Letters to the Editor
-
Now see...
This is the kind of piece I hope for when I log onto Salon over my morning coffee. Regardless of how I feel about the content, per se, it was an engrossing read and well-written. Depth! I realized it's been a long time since I savored something like this on Salon, and too long in between savorings. I blame the terrorists, and our own terrorist in chief, I suppose.
When I saw the piece was 4 pages long, I got up and turned off MSNBC to devote my full concentration in silence. Not that I sacrificed anything but the non-stop Don Imus Breaking Non-News Fest, this season's Anna Nicole Breaking Non-News Fest. Would someone please tell Prince von Sharpton this baby is not his?
-
Deconstructing Castaneda
As we all know, there may not have been an actual Moses or David but evidently someone wrote the words "Thou shalt not kill," and "Though I walk through the valley in the shadow of death I shall fear no evil," and they do exist in the physical realm. Even if written by Shlomo Bernstien in 213 BC they remain powerful.
Similarly, despite the widespread acclaim for Casteneda's books, the writing was repetitive, weak and like watered down Hemingway — but only the exposition. The quoted material, from the supposed Don Juan and Don Genero characters, was generally brilliant, concise, on point, hysterically funny and as enlightened an analysis of mystical theory as exists from Buddha through Huxley.
If Castenada was a mere novelist and plagerist how did he switch so effortlessly from plodding prose to scintillating succinct insight — either he was a great novelist hiding behind a hack or he got some words of wisdom somewhere.
#2. While his first four books are rather dynamic and coherent in construction, his later eight or whatever, often degenerate into outright insantiy — except for the fact that portions seem to depict modern physics and string theory, again with surprising precision.
Some times things are not A or B but both AB. Castenada may have had a Yaqui informant who he then ginned up.
Doniphan Blair
doniphan@amedianysf.com
-
Transcedental hoo ha...
It’s always a good day when religionists, especially the airhead New Age reality is unreal variety, take it up the ying yang. In this case, via the exposure of that plagiaririzing pussy hound, Carlos (Wanna See My Etchings?) Castaneda.
The sixties/seventies were full of talented transcedentantalizing scam artists cum pussy hounds cum gurus, big and small, preying on bored middle class wankers living off their parents and/or selling flowers on the corner to keep the master in gold plated Rolls Royces. They did get a lot of pussy, though, no question.
As to atheism being a religion, nice try. Atheists don’t have to prove anything since there’s nothing to prove. It’s religionists who have to prove, let’s take it down a notch, support, their bullshit. They can’t, of course, which is why they invented the word, faith. As in, leap of faith into the nagual. As in, OK, now that you’ve seen my etching, take a leap and fuck off.
Lol!
-
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.