I’m in the middle of Ru Marshall’s American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda and it’s got my brain buzzing. I’m going to have a lot to say when I finish. Meanwhile, here’s a close call I had with Castaneda’s universe that's too much to plug into a book review:
It was back in the Nineties. I was getting over being depressed by my career crashing and burning. My wife, Emily Devenport, and I were cleaning houses for a living. It amused me to muck around in the dirty corners of the disintegrating yuppie lifestyle.
Through some friends we met a woman I shall call the Dreamer. She thought that the X-Files were some kind of documentary. “When is he going to reveal what he really knows?” She’d say with wide-eyed wonder.
She was also a wannabe writer. The only problem was she couldn’t bring herself to write. When she did, the process was painful and she complained a lot. She seemed to think that we could help her.
She was also a big Castaneda fan. I’m pretty sure she moved to
Arizona hoping it would help with her spiritual journey. She met a guy I
shall call the Scientist in a Castaneda chatroom.
He really was a scientist. Worked for the City of Phoenix, analyzing the water supply. They were just friends, but the Dreamer was hoping for more.
She hoped a lot.
When Castaneda held one of his magical passes workshops, they had to go.
Emily and I landed the gig of cleaning and taking care of the Scientist’s house. He wanted the Sixties to “just die” but was also a hardcore Deadhead. A minimalist, he didn’t have much furniture, and only one chair. I don’t think he had a TV. And there were also two cats.
The retreat, workshop, whatever, sounded like a cult initiation to me. They controlled when and how much the participants could sleep and eat, had them do a lot of the “magical passes” that were calisthenic-type exercises. Brainwashing 101. Guaranteed to have an impact on bookish intellectuals who spend most of their lives sitting.
Eventually, the witches would bring Carlos (they were all on a first-name basis by then) out to babble for hours.
At one point a young “Hispanic” man wearing a wolf-teeth necklace broke in, calling Carlos a phony, and declared that HE was the “New Nagual.” The kid was ushered out.
Carlos shrugged him off: “It must be nice to be so sure of things.”
Then the witches warned the participants not to take the drugs that Carlos wrote about. Just keep doing the magical passes. If they achieve something, the witches would know and contact them.
Though she didn’t say so, the Dreamer seemed to be disappointed, but then disappointment was her reaction to most things. She wanted power in the don Juan sense. But what did that mean?
When she wasn’t around, the Scientist said that she probably thought she would suddenly be able to lose 200 pounds overnight and fly.
He, on the other hand, thought it was a good time. “A yuppie lark.” (It wasn't cheap.) A break in the routine before getting back to the water analysis. He didn’t need no stinking power.
The Dreamer eventually moved to Oregon. I heard that she died about a decade ago. Did the witches ever come a-knocking?
For all I know the Scientist is still analyzing the water.
Does anybody know what power is? Did the witches ever knock on anybody’s door?
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