If Matucana felt like a stifling prison to me, then so did my body. Feeling ill at ease in my flesh, I fled into my intellect. I lived shut away in my mind, levitating a few meters above a walking corpse that felt alien to me. I was conscious of myself as a multitude of disordered thoughts that eventually lost their meaning and became masses of empty words without any roots to nourish my being. I was a dry well in which phrases floated around, accumulating into a fabric of anguish. I knew that I was somewhere in there, behind my face, but I could not tell who or what this self of mine was. I felt cold, heat, hunger, desire, pain, and sorrow, but at a distance, as if they were in an alien body. The only thing that kept me alive was the ability to imagine. I dreamed of adventures in exotic lands, colossal triumphs, virgins sleeping with pearls in their mouths, elixirs that conferred immortality. Everything that I wanted could be summarized in a single word: change. The essential quality that I needed in order to love myself was to become what I currently was not. Like the frog awaiting the princess, I waited for the arrival of a superior and compassionate soul who would overcome disgust and approach me to give me the kiss of knowledge. Unfortunately I only had two friends, and they were imaginary: the Rebbe and the aged Alejandro. For what I wanted to achieve, I needed more than a couple of ghosts. I decided to be my own helper.
Even after meditations that seemed eternal, I was not able to dissolve my intellect within my body. Getting out of my own head was as impossible as escaping from a strongbox. It was impossible to get rid of the supremacy of my identification with the flesh. Therefore, I decided to try the opposite: since I could not go down, I would make all my sensations ascend! Beginning as pure intellect I began by considering my physical form, then my needs, desires, and emotions. I examined how I felt, then what it was like to live with this sensation. I realized that so-called “reality” was a mental construct. Was it a total illusion? This was impossible to know, but quite clearly I never perceived what was real in me in its entirety. Intellect always provided me with an incomplete fantasy, distorted by the false consciousness of myself with which my family had imbued me. “I am living inside a madman! My rational ship is sailing on a sea of insanity!” What at first I thought was a nightmare changed, little by little, into hope. Since everything that presented itself to me as part of “my being” consisted of illusory images, nothing more than dreams, I was able to change my sensation of myself.
Thus, a long process began. I focused my attention on my feet. They felt heavy, numb, distant, incapable of balancing properly. I began to imagine them as light, fine-tuned, sensitive, confident, their toes extending intrepidly onto the paths of life. I imagined myself with the feet of Christ, pierced by a single nail that fastened them to the pain of the world, a bleeding wound offering ascendancy to change lamentation into prayer. I imagined that the wounds I endured were not mine but those of humanity, and that through those wounds I absorbed the suffering of others and let it circulate in my blood like a balm, transforming it into happiness.
Next, I focused on my bones, felt them one by one. How forgotten was this humble structure! I had lugged it around as a symbol of death, not realizing its vital power. I recreated my skeleton, giving it a strong and flexible material like that of a steel sword, bones almost weightless, with a core of molten lava, like those on which the eagle soars. Suddenly, I realized that I had created the skeleton of a dancer — the skeleton of my maternal grandfather. Without the intervention of my own will I then felt long, powerful muscles and indestructible entrails forming around this luminous structure, with abundant golden hair falling around its shoulders like a liquid halo. I realized that during my gestation Sara had unceasingly desired to recreate her father, the legendary dancer turned into a burning torch. Those wishes had infiltrated my cells, a mandate contrary to the natural order of things, causing me to be born giving forth cries of dissatisfaction. I was myself — what a sin! — and not the seven-foot-tall giant, the practically weightless solar Hercules. In order to be loved, I would have had to make myself into that myth. The flaming dead man was my ideal of perfection. I wanted to undo all of that and imagine another ideal body for myself. And yet, for all that I tried, I could not get rid of it. I recognized that I carried that model embedded in my genes, that every cell in my body aspired to be him. To keep struggling to change the effigy would be to deceive myself. Perhaps for centuries, from generation to generation, nature had been striving to produce that entity. Why not obey her? And if this meant that in a metaphorical manner, I would become my mother’s father, then what of it? She had dreamed of being the daughter of a strong yet sensitive man, an artist. Once, shedding many tears, Sara had told me that when her father, Alejandro Prullansky, was dancing down the street engulfed in a rose of flame he had shouted out poems instead of screaming, until he crumbled to ashes.
Feeling myself living in this graceful imaginary body, I now became capable of movements that I had never known before. Space, which had previously seemed to me a terrifying abyss, enveloped me like a soft coat and showed me where to go; it became a protective carpet and ceiling, stretched to the horizon like an enormous harp, standing before me offering views through infinite windows. For the first time, I felt at ease in the world. The sensation of divergence disappeared. Countless invisible threads tied me to the center of the Earth, to the land, to the sky. With the whole planet licking the soles of my feet, I was moved to dance, to jump higher and higher, to go beyond the stars, into the depths of the sky.
What I am relating may seem absurd. What could be the use of such self-deception? My answer is that as a young man struggling to escape the weight of depression during that time, imagining myself to be strong and weightless offered me a lifeline that saved me from suffocating in the trap that was my family and allowed me to undertake liberating work. But, without any guide, where was I to start? Sometimes in those moments of greatest abandonment when we feel utterly deserted a sign appears where we least expect it and shows us the way. Those who dare to advance into darkness, expecting nothing, will at last find their shining goal. On a page torn from a book, which an autumn wind blew around my feet, I read the words that showed me I was on the right path: “The initiate who sets out in good faith to find the Truth, only to find, on all sides, the inexorable barrier that throws him back into the ‘ordinary tumult,’ will hear the Master say: ‘Watch out, there is a wall.’ ‘But is this wall temporary?’ asks the restless soul, ‘can I pass through it or demolish it? Is it an adversary? Is it a friend?’ ‘I cannot tell you. You must discover it for yourself.’”
Who had written these lines, brought to me on a piece of paper that flitted down the street like a dirty butterfly? Was someone trying to tell me that my own being, which I myself despised, was worthy of attention from magical chance? And that I was not a vacant entity, that inside me there existed the power to cross or demolish the wall, because it was I myself who had built it? By saying, “Watch out, there is a wall!” the Master had stated that the disciple was not seeing due to distraction. Perhaps I was confusing the wall with reality, mistaking my mental limits for the natural boundaries of the world. Here is how I saw myself: since childhood I had been robbed of my freedom, my mind enclosed by a fence that prevented expansion. I closed my eyes. I saw myself submerged in a black sphere. This was the wall. As soon as I shut my eyelids, I found myself compressed within a dark skull. And because I felt blind, the possibility of existing escaped me. To lose sight of the outside world was to lose myself. The solitude became even greater when I plugged my ears with my fingers. Blocked off from light and sound, my wretched condition, my lack of sensation, my nothingness, manifested with implacable cruelty. In fact, I told myself, this blackness is impalpable. And if it is impalpable, then it does not have to be a thick barrier; it can be an infinite space. That’s it! When I close my eyes, I will imagine that my consciousness is floating at the center of the cosmos.
I began to feel that I was moving forward. I traveled and traveled for a considerable time, farther and farther, extending without end. Gradually, in the infinite blackness, points of light began to shine. Now I was moving through a starry firmament. After enjoying the vastness that was presented to me, I undertook the same experience in reverse, as if I had eyes in the back of my head, then to the left and right, as if I had eyes in my temples. Then I descended into a well of infinite circumference, never reaching the bottom. The farther I went the more I lost the sensation of falling, and at last the descent reversed and turned into an ascent. Farther and farther, always farther; I returned to my center and made the sphere grow in all directions at once. The space around me was constantly expanding. Then I began to contract it. Forward, backward, left, right, up, down, all directions were concentrated on me. I nourished myself with stars, becoming more and more intense. I had eliminated distance. I was a point of light. Ah, such concentration! Attention, attention, attention is all that I was! My mind turned me into a transparent receptacle in which words arranged into sentences without beginning or end — impersonal herds with no use besides their beauty — paraded like windswept clouds.
I allowed the sensation of my body’s presence to manifest itself. I concentrated my attention on all the different parts of the organism. I took stock of what I was feeling. Every organ, every limb, every region of the body had something to say. At first there were complaints, accusations of me abandoning them, not trusting them, but then came euphoric declarations of love. I discovered that my arms, my legs, my ears, skin, muscles, bones, lungs, intestines, the whole body was filled with an immense joy of living. I sank into my brain and entered the pineal gland. I imagined it as a diamond reigning on a throne amid reverent convolutions. I then navigated into the bloodstream. The heat of this thick liquid seemed to come from a distant past. I gave myself over to the ebb and flow, the coming and going from the center to the periphery and from the periphery to the center, as from the explosive central point of creation to the confines of the universe, an incommensurable rose opening and closing for all eternity.
Thanks to these exercises I was able to expand my limited mental space. Whenever an idea appeared, locked in a chain of words, I exploded it into a thousand echoes that transformed themselves like clouds. I never again thought linearly but in complex structures, labyrinths, where the effect sometimes came before the cause. The outer surface of my skull became the interior, and consciousness, like the pulp of a peach around its pit, became an exterior inextricably joined to the sky.
These sensations became my great secret. Neither my parents nor my sister knew about this transformation. In any case they paid very little attention to me, and even if I had revealed this to them they would have kept on seeing me the same way, as something invisible. I returned to the high school with no friends and no loving family. From that moment on I sat in my wooden chair with my feet parallel, firmly on the ground, a shoulder’s width apart, hands outstretched over my thighs with palms up, my spine held straight with no support at the back, and with eyes closed, devoted myself for hours to my exercises. My mind was a vast and unknown land, and I dedicated myself to exploring it. Thus I continued until the age of nineteen. I moved forward in stages. At first, to help prevent parasitic thoughts from invading my mind, I repeated an absurd word to myself: “Crocodile!”
Having conquered space, I then decided to alter my sense of time. To this end, I eliminated the idea of death. “One does not die, but is transformed. Into what? I do not know! But I was something before birth, and must be something after my body is dissolved.” I imagined myself ten years later, thirty, fifty, one hundred, two hundred. I kept advancing into the future, increasing my age to a dizzying figure. “It will be like this when I am a thousand years old, thirty thousand, fifty thousand. ” I imagined the changes in my morphology. In a million years I would begin to lose my human form. In two million years I would be transparent. In ten million years I would be an immense angel, traveling with other angels in a euphoric throng, traversing galaxies in a cosmic dance, helping to create new suns and planets. Fifty million years later, I would not have a body; I would be an invisible entity. A billion years later, dissolved into the energies and the totality of all matter, I would be the universe itself. And even farther, deeper and deeper into eternity, I would eventually become the point consciousness, the absolute root of existence, where all is in potential, where matter is nothing but love. Finally, after the explosion and implosion of countless universes, the stars dissolved and my mind froze. I began my journey backward, coming back into myself. Then I turned toward the past, seeing myself as a child, a fetus, imagining a multitude of lives, each one more primordial: dark beasts, insects, mollusks, amoebas, minerals, a rock wandering the cosmos, a sun, a point of continual explosion. Beyond this final stage I immersed myself in the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the infinite, the eternal mystery that, being incapable of defining it, we call God.
When I emerged from meditation and saw myself as a human being once again, all my problems seemed insignificant. I went out into the street, and with an arrogance that barely fell short of being a delusion of grandeur, I saw people immersed in their narrow mental space absurdly accepting the brevity of their lives, much closer to being animals than angels. As I had not been loved I did not know how to love myself, and thus, being unable to love others, I watched them with vindictive cruelty.
I thought that I could make my mind into whatever I wanted. If no one would deign to form me, I would be my own architect. Many paths presented themselves before me. Philosophy was one, art another; between intelligence and imagination, I chose imagination. Before setting myself to developing what I then considered the supreme power of the spirit, I asked myself what my ultimate objective would be. “The power to create a soul for myself!” And the objective of humanity? Not one, but three: to know the totality of the universe, to live as long as the universe lives, and to become the consciousness of the universe.
I realized that the basic (why not call it “primitive”?) imagination corresponded to the four primary mathematical operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. With addition, which is equivalent to enlargement, I considered how literature and cinema have used this technique to exhaustion. An ape becomes King Kong, a lizard becomes Godzilla, or an insect becomes Mothra, a butterfly so enormous that the movement of its wings brings about hurricanes. Inspired by this, a sugar cube might expand to become a runway for starships to land on. My grandmother could extend one arm, reaching around the entire world in order to scratch her back. A saint’s heart swells to the point that his chest bursts open, continuing to grow in volume until it becomes as large as a skyscraper. Poor people by the millions come to live near it. They feed by cutting pieces off the organ, which moans with pleasure as they mutilate it.
The second technique, subtraction, decreasing, could be found in fairy tales, where there is an abundance of dwarves, gnomes, homunculi. Alice eats the cake that makes her shrink. Jonathan Swift sends his hero to the land of Lilliput.
Applying this technique, I imagined the wedding ring of a dissatisfied husband shrinking to cut his finger. Eve, cast out of paradise, searches for it for centuries, asking around among the people for its location, but nobody knows the answer. Desperate, she becomes silent; then paradise, as a tiny spot of vegetation, grows on her tongue. A locomotive, pulling train cars full of Japanese tourists, travels among the cerebral lobes of a famous philosopher.
Another aspect of diminution is the removal of some parts of a whole, eliminating them or making them independent. For example, in a movie the hands of an assassin are detached from his dead body and grafted onto a pianist who has lost those precious appendages in an accident; they then acquire their own will and force the musician to commit murder. In Alice in Wonderland a cat becomes invisible except for his grin, which remains floating in the air. Dracula has no reflection in mirrors.
The windows of a skyscraper, wishing to see the world, detach themselves from the facade and fly away. Flocks of tiny seagulls come to nest in the empty eye sockets of a blind sailor. A holy man’s shadow breaks away and goes off on its own adventures, fornicating with the shadows of all the women it meets.
Another basic technique is multiplication: a painting by Breughel shows the invasion of thousands of skeletons. One of the seven plagues is the invasion of locusts. To prove that Rahula is his son, Buddha gives him his ring. He says, “Bring it to me,” and multiplies into thousands of beings identical to himself. The son, paying no heed to the false Buddhas, goes directly to his father and gives him the ring.
I imagined a parade through the streets of Rome consisting of a hundred thousand Christs, each one on a cross. In Africa, a rain of albino children falls. The Statue of Liberty appears black one morning, because it is covered in flies. The emperor of Japan cuts out the tongues of his two thousand concubines and serves them as sushi to his victorious army. Millions of rabbis blacken the streets of Israel, protesting against their Messiah because, after being awaited for thousands of years, he has decided to return in the form of a pig.
I concluded my development of these simple techniques by visualizing the simplest one of all: grafting. Some part of a ruminant is joined to part of a lion, and to another part of an eagle, along with a human face, creating a sphinx; stick a woman’s torso onto a fish’s tail and you get a mermaid; put bird wings onto an androgynous human and you have an angel. And instead of having long hair, why shouldn’t an angel have very thin rainbows? The trunk of a man on the body of a horse: a centaur. Why not graft the same human torso onto a snail, onto a stone, as the living figurehead of a ship, as the conscious part of a comet? The Aztecs combined a reptile with an eagle and obtained Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, while an eagle covered with scales lurks in the shadows of the stream. If the god Anubis had the head of a jackal, why couldn’t he also have that of an elephant, a crocodile, a fly, or a cash register? And why not think that the mysterious face of Muhammad is a mirror or a clock?
Another primary technique is the transformation of one thing into another: a worm becomes a butterfly, a man becomes a wolf, or else a vampire, a robot becomes an interplanetary spaceship, a good fairy becomes a witch, a demon becomes a god, a frog becomes a princess, a whore becomes a saint. In Don Quixote, windmills turn into aggressive giants, an inn becomes a palace, bottles of wine turn into enemies, Dulcinea becomes a noble lady, and so forth.
Walking around the city I imagined houses becoming huge lizard heads, an industrialist’s wallet transformed into a raven, the pearls on a diva’s necklace suddenly becoming small oysters, groaning like cats in agony. My mother grabbed me first with two, then six, and finally eight arms: now she was a tarantula.
From transformation, I went on to petrification: Lot’s daughters became pillars of salt, the daughter of King Midas became a gold statue, the adventurers who looked at the Medusa were turned into stone. Time ceases to pass, planets, rivers, people, all things are paralyzed forever; the universe is a museum that no one visits; swallows, transformed into granite, fall from the sky in a deadly rain.
I applied the idea of union to my imaginary world, conceiving of an invisible bond with infinite extensibility, and saw it pass through the third eye of every human being, linking all the denizens of the planet in a living chain; the poet is joined to a humble stone, discovers that it is his ancestor and that what he recites is nothing more than the reading of love that has been inscribed in matter since the beginning of time; I was united with the sick and the poor, I felt that their pain and hunger were mine; I was united with sporting champions, their triumphs became my own; I was united with all the money in the world, making it mine: this energy invaded me like a whirlwind, giving me health, driving me to stop asking for things and start investing, making me realize that I must change from a harvester into a sower. I identified myself with the unifying chain. I felt like a canal; what I had I was receiving, and in the same instant that I was receiving it I was also giving it; there was nothing for me that was not for everyone else. If a child in the desert grabs a handful of sand, then lets it go, all of the desert may pass through his open hand. I was united with Chilean poetry, the poets faded away as their words melted:
In the evening when the ghosts crack what little earth
lingers in my body while I sleep
my heart could deny its small chrysalis
and those dreadful wings could sprout from it, out of nowhere.
Who are you? Someone who is not you is singing behind the wall.
The voice that answers comes from somewhere more distant than your chest.
I walked like you, probing the infinite star
and in my net, at night, I awoke naked
just a catch, a fish trapped in the wind.
I walked along all the roads asking for the way
without route or line, driver or compass
looking for the lost paths of what never existed
viewing myself in all the broken mirrors of nothingness.
Oh abyss of magic, open the sealed doors,
the eye through which I may return once again to the body of the earth
What would become of us without the unlit labor
without the double echo toward which we reach out our hands?
Humberto Díaz Casanueva, Vicente Huidobro, Pablo
Neruda, Pablo de Rokha, Rosamel del Valle
I realized that the desire for union was present in every cell of my body, in every manifestation of my spirit. This was not a matter of imagining bonds, but of realizing that they already existed: I was tied to life and bound to death, tied to time and bound to eternity, tied to my limits and bound to infinity, tied to the Earth and bound to the stars. Joined to my parents, my grandparents, my ancestors, united with my children, my grandchildren, my future descendants, joined to every animal, every plant, every conscious being. United with matter in all its forms, I was mud, diamond, gold, lead, lava, rock, cloud, magnetic field, electric spark, soil, hurricane, ocean, feather. I was anchored in the human and joined to the divine. Rooted in the present, united with the past and the future. Anchored in darkness, united with light. Tied to pain, joined to the delirious euphoria of eternal life.
After joining in this manner I decided to look at what was driving me to separate: the voice of the dead father resonating for years throughout the house; millions of tiny silver eagles rising up from half-dollar coins and flying up into the stratosphere to devour satellites; the tiger’s skin, having lost the Buddha who used to meditate on it, tells a murderer to use it as his cloak; in the land of the decapitated, the last hat is publicly burned. When all living things perish, the roads moan, thirsty for footprints.
I had the idea to materialize the abstract. Hatred: a cornucopia inside a chest to which we have lost the key. Love: a road where our footprints go in front of us instead of following behind. Poetry: the luminous excrement of a toad that has swallowed a firefly. Betrayal: a skinless person who jumps into another’s skin. Joy: a river full of hippopotamuses, their blue mouths gaping open to offer diamonds that they have taken from the mud. Confidence: a dance without an umbrella in a rain of daggers. Freedom: a horizon that detaches itself from the ocean, flying up to form labyrinths. Certainty: A lone leaf turned into the shelter of a forest. Tenderness: a virgin clad in light, hatching a purple egg.
Thus I devoted myself for a long time to conceiving of techniques to develop my imagination. For example, how to overcome the laws of nature (how to fly, how to be in two or more places at once, how to draw water from rocks); how to reverse qualities (fire that cools, water that burns, salt that sweetens); how to humanize plants (a tree grows lottery tickets), animals (a gorilla becomes faculty chair of the philosophy department), and things (an army tank falls in love with a ballet dancer); how to add what has been taken away onto something else (put an octopus’s tentacles on the Venus de Milo, the head of a fly on the Winged Victory of Samothrace, an elephant’s eye as the apex of the Pyramid of Giza); how to extend the qualities of one being or thing onto all beings or things (a log on fire, a cloud on fire, a heart on fire, a saxophone on fire, a moral judgment on fire).
One night, seeking to enrich my view, which was usually in the horizontal plane, I threw my head back as far as I could to see what it would be like to see along a vertical line. I was distracted by the sight of a cobweb on a lamp: at its center, the web’s weaver crouched, waiting. A fly buzzed around the lamp. Instead of feeling sorry for myself, seeing the neglected state of my room — which Sara grudgingly cleaned once a month to satisfy the critical eye of her mother, who complained of the stench of Matucana when she came to visit us — I imagined the different degrees of a story, organizing them into a scale ranging from the lowest to the highest level of consciousness. At the lowest degree, not conceiving of change, striving always to remain what they think they are, the fly spends its life trying to avoid the spider while the spider spends its life trying to catch the fly. At a higher degree the fly, perceiving the spider’s carnivorous desire as an input of energy, loses its fear, accepts that it is food, and sacrifices itself. The spider, meanwhile, learns to put itself in the place of the fly and decides to give up trying to catch it, even to the point of starving itself to death. At a third degree, the fly voluntarily enters into the sticky trap and when it is devoured by the spider invades its cells, its soul, and transforms it into a luminous being. The two creatures, thus amalgamated, are a new entity: neither fly nor spider but both at the same time. At a fourth degree the spider-fly, realizing that the light that inhabits it is not of its own making, that it is a servant whose master is an impersonal inexhaustible energy, breaks free from the web and, attracted by the light, rises up until it is immersed in the sun. At the fifth degree, similar to the first, the spider waits in its web, hoping to catch a fly. But now the spider is not crouching, it is showing itself openly, without greed, and the fly, without distress or unnecessary buzzing around, flies directly toward the web. Change, transmutation, and adoration have submerged the menacing reality in a bath of joy. The hunt has become a dance in which continuous death is accompanied by continuous birth.
Suddenly, without any movement of the legs announcing it, the spider let out a long thread and made as if to drop down on me. I gave a cry of fear and dodged it, my armchair tipped over, and I fell backward onto the floor. I grabbed my shoes, put them on my hands like gloves, and with a single clap crushed the innocent creature. I felt sorry, not for it but for myself. Thanks to the derelict state my room had fallen into I was able to realize that in spite of these imaginative pleasures I did not feel any better emotionally. The images I created might be jewels, but the chest they were kept in, which is to say myself, was worthless. I was using my imagination in a limited form. I had dedicated myself to creating mental representations. This technique certainly opened up dreamlike paths, showed the way to sublime ideals, and provided elements for making works of art, but it did not change the incomplete manner in which I perceived myself. My body still appeared to me as a ghastly enemy, no more or less than a nest inhabited by death, and I was afraid to use it to its fullest extent. My sex organs were filling themselves with shame in order to dissimulate the fear of creating. My heart was immersing itself in malice and indifference to the world in order to avoid developing sublime feelings. My mind was invoking human weakness in order to ignore its power to change the world. Anything infinite, however well I could imagine it, gave me visceral dread. My animal side wanted a small space, a lair, a short amount of time, “I’ll only last as long as my body,” an opaque consciousness, relegating me to a life in the shadows avoiding responsibilities, an unvarying life bolstered by rigid habits in which change was considered a hidden aspect of death. I decided to free myself from these images, this mental celebration that concealed an avoidance of my organic nature, and to investigate a form of creation by means of my sensations. I thought, “When I hear sad news, I have no desire to move; I feel heavy, dense. By contrast, when the news is good, I want to dance; I feel light, agile. The facts that I know from words or visual images do not change my body, but they do change my perception of it. It must be possible to transform my perception of myself by my own will!”
I began an intense series of exercises. At night, once the insults and occasional blows between my father and mother had ceased, once my sister had stopped playing Chopin exercises on her white piano and the silence spread like balsam over a wound, I sat naked in my wooden chair and began to relax my muscles in order to concentrate and meditate. Unfortunately, several times during each night, trains passed directly below my window with deafening whistles. This noise, like a lance, left a bloody gash at the center of my spirit. I struggled for several weeks not to defend myself, to let the sound traverse my consciousness without retaining it, to pay it no attention and continue with my exercise. When I achieved this, I was able to immerse myself in my meditations without any apprehension. I conquered the flies, which were even more of a nuisance than the trains, in the same manner. Even though I closed the curtains and plunged myself into darkness, those insects never ceased buzzing and circulating, irritating my skin as they walked on it. Added to this, the apartment where we lived had no heating or air conditioning, and the heat and cold were intolerable at times. All these difficulties sharpened my capacity for concentration.
If I wanted to develop my sensory imagination, before anything else I had to liberate it from the tyranny of weight. The planet, always present in my body through its force of attraction, was telling me, “You are mine, from me you came and to me you will return.” I felt that what was heaviest was darkness. I filled myself with it, a dense material, painful, overwhelming. I filled my feet with its blackness, then my legs, and the rest of my body. Having become a skin that was filled with tar, I breathed in as deeply as I could and exhaled the magma from my feet, replacing it with light. I emptied my legs, my arms, my torso, my head; I was a hide filled with glowing energy. I felt lighter and lighter. It seemed to me as if I would jump twenty meters when I took a step. The absence of the sensation of weight filled me with joy, with a desire to live, and made me breathe in deeply. My spirit was no longer invaded by psychological garbage, by gloomy serpents of shadow. I wanted to get dressed and go out for a walk. So I did. It was four in the morning. This working class neighborhood, with its dark streetlights (thieves had stolen the bulbs), was almost completely obscured in darkness. I walked along feeling as luminous as the moon, occasionally taking little jumps. Suddenly I saw three evil-looking men approaching. Prudently, I changed my course. Seeing my defensive movement, they fanned out. One pulled a club, the other a knife, and the third a pistol. I set out running toward San Pablo Street, the central artery of the neighborhood, where trains passed and a bar might still be open. “Stop, dickhead!” they shouted. I let out a cry of distress, sounding like a pig squealing in the slaughterhouse. Not a single window opened! Not a door! There was I, who had just recently been weightless, galloping along, feeling heavier than an elephant under the indifferent sky, the fecal footprint of fear growing in my pants. Feeling the pain of shattered dignity, I set all my hopes on getting to the main street. But it was dark! They were ten meters behind me. Giving up, vanquished, trembling, I stopped and waited for the bandits. They came at me and knocked me to the ground with a punch in the stomach. With agonized calm, I begged them not to kill me, to take everything from me, because I was a poet. They searched my pockets, finding a crumpled banknote and my school papers. After examining the papers meticulously, they returned them to me, along with the money, then saluted and explained that they were police and had mistaken me for a thief. “Young man, next time don’t run away, because that makes you look suspicious!” With my body and soul aching, I walked on to San Pablo. There, just around the corner at a café a group of people were playing cards under the light of a gas lamp. A few more steps and I would have been safe! If they really had been muggers, they could have slit my throat like a cow’s and left me there, a few steps from salvation. At that moment, I swore that I would always sustain my efforts until I had no drop of energy left and that I would never abandon a task I began until I finished it.
I continued my work after I returned to my room. I had met terror face-to-face, a paralyzing sensation of oppression that turned me into an animal. In that realm, where beings devour each other, fear is the essential element of survival. To ascend from animal to human is to escape fear. Fear of what? Animals have no concept of death because they perceive themselves only as matter. Their essential fear is that of losing the corporeal form. I felt the threats to my body that were present like never before. Flesh was bound to age, sicken, die; it had to be nourished and protected. Along with the fear of losing my body came the need to have a lair. Being descended from the Jews, who had been nomads for centuries, I had no homeland, no roots, no burrow. How could I rid myself of this anguish? Should I imitate Buddha, renouncing earthly life, disassociating myself from my body as well as my “ego,” returning to the impersonality of the original energy, liberating myself from the chain of reincarnation? Thanks to the atheism that Jaime had inculcated in me this seemed like a fairytale, a coward’s way out. “The sword that cuts everything will not cut you when you become the sword.” Thinking thus, I decided to become that which caused my terror.
In my preceding exercises I had begun by imagining myself filled with black magma, which was then expelled so that light could inhabit me. But the mythological dragon, being immortal, cannot be conquered by killing but only by seduction. Thus one must accept being its food. I returned to imagining my feet full of that nefarious tar. Then, instead of identifying with my feet, I made myself one with the black stuff. I was the threat; I was the bringer of death; I was the nothing with its carnivorous cravings. I moved up through my legs, filled my pelvis, my trunk, my arms, my head, and erased all traces of morality, becoming a thick evil. With a phenomenal effort, I abandoned my attachment to my human form and turned loose. Leaving the carnal vessel I grew out in all directions like a voracious mass and began to overtake the building, the city, the country, the planet, the galaxy, finally filling the universe and continuing my infinite expansion. Stars lived within me, space monsters, demons, ambiguous entities, insidious ghosts, demented murderers, rats, vipers, venomous insects. Then I imagined the inverse: the infinite menace, the mortal shadow, began to invade space from all points and inundated the cosmos, advancing toward me. It swallowed galaxies, our solar system, the planet, the South American continent, Chile, Santiago, the neighborhood of Matucana, my house, my room, and finally concentrated itself on my body. While I occupied the universe, the universe also accumulated beneath my skin. I felt invincible, I was the evil, and there was nothing that could frighten me, least of all my father.
At that late hour of the night, naked as I was, I began slowly walking around the apartment. I walked crouching forward like a hungry beast. My eyes adjusted to the darkness very quickly, and my sense of hearing became sharper, I could hear the slightest creak, and from far off I could hear the deep breathing of Jaime, Sara, and Raquel. Also, my olfactory sense perceived the different smells that filled the house like never before: the sweet scent of damp sheets, the rancid floorboards, the sulfur in the air, the salty smell of the walls. I went into my sister’s room. Because the windows were kept closed for fear of thieves, the heat made it necessary for her to sleep naked, with her legs spread. I put my nose a few inches from her crotch and smelled it. Both my pleasure and my disgust were such that the blackness of my heart seemed to transform itself into a tarantula. I imagined myself violating her, then ripping open her belly with my fangs to devour her guts. I savored the sight of this forbidden orifice for a long moment, then slipped into the master bedroom. There was my mother, leaning against my father’s back. They were sleeping so deeply that they seemed like wax statues. I was invaded by a gigantic anger. I felt sure that I could rip open their jugulars with a single bite. Sara deserved my hatred because her foolish passivity made her complicit with Jaime. Without lifting a finger, she allowed my father to enjoy terrifying me. It was he who had taken pains to make me into a coward because he felt obliged to assert his dubious manhood and needed to overcome his problems with his gay brother. He who had taken me to the beach and made me stick my legs into pools where he knew octopuses lived, distracting me and keeping me there until one of those viscous animals wrapped its tentacles around my ankle. He who let me scream for a little while, then came to me laughing, pulled the suckers off my skin, bashed the animal against the rocks, then stuck his hand under the root of the tentacles and lifted the monster’s hood under my nose, turning it inside out. “They’re harmless. Don’t scream like a little girl; learn to be brave!” But how can a five-year-old child be brave when an adult forces him to hold onto his back, arms around his neck, as he runs into the raging ocean waves? There, clinging to my father like a limpet, I shut my eyes, wrinkled my nose, clenched my jaw, and endured the ordeal as he, roaring like a lion, threw himself under the giant waves again and again, riding them just as they broke. Despite my young age, I knew that if I let go I would die by drowning. The cold water of the Pacific Ocean seemed to turn my body into ice. My fingers were getting stiff. The force of the waves would tear me off Jaime’s powerful back. I began to scream. Jaime, furious, deposited me back on the beach while spitting the word “coward!” over and over again, not noticing that my lips were blue with cold. “Stop shaking, sissy! You have to learn to overcome fear!”
Well, now I had won. The guilty couple was there, defenseless, at the mercy of my hatred. I took a flowerpot full of moist soil in which worms had grown instead of the carnation seeds Sara had planted and with feline delicacy crawled onto the bed. Crouching, I emptied it out between their intertwined legs. I saw the masses of worms squirming very near to their crotches; the demon who protects the denizens of the night ensured that they did not awaken. I returned to my room, happy like never before, and fell asleep knowing that reality would no longer be the same. Neither Jaime nor Sara ever commented on the incident. Why? The event was so strange, so impossible, that their minds erased it like a bad dream.
Little by little, I understood that the being I perceived myself to be was not exactly the being I was. Moreover, the consciousness I perceived was not exactly my true consciousness but a distortion of it, brought about by my family and my education in school. I saw myself as my parents and teachers saw me. I saw with the eyes of others. My child’s brain, like a piece of wax, had been sculpted into the shape of the judgment of others. I concentrated on my hooked nose. I thought of the memories it contained — contempt, ridicule, name-calling, Pinocchio, Big Nose, Tuna Fish, Vulture, Wandering Jew — and then, the contemptuous stares of Jaime and Raquel, so proud of their straight noses. And finally, the indifference of my mother, who had erased me from her soul after they cut off my blond locks and left only some short dark hair. “Yes, I feel ugly, horrible, this enormous, monstrous bony nose that is not mine, I do not want it, it has invaded me, it is a vampire stuck to my face.” Once I had precisely delineated this feeling of disgust, I began to change it. The hooked nose that had been imposed on me must be conquered. I softened its boundaries, made it a ductile and malleable mass, perfumed it, filled it with love, light, and goodness, and finally I gave it sublime beauty. Little by little, I expanded this beauty across my face, my hair, my head, and then, like luminous water, over my entire body, washing away the cruel looks and revealing the beauty I deserved. I turned on the radio and heard a piece by Berlioz. Letting the accusations of ugliness fall away like tattered rags I began dancing, allowing my body to make graceful, delicate, beautiful movements. I felt that this beauty of form was inundating my soul. Something was opening up in my consciousness, and I realized that this assumed beauty was like a flower, spreading its perfume all over the world.
I did the same thing again, with more strength. My father’s gaze had trapped me in a corset of weakness. I chose my testicles as a starting point and filled them with an energy that spread through my body. Once I was completely full of this energy I tried to send it out through my fingers and toes, and with those twenty rays to transfix the world, reshaping its negativity to make it positive; but I encountered locks. In my soul there were prohibitions against being myself, requiring that I retain my conditioning, forcing me to live by the norms I had received through an ossified tradition. “You must not eat pork, you must not marry a Catholic, marriage is for life, money is earned through suffering, if you are not perfect you are worthless, you must be and act like everyone else, if you do not get your diploma you will fail in life. ” Family guardians appeared at my least attempt to transgress these crazy ideas, brandishing swords to castrate me. “How dare you? What do you take yourself for? Who are you to change the rules? If you do this, you’ll die of hunger! We are ashamed of you! You’re mad; come to your senses! Everyone will reject and despise you; you are destroying yourself! You’ll lose our love!” I felt like a dog covered with fleas. I realized my parents had abused me on all levels. On the intellectual level they had blocked off paths leading to the infinite with scathing, aggressive, sarcastic words, portraying themselves as clairvoyant, omnipotent, forcing me to see the world through their colored lenses. They had abused me emotionally with their cruelty, making me feel that they preferred my sister, creating a sordid trio of dependency, jealousy, and love-hate with her. They had bargained with me: “for us to love you, you have to do this or that, you have to be so and so, you have to buy the affection we give you at a high price.” They had abused me sexually, my mother because she hid all manifestations of passion beneath a veil of shame, passing herself off as a saint, and my father because he seduced his customers in front of me, hiding scurrilous insinuations beneath a mask of mirth. They had abused me on the material plane: I do not remember my mother ever cooking a meal, which was always done by a servant. I do not remember any cuddling, ever being taken out for a walk, ever having my birthday celebrated, ever being given a toy, ever being given a nice room. I slept on old stitched-up sheets, had plain curtains in my room dyed a hideous shade of burgundy, never had a nice ceiling light in my room, my bookshelves were made of old boards propped up on bricks, and I was always enrolled in horrible public schools. And what’s more every Saturday, when the other boys were relaxing or going to parties, I had to “pay” for what my parents gave me by staying in the shop, protecting the goods from the greed of thieves. And now I, this abused child, was abusing myself, trying every instant to reproduce the things that had traumatized me. Because they made fun of me, I sought out friends who despised me. Because they did not love me, I was forced to enter into relationships with people who could never love me. Because they ridiculed creativity, they made me doubt my values, sinking me into depression. By not giving me material things they made me pathologically shy, preventing me from going into a store to buy what I needed. I had made myself into my own bitter prisoner. “I have been despised, I have been punished, so now I do nothing, I am worth nothing, I do not have the right to exist.” Unable to feel at peace, I was being persecuted by a horde of ancient furies. I began to shake myself as if to throw this old pain, this infantile anger, these grudges, these chains, away from my body. Enough! This is not me, this depression is not mine, they have not won, they will not stop me from doing what I want to do! Off, invading fleas! My inner universe belongs to me, I am taking possession of it, I am occupying it, exterminating what is superfluous! I opened myself to mental energies; I received them from the depths of the Earth and projected them into the sky; at the same time I received them from immeasurable space and projected them toward the center of the planet. I was a receiving and transmitting channel! I did the same with emotional, sexual, and physical energy: I plunged them into the bottomless void. Every idea, every feeling, every desire, every need touched my soul saying, “You are me!” These were usurping entities. The empty being, capable of containing the universe, did not know what it was and yet was living, loving, creating.
Around the time of my nineteenth birthday there was a quarrel in my family that, despite its monstrosity, revealed another aspect of my creativity: up until that point I had worked with images and sensations, but had not explored a technique composed of objects and actions. It happened that every day, between one and three in the afternoon, my parents shut El Combate to come back to the apartment for lunch. Jaime would sit at the end of the table, facing away from the window (he had appropriated this location where the light from the sky fell on his back). Beside him, on his right, sat my sister. I was disdainfully granted a seat a little farther down the table, on the left side. My mother would sit at the other end, off on her emotional island, always eating with her eyes directed up toward the ceiling to express the disgust that my father’s noisy munching caused her. On this day, enervated by an accumulation of debts, Jaime devoured the food that was served by our faithful maid, sullying his lips and shirt more than was customary. Suddenly, Sara gave a low moan and murmured, “This man looks like a pig; it makes me want to throw up.”
On the wall behind my mother hung an oil painting by a commercial artist of the lowest caliber. It was the familiar Andean landscape, illuminated by the red light of a sunset. My mother liked it because her mother had suggested she buy it. My sister and I thought it was ridiculous. Jaime hated it because it had been expensive. Raquel and I were silent with terror upon hearing Sara’s unexpected words. Generally, in such cases, Jaime would get up and punch her in one of her pretty eyes. This time it was not so: he turned pale, slowly lifted his plate as a priest might lift a chalice, and threw his fried eggs at my mother’s head. She ducked, and they landed right on the painting. The two yolks stuck there in the middle of the sky like twin suns. And oh, what a revelation; for the first time this vulgar painting appeared beautiful to me! In one fell swoop, I had discovered surrealism! Later on, I had no trouble understanding the words of the futurist Marinetti: “Poetry is an act.”