Letters to the Editor
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My ex-girlfriend, the Chacmool
I'm sad every time I read about the truly piece of shit that was Castaneda. I knew a wonderful, though kooky girl named Caren who vanished into his stupid cult only to emerge as one of his Chacmools.
I dated Caren for a few months in the fall of 1991, ostensively now I think because she must have thought of me as safe, someone she knew from her past life as a college student in Mississippi. She had an ordinary family, though a brother who had been killed in a car accident a few years before had made her mother very depressed. Her father seemed nice but aloof, though it was hard to tell much about them. I was just another boyfriend with long hair as I overheard her father describe me.
We dated for a while, mostly because she was teaching English at one of the universities and needed a place to stay in LA instead of the crushing drive to Thousand Oaks where then at 28 she still lived at home with her parents. We went to movies, ate out and hung around the old Onyx coffee house on Vermont.
Her penchant for crystals and astrology I thought was really strange and in the end we were too different, argued too much about life, the Universe and everything as 20-somethings are wont to do and broke up.
Later I heard from one of her best friends and another college girlfriend of mine that Caren had cut all ties with her family and friends and joined a cult. At first it was a WTF moment, but thinking back on all the interest she had in mystic claptrap I thought was quaint it started to make sense.
For several years I thought we'd hear that her skeletal remains might turn up in the desert because she'd cut off all ties with former friends and family and well, that's pretty much what you hear happens to people that join cults. They wind up dead in the desert or drinking koolaid in South America. When the Heaven's Gate cult offed themselves I kept a close eye on the stories fearing Caren was amongst them.
It was around 10 years ago now in 1995 a friend's mother happened to spot Caren's picture in a yoga magazine that gave us any clue at all as to what had happened to Caren. No longer was she Caren, but "Nyei Murez" and the article was the first time I had ever heard the name Castaneda or of his nonsensical teachings. The stuff I would read afterward is mostly what we know now and is the stuff this article was made of. What a sham!
Last I knew of I heard from a former cult member she took the last, crazy dictations of Castaneda as he lay dying of cancer and later reappeared in the Cleargreen offshoot who seem to make their living on high priced 'seminars' teaching 'tensegrity', a pseudo mish-mash of yoga and other exercise disciplines with a dash of mystic nonsense.
'Tensegrity' is term stolen from Buckminister Fuller who actually coined the word to describe architectural structures that have strength from wire tension (think suspension bridges or large antenna towers that are supported by wire.) I often fear that I'm responsible for this because when Caren broke up with me I found that several of my Buckminister books were gone too along with my favorite denim shirt she liked to wear.
I guess Caren is a good recruiting tool because when I Google "Nyei Murez" there's frequently an accompanying ode to her large breasts and figure along with the mysticism.
I find it hard to reconcile this hard, dykish cult recruiting image with the shy, willowy girl who was once an Honors College Student at the University of Southern Mississippi, but then isn't that what LA is all about - for hucksters like Castaneda or lost souls like Caren?
LA is the place to reinvent yourself a glorious new luminous being rather than a formally ordinary, troubled human. The trouble is that no matter how many people you fool, you still have to, in the end, die just like all the rest of us ordinary, troubled human beings.
It's appropriate that Carlos reinvented himself as a god out in the desert where the mirage is that luminous image out on the horizon much like LA itself. It looks pretty from a distance but up close it's nothing of the sort.