. I don't trust his word. I don't trust that he will reappear for my question as he promised. But if he does I think I know the question I will ask.
Why?
Why did you come and turn my world inside out, and then abandon me?
***
I watch a red squirrel leap across the river and frolic down the lane. It's just beyond the height of summer and the river is low. A rock juts out of the centre of its stream, coated white with minerals, and shortly after nine each morning a turtle climbs aboard. For several hours it sits there, soaking in the sunshine, before swimming off into the afternoon.
The magic of the Pyrenees is working for me again. It starts by shifting my attention from niggling concerns toward details in the landscape. The butterflies are one example, but after a time my attention becomes less obsessive. I step back from looking for irritants in my life and take in a broader view. The everpresent sound of the river's running waters suddenly surprises me and I take the time to appreciate it, so that the sound flows through and cleanses me somehow. I go cycling after a brief shower of rain, crest a hill, and freewheel through the most fragrant air I have ever tasted. Rain has moistened and released the scents of wild thyme, sage and rosemary, and now the sun warms the breeze that collects the perfume. I note the passing shadow of cloud as it undulates over a rock face, the passage of wind gusting through trees along the valley floor. At night I rise from my bed, walk out along the asphalt road, and lie on my back. The road, which receives as many bicycles as cars, still holds the heat of the day. Cool air passes over my face as I stare up into the sky, which offers a view clear through the blackness to the canopy of stars.
Nature accepts you as its own in such a place. Or perhaps it simply gives you space to accept the nature in yourself.
This valley is where I learned not to write.
It's hard to emerge from a writing day and blink out at a world that has continued in your absence. Hard to narrow your focus on the practicalities of staying alive, the niceties of society. Too many masterpieces of world literature have been wrung from miserable lives. As I developed my writing, my success in the world crumbled away. Those hours of writing were my refuge, where life was as sublime and various as I imagined it to be. Life in the streets was not like that. I would go out and I would stumble.
Here in the valley, life is as sublime and various as in my writing imagination. There is no chasm between them. The experience helps in writing for a public, because the public is no longer in a world apart. I can sit and write, but more importantly I can sit and not write for day after day and still be in the same space. I learned how to write, then I learned how to not write.
Castaneda compacted his lessons for me into twenty-four hours. He was a great teacher, but after weeks in this valley without him I come to see that he has left all his material behind. He wasn't a spider, drooling silken strands from his stomach. I don't think he was even a catalyst, conjuring things into being that couldn't have happened without him. He was more like a prism. I looked through him and saw the constant interweavings of the cosmos in many dimensions.
I sit in the valley and recall his teachings on the flexibility of time. This is a day of not writing, but it is a day when I am in that space that doesn't constrict possibilities. Time can expand. It can collect what is in the future and what was in the past so that they both settle in the present.
I begin to wonder if Carlos has made another appearance in my life, one I might have missed for some reason.
I turn around to have a look.
I am at a party. Nobody dances, they just talk and eat and drink. It is the previous Autumn, in Santa Fe. I am in an airy living room, open plan to the kitchen, smooth and rounded plastering to the walls, timber vigas spanning the ceiling, pinyon logs crackling in the kiva fireplace. It is a gathering of scientists and writers. The food and drink is ample, the conversation good. I can see that Carlos would like it here.
I look around. He is nowhere to be seen.
It is hopeless. I come to see that replaying a scene doesn't alter it. If he wasn't there he wasn't there. Wishful thinking won't change it.
Back in my mental rerun of the evening I turn to pick up a bottle and pour some white wine into the glass of my friend. The party is continuing, replaying itself, from the moment at which I re-entered it.
"Have you begun your book yet?" my friend asks. "Your book of the summer? When you met Castaneda?"
My friend is a best-selling writer, but more than that she is someone who has taken direct experience of ancient shamanic practices, most especially in her native Siberia, and brought them into her work as a psychiatric doctor. I trust her intuition, and have welcomed her encouragement.
"Not yet," I admit. "Just my notes. I think I will though."
We have already discussed the difficult choices of what stories to keep private and what to release. The choice isn't one of secrecy. Sometimes it is about respecting the privacy of people or of places. Generally it is understanding that some encounters shape the course of your own life, and once that has been effected their purpose is at an end. Other encounters reach beyond your own life. It's the difference between being given a direction on a street corner when you are lost, and being given a map. The street corner direction has reference to where you yourself are at a certain moment. It has a personal resonance. The map also helps you, though maybe no better than a spoken direction might have done. Beyond the help it gives to you it has a universal resonance. You recognize it as something to be passed on, for the use of others who enter the same territory.
"You must write that book," my friend insists. This is no earnest instruction. She is in party mood. She bounces on her stool in enthusiasm, her blonde hair catching the light, her blue eyes shining. "If you don't do it someone else will, and your book is the one we must have. Did I tell you of my meeting with Castaneda?"
"Recently?"
"Yes. Like you. After he died. Only mine was not like yours. It was in a dream. And he was dancing."
"You're sure it was Castaneda?"
"Oh yes. He was very clear. And what a dancer he is. Very extravagant. I kept my distance from him."
"Did you speak?"
"We did. But not in words. I just remember him looking at me, and then some message was lodged in my head. He was telling me to watch him and see how he was not dancing alone. He was dancing with his sexuality. It is important to keep a proper relationship with your sexuality, he says. That's all. Perhaps when you see him again, you can ask him to clarify this!"
She is playing with me, but as she sips from her glass her eyes look into mine.
"It is a funny thing," she says. "It is not exact. It is not identical twins. But when I look at you I see him. You and Castaneda have the same face."
***
This isn't the solution to my quest. I don't rush to a mirror to find Carlos Castaneda staring back at me. I never even think of doing that. Whatever Carlos was, and the nature of someone who makes a bracing appearance some months after his painful death bears looking into, he wasn't and isn't me. I understand in some ultimate way that we are one another, that there is no separation between things. I also know that a finger and a foot can both be part of the same body, but a finger isn't a foot. Carlos and myself are not the same person, whatever the wash of similarity that passes over us.
However I have set myself open. Recollection is taking me where it will. I know there is some clue in my friend's conversation at the party, and understand that I am on the track of something.
The party has continued when my memory comes back to it. Some people, including my friend, have left. A few of us are gathered around our host and hostess. Conversation has turned to a trip they have been planning to make for some years. It needs six people to travel together. Suddenly six of us are chosen, a date is set, and our hostess promises to make the booking.
When I phone to thank her for the party the following day, she lets me know how much I owe her. The booking is made, and has to be paid in full upfront. She is excited, because our favoured date at the end of July is available. It is right in the middle of the storm season. The six of us will travel southwest, toward the New Mexican border with Arizona, and spend twenty-four hours in a vast art installation known as the Lightning Field.
Next > The Lightning Field - part 2 of the sequel
